In those bleaker moments, with a player writhing on the field—again—it seems as if there’s no fixing football. The sheer force of the sport’s intrinsic and inextricable violence overwhelms one well-meaning new rule after another. There is some wringing of hands by authority figures—even the President, an ardent sports fan, expresses some grave concerns about the game and its costs—and a sense that Something Must Be Done, if notably less sense of what that might be. That was the state of football in 1906.

It’s the state of football in 2013, too. The same managed, choreographed violence that drives the game’s popularity can’t be managed or choreographed into un-violence. That reality, football’s defining conflict and central contradiction, would be recognizable to a fan from 1906. The game itself, though, would not be. Contemporary football’s intricate passing-driven offenses, as well as the speed, strength, skill and sheer tonnage of the players involved, make today’s game seem even more than a century removed from the version played around the turn of the 20th Century.

Take, for instance, the game played between Pomona and Stanford on Oct. 27, 1906, at Fiesta Park in Los Angeles. The players on those two teams averaged a little under 160 pounds. (If you were wondering: There is no player on this year’s Stanford roster who weighs less than 170 pounds, and a dozen listed at 298 pounds or more.) This wasn’t just a time in which Pomona College had a football rivalry with the 2012 Rose Bowl Champions, it was a time in which those two football teams were roughly equivalent in size and skill. But the strangest thing about that 1906 game was that these two teams of football players were squaring off in a game of rugby. How and why they were doing that is something of a long story, but it comes back to football’s old—and still contemporary—crisis of violence.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL IN THE EARLY part of the 20th century was, by and large, an East Coast pursuit. While Pomona and Occidental had rivalries with present-day Pac-12 powerhouses such as USC, Cal Berkeley and Stanford, those games and the teams playing them weren’t held in especially high regard nationally. But if California football was considered, in the words of a 1905 article in Outing Magazine, “slow and second class,” the game was no less violent west of the Rockies.

The game’s roughness was then, as it is now, both a part of the game’s appeal and its distinctive mythos. No less a fan than Theodore Roosevelt wrote, in an 1893 response to concerns about football violence in Harper’s, that, “the sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk. Every effort should be made to minimize this risk, but it is mere unmanly folly to do away with the sport because the risk exists.” But injuries and even deaths continued to occur on the field, and the sporting press of the period happily hyped the violence. The presence of bought-and-paid-for players on bigger and more ethically flexible teams—a problem big-time college football is still working on, actually—added to the appearance of chaos. A round of rule changes in 1905 legalized the forward pass, opening up the game and diminishing the importance of the dull, grunt-y, straight-ahead brutality that the football writer Caspar Whitney dubbed “the beef trust.” The changes also led to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the predecessor of the NCAA. On the East Coast, university presidents further responded to the rising tide of injuries and on-field deaths with a series of “debrutalization” measures designed to make the game safer.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t quite work. “The season of ‘debrutalized’ football ended … with a record of eleven deaths and ninety-eight players more or less seriously injured,” The New York Times reported in November of 1907. This was only a slight reduction in casualties and no reduction at all in the number of fatalities, although the Times did note, hopefully, that “not a single serious injury has been sustained by Yale, Harvard or Princeton.” On the West Coast, at Cal and Stanford, university presidents were notably more proactive. They dumped football entirely for the 1906 season, and replaced it with rugby.

This was not necessarily a popular decision at the time. In June of 1907, Berkeley high school students (naturally) staged demonstrations against the imposition of what the newspapers of the time called “the English game.” But the shift to rugby was one that Pomona reluctantly made as well. They had to play against someone, after all.

 THE GREAT RUGBY EXPERIMENT didn’t last long at Pomona. Pomona was shut out by Cal, and while the Sagehens did win a tune-up game against Pomona High School in early October—“The game was not a particularly brilliant one,” the Los Angeles Times sniffed—they didn’t fare nearly as well against collegiate competition. Pomona was shut out again, 26-0, by Stanford shortly after that win against the local high school. “Pomona made a game fight to the end, and came very close to being enti-tled to a score,” the Los Angeles Times reported, quite possibly sarcastically. The headline in the Times, three days after that game, read “Pomona Drops Rugby Games.”

This was not the end of California’s football war. It was the end of intercollegiate rugby’s attempt at supplanting football at Pomona; the football team was back at practice by Halloween. It took Occidental and Whittier several years to follow suit, but within a few years a schism had emerged: Cal, Stanford and other Northern California schools played rugby, while by 1910, Pomona, Whittier and Occidental were playing football again, albeit against each other and teams from Colorado and Oregon instead of their larger and more geographically proximate rivals. “The two northern universities have adopted rugby for all time,” the Los Angeles Times columnist Owen Bird wrote in 1912. “The University of Southern California saw the way the tide was setting last year and took up the new game. Now it looks to be only a matter of time until the [Occidental] Tigers and the Sage Hens are forced to take up the game or lose standing with the athletic students of Southern California.

“This was not necessarily sportswriterly hyperbole on Bird’s part. “Rugby and American football are about on a par here,” Bird wrote, later in 1912. “This season will tell the tale as to which will survive.”

The answer, for a while, was both. Stanford, Cal and USC stuck with rugby, playing each other and teams from Canada and Australia for (very-far-) away games; the New Zealand All-Blacks, then as now one of the premier rugby sides in the world, swung through for an exhibition in 1913. But if rugby was an improvement on the brutal, dull, two-yards-and-a-cloud-of-ugh version of football that existed prior to the “debrutalization” rules and later reforms, the game that had emerged in the intervening years was a different thing—something slightly less bruising, a good deal more open, and notably more like the sport that’s currently the most popular in the United States by a wide margin. With the more pass-friendly and marginally less vicious game catching on in the rest of the nation—and booming in Southern California—the rugby schools were increasingly isolated. And then, in 1913, Pat Higgins initiated USC’s proud tradition of high-confidence, high-volume football coaches by injecting some trash-talk into the dispute.

“It will be remembered that Pat Higgins stated recently that he could get up a football team of rugby players, who could show the American players a few tricks at their own trade,” Bird wrote in the Times on Dec. 12, 1913. “Said speech caused a river of wild argument to be loosed upon our devoted heads.” Less metaphorically, it also led to a heavily-hyped exhibition American-style football game on Christmas Day, at Washington Park in Los Angeles. Higgins put together a team of elite rugby players from Cal, Stanford, Santa Clara and USC; coach Jack d’Aule built a team of his own, with Pomona (four players) and Whittier (five) represented heavily. “This squad of local intercollegiate men are fast, in condition, veterans of the game, and, best of all, are fired by a mighty impulse to defend the game they love,” Bird wrote. The opposing side, Bird noted, “[ran] to beef”—they outweighed the football players by 23 pounds per player, on average. They were, for the most part, the best rugby players in the United States.

It is, admittedly, something of a stretch to say that the resounding and lopsided 24-2 win that the team of smaller players from smaller schools rolled up that day saved college football in California. The game was not necessarily going anywhere; there is, for better or worse, something in the American psyche and populace that loves football. It was still several years before the rugby schools—Stanford was the last—dropped the sport in favor of football, although it’s safe to say that their programs have recovered from the blow. But while football still has a great many problems of its own to sort out, that Pomona-powered win a little over a century ago did at least ensure that rugby isn’t one of them.

 

I.
I Fly to Austin to Visit an Archive of the Entire Works and Life Papers of My Writing Mentor and Once Professor

The great thing about being a writer is that you send out vague emails like the one I sent asking the editor of this magazine if he had any work for me, and sometimes something wonderful, and completely beyond the value of money comes back. That was what happened when the editor of this magazine asked me if I might want to go to Austin to spend some time with the papers of David Foster Wallace who, despite my complicated feelings around his death, remains the most influential writer and perhaps more importantly, teacher, in my life.

A few weeks later, I was flying to Austin on-schedule through sheets of unbroken blue spotted with perfect clouds reminiscent of the original cover of Infinite Jest.

II.
The First Time I Encountered David Foster Wallace, the Writer

I found that blue-sky book in my father’s office in our house in 1996, opened it and didn’t leave my bed for five days. I was 15. I can’t remember whether I was actually sick or just decided to stay home “sick” from school for a week so I could do nothing but read Infinite Jest from morning until night.

All I know is that absorbing those words for the first time, for me, was a kind of transport as real as the flight I took from JFK to Austin. It was more than half my life ago, but I still have a very visceral memory of the days I shared with that book in my bed in my sophomore year of high school. I remember those days reading Infinite Jest in flashes, as if they were sections of a scary and wonderful trip I took by myself away from the teenage high school place I was stuck in at that time and so longed to escape, and into a terrain far more sophisticated and complicated. It was the kind of journey that, even though it had to end, when I got back I was permanently changed, and I knew it. Another way to say this would be that in adolescence, before I stumbled upon Infinite Jest, I was sad, but I thought the sadness I felt was unique to me, and that made me sadder. After reading Infinite Jest, I realized that there was a vast, great, adult sadness in the world that I was only likely experiencing the very tip of at that particular adolescent moment, and that made me feel significantly less sad.

I know now that many people feel that sense of both change and of having their specific sadness understood and put to words for the first time when they first read the work of David Foster Wallace. I didn’t know it then. I just knew that despite being an insatiable reader since I could put letters together, I finally had a favorite author.

III.
The First Time I Encountered David Wallace, the Professor

By the time I arrived at Pomona in 1999, I had read all of David Foster Wallace’s books that he had published up to that time except one and loved and was likely changed by them all. (The one book I hadn’t read was Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, because it was harder to get, and still is. I should probably still get it.)

I met David Wallace the person and professor in 2002, in the fall semester of my senior year. I had just returned from taking the previous semester off. During my semester off, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I walked from Georgia to Maine, over 2,000 miles. I was struggling with a lot of things that now, as a professor, I understand are not uncommon for college students to struggle with. At the time, however, I thought my struggles meant I might not come back to Pomona in the fall when and if I finished my epic hike. I felt like maybe I wasn’t in the right place to be in college, or that college maybe wasn’t the right place for me to be.

I met with my advisor at the time, a professor in the English Department whom I also still admire. I told him that even though I was leaving college to live in the wilderness for six months to walk until I (I hoped) became unrecognizable to myself, I needed all the information he had available so that I could apply to the workshop I’d heard rumors that David Foster Wallace was coming to teach at Pomona in the fall. My advisor then said what many writers I respect have said to me about the writing of David Foster Wallace since. He said he didn’t know what everyone was so excited about, because he thought David Foster Wallace was sophomoric. I told my advisor that I was only a junior, and that when I had fallen in love with the writing of David Foster Wallace I had actually been a sophomore in high school, so that made perfect sense.

A few months later, I mailed in my story to apply to be in Professor Wallace’s Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop from a small outpost in rural Tennessee on the Appalachian Trail. It was the first story I had ever written from beginning to end, and it was about opening my father’s stacks of forbidden journals to find that they were not full of racy life experiences but instead of lists and lists of the books he had read when he was younger. I don’t know if I got into the workshop because the story was any good or if Wallace was just impressed with how battered the envelope was from being lugged around in my pack in the woods. I just know that I wasn’t a writer when I went into his workshop, and I was when I came out.

IV.
I Find Enough Wallace Files to Build a Fort Out of File Folders, No Make That A Whole Empire of Forts, So I Make Some Ground Rules and Start Sifting

There are five “collections” of papers at the Harry Ransom Center that come up if you do a search for David Foster Wallace. Each collection has an average of one to 10 “series,” which are groups of containers. From there, the numbers get complicated. The number of containers in each series varies greatly. The number of boxes in each container also varies greatly. The number of folders in each box—you get the idea.

One way to think of the categorical branching off of the material remnants of Wallace’s life would be like being surrounded by the folds and memory files of a giant, sterile, academic brain. I’m not a neuroscientist, so forgive me for the crudeness of this metaphor when it comes to its scientific roots. But at certain moments, going through those carefully ordered compartments of paper—being in the reading room at the Ransom Center did feel like being inside a brain in the best kind of way. A brain where everything had finally been sorted and smoothed and was organized once and for all to be shared, something I guessed Wallace might have appreciated, at least based on the lamentations about how hard it was to communicate the chaos in one’s head in an orderly way on paper that I was reading over and over as I sifted through those concrete-colored cardboard boxes of correspondence.

Confronted with so much paper, I had to determine what not to write about. After significant deliberation, I decided:

1. I would not write about manuscripts, various versions of manuscripts, or Wallace’s marginalia on manuscripts. I knew this was the kind of undertaking that would require far more time than I had at the University of Texas at Austin. Also, after having Wallace as a professor, I really respect him as a reviser, so I was not that interested in mining earlier drafts.

2. I would not write about Wallace’s correspondence that had to do with pitching his books and other writing. It seemed to me to be the most business part of the files, and I was interested in the opposite.

3. I would not write about his personal correspondence. It was just too sad. Exposing it without permission would feel like a violation. I will say that there were some fun postcards. I left the archive with the resolution to send more postcards, especially when not traveling. Favorites included pulp book covers such as A Woman Must Love: She Thought She Could Live Without Men, a photo of Truman Capote luxuriating at home in a bathrobe and Stetson, and a photo of an old geezer that Wallace had drawn a voice bubble for with the words, “Kein kluger Streiter hält den Feind gering.” I put the line into Google and learned it was a quote by Goethe. Translated, it reads, “No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversary.”

4. I would not present the reader with just lists—lists of the words Wallace looked up and wrote his own definitions of, lists of the readings he assigned his students. I couldn’t fit those amazing lists into this brief article even if I wanted to. There were too many and they were too long! One folder I scanned of words Wallace wrote the definitions of is 100 pages long. Most of the pages are filled with lists of words in small print and they are on both sides. I hope someone someday publishes a book of his lists: lists of words, lists of recommended readings … I have a feeling someone will … In the meantime, here are a few gems that Wallace looked up the definitions of: vituperations, littoral, oneiric copralalia, tenesmus, gomphosis, coruscate, felo de se, votary, sapropel, nonceword, polyandry, logorrhea, facula, stellify, comether, rimple, hypolimnion and adumbrate. I leave it to you to take to the dictionary to unearth their meanings. One thing is certain about the David Wallace I knew as a student at Pomona, he would want you to work for it.

V.
The Single Most Joyful Thing I Found While Sifting Through the Papers of My Dead Professor

As I returned various boxes to the reference librarian, I slowly realized that what I was most interested in, and what fellow Sagehens were likely to be most interested in, was David Wallace the professor and David Wallace the person. That was how we knew him best after all. I decided to leave David Foster Wallace, fascinating and heartbreaking as he was in the pages I sifted through, to the people who knew him as a writer, in that way while he was still alive—to leave it up to them to decide when and what to
share from that aspect of the archive.

My favorite folder was the folder of the photocopies of the American Heritage Dictionary ballots. Wallace was a member of the company’s board that governed decisions on usage, spelling and pronunciation. The ballots show the feedback he gave to the American Heritage Dictionary over the years on items they sent him to review.

I think I was especially delighted to find Wallace’s dictionary ballots after reading his personal letters to the writer Don DeLillo, many of which seemed tortured or fraught with insecurity and self-doubt, because when Wallace is commenting on the dictionary ballots there is not a shred of that self-consciousness in his obvious joy in interacting so directly with pure language in its most naked state. Whether he is appalled at the way most people don’t understand the meaning of “to beg the question,” or enthusiastically approving the many acceptable different ethnic pronunciations of the words “bayou” or “calzone,” it is clear that there is no terror or stress for him on these pages, only an incredibly exuberant love of the words, stripped down to their barest selves.

Though Wallace may have wrestled with his role as a writer, his role as a grammarian and expert on words was clearly pleasing to him, and carried with it none of the burden of assemblage that creating novels and other texts did. I like looking at these dictionary ballots because, even in this quiet room that I can’t help feeling is a tomb of some kind, his joy and the thrill he got from his expert manipulation of the English language shines through.

When I reach the end of the folder of dictionary usage ballots dated 11-04-05, I get a pang seeing that he has listed a permanent change of address to Claremont, California, after he had already lived there three years. The address snaps me out of the paper and back to thinking about how difficult it is to reflect, on the one hand, about your friend whom you admired, who died, and on the other, about the intersection of your somewhat normal life with the life of someone whose papers end up in an archive … it’s difficult and disorienting to try to reconcile the two.

I only knew one very specific and cordoned-off part of David Wallace. Being confronted so closely with the other parts, having access to so many of them, felt reckless and unnatural, almost as if I was traveling through time. At points, I had to remind myself that Don DeLillo is still alive—that the dictionary ballots I was looking through were filled out by Wallace two years after I graduated from Pomona, only eight years ago. Retrieving them from those files in the archive where the papers of other great thinkers, long dead, were kept changed them somehow. It made him feel less like a person or friend, and more like a dead great writer.

VI.
There are More Than 40 Bronze Busts of (Predominantly White Male) Authors in the Harry Ransom Center, and a Bust of David Foster Wallace is Not Yet Among Them

There is an epigraph printed on the wall as you enter the reading room where you go to request the files. It is cited only as coming from the Hebrew Union Prayer Book. It reads, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”

There are also the busts of great dead authors everywhere, immortalized in bronze inside the reading room, on the halls leading up to it and on the floor below where you enter the building that is designed to protect the delicate remembrances of great men from excesses of heat or light. Unfortunately, the busts are mostly old white men, which makes me start to wonder about the obvious question.

Who decides who gets a bust?

I walk around photographing all the bronze busts, metal, immortal monuments to other “great” authors (photographing is a way of looking when you are in an archive trying to absorb as much as possible). It is only when I get to the last one that I realize I had been hoping to find a bust of Wallace. There isn’t one. At least not yet.

Some of the authors get more than one bust inside the Ransom Center. There are three James Joyces, two Hemingways, two George Bernard Shaws. Steinbeck’s mustache is sculpted in a way that makes him look like a bullfighter, Tom Stoppard’s bust looks an awful lot like Mick Jagger, the two women who have been chosen above all the rest seem to be somewhat randomly Edith Sitwell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Sitwell’s bust is also the only one that isn’t at least somewhat realistic. The rendering of her head as a giant, balloon-ish, moonlike white marble sphere with enlarged, alien eyes is eerily out of place, as if, in the afterlife, only her soul out of them all is not shaped like a person.

Perhaps someday there will be many busts to represent the many David Wallaces. The wacky young Wallace, eternally bandana-ed. The junior tennis pro. The fat, sweaty Wallace I saw read as a sort of audition for the post he came to fill the following year, significantly more svelte. The drug-addicted atheist and the sober Christian. It’s possible bronze is too ancient a material to capture a personality with so many genuine permutations. The future is long. Maybe someone will commission a hologram. Then, perhaps, the next time I come to visit these papers (I suspect there will be a next time), between the busts of Whitman and Frost, there will be a simulacrum of my old professor, made of light, chewing tobacco and spitting it into an old, dirty peanut butter jar, just as he used to do in class.

 

The widow of.

The phrase travels with her through life, as if it were part of her name.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Inaugural Invocation,” said a recent headline in The New York Times.

“Widow of Medgar Evers to Deliver Invocation at Obama Inauguration,” said the Washington Post.

“Medgar Evers Widow Gives Inaugural Invocation,” says the YouTube video.

Fifty years have passed since the hot June night in Jackson, Miss., that she heard the crack of a gun then bolted out of her bedroom, followed by her three children, and fell to her knees next to her husband, who lay near the doorstep in a pool of blood.

Within an hour, she was the widow of.

Myrlie Evers-Williams ’68 has tried to be the very best widow Medgar Evers could have hoped for. She has devoted herself to bringing his killer to justice, to keeping the cause of civil rights alive. But in the past half century, she also has maintained another struggle—to become fully realized and recognized as herself. Just Myrlie.

“I made a decision,” she said one balmy winter day when I went to visit her at her apartment in a senior community just outside of Claremont.

The decision she was announcing wasn’t on par with others she had made recently, like selling her big house in Bend, Ore., or squeezing into a tight red dress to play piano at Carnegie Hall with Pink Martini, or agreeing to stand next to the black president of the United States and deliver the inauguration prayer.

This was a smaller act of liberation.

“I’m going to keep my hair natural,” she said, with a deep laugh. “I don’t have time for blow drying and curling and styling. I prefer to let the personality of yours truly emerge.”

On that day in early January, Evers-Williams, a tall woman with a rich voice whose friendliness carries a dash of tartness, felt under siege. She was recovering from the flu. Her sunny one-bedroom apartment was stuffed with boxes and her days were packed with chores.

The inaugural staff kept calling, and she had preparations to make for a 50th anniversary commemoration of Medgar Evers’ assassination.

“I am juggling a life that is not mine,” she said. “You know, as I approach 80, I ask myself why, why are you doing this?”

OK, why?

She plunged her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

“It’s just me,” she said. “It’s the nature of Myrlie.”

A few days earlier, trying to get organized for her upcoming appearances, she had fished some old documents out of the boxes in her living room. She sat down, in one of her orange wing chairs, and began to read about the funeral of the man she had married at 18 and lost at 30.

She was freshly struck by what he meant, to American history and to her. It had been a long time since she wept over Medgar, but sitting there, alone in the clutter of the past, she cried.

 

TO GRASP the improbable sweep of Myrlie Evers-Williams’ life, you have to understand the place she came from.

Mississippi in 1933 was poor, even by the standards of the Great Depression. In its small towns and out on the sharecroppers’ fields where blacks and whites alike struggled to eke a living from the land, the myth of white supremacy flourished as hardily as Delta cotton.

Like the rest of the Deep South, Mississippi abided by Jim Crow, a set of laws and customs that segregated blacks and whites in public places. Black people were shunted into separate schools and corralled in the backs of buses.They drank from water fountains marked “colored.” When they were allowed in “white” movie theaters, it was through a side door, then on up to “the buzzard’s roost” in the balcony far from the white patrons and the screen.

In that era, in the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg, lived a schoolteacher named Annie Beasley.

Beasley was one of the lucky few, a black woman who had gone to college for a while, and she believed that education was salvation. Shortly after her son and a 16-year-old girl gave birth to a child, she knew what she had to do.

She brought the baby, Myrlie, home.

Beasley owned her own house, a whitewashed place up the hill from the shacks where the poorest blacks lived. In her clean rooms, with the vegetable garden and fruit trees out back, she kept books. She listened to classical music and on Sundays wore white gloves to church.

Myrlie, named after an aunt who also helped raise her, called her grandmother “Mama.”

“Open your mouth and speak distinctly,” Mama instructed Myrlie.

“Baby,” Mama told her, “you may not have the money to travel, but as long as you can read, and books are accessible to you, you can travel anywhere in the world.”

“Baby, baby, get back here,” Mama would call if Myrlie left her nightly prayers too early. “You didn’t ask God to make you a blessing.”

Myrlie Beasley didn’t grow up feeling inferior or poor, and not until she was ready for college did she register how high and hard the wall of segregation was. When she applied for a state scholarship, hoping to study music at a college outside Mississippi, she was told that she could find everything she needed at a black school right there at home.

In 1950, she enrolled at Alcorn A&M College out in the woods of tiny Lorman, Miss.

“Stay away from the servicemen,” Mama and Aunt Myrlie warned.

On her first day at Alcorn, as she leaned against a lamppost, a football player approached. He was a few years older, one of the black Army veterans who had come home to Mississippi after World War II, having tasted the possibilities of the wider world. He was from the little Delta town of Decatur. His name was Medgar Evers.

They married the next year. She was 18.

Medgar Evers got a job selling insurance, and as he drove the Delta peddling his policies, he witnessed daily, in growing dismay, the black sharecroppers who lived barely better than slaves. He loved Mississippi, but in the nascent civil rights movement, he saw a chance to change it.

In 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hired Evers as its first Mississippi field secretary. He roamed the state, documenting lynchings and other brutalities against black people, helping blacks register to vote, organizing boycotts and sit-ins. At one point, he handed out bumper stickers that read, “Don’t buy gas where you can’t use the restroom.”

Myrlie Evers worked as his secretary while she raised the children. They both grew tired, and scared. They argued, about money and safety. Civil rights was risky business.

In 1957, the Evers family moved up in the world, and into a small new house, with a mortgage, in a stable black neighborhood in Jackson. Some of their neighbors didn’t want them. Medgar Evers was stirring up trouble. Trouble was bound to follow him home.

On June 12, 1963, just past midnight, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy gave a televised speech in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway. He stepped out of the car, carrying T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.” From a honeysuckle thicket across the street came a bullet. It pierced him in the back.

“His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause,” the historian Taylor Branch wrote in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Parting the Waters.

“. . .White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend.”

Not all white people.

A proudly racist and cockily unrepentant fertilizer salesman named Byron De La Beckwith was soon arrested, tried twice in 1964, and both times let go after the juries, composed entirely of white men, deadlocked.

 THAT SUMMER Myrlie Evers packed up her life and headed for Claremont, Calif., about as far from Mississippi as a car and her imagination could take her.

“The kindness of people in Claremont was beyond belief,” Evers-Williams said, sitting in her apartment all these years later. “That was not what I wanted. I wanted the nastiness, the hatred. I wanted a fight. God, I wanted a fight so bad.”

Medgar had always told her that if they ever left Mississippi, he’d like to go to California, and in Kiplinger’s Magazine, she read a story on the country’s best small colleges. A name caught her eye: Pomona.

Then there she was, the famous widow of the newly famous Medgar Evers, living a continent away from friends and family, in a pruned and placid college town where blacks were almost as rare as snow.

She hadn’t comprehended how white her new hometown was. She had imagined it was more like the neighboring city of Pomona, and some of the black people there were miffed that she’d chosen insular, collegiate Claremont. Did she think she was too good for them?

Not only was she black in a land of whites, but as a 32-year-old student, she was old in the kingdom of youth.

She remembers her first day on campus, some professor addressing the freshmen about what an important time in life this was.

“Why am I sitting here?” she fumed to herself, “when I have three kids at home and I have no idea what they’re doing?”

Her arrival in Claremont made news. Look Magazine photographed her poring over her books. Ebony Magazine put her and the three kids on its cover, posed next to their big stone fireplace, all smiles, dressed like the era’s perfect white sitcom families, only without the dad. Inside is a story: “Why I Left Mississippi,” by Mrs. Medgar Evers.

 Little by little, she softened to the kindness around her. Masago Armstrong, the Pomona College registrar, was among those who took a special interest.

“She and others were so powerful,” Evers-Williams said. “So powerful in their excellence, making me think about what I wanted to do.”

But the work was hard. Her grades weren’t good. She walked into a professor’s office one day—“Alvin?

Was that his name?”—and announced, “I quit.”

Go home, he said. Put your books away. Come back in a week. She came back in a week, ready to keep going.

When the Pomona College class of 1968 paraded across a stage to collect their diplomas, Myrlie Evers, sociology major, was there. The audience rose and cheered.

“Why did they stand up to applaud you?” her older son, Darrell, asked afterward. “You didn’t do anything different from the other graduates.”

“IS THAT the pool?” she said.

We were standing in front of Sumner Hall, out for a tour of the Pomona campus, where Evers-Williams rarely comes these days. She peered toward the blue shimmer in the distance. Pendleton Pool. She remembers that. Shivering in the water, clinging to the side, afraid, listening to the swimming instructor, Anne Bages, who finally, one day, said, “Myrlie, you must do this. Come on. If your child were on the other side drowning, what would you do? Envision it.”

She envisioned it and swam across the pool. “Her patience, her strength and determination to see I did what I had to do,” Evers-Williams said, “that speaks to my entire experience here.”

It was a sunny, warm day, and as we walked past Little Bridges, she remembered that old, elegant, mission-style building, too. She and her second husband, a longshoreman and union organizer named Walter Williams, were married there in 1975, before they set off for a life in Oregon.

“He was my dearest best friend,” she said. Williams died in 1995. “He was so good to me and my children.”

She walked on, slowly, wishing she’d brought her cane.

“God,” she said, “I’ve lived through so many changes. It’s amazing to walk on this campus and think of it. Mind if we sit?”

We sat on a bench on Marston Quad, looking toward Mount Baldy, past the trees that never seem to change. She thought back. Her eight years as an executive at Atlantic Richfield Company. Her run for Congress, unsuccessful but a decent showing. Her three years in the mid-1990s as head of the NAACP; she has some untold stories she’d love to tell about that. The writing, the speaking. The three children brought successfully to adulthood. “When I look at my bio,” she said. “I say, ‘wow.’”

Through it all, she never forgot that she was the widow of. She kept her eye on that cocky fertilizer salesman, Byron De La Beckwith. Her pressure helped persuade the state of Mississippi to retry him, and in 1994, a racially mixed jury of Mississippians declared him guilty of Medgar Evers’ murder.

There were many times after Medgar Evers died that his widow cursed and cried and wanted to dwell in hatred. She built a different life instead.

“And now?” she said. “Back in Mississippi after 50 years.”

Last February, while keeping her apartment near Claremont, she returned to Alcorn State University as a visiting scholar. “Come home,” she says the president of the college told her. “Come home and let us take care of you.”

So she went, and flew into Jackson-Medgar Wylie Evers International Airport.

In this half century, Evers-Williams has never ceased to be surprised.

Another surprise arrived after she gave a TEDx talk in Oregon a while back. She told the audience about how as a girl in Vicksburg, she sang and played the piano, and how her grandmother and aunt dreamed she would make it to Carnegie Hall. Out in the crowd that day sat Thomas Lauderdale, the founder of the pop orchestra Pink Martini. Afterward, he made her a proposition: Come perform with us. At Carnegie Hall. Crazy, she thought. Not with her arthritic fingers, and besides, she didn’t play much anymore. And, really, she was shy.

Then she thought of how Medgar used to say, “Trust yourself.”

She said “yes.”

One night last December, at the age of 79, she swept onto the New York stage in a form-fitting red dress— “long trumpet sleeves, just a little bit of cleavage and this gorgeous train”—tailored for her by the designer Ikram.

She sat down at the baby grand, so unlike the cold, out-of-tune piano at Alcorn that she’d been practicing on.

She played “Claire de Lune,” her grandmother’s favorite, followed by “The Man I Love.”

The audience gave her a standing ovation.

“As ‘the widow of,’” she said later, “I kept Medgar’s memory alive, and that’s what I was determined to do. But there is the Myrlie who at times finds herself saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve done these things too, on my own.’ That’s one reason I got such a kick out of Carnegie Hall.”

Soon after her Carnegie debut, she would be at the inauguration, standing next to the first black president of the United States, praying aloud for the nation, the personification of its past, its progress, its hope.

“People choose, I think, what they want to be,” she said that day in Claremont, closing her eyes for a moment, soaking up the sun. “I don’t believe in self pity forever.”

Her mind flitted back to her old friends, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin, and Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X. She recalled a newspaper story a young woman once wrote about the three of them.

“The article was: these are just widows living off their husbands’ reputations,” she said. “Betty, Coretta and I talked, furious. Coretta said, in her calm, understanding way, ‘Oh, she’ll learn, she’ll learn.’”

Evers-Williams sighed.

“I miss those two ladies so much.”

At 80, there are many people for her to miss. Mama, Medgar, Walter, Aunt Myrlie, her mother and father, her son Darrell, who died nine years ago of cancer. She feels their absence but looks for the blessings.

Every morning when she gets up, she walks into the bathroom and before brushing her teeth or washing her face, she performs a ritual that shapes the day.

“Hi, beautiful,” she says to the mirror, and she smiles.