High School Star

...The high school contests are remarkably free of racial incidents that often mar similar events in the supposedly enlightened North...

...the troubled history of race relations in Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi (and, by extension, in the entire South) and the extraordinary senior year of high school running back Marcus Dupree and his collegiate pursuers...

...When Dupree scored, joyous pandemonium broke loose in the stadium, involving white, black, and red fans equally...

...The unity of Philadelphia, of Neshoba County, and of the state of Mississippi behind the exploits of Marcus Dupree indicates how far we seem to have come from the past...

...But events that fall outside the scope of the book—Dupree's mysterious disappearance from the University of Oklahoma in mid-season last fall, his sudden transfer to Southern Mississippi, his subsequent withdrawal, and the signing of a big United States Football League contract—make us want more of an insight into Dupree himself...

...the story involved more than football, and appealed to their histrionic nature...

...He digresses often, commenting on everything from the comparative psychologies of cheerleaders and baton twirlers to a biography of his dog Pete and reminiscences of literary lunches in New York bistros...

...Philadelphia, a town of some six thousand inhabitants, is remembered as the place where civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered in 1964 by a group of conspirators that included the deputy sheriff...

...The town and the county were the sites of bitter conflict and intense Klan activity...

...Philadelphia's unity in its affection, bordering on idolatry, for a seventeen-year-old black high school senior, Marcus Du-pree, is a reflection of some deeper sense of the cohesion that has come slowly to the town in the aftermath of the turbulence of the civil rights movement...

...How Dupree recovers from the embarrassment and opprobrium of last fall's debacle and the apparent betrayals of "amateurism" in recent months—and how the town accepts him in their wake—will be the real measure of both his maturity and Philadelphia's...

...Morris writes, "To Mississippians...

...The town of Philadelphia made a huge emotional investment in Marcus Dupree, giving him an Appreciation Day, following his career, and "courting" him avidly...

...Yet the disturbingly skewed academic priorities of football-oriented schools like Oklahoma (far from the worst offender) and its brethren, as suggested by Morris's documentation of the recruiting process, can't but have had a negative effect on Dupree's college experience, and may have contributed in some way to his abandoning his education for the blandishments of the pros...

...Morris is at his best when intercutting the chronologies of "The Troubles" and his own slow seduction by Philadelphia...

...As for the book itself, it is a graceful if flawed effort, one of those curious works that are most satisfying when most desultory...

...The most vivid vignette was the unbridled delight of a Philly benchwarmer, Cecil Price Jr., the son of the deputy sheriff who went to prison for his part in the Schwerner-Chaney-Goodman murders...

...The way all Philadelphia has embraced Dupree suggests—and Morris gently insists—that the young athlete's success is viewed as the success of a member of an extended family unit, a family unit that until 1970 would not have included him...

...The bittersweet but immensely satisfying realization that his home state has finally joined the Union pervades the entire book...

...The score came at the Choctaw Bowl, a post-season contest played on the Choctaw reservation near Philadelphia...

...Of him, Marcus has said, "I guess I run for both of us...

...In a town as poor as Philadelphia, a county as poor as Neshoba, and a state as poor as Mississippi, sports represent a major escape route—literal for the athletes, vicarious for the fans...

...The key to this transformation is the gradual emergence, in the wake of the three murders, of a sort of "radical middle," a small core of white men and women of decency whose innate sense of justice allowed them to speak out, albeit a bit belatedly, against the odious excesses of the Klan and their brethren, the White Citizens' Councils...

...The county's one segregation academy—one of those private schools founded for the sole purpose of undercutting the integration of the local public institutions—faltered and died within three years...

...On a certain level, school sports are the extension of the family, involving not just the players but band members, cheerleaders, mascots, girlfriends, booster groups, all the kin that gather around this mass of youthful exuberance—ultimately, the entire town...

...In spite of the book's structural flaws, Morris is one of our most endearing chroniclers of the modern South, and The Courting of Marcus Dupree is an illuminating addition to the literature of integration...

...Perhaps the most telling moment in Morris's book is the scene after Dupree broke Herschel Walker's record for the most touchdowns by a high school football player...

...Perhaps, as one coach said, "the only thing he's guilty of is being seventeen [now nineteen] years old...

...Almost twenty years later, Morris returned to find a town in which the wounds inflicted by that period, tersely called "The Troubles," had healed surprisingly well, leaving less sociological scar tissue than one would have dreamed possible...

...George Robinson (George Robinson is a free-lance writer based in New York and a member of the National Writers Union...

...Here he continues the chronicle of himself, a son of Mississippi, coming home at last...

...Now a writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, Morris is a novelist and former editor of Harper's...

...There are two central themes braided together throughout Willie Morris's new book, The Courting of Marcus Dupree...

...he wrote an earlier autobiography, North Toward Home...

...By the time the school integration order was handed down in 1969 and implemented the following year, the integration process was accomplished with surprisingly little friction...

...The Courting of Marcus Dupree is as much about the actual recruiting process and the town's pride as it is about Dupree...

...The one figure who remains disturbingly vague in this mixture of history, athletics, sociology, autobiography, and anecdote is Dupree himself...

...Although Morris writes of how he came to love the shy young man, and many of the book's participants speak of him at length, one has little sense of what has motivated Marcus, other than a deep love of his younger brother, crippled by cerebral palsy...

...He has, for the moment, let the town down...

...The social function served by the football games is more complex than that of an opportunity for the working-out of formulas for racial balance (although their place as a neutral meeting ground for black and white Philadelphians is unmistakable...