The book describes an incredible life journey from McComb MS to London

June 25, 2024

MacGordon
| Specially for the Mississippi Clarion Ledger

Our best writers follow a script that rarely lets them down: they write about areas they know.

The stories in Carla Heffner-Carlisle’s latest book, Another Country, detail her life’s journey from McComb to a 1,000-acre estate in England on land once inhabited by the Romans.

Adept at writing from both sides of the pond that separates these nations, she has packed much of life in Mississippi and Britain into this compendium, the third volume of Writings from Country Life, a magazine that is one of the best of its kind in America and is described as “the English magazine par excellence… (which) provides in-depth commentary on a wide range of subjects… architecture, property, art, gardens and gardening, the countryside, schools and wildlife.”

And politics, I might add.

Her family story began on the Shellmound Plantation in Leflore County, where her father, Albert W. “Red” Heffner, grew up. He eventually led his wife, Malva Cooper Heffner, a Forest native, and their two daughters, Jan Nave Barnes, now of Maryland, and Heffner-Carlisle, to McComb, where he opened an insurance business. Carla was one of my classmates at McComb High who would have graduated in 1965 if only she could.

Barnes, a student at what was then Mississippi State College for Women, was named Miss Mississippi in 1963. The following year, the Heffners were banished from McComb and the state for attempting to mediate the city’s turbulent civil rights conflicts during Freedom Summer 1964.

They moved to Washington, DC, where Heffner-Carlisle attended the Episcopal High School for Girls with Luci Baines Johnson, the daughter of President Lyndon Johnson. After college at Sarah Lawrence College, she wrote and rebelled against the Vietnam War before moving to England, where she married Kenneth Carlisle, then a member of Parliament, in 1986.

Today, Heffner-Carlisle runs a Michelin-starred restaurant on the estate 90 miles from London in Suffolk, near the mid-7th century town of Bury St Edmunds and the hamlet of Bardwell. There is also a working farm where grapes are grown to produce award-winning wines and where lush crops of beet, wheat, barley and potatoes thrive. The lamb produced in her restaurant is considered to be the most delicious in the region.

Several other businesses and a significant 16th-century mansion, Wyken Hall, are also located in the historic building.

What we want to learn in this collection, “Another Country,” are Heffner-Carlisle’s not-so-shy views on Mississippi and America, rather than those delivered with a cultured British accent.

These are some of the best lines in the anthology.

“I was born in this hot, dusty delta and our fields stretched to the Tallahatchie – the Choctaw Indian word for ‘rock of water.’ When the song came out, it felt like Bobbie Gentry had put our moonscape of cotton and soybeans on the map.”

“The South is a land of readers and writers. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the Southerners who read Yeats don’t usually own semi-automatic rifles.”

“Here in the wheat fields of East Anglia, I see a new Prime Minister who is intelligent and sensible. There are deep divides… but we can celebrate the luxury of a leader with principles, dignity and a nice haircut.”

“On the table is a script for Gone with the Wind… left to me by Will Price, McComb’s voice coach. It is inscribed: ‘For Will Price, who literally forced the South on us. Best wishes, David Selznick,'” who produced the film.

“This (the 2020 election) is not a fight between two political parties, not an ideological competition, not a culture war. It is like a religious war, and there is no forgiveness in sight.”

“Good old Google, lifeboat of baby boomers with fading memories.”

— Mac Gordon is a McComb native and retired newspaperman. He can be reached at [email protected].