TRAIN RIDES AND INSPIRATION. March 4, 2009

Fact or Fiction What was the inspiration forMY play WISHING ACES and my novel TROPICAL DEPRESSION

Yes, I did take a train regularly from New Orleans to Ole Miss (but not with a professor I fell in love with). Remarkably, one Tulane graduate student who read the story, took me out for coffee at a pancake house, and she asked me if my tale was a chronicle of her affair? That is so New Orleans!

Did you know that, after Tulane (New Orleanians stress the first syllable when pronouncing that), Ole Miss is considered the most prestigious of the Deep South colleges?

But, you can’t catch a fast train from New Orleans to Ole Miss. You’ve got to take a scabby local that bumps you off in Batesville, Mississippi 30 miles from Oxford, where the University is based. The notion of Amtrak or express travel is absent in the Delta.

As a woman college professor (the first full-time appointment in Loyola University’s drama department), I received fellowships to go to Ole Miss conferences for minorities and women. Sometimes, I drove the lonely hot highways with a colleague, but most times I took the fearful run-down train. I’d grit my teeth imagining a hurricane hitting that train as it slugged over large expanses of swamp.

Still I was grateful for the chance to travel to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss and meet other pioneers like myself teaching across the South. Most of the appointments I have received have been based on institutions wanting to include woman as role models, thank god. Whether it was at Beaver college, Loyola University, or Ole Miss, fellowships that deposit women inside the intelligentsia have helped me.

Ole Miss is in Oxford, Mississippi, and I originally called this novel. “On the Way to Oxford,” because I thought that title heralded depth. The brightest men for centuries have gone to Oxford and sought out mentors and places of inspiration.

In New Orleans, I had a volunteer at Southern Rep, the theatre which I founded. This mother and brilliant housewife agreed to accompany me to Ole Miss just to “go to Oxford.” Isn’t that what women need, a place to ruminate, to let our minds roam free?

The idea of going to Oxford and sitting around talking in the Square Bookshop famous for birthing so many intellectuals was vastly appealing. The bookstore champions Faulkner as does the English Department of Ole Miss that now presides over his homestead Rowan Oak where he wrote so many of his stories and where his cherished black nanny is buried. (No I won’t comment on this.)

On the train to Batesville (watched over by minority women now porters) were mostly drunken college students trying to get into or leaving the Big Easy after a week-end of debauchery. Interspersed were rattled 17-year-olds leashed by parents and traveling with them to interviews at the college.

Back then, and even when I was the 2nd woman to get a PhD at UCLA, I never thought of myself as a minority. Even though when I entered UCLA 59 of the 60-drama faculty was male, I didn’t evaluate what it meant that the only woman professor was one who taught sewing part time in the costume department. Isn’t patriarchy everywhere? I don’t look in the mirror all day long and say, “Oh, I’m a woman and attractive,” and notice doors that enviously or secretly snap in my face.

At that time, I was getting a Ph.D. in case I didn’t become a famous actress. But of course I thought I would. And so when my advisor asked why I was getting a theatre history degree, because an actress didn’t need that,I simply said I need to work. (I was already a mother in graduate school and had some sense of the cycle of death and birth.)

Life is full of little deaths and big births and writing is my way of growing. What’s yours?

I guess I’m always on the way to Oxford, trying to skirt tropical depressions. Most times I’ve had the right person next to me on the train, even if that person was just myself. But usually crisis presents me with unexpected heroes. Strangers suddenly fearless and focused. Ancestors come to memory reminding me to be valiant. Children pave the way and follow me—role model that I don’t want to be but am.

Throughout a tropical depression, I touch my heart and it’s beating. I breathe out and I can breathe in. That’s life. Bring it on!