Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Famous folk, famous places

We’re starting to feel like celebrities in Mississippi. A waitress serving us dinner the other night became so excited when she heard we were from Australia that she kept coming over and getting us to talk to her. She loved our voices, she said. She told us she had come over all ‘tizzy’ as if we were ‘visiting celebrities’. She went into the back of the restaurant and told her two managers who came out to stare at us. One eventually made his way to our table shook hands and asked lots of questions, amid lots of other welcoming noise and gestures.

The very next day, in a coffee shop in another town, the barista told the owner out back that he had Australians in for coffee, so out he came, too, all suited up ready to attend a business meeting downtown, but first wanted a photo of us in his shop.

Our faces may go up on another wall. When we were in Turkey the year before last we appeared on one waiter’s Facebook page. Twice. Soon we might come to expect this level of notoriety and acclaim every time we travel.

Aussies must be rare down here, we think. Though, other celebrities, that have us tingling, aren’t. We found William Faulkner sitting on a bench seat looking out over the Courthouse Square in Oxford. I read Faulkner when I was young and enjoyed him, then, along with Mark Twain. But I picked something of his up just recently, and it put me into a deep sleep. So, I deliberately chose not to pick up Twain again, as I didn’t want to mess with my memories of Huck.

William Faulkner tried attending Ole Miss - the sobriquet for University of Mississippi in Oxford. He had to apply as a special student given that he had never graduated high school to gain general admittance, but he only survived a semester or three. His history for attending school, even elementary classes, was patchy and forever incomplete. Still he won a Nobel Prize for literature. And remains one of America’s literary giants.

Ole Miss lies at the heart of everything in the city of Oxford. And what a beautiful city these University cities in America are. We see this again and again on our trips when we come across. There is something so attractive about them with their quaint, often whimsical, restaurants, interesting bookstores, tree-lined streets filled with clapboard houses sporting flags of the university along with the sporting colours, and students with laden knapsacks, walking between their residences and their lectures. Just love these places.

Amazing, too, the facilities in these university towns. Ole Miss has a basketball pavilion and a football stadium that, to us, look larger than similar stadiums at home that are venues for professional games. And the university buildings themselves occupy many city blocks — the Halls of Residence similarly. And the student accommodation spreads to the outer reaches of town. Amazing money spent in what, essentially, are just small towns. It all creates so much atmosphere, too, and this surprises us, as that is not true for university towns back home. The town and gown connection hardly exists. Why is that? And, yet again, we wonder, where does all the money come from for such amazing university facilities in such a small city?

Student dives make famous eating places, here, too. Just outside Oxford, about 8 miles down a dusty road which comes to a dead end where a pile of corrugated iron shanties tumble around the crossroads, lies Taylor Grocery, famous for its catfish. Not just the best in Mississippi, we are told: but touted as the very best catfish in the world.

Sadly, we can’t confirm this as while we arrived in time for lunch the restaurant was not opening its doors until 5pm. Even for Aussie celebrities. And even then, you must ensure you are an early bird in order to score a seat.

The previous night we ate at a famous down-home soul food joint in the heart of Oxford, just opposite where Faulkner keeps his eye on the goings-on in the square, Ajax Diner. A great student hangout. Here, any of the toothpicks holding bits of food together typically get fired deep into the styrofoam ceiling where they stay stabbed forever.

It is all such a buzz.