I rarely miss my days as a newspaper journalist. Occasionally, though, a story will catch my attention and I wish I could jump right in and start interviewing people and reporting on what they say. Such a story happened a couple of weeks ago in my home state, Mississippi, and my home county, Tishomingo. The voters of the county agreed by slim margins to allow the sale of beer, wine, and liquor. I realize that may not be earth-shattering news to the rest of the world where drinking is allowed without much question, but my home county has been completely "dry"--meaning no sales of any alcoholic beverage of any kind--since the end of Prohibition. In case you've forgotten your history lesson, that would mean no legal drinking since 1933, eighty years ago. I guess the residents felt that since Prohibition had gone so well, they would just keep it up for almost another century?
Actually, I know what kept the sale of beer and alcohol out of Tishomingo County all those years. It was the religious background of most of its people. Even though many of them had certainly hoisted a few in their day, they just didn't want to take a moral stand that it was okay for anyone else to drink. If the word "hypocrite" springs to mind, well, there's a reason for that.
The pastors and ministers were out in full force this time around too. They someone managed to keep the two referenda regarding beer and liquor sales off the ballot for three years while people gathered signatures and support. They tried to turn out as many voters as possible to vote against the initiatives, and they have already attempted to challenge the results. Once it was clear that they had lost, they promised to keep careful records of the number of DUIs issued once alcohol sales begin and of the amount of tax revenue the county actually receives. The promise of more tax money for a very poor county was one of the key selling points of the referenda, and why should the residents keep giving their money to Tennessee and Alabama and neighboring counties instead of keeping it at home?
Well, tax money and the reality that many people in the county already drink and shouldn't have to go somewhere else to enjoy a cold one.
None of this is what really fascinated me about the election. It was all to be expected. And what intrigued me most about this story was also not that I would have known some of the players on both sides of the debate. It was the margin of victory and the remarkable turnout for an election where these were the only issues on the ballot.
The first vote was to allow for the sale of beer and light wine. No, I don't really know what "light wine" is although I suspect it might have something to do with the alcohol content. It does make you wonder what "heavy wine" might taste like. In that election, 3,259 people voted in favor of making the county "wet," as the terminology goes, and 3,186 voted against it. That's a margin of just 73 votes out of 6,445 cast in the election.
The second referendum was even closer. That one allows the sale of liquor, the hard stuff, and it passed with 3,267 votes versus 3,225 against, a margin of just 42 votes out of the total of 6,492 cast in that election. That suggests that a lot more people were interested in voting about liquor sales, and apparently a few more of them were against it but still okay with beer. Astonishing results.
By the way, the numbers of voters might seem a bit low to anyone who doesn't live in Tishomingo County or in Mississippi, but that constitutes about 53 percent of the county's registered voters. If you want a basis for comparison, the city of Los Angeles was holding a run-off election on the same day to select the new mayor for one of the largest cities in the United States. The turnout in L.A.? About 19 percent. Obviously, choosing who's going to run a major city is less interesting than whether or not you can have a drink.
I haven't lived in Mississippi since 1990 and not in Tishomingo County since 1985, almost thirty years ago. I do recall growing up knowing that anyone who wanted to drink had to drive a long way to Tennessee, a little town of Counce in particular, to get a beer, sometimes at least twenty-five miles away. Many people made that drive, and too many people died returning from having drunk too much and trying to return home. A lot of people were also stopped and arrested for possession of alcoholic substances. It didn't take the sharpest law enforcement officer to figure out that on Friday and Saturday nights, a lot of people would be making the trek to Counce and back on the one highway that travels the length of our county.
When I went to college--well, university--I saw for the first time beer for sale in a grocery store. I'd never seen that in Mississippi before. Of course, you couldn't buy it on Sunday because of the so-called "blue laws," prohibitions designed to keep people acting morally on the Sabbath. (You might detect a trend here.) You also couldn't buy the beer or wine coolers (hey, maybe that's "light wine") cold. You had to make your purchase and take it home and refrigerate it and wait for it to get cold enough to enjoy. Unsurprisingly, when the weekend approached, you'd see fraternity guys in the stores pushing shopping carts full of beer and bags of ice, which they would dump into coolers in the backs of pickup trucks as soon as they got to the parking lot.
I don't know when you'll actually be able to buy a drink in Tishomingo County. Permits for the sale of liquor have to be cleared through the state bureaucracy, and I'm sure that will take some time. Permits for the sale of beer and light wine will be handled by local governments, but no one has figured out yet how to make that happen. In the meantime, I'd imagine that some people have been stocking up in anticipation of the day when they'll no longer be legally suspect. They will, of course, remain morally suspect in the eyes of almost half of the county, but that seems a small price to pay for a measure of freedom. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time they've felt that way anyhow.
In case you're wondering, Tishomingo is not the last county to go "wet" in the state of Mississippi. There are apparently still thirteen counties remaining in the state (which has a total of eighty-two counties) where you cannot buy yourself a beer or a glass of wine or a cocktail or even the stuff to make a cocktail. I guess it's some small comfort to know that where I grew up isn't the most backward of all places in a state that's often pegged as one of the most backward places in the country. Small comfort, indeed, but if I ever return to visit, I intend to have a beer just to celebrate my home's great leap into the 20th Century.
And, no, that last sentence doesn't have a typo.
