Writer Willie Morris died of a heart attack on August 2, in Jackson, Mississippi. Morris grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, attended college at the University of Texas, became a Rhodes Scholar, served as editor of Harper's magazine in the 1960s, wrote 16 books, and served as writer in residence at the University of Mississippi for over a decade. He was a longtime friend of the Center, participating in the Oxford Conference for the Book and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

Morris lay in state in the rotunda of the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, only the third person and the first writer so honored. Seven hundred mourners passed by his pecan wood casket, with lilies atop, and visited with his widow, JoAnne Prichard, and his son, photographer David Rae Morris. Jewish writer Eli Evans and Baptist minister Will Campbell accompanied the casket into the rotunda, wanting to honor the old Jewish--and Southern--tradition of not leaving the deceased body alone.

The funeral was in nearby Yazoo City, in the First United Methodist Church, where Morris's mother had played the pipe organ. Her friend, Hannah Kelly, played "Abide with Me" at his mother's funeral, and she played it at his, too. The choir sang the sweetly devotional "In the Garden," with its comforting images of the intimate friend Jesus, and an African American singer, Jewel Bass, moved everyone with "Amazing Grace."

Morris's funeral included eulogies by writers and politicians. William Styron, David Halberstam, Ellen Douglas, Will Campbell, former Mississippi Governor William Winter, and former Congressman and Cabinet Secretary Mike Espy all delivered eulogies that recounted Morris's love of drink, spinning yarns, staying up late, and wandering cemeteries. Styron said that "an innate and profound Southernness made him tick," and recalled Morris's practical joking, including the time Morris took him to a graveyard and led him to a tombstone where Styron's Lie Down in Darkness was lying open. Campbell speculated that Willie would always have "some yarns to spin" in heaven, and he led the mourners in a standing ovation for Morris's good "speech of 64 years."

Eulogists praised Morris for helping Mississippi and the United States to understand the need for social change. "Behind all the charms and jokes," said David Halberstam, "a better America was the single driving purpose of his life." Halberstam, who had covered the civil rights struggle in Yazoo City in the 1950s, recounted how pained Morris had been early in his career, "when he was going against his own people" but with the understanding that "Mississippi could not, until it dealt with race, be whole." Halberstam concluded that when Morris had begun writing, "he came from a Mississippi that did not yet exist."

Mike Espy, the first African American congressman from Mississippi since Reconstruction and later Secretary of Agriculture, was also a Morris friend, and his eulogy noted that Morris was "our region's greatest ambassador." He cited the old spiritual, "Let the Work I've Done Speak for Me," in honoring the writer "and his fierce loyalty to a place and a people and an ideal." William Winter noted that Morris's religion was revealed in his embrace of the humanity he saw at "ball games and bus stations and bargain stores and beauty pageants and little churches," where he found "goodness and kindness" in people he met.

Others who attended the funeral included writers John Grisham, Kaye Gibbons, Curtis Wilkie and artist Bill Dunlap. They attested to the impact of Morris's classic autobiography, North toward Home (1965), on their own work, and they praised his generosity in encouraging their own work.

Pallbearers took his casket to the grave in Glenwood Cemetery, where as a teenager Morris had played taps at the burial of Korean War casualties and where he later gave tours for his friends, pointing out the markers that revealed the town's history. He had immortalized the local legend of the cemetery witch, and Morris was buried 13 paces due south of the witch's grave. As his son said, "The closer Willie is to the witch, the more at home he'll be."

Mourners at the graveside service joined in singing "We'll Meet Again" and heard author Winston Groom say, "Well, Willie, it is a hot dusty Delta day. Your journey's over, but your friends are all here--just like you knew they would be. Just like they had to be." The service ended with the playing of taps on the hillside above the grave.

Charles Reagan Wilson

Photographs by Tom Rankin