Excerpt from Southern Boy

IN 1923, when I was two years old, my family moved from Okolona in north Mississippi down to Gulfport (pronounced "GUFF-port") on the Gulf of Mexico. It must have taken a shoehorn to squeeze all of us with the luggage into our yellow 1922 Studebaker touring sedan. There were six of us. In addition to my father and mother and seven-year-old sister, Mollie, we had Laura, who was both cook and nurse and Laura’s daughter, Doll, who was a big twelve-year-old girl. This was during the warm summer month of June when the roads were beginning to get dusty, but before the mosquito season set in down on the Coast.

Moving the family down to the Gulf Coast – a distance of 282 miles
– was quite an undertaking. The journey took three days and two nights. We spent the first night in Meridian and the second in Hattiesburg. During the trip if it began to rain (as it did several times), it was simpler to drive somewhere under cover than to take time to roll down the isinglass windows and snap them closed. In a downpour, before they could get the car windows in place, everybody would be soaked. And by then, the rain would have stopped.