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on
The Andy Griffith Show
, and he quickly became the focus of amused attention. We learned that his was the only Jewish family in Winona, Mississippi, a town where his father owned the local clothing store, his brother was married to the daughter of the Baptist preacher, and Macy himself led an idyllic Tom Sawyer life, playing basketball for his segregated highschool, riding with the Confederate Cavalry Club, spinning records as a DJ on the town’s underpowered radio station, and chasing girls with innocent abandon.
    Macy was perfectly well aware of his impact on us northerners and he played it for all it was worth, deepening his already outrageous Mississippi drawl, calling fifteen-year-old girls “ma’am,” and regaling us with tales about his exotic hometown. In the course of these stories it emerged that there was a serious side to Macy B. Hart. Back home, on Sunday mornings, he drove seventy miles over rural roads to Cleveland, Mississippi, to attend religious school and to take part in the youth group; and despite his lack of a hometown constituency, he had somehow managed to get himself elected a regional officer of SOFTY, the Reform youth movement of the Deep South. Macy’s knowledge of Judaism was tenuous—he was capable of asking, “What do y’all call Friday night, Shabbes?”—but his sincerity was obvious and touching. He came back to the summer institute year after year, and in 1967 he was elected president of the National Federation.
    Macy went to Louisiana State University and later to the University of Texas, where he met his wife, Susan, a former high school majorette from Lexington, Mississippi. After graduation he intended to become a lawyer. But the Reform movement wanted to start a camp in Mississippi for Jewish children, and Macy agreed to set it up and run it for one year. Macy and Susan wanted to live in a large city with a real Jewish community; instead they wound up in Utica, a place where Jews are so rare that Susan, whose southern accent makes Dolly Parton sound like Margaret Thatcher, was once asked by a neighbor if she knew of any other foreigners in town.
    That was in 1970. Now, almost twenty years later, Macy was still at the camp, still engaged in a quixotic struggle to preserve and defend Jewish life below the Mason-Dixon line. It was a losing battle and he knew it, but something compelled him to keep fighting. I was interested in seeing the South and its Jews, but I was even more curious to learn what made Macy feel such a sense of obligation. I thought I might find the answer on his somewhat macabre burial tour.
    There were four of us in the van as Macy headed onto the highway, up the Mississippi from New Orleans in the direction ofthe Louisiana bayou. Vicki Fox, a young museum consultant from Los Angeles by way of Hattiesburg, had been brought in to help with the technical details. And Macy had drafted Betty, a New Orleans Jewish matron who grew up in Donaldsonville before World War II, to serve as our guide to Cajun country.
    For Betty it was a sentimental journey, and she was in a nostalgic mood. “My daddy had this store in Napoleonville?” she said, ending her declarative sentences with question marks in the southern way. “Well, everybody in town knew we were Jewish, I mean he closed up on the holidays. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Of course he closed for Christmas, too. And we had a Christmas tree. I never did have a feeling that there was anything too different about being a Jew back then, you want to know the truth.”
    “People up north think that the Jews down here were afraid of the Klan,” Macy said, and Betty shook her head. “I can’t honestly say we ever had any anti-Semitism that I knew of. Well, there was this one time when a little nothin’ boy put a note under our door, but nobody got too excited about that.”
    As we approached Donaldsonville, Betty began to point out local landmarks. She became especially animated when we reached the Sunshine Bridge.