Mystical Bayou Slot Machine
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Mississippi. Even the name suggests a slot machine that comes tantalizingly close but repeatedly fails to give you three in a row.
Bayou Caddy's Jubilee in Clermont Harbor is the first casino you come to as you make your way east along the Gulf Coast. It juts out over the water, giddily aglow in the surrounding darkness; the lot is lousy with Louisiana plates. Down the road in Bay St. Louis, Casino Magic floats on the back bay, well out of the way of the waterfront main street with its antique shops, crawfish bars and well-kept homes.
It is not that Mississippians have found some mystical connection between gambling and water; it's the law-since gambling was approved in 1990-that all casinos must be built over water. As a result, they are sprouting on the Gulf of Mexico (10 at this writing) and pullulating along the Mississippi River (12), with applications currently in for 49 new ones.
'Gambling is nothing new here,' says the woman behind the counter at the Big E grocery. The Big E overlooks the Gulf and, in addition to crawfish, sells Snoballs in a multitude of flavors, including 'popeye,' 'bubblegum,' 'cotton candy' and 'wedding cake.'
'We had slot machines in places along the beach,' she continues, 'card games in the back rooms of bars. I'd say up till about 30 years ago. Then a sheriff came in and got rid of it all.
'Our business hasn't been affected much by the new ones. But we see strange faces. And it's hard to get help. They all want to work in the casinos. It's not just the money but the benefits. One girl told me: `I'd work there just for the insurance.' '
Bay St. Louis has long been a summer retreat for people from New Orleans and it shows: Restaurants serve po' boys ('Do you want that dressed?' the waitresses ask, without Southern accents), statues of Mary grace front lawns, names like Pouyadoux and Saucier Gallicize the cemetery, votive cards turn up in antique shops.
For now, owners of the white-frame houses along Beach Boulevard can sit on their screened-in porches and enjoy an unobstructed view across the Gulf.
'They keep trying to put casinos downtown,' says Susan, owner of Bookends bookstore. 'And the people keep fighting it. It's a shame, because it's dividing the town.
'I'm against it. It has given people jobs. You hate to say it but it has. But it's a quick fix. It's greed.
'What I would like to see is a storm come and knock a few of them out. That would slow the whole thing down.'
Over at Ruth's Bakery, Ruth is busy frosting. 'Business has been great,' she says looking up from her spatula. 'Not from tourists but from local people, who are finally employed. Now they have more money than time. So they buy cakes instead of baking them themselves. Our birthday cake business has doubled in the last two years.'
Route 90 runs east across the bay bridge and, after a quick dip south, hugs the coast the dozen or so miles to Biloxi. On your left, fine Southern mansions with august white pillars and dark green shutters. (At night, with their windows glowing behind the oaks, they take on an eerie human presence.) On your right, like a weak gumbo, the glum brown waters of the Sound. Approaching Gulfport the four-lane road turns busier and more commercial.
The next stop on the Casino Trail is Grand Casino, across the street from St. Peter's-by-the-Sea. 'We used to have a lovely view,' a parishioner tells a visitor after the Palm Sunday service. Motioning to the blue and gray gambling hall with more tolerance than wrath, the priest says, 'God and Mammon on the same street.'
The nearby Copa Casino is the first that is actually a ship; it even has the smell of a ship; you reach it through dockyards lined with Chiquita banana and Dole pineapple trailers. The depictions of fruit only whetting the appetites of those heading to the slots.
The next one, now in Biloxi, is the President Casino, just down the road from Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis. In Mississippi, even casino owners have a sense of history. But it's true that Biloxi-despite its storied, jaunty name-is nothing to look at. Downtown consists of a few wide, empty streets and flat, perhaps equally empty buildings. The main drag along the beaches bulges with franchises and, now, the largest concentration of casinos on the Gulf.
After the President come Biloxi Belle (with a working paddle wheel, the only locally owned casino), Lady Luck, another Grand Casino, another Casino Magic and finally, the Isle of Capri Casino, named (history again) for the lavish gambling resort of the 1920s-Isle of Caprice-which thrived on Dog Island before the island, over time, became submerged.
The last four form a bulky concrete waterborne cluster at the edge of town. Together they have the look-a pagoda twist here, a modernist tower there-of a shopping mall designed by a schizophrenic and chopped into bits. Wildly blinking neon signs soar above the parking lots.
Just past this jumble is the bridge to Ocean Springs, the eastern version of Bay St. Louis. The two towns lie on either side of the Biloxi-Gulfport-Long Beach axis, both connected to it, tenuously, by a bridge. Both are pretty, retiring places that, instead of embracing Route 90 (as those other Gulf towns do), go about their business on small leafy streets. Both have a bookstore and both bookstores have kitchens (displaying cookbooks). Both claim artists: Alice Moseley (a painter in the naive style from Bay St. Louis) and Walter Inglis Anderson (a too-little-known genius from Ocean Springs featured in the Tribune's Travel section on May 1).
'One of the first things I can remember in my life was hearing about the New South,' the novelist Walker Percy wrote in 1977. 'I was three years old, in Alabama. Not a year has passed since that I haven't heard about a New South. I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again. In fact, my definition of a New South would be a South in which it never occurred to anybody to mention the New South.'
Percy, who died in 1990, grew up in Mississippi-as did, it sometimes seems, half of America's writers: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Donna Tartt, John Grisham; the names spill forth like coins from a slot machine. And it is conceivable that he would find nothing New were he to visit the state today. Gambling certainly isn't.
But 22 corporate casinos? With perhaps twice as many on the way?
'We're in a kind of stupor,' says Charlie Mitchell, managing editor of the Vicksburg Evening Post. And wherever you go, even in landlocked, casinoless towns, Mississippians are talking about gambling. Virtually everybody agrees that it has been a boon to the economy. Unemployment has dropped. 'It used to make Page 1 when the paper mill announced it was hiring 10 workers and a new scrubber. Now news of 1,200 jobs is kind of ho-hum.'
Tunica County, south of Memphis, Tenn., one of the poorest counties in the country, now has six casinos. People are working, drinks are free and accidents are up. Revenues are up. The tourism office finally has money with which to promote the state, so the Vicksburg Military Park and the Faulkner home are profiting off the roll of dice.
And the casinos, unlike some local companies, are setting a good example with their hiring and promoting of minorities, and their strict drug testing. Businesses are benefiting, but not all. Some restaurants that envisioned a slew of tourists are losing locals to the cheap buffets.
Crime is more prevalent because of people desperate for money to gamble. Pawn shops have sprouted up. Car auctions are held after enough people lose their titles in nights of excess.
The construction of hotels and housing hasn't kept pace with the spurt of casinos. Everybody, you hear, is taking a wait-and-see attitude. So tourists have trouble finding motel rooms on weekends.
A casino manager, sent out from Las Vegas, sits at the counter of the Ole Biloxi Schooner. It is lunchtime, the place is humming, and the young man from Nevada is the only customer in a suit. He is also one of the few wearing a pinky ring. And no baseball cap.
He's been in town a year, he tells the man next to him, waiting for the Palace, his casino, to open across the street. The casinos, he asserts, picking up another fried crab claw, are ruining the Gulf.
'They're gonna change the way of life, the culture, places like this,' he says, looking around at the fake wood paneling, the rough-hewn diners putting spoons into gumbo and drinking Barq's root beer. 'The Gulf is real. It has a sense of tradition. I know what casinos can do to a place.'
It's a little different in Vicksburg and Natchez. The casinos, at least for now, don't dominate; they sit, like the river, below the towns. And the riverboat casino in Natchez is as pretty and white and ribbed with balustrades as the antebellum mansions up above.
There is a rivalry between the two towns that stretches back to the Civil War, when Natchez surrendered without a struggle and Vicksburg held out. You can hear in Natchez today that 'Vicksburg has sold out to the casinos.' (It has three to Natchez's one.)
At the Old Court House Museum, the historian Gordon Cotton is suffering from his allergies. 'Never had 'em as kid,' he says regretfully. 'Then I could have gotten out of cutting the grass.' He is not a friend of the casinos, especially the Ameristar, with its nightly searchlights. When he explains why, he sounds like a character out of Tennessee Williams:
'My starlit skies have been infringed upon.'
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The historian lives in an old ancestral home south of the casinos along the river. Even though the Delta towns are less dependent on it now than they used to be, the Mississippi still has a powerful presence, flowing by so grand and silent. It carries barges and, someday, some people fear, it will carry the casinos.
As more states legalize gambling, the lure of Mississippi casinos may disappear. Then there'll be nothing to keep them-they all float, of course-from drifting away. And gambling, like cotton, will no longer be king.
GULF COAST ARRANGEMENTS
Getting there: You can drive or you can fly into New Orleans and rent a car.
Getting around: In nine days I was able to cover the southern half of the state, with a long weekend on the Gulf Coast, brief stops in Hot Coffee, Hattiesburg and Jackson, and stays of a couple of days in Vicksburg and Natchez.
Sights: Highlights include Jefferson Davis' last home, Beauvoir (Biloxi); the Walter Anderson Museum of Art (Ocean Springs); Vicksburg National Military Park; the Natchez Trace (an ancient trade route that cuts diagonally across the state); and Natchez's antebellum mansions.
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Casinos: The biggest concentration is in Biloxi, with the Grand being perhaps the grandest. (Its L.B.'s Grill is reputed to be the best casino restaurant.) Those that are actual boats, such as the Biloxi Belle, are small and a bit cramped but have some charm. The most aesthetically pleasing casino is Natchez's Lady Luck. All have restaurants (some more than one) and gift shops; some have playrooms and video arcades for children. I don't gamble, so I can't tell you which gives the best odds, but I didn't see many people winning jackpots. (Also, I didn't get to the casinos in Tunica County.)
Lodging: On the coast, Bay St. Louis and Long Beach have a few nice bed-and-breakfast places; most of the other options are typical seaside motels. Vicksburg and Natchez are both rich with attractive B&Bs, often in antebellum mansions. A new B&B brochure for the state is available; contact the office mentioned below.
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Eating: Excellent food, especially along the Gulf: crawfish, gumbo, shrimp, oysters. Catfish is a state specialty, often fried with hush puppies accompanying. Grits is a popular breakfast item. Barq's, an excellent root beer, was first made in Biloxi.
Information: Contact the Mississippi Division of Tourism, P.O. Box 1705, Ocean Springs, Miss. 39566-1705; 800-WARMEST.