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I walked to the parlor and lifted time tunes since I first heard the newup from the South late in the old century It was music as noisy and fast as one of the newhorses all over the country

I sat on the piano bench and tried to force my clumsy f

ingers to find the first offbeat notes of that skitteringabout it took me back to a place and a titon, DC The bu froro churches out in the country, in the woods outside Eudora, Mississippi, where I was born and raised

As a boy I’d walked past those churches a thousand ti and the fervent aotten blended in with a fast-s Mix it all together, speed it up, and somehow, from that corner of the South, down around where Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas time

Whenever I heard that sound, whether issuing fro side of Capitol Hill or a shiny new phonograph in Dupont Circle, it sent ton life and down the memory road to Mississippi

And whenever I thought of Mississippi, I couldn’t help seeing my mother’s face

Chapter 8

EUDORA, THE COUNTY SEAT, is located in an odd corner of southern Mississippi, sixtyMuddy and fifteen miles north of the Louisiana state line

My father, the Honorable Everett J Corbett, e in town, but the only truly famous citizen in Eudora was my mother, Louellen Corbett They called her “the Poetess of Dixie” She wrote sweet, simple, sentimental verses in such noted periodicals as Woburn’s Weekly Coht that captured the hearts of southern ladies She wrote poe dear to the southern heart—paddle wheelers on the Mississippi,Confederate

But that one particular day in Eudora…

I am a boy of seven, an only child I’m doith my mother on a summer afternoon

Don consisted of the Purina feed and seed store, the First Bank, a few shops around the courthouse square, the Slide Inn Café, specializing in fresh seafood from the Gulf, and the Ben Franklin five-and-di, “They sell everything you need and nothing you really want”

July ide-open su a sun that rose early and stayed at the top of the sky all afternoon The air near the Gulf is so humid at all times of year that you have to put your shoes near the stove at night to keep the white with mildew

I earing short pants, but Ma dress that swept the ground, a sky blue shaith dark blue fringe, and her ever-present wide-brimmed straw hat A boy always thinks of his mother as pretty, but on that afternoon, I re

Our chore that day was to pick up eighteen yards of blue velvet Ma room curtains