Do you need a break from the Delta yet? Has counting pickup trucks, propane tanks, and barbecued ribs induced a bad imitation drawl? How far would you detour for a well-stocked bookstore, or a restaurant that doesn’t immerse everything in boiling oil? Sixty-two miles east of Clarksdale on Hwy-6 is the college town of Oxford, whose cultural amenities, though common to college towns from Amherst to Berkeley, set it in a world apart from most of Mississippi. The college in question is “Ole Miss,” otherwise known as the University of Mississippi, whose pleasant campus holds such treasures as B. B. King’s entire personal collection of records, posters, photos, and more in the Ole Miss Blues Archive (Mon.–Fri. only), in Farley Hall across from Barnard Observatory. The renovated antebellum observatory houses the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (Mon.–Fri. only; 662/232-5993), which sponsors exhibits, lectures, and screenings.
Elsewhere under the leafy old oaks you’ll find a large collection of primitive Southern folk art in the University Museums (closed Mon.), and a collection of William Faulkner first editions in the J. D. Williams Library. Faulkner was a resident of Oxford for most of his life; readers of his novels will recognize in surrounding Lafayette County (luh-FAY-it) elements of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha. A statue of him was recently placed in the square at the center of Oxford, and Rowan Oak (Tues.–Sat. 10 am–noon and 2–4 pm, Sun. 2–4 pm; free; 662/234-3284), his house on Old Taylor Road off S. Lamar Avenue, remains as he left it when he died in 1962, with the bottle of whiskey next to the old typewriter in his study almost, but not quite, empty. Visit his gravesite by following the signs from the north side of the courthouse square; near the cemetery entrance lie other family members who didn’t affect adding the “u” to their surname, including the brother whose untimely death Faulkner mourned in his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.
