CHAPTER 17

MY KNOWLEDGE OF FERRIDAY, Louisiana, is so limited that I only recently realized that the town lies within Concordia Parish. I always thought the Concordia Beacon was printed in Vidalia, the little town just across the river from Natchez. I’d never confess this to Henry Sexton, of course. The man has done some amazing journalism from this farming village. I won’t be surprised if Henry brings a Pulitzer back to Ferriday someday, if only he lives long enough to accept it.

Dusk is falling as I roll into the town proper, its main drag a hodgepodge of gas stations, convenience stores, and small repair shops. The newest-looking building in sight is a Kentucky Fried Chicken. For most of my life, I thought of Ferriday only as a town I had to pass through to get to Lake St. John. During the Urban Cowboy craze, I’d hear it mentioned as the birthplace of Mickey Gilley, and later as that of Jimmy Swaggart. Both men are cultural footnotes now, and favorite son General Claire Chennault is as unfamiliar to anyone under fifty as the crank telephone. It’s local boy Jerry Lee Lewis—the Killer, by his own proclamation—who wrote his name in the brightest lights on the world’s stage. Jerry Lee may have tarnished his legacy by marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin (something that wouldn’t have shocked the homefolks nearly so much as it did the London reporters who first broke the story), but John Lennon kissed his feet twenty years later, and the Killer is still going strong. My clearest memory of Ferriday is driving over to sit in the decaying old Arcade theater in 1978, because unlike Natchez’s conservative theaters, the Arcade was showing Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. To this day, I believe the Arcade owners booked the film because they thought it was a movie about deer hunting, not Vietnam.

The Concordia Beacon is housed in a shockingly small building on the north edge of town. No bigger than a successful dentist’s office, it stands at the border of an empty cotton field that stretches off toward a distant tree line. The sickly sweet smell of some chemical poison rides the chilly breeze as I get out and walk to the glass front door.

I hold my breath until I get inside.

A woman of sixty-five stands behind a high receptionist’s desk, her hair done in a style that would have looked fashionable in the late 1950s. She looks as though she’s gathering up her things to leave. I hear a radio playing in the back, but when the woman calls “Henry?” over her shoulder, the music stops.

“Send him on back!” comes the reply. Then the music starts up again.

The woman laughs and shakes her head. “Same old Henry. I worry about that boy.”