In 1969, when 17-year-old Jeff Durstewitz and some friends wrote a smart-alecky letter to Ruth Tuttle (now Williams), these suburban New York kids assumed she must be "some sort of prototype Southern-belle-racist" because she edited a Mississippi high school newspaper. What they got back was a smart, gracious reply from a nascent rebel desperate for companionship beyond the restrictive confines of Yazoo City. Jeff wrote back apologetically, and an intense relationship was born. The pair found after Jeff's awkward first visit to Mississippi that they weren't destined to be lovers, but nevertheless the friendship endured. Their early letters, surprisingly mature and touchingly vulnerable, remind us how late the '60s started in the South, where Ruth struggled to express more enlightened racial attitudes and protest the Vietnam War without alienating her conservative parents. Jeff's experiences are more conventionally countercultural, right down to the fact that his high school buddies Ben and Jerry grew up to be the famed ice cream moguls. Yet both Jeff and Ruth's lives follow the pattern of many of their generation, beginning with radical politics and grungy communal living and ending in a tentative return to the mainstream and middle-aged settling down. Their correspondence, supplemented by the authors' present-day recollections, evokes with pleasing specificity an era that seems at once very recent and amazingly long ago.
BX684
