Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain: Sage words for an Ole Miss audience - in 1962

By Robert Hamblin

My wife, Kaye, and I are eagerly anticipating the performance of Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain on the River Campus, but we doubt that this performance will be as dramatic and riveting as the first time we saw the show.

That was in mid-October 1962 at the University of Mississippi, just days after the riot that accompanied the admission to Ole Miss of James Meredith, the first African American to enroll in the university. That riot, now called by historians "the battle of Oxford" and "an American insurrection," left two people dead, scores injured, automobiles burned, buildings damaged and Gov. Ross Barnett and the state of Mississippi disgraced in the eyes of most American citizens.

In September 1962 Kaye and I moved to Oxford, where I enrolled as a first-year graduate student at the University of Mississippi. Along with other Ole Miss students, I followed the developments throughout that fateful month as day after day Meredith, accompanied by lawyers and a host of federal marshals, sought to register for classes, only to be turned away time and again. Three weeks into the semester my relation to these events changed from that of a mere spectator to that of minor participant. Early Sunday morning, Sept. 30, I opened my apartment door, picked up my copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and learned from the banner headline that the Mississippi National Guard, of which I was a member, had been federalized by President Kennedy. Later that morning I received the phone call ordering me to report immediately to my home unit in Baldwyn, some 60 miles away.

By 10:30 that same evening, after the protest had escalated into a full-scale riot, I was back at Ole Miss, now in army fatigues, a soldier rather than a student. I was shocked by the transformation the peaceful, if tense, campus had undergone since I had left it that morning. Now the scene I viewed from the rear of a military transport was an active battlefield, with burning vehicles scattered around the main streets of the university, smoke and tear gas filling the air, sporadic gunfire sounding from all directions and a vicious mob shouting curses and hurling bricks, lead pipes, bottles and Molotov cocktails at the arriving troops. The lead vehicle of our convoy crashed through the barricade that the mob had erected on the bridge at the entrance of the campus, and the remaining vehicles followed, one after another speeding past the Confederate monument at the eastern edge of the campus, past the burning vehicles and the jeering mob, to come to a stop directly in front of the Lyceum, the federal marshals' command post. There we unloaded from our vehicles, quickly organized ourselves into strike formation, and marched through tear gas and darkness toward the rioting mob.

Though at the time I was too frightened and preoccupied with immediate concerns to think much about the significance of the events, in retrospect I realized that the moment in which I climbed down from that military vehicle, strapped on my gas mask, adjusted my steel helmet and walked with loaded rifle at fixed bayonet toward that angry mob, I had crossed the boundary of the Mississippi that had nurtured me and entered a strange, new world. And I knew that all Mississippians, indeed all Americans, white and black, would have to make major adjustments to accommodate that new world.

Negotiating the conflicts and challenges of that new world would prove difficult for all of us, but one unforgettable event that helped me to do so was viewing Hal Holbrook's performance as Mark Twain in Fulton Chapel on the Ole Miss campus at the time when Oxford was, literally and emotionally, still smoldering from the effects of the riot. I learned later that Holbrook had been encouraged to cancel that performance. The situation was still dangerous, he was told, and his security could not be guaranteed. But he had strong feelings about the issues of integration and racial justice, so he insisted on doing the program.

In 2006 Holbrook returned to the University of Mississippi to repeat his performance as Twain. In an interview with the Jackson Free Press, he recalled his earlier visit to Ole Miss: "There were machine guns on the back of trucks, and mortars and sandbags around the entrance to the university, and soldiers walking around with carbines." Holbrook's anxiety was not lessened when, just before he went on stage, a stagehand called attention to the large windows in the chapel and joked, "Watch out for those guys in the trees with squirrel rifles." Holbrook didn't find the comment very amusing. "That was the last thing I heard before I went on," he recalled, "and my knees were shaking."

Fulton Chapel was filled to overflowing that night, and everyone in the audience was white. Holbrook explained to the Free Press interviewer how he had loaded the script for the second act of the program with Twain's hardest-hitting remarks about slavery and racism. But even at intermission he still had not decided on how much of that material he would use. "I wanted to say everything that I felt I could say on the subject. I wanted to use all the material I had. But I did not want to create a riot," he said.

Walking back on stage to open the second act, he determined, as Twain's Huckleberry Finn did in his moment of moral testing, to follow his conscience -- and to trust his audience. "I thought, 'Go for it.' So I did the silent lie material. There is a pause in it, a long one. It comes right after Twain talks about the silent lie of slavery; how people can remain silent in the face of a great injustice like slavery. At the end of that sequence, it ends up with 'It is timid, and shabby.' I'm downstage right, and I turn and I walk all the way across the stage to the lectern never saying a word, just let what was, in those times, a very hot potato sit in the lap of the audience."

At the end of that long delay, to Holbrook's astonishment, the audience broke into applause. And they continued to applaud throughout the remainder of the evening as Holbrook as Twain leveled his harshest verbal attacks on racism, injustice and hypocrisy. When the show ended, Holbrook was given a standing ovation.

I still recall that long-ago evening in Oxford as the most electric and moving I have ever experienced in any theater. It was as though, by cheering the humanity and compassion and outrage expressed in Twain's memorable words, these white Mississippians, many of them from the Ole Miss campus, were publicly proclaiming that they were better than the news releases of recent days, that they too, like people elsewhere, were grief-stricken and ashamed over what had happened in their community the night of Sept. 30, and that this night would be the beginning of their atonement. It was, to my mind, a telling example of the cathartic effect that Aristotle defined as the intended purpose of all great drama.

Holbrook later expressed genuine regret that his enthusiastic and supportive reception by the Oxford audience never made the newswires. That night, at the conclusion of his performance, he told reporters, "You guys have written a good deal about what's going on down here in the South. You have to write about it, but it's not good. Now tonight, you saw something good. Why don't you write about that, too? You saw something good tonight -- hopeful -- write about it." To his disappointment and chagrin, they never did.

But Kaye and I didn't need to read a newspaper account of that evening: We were there. And we knew that if, two weeks earlier, we had witnessed human nature at its worst, now -- through the words of a famous writer, the interpretation of those words by a great actor and the sympathetic response of a decent, ethical audience -- we had seen it at its best. Both events taught us lessons we have never forgotten.

Robert Hamblin of Cape Girardeau is professor of English and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.