In the small, southern town of Oxford, Mississippi, two people were married last Saturday night. It is a simple statement, one that in no way reveals the significance and meaning of what really took place on that warm, summer evening under the magnolias in the back garden of an antebellum home on Jefferson Avenue, just off the square.

If you are a southerner and were fortunate enough to be there, you would know immediately that you were at the center of the universe, because weddings among southern families—white or black—are at the center of southern society. They are the glue that bonds not just two young hearts in love, but entire families and fortunes and futures. If you weren’t there last Saturday, and unless you were familiar with southern weddings or unless someone explained them to you—especially this wedding—you would probably never know what took place, who had been there, how simple and beautiful the ceremony was, or why it was such an event to be remembered.
____________________________________


The Dr. Thomas Isom House, Oxford, Mississippi
____________________________________

It happened at the Isom House, a historic two-story home built in 1843 by one of Oxford's founding fathers, physician Dr. Thomas Dudley Isom. The great magnolia in the front yard, brought from South Carolina by Sarah Isom after marrying the doctor still stands after 166 years. The house has been witness to the antebellum glory days when cotton was king, to secession, and to occupation by Union troops who ultimately burned the town completely to the ground in 1864. Isom's own slaves lived here until freedom came in 1865, and the property went on to witness the life of the town's most prominent native son - Nobel Laureate William Culthbert Faulkner.

The house is rumored to be the home which Faulkner used as the model for the house of Emily Grierson in his famous short story “A Rose for Emily”. However, most scholars have discounted the idea because of the lack of evidence and the house's own lack of similarity to the description of the Grierson house in the story.

Yet, the Isom House - surrounded by fragrant magnolias, flowering crepe myrtle, and sprawling, gnarled oak trees almost as old as the house itself - lies less than two blocks from the courthouse on the square and about a half mile from Rowan Oak—the antebellum home of Colonel Robert Sheegog that became the home of William Faulkner in 1930. It also lies just three blocks from St. Peter’s Cemetery where Faulkner is buried. Everything about Oxford reeks of Faulkner and books and writers and southern gothic. It hangs in the air suspended like woodsmoke—you cannot help breathe it in or taste in the town’s architecture, its residents, its food or its history. Oxford is the place where southern literature begins and ends.