L iving on a mountaintop in New York seemed like a bold and adventurous move to friends I left behind in warmer places, and Ellenville and Cragsmoor — the land of mountain vistas, interesting people, and fabulous food — was great.

But living in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast landscape between lovely and gracious Mobile and quirky New Orleans, was "thrill-a-minute," and offered the best learning experiences I've ever had.

Here was the adventure I had longed for as a teenager growing up in Baltimore during the stifling post-war Eisenhower years of Peace and Prosperity. Coming from an environment where being a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant were the only credentials needed for success, it was a shock to find myself in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and hear myself described as a "Yankee," which was only an invisible notch above "Negra." This was new and exciting.

I had a husband now, and children, and had stopped looking for excitement. But here it was, rich and gooey like pralines, darkly mysterious like the bayous, wispy and ethereal like Spanish Moss, and infinitely intriguing. I knew how Alice must have felt.

A closed society was opened to me when my doctor (a sympathetic New York Italian), introduced me to an old-line southern lady who brought me into a society invisible to other Yankees. It was better than the rabbit hole.

Here begins the Mississippi Chronicles, the telling of events that my mother and my friends, still living in the real world, were unable to grasp. It was both a society that was older and more graceful than any I had ever imagined, but one that was not aging well. You had to be there.

This was the sixties, but love beads and long hair didn't make it to Mississippi. I read about it in Time and Newsweek, but locally, the old traditions held on.

When a socially prominent woman chopped her husband up into little pieces and shipped him home to his Mama in an antique trunk, well, "She was just not herself that day." And she got off.

If it was a man who did something unsavory, "He was on something." And he got off.

Our friend Bernard, pronounced Barenar, due to his French heritage (we were close enough to New Orleans that all names were given French pronunciation if there was one) was the public defender. His was an old and distinguished family but he had been deprived temporarily of a lucrative private practice over a little indiscretion with a young black baby-sitter. He had returned to home after a few years in the North as penance and now found himself defending a man who, just released from prison, murdered his wife and stepdaughter. The defendant had married this woman while in prison for murdering his first wife.

"It was so oppressively hot," said the defendant. (Which was certainly true). And the humidity — also oppressive — just piled on the pressure. Bernard got him off by having him shave his head and "find Jesus." "He said he was sorry about a hundred times," Bernard told the jury, "and at least he's one of us, not some Yankee come down here and done that."

Where else could registering to vote be so interesting? I entered the courthouse through the police entrance, because that's where the parking lot was, and the young officer was instantly alerted by my 'funny accent" and the fact that I was pregnant. "Where you from?" he drawled in a classic TV commercial caricature, when I announced my purpose. "You married?" he said, noticing that I was front-loaded.

I was flustered. Should I say, "We just moved here from Minnesota, or did you mean where was I born and raised?" No matter; he would escort me to the voter registration person.

An elderly woman scrutinized me carefully and told me I would have to take a literacy test. This was the sixties, and Mississippi was swarming with white civil rights workers whose sole purpose (as perceived by the locals) was to make trouble where none was needed. And it was still considered appropriate to kill trouble makers when necessary.

When they dug up Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, we Yankees realized with startling clarity that some folks make their own rules about dealing with "outsiders." Bull Connor represented the "law of the land," and I was on their turf. But I was too new at this to know I should be scared.

I was given a paragraph from the Constitution about "usurping the rights of government," which I had to read aloud and then interpret. When I finished, the clerk and the officer looked at each other blankly. I was told to come back on Monday.

I was all the way home before I realized what had happened. Neither one of them knew if I had correctly interpreted the paragraph.

"You better 'git on home," the officer had said.

"Would that I could," I thought.