Bagel or Beignet?

It may have been the Marshall Tucker Band t-shirt I was wearing. Or it may have been that he knew I was a fan of anything having to do with rock music of the ’60s and ’70s. Whatever it was, as soon as he sat across from me at our church’s Wednesday evening potluck supper, my friend, Paul Laughlin, was prompted to ask if I was familiar with the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash that our mutual friend and fellow church member, Clark Hicks, had recently written about in his column in the local newspaper. I told him I had not yet read the article, whereupon Paul began to describe the gist of it to me.

Clark had written of how, back in 1977, Jamie Stewart, a former staff member at our church, had been one the first to arrive at the scene of the plane crash that killed several members of the Lynyrd Skynyrd rock band. That crash happened here in South Mississippi, about 85 miles west of where Paul and I were sitting in the fellowship hall of University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. I told him that, while I didn’t know many of the details of the crash, I had actually known one the band’s backup singers, and, coincidentally, she was the only band member who was not on that fateful flight. That vocalist, Deborah Jo Billingsley, was the sister of one of the first friends Gena and I made after we moved to Senatobia in 1976. JoJo was the daughter of a prominent Senatobia family and was raised there. And, as an additional coincidence, a few years later Gena and I bought the house that JoJo’s brother, Travis Billingsley, had owned.

Paul commented that this was, indeed, an interesting and surprising set of coincidences, but it still didn’t top the strangeness of the John Grisham/Pelican Brief/bagel-beignet coincidence that he and I together experienced a few years earlier. We both love to tell that story, but before I relate it here, let me say that Paul’s recall differs slightly from mine, but only in a couple of minor details and not in the remarkableness of the incident.

One day, again at some church function in the fellowship hall, Paul and I were discussing John Grisham. He said that he enjoyed John’s first two novels, A Time to Kill and The Firm, but not so much the third, The Pelican Brief. He said that book had too many implausibilities for him. As one example, he mentioned a scene in which Darby Shaw, the protagonist and character played by Julia Roberts in the movie, was hiding out in New Orleans and slipped into the famous Café du Monde restaurant where she found a deserted corner and ordered a coffee and a plain bagel. Paul remarked, “A bagel? Anyone who knows anything about the Café du Monde knows you’ll get beignets there and hardly anything else. You certainly won’t get a bagel.” I pointed out that she wouldn’t likely find a deserted table, not at any time of day or night. Paul went on to suggest that Grisham, good ol’ southern boy that he is, surely would not have made that mistake, and that in all likelihood John’s New York City editor at Doubleday saw “beignet” in the manuscript and not knowing what it was and assuming most readers wouldn’t, either, changed it to “bagel.”

Page 191 from my copy of the pre-publication manuscript for The Pelican Brief by John Grisham. The two passages marked supplied the answer to the Bagel or Beignet question.

I agreed that that may have been the case and that John probably would not have made that mistake. He would’ve known that Darby could’ve waited till three days after the world ended and never would’ve been served her bagel at the Café du Monde. However, I said I could easily find out whether it was John’s goof by looking at my copy of the pre-publication manuscript for The Pelican Brief. When I got home, less than an hour later, I checked. I immediately emailed Paul with the happy truth. John had, indeed, written “bagel,” but he had placed the character in the Abstract Bookshop and Café, a quaint little out-of-the-way place on Magazine Street, where, indeed, Darby could’ve gotten her bagel. Good for John. That one little bit of verisimilitude makes much more sense than having our on-the-lam protagonist hide out in the bustling, tourist-laden Cafe du Monde. Apparently, the editor made this change from John’s original text, but one can only guess as to what he or she was thinking. I checked other editions, both paperback and large-print versions, and later printings of the book, and it looks like this gaff was never changed.

Paul maintains that this is the most surprising coincidence that he’s ever personally experienced. I was a little doubtful when I first heard him say that, but he has repeatedly remarked about how amazed he was that he mentioned this obscure, over-30-year-old bit of trivia to the one person in the world who had the resources to resolve the question—me—and that person—again me—had in his possession the very resource needed to supply the answer, and was able to do so in minutes.  Frankly, Paul, when you put it that way, I’m amazed, too.

But wait, I hear some of you asking, Russell, just when and how did you come to possess this pre-publication copy of Grisham’s original manuscript? Well, that’s something I’ll pick up in Part II of this story.

The autographed title page from my copy of the pre-publication manuscript for The Pelican Brief by John Grisham. The inscription states: "To Russell Lott — good job with the manuscript — all the best" and is signed by John on July 29, 1991. The novel was originally published by Doubleday in March of 1992. 

TO BE CONTINUED

A Word to Ponder

veri·​si·​mil·​i·​tude (noun): the quality of seeming true or of having the appearance of being real and believable. From its roots, verisimilitude means basically “similarity to the truth.” Most fiction writers and filmmakers aim at some kind of verisimilitude to give their stories an air of reality. They need not show something actually true, or even very common, but simply something believable. The mass of good details in a play, novel, painting, or film will add verisimilitude. A novel without some verisimilitude won't interest many readers.
merriam-webster.com

Update (16 Oct 2024): Yesterday, as I was mowing the lawn, my mind wandered and I suddenly remembered that it was my long-time friend, Charles Ingram, who introduced me to this term. Charley was an avid supporter of My Back Pages and I felt that I should have mentioned him. He and I were colleagues at Northwest Community College, though on different campuses. We didn’t know each other very well until about 25 years ago when we discovered our mutual love for trivia and classic movies and our shared quirky sense of humor. It was somewhere around 2002 or ’03 that we first traded a few trivia questions via email. And thus began a long-standing trivia exchange that continued well into our retirement and only ended with his death a little over a year ago. He and I eventually quit trying to best one another with increasingly difficult trivia questions, but we kept up our exchanges, passing along items of interest, engaging in far-ranging discussions on a multitude of topics, as well simply checking up on each other’s health and family, and such. One day I hope to write more about this interesting man and the diversity of our exchanges. I sure do miss him. Anyway, back to verisimilitude; if Charley and I had differing opinions on a scene in a particular movie, for example, his counter-arguments would usually center around verisimilitude. “It’s not everything,” he’d say, “but it is an absolutely necessary minimum to maintaining audience involvement.” Multiple times over the years he’d tell me, “Come on, Russ, it’s just another cropduster scene,” (referring to an iconic episode in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest). “It’s a great until you realize that it makes no sense whatsoever. What idiot would hire a cropdusting plane to hit and kill a pedestrian in a cornfield?” Charley would’ve loved this bagel or beignet thing.

Song of the Day

“A Wound That Never Heals” by Jim White
(Oxford American Southern Music Sampler #5, 2001)

This song, in a different arrangement by this same artist, first came to my notice when it was featured on the 5th Oxford American Southern Music Sampler CD. I chose it for this piece for two reasons: One, because of John Grisham’s association with the Oxford American. He was a major benefactor in the magazine’s early years (when it was still headquartered in Oxford, Mississippi). And also I love the way the haunting narrative lyrics are sung a lot like someone reading a novel. As an additional plus, there’s a mention of a coincidence occurring in South Mississippi. I don’t think I could’ve found anything more appropriate.