It’s the original and the ultimate Natchez success story.

Every day at the crack of dawn, the Great Sun, the feather-crowned chief of the Natchez Indians, stood atop a high mound howling and waving his hand from east to west.

He was showing the real sun which way to go. Not once in several centuries did he fail.

That was the first story I told two years ago this month when I had the honor, pleasure and sheer fun of keynoting the 23rd annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the theme of which was “Storytelling in the South.”

Then after stating what everyone knew — “Many of the world’s best stories came from the likes of Homer and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Mississippians too numerous to mention” — we went on to mention and talk about several lions of Mississippi literature, including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Shelby Foote. And I added Jane Stubbs of Natchez, who in 1957 wrote a poem about a local bridal party, a delightful ode that appeared in The New Yorker magazine and 55 years later in my talk, prompting a gleeful gale of laughter at the Natchez Convention Center.

For an hour we wandered around — from Mark Twain, Davy Crockett, Hank Williams and Muddy Waters to Jerry Clower, Ross Barnett, Burma-Shave signs, Brer Rabbit, Vicksburg’s Red Tops, Shakespeare’s Puck, Zora Neale Hurston, boast-and-brawl river men on the Mississippi, Lake Providence mosquitoes, jive-talking deejays on 50,000-watt WLAC in Nashville, steamboat lore, Millsaps College, lovers in Duncan Park, Walter Cronkite, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Medgar Evers, Chopin and Liszt, raw whisky, Papa George Lightfoot and his harmonica at the Blue Cat Club, carhops and country music at the Monmouth Drive-In, and, of course, Elvis.

Amid the meandering were more tales of successful Natchezians. Like a band of mothers conspiring in 1950 to enroll their protesting eighth-grade sons in the Martha Hootsell School of Ballroom Dance.

And Tony Byrne, one of the finest mayors any town could have, scoring 32 touchdowns in a single season for the Natchez High Rebels. And Miss Ruby Lee Chance, our 12th grade English teacher, putting me on track for a satisfying half-century ride in journalism by naming me sports editor of the Natchez High Echoes the year Tony did all that.

One more success story, this one quite significant, is the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, 25 years old this month.

Another development this month is the publication of the Raritan Winter Quarterly, the literary journal at Rutgers University in New Jersey, 24 pages of which are devoted to the 9,000-word text of our NLCC talk, “Supper Table Stories.”

For a $10 donation to the NLCC at the convention center welcome desk on Feb. 21 or 22, the second and third days of the NLCC’s annual conference, guests can receive a copy of that Raritan issue and simultaneously support what, over the past quarter century, has become one of the nation’s premier cultural events, the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration.

 

Lewis Lord, now retired and living in Falls Church, Va., worked one year for the Natchez Times, 22 years for United Press International, and 29 years for U.S. News & World Report. He will join other former NLCC speakers at the Silver Anniversary conference February 20-23.