My Cat, Spit McGee: A Memoir

By Willie Morris

With endearing humor and unabashed compassion, Willie Morris--a self-declared dog man and author of the classic paean to canine kind, My Dog Skip--reveals the irresistible story of his unlikely friendship with a cat. Forced to confront a lifetime of kitty-phobia when he marries a cat woman, Willie discovers that Spit McGee, a feisty kitten with one blue and one gold eye, is nothing like the foul felines that lurk in his nightmares.

For when Spit is just three weeks old he nearly dies, but is saved by Willie with a little help from Clinic Cat, which provides a blood transfusion. Spit is tied to Willie thereafter, and Willie grows devoted to a companion who won't fetch a stick, but whose wily charm and occasional crankiness conceal a fount of affection, loyalty, and a "rare and incredible intelligence." My Cat Spit McGee is one of the finest books ever written about a cat, and a moving and entertaining tribute to an enduring friendship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 13, 2002
• ISBN: 9781400033072

Willie Morris

Willie Morris (1934–1999), a native Mississippian, came to national prominence in the early 1960s as the youngest-ever editor of Harper's magazine. His first book, North Toward Home, became an instant classic. Among his other notable books are New York Days, My Dog Skip, The Courting of Marcus Dupree, and My Mississippi, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

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Always a Dog Man

As I write these opening words, I pause to gaze out the windows of my upstairs workroom onto the broad lawn and to the creek beyond, which we call Purple Crane. I sight Spit McGee there, more likely than not communing with his companion, the big noisy bullfrog who has resided in these waters ever since we moved into this house five years ago.

Spit’s clean white fur glistens in the autumn sun. In the brightest of sunshine he can be almost invisible in his whiteness, but I know his silhouette. He strides closer to the creek. He has a jaunty walk for a large cat; if human he would be either a catcher or a third baseman. Sometimes he senses when I am looking down at him, because there is something like that between us, and he will turn and stare up at my window in recognition, but on this day he is concentrating on the bullfrog.

He is eight years old now, contented, I believe, and in good health. In all those years he has been with me. It was I, in fact, who actually delivered him at birth, and I have saved his life four times. In the ancient Oriental dictum, if you save a fellow creature’s life just once, it is your responsibility to watch over him forever.

My wife says Spit is my factotum. I will admit to serving as his valet, butler, and menial, daily and in perpetuity, and in recompense I think he consents to being my constant and abiding comrade. When we first came together, he and I had monumental arguments, disagreements, spats if you want to call them that. We were different. To this day we have these intermittent contretemps, but they seem part of a larger whole now. We know our foibles and try to forgive each other, for neither of us is perfect. Why on earth, out of all the countless billions of cats in the world, am I ineluctably drawn to this one? There are times, I confess, I feel an odd writer’s inkling that Spit McGee is the reincarnation of my dog Skip, the beloved companion of my long-ago boyhood, whom I once wrote a book about, and about whom a movie was made; that Spit had been dispatched in the spirit of Old Skip by the Almighty to make sure I am doing okay.

But that is a very long story, and I must first digress to a most candid and pristine account of what I for the longest time thought about cats.

I had always been a dog man, as was just about everyone else I ever knew. When I was growing up we did not pay much attention to cats, and we certainly did not like them. In fact, I could not stand them.

Dogs were essential to our very existence. They were distinctive presences in the small Mississippi town where I was raised. We knew them all and called them by name. I got to know all about dogs—their various moods, how they acted when they were hungry or sick, what they were trying to tell you when they made strange, human noises in their throats. My father had big bird dogs when I was very little—named Tony, Sam, and Jimbo—and my most precious moments were when they licked me on the nose, ears, and face. So when Skip came to me in the third grade, I was ready for him.

What is the mysterious chemistry that links a human being and a dog? I only know that the friendship between Skip and me, and later a black Labrador named Pete and me, was God-given, and solidified by shared experience and fidelity and a fragility of the heart. (How could there be such a compact with cats?) It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs, Jim Harrison, one of my favorite authors, has written. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life, growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends. My enduring memories of Old Skip reside in my deepest being. Those readers of My Dog Skip may recall that I was an only child and he was an only dog, and that he was less my dog than my brother.

Boys and dogs have been allies since caveman days. We were inseparable. Older people in the town still talk about him. He could drive a car with a little help. He could play football and climb trees. He held the world record for fox terriers in the 100-yard dash. He could read my mind and had an inexplicable divination of where I might be at any given moment: the same attributions that my unlikely future Spit McGee would likewise have. We even fell in love with the same girl. He was such a part of the town that photographs of him were featured in the school yearbook. He could get into anywhere on his own if the whim was upon him—my schoolroom when class was in session, picture shows, baseball games, funerals. We were together at birthdays, Christmases, and New Year’s Eves. We admired the same friends and suffered the same fools. And when he died at age thirteen while I was far away in college, my parents buried him in my old baseball jacket under the elm tree in our backyard. Years later my mother donated his tombstone to the local historical museum in Yazoo City, and if any of the readers of this book wish to see it, it is to this day on honored display.

I did not have another dog for many years, until I was married and had a small son. We got him a little fox terrier who was run over and later an eccentric black Lab named Ichabod H. Crane, who met the same fate. We grieved over their demises. And then Pete came along. If Skip was the dog of my boyhood, then Pete was the one of my maturity. He was in every way as special as Skip, but he was different, although the two of them had many of the same traits: affection, loyalty, imagination, and intelligence being most notable among them.

After years in the magazine business in New York City, I moved out to a village by the sea on eastern Long Island called Bridgehampton. I was divorced and lonesome. My best moments were when my son David Rae, who was then twelve years old and living in the city, took the train from Penn Station to see me on weekends. Years later David Rae said he was the only kid in history to have a sibling rivalry with a dog.

Pete and I sought each other out, two vagabond bachelor hearts. Just as with Skip, I was drawn to him from the moment I saw him—a splendidly handsome black Labrador retriever, perhaps three years old, with brown eyes, floppy ears, and a shining ebony coat, who spent most of his time with the boys in the service station. As with Skip those years and years ago, he was a ubiquitous presence in the town. I once even saw him driving around with Truman Capote. As the town’s semiofficial mayor, known to all as Your Honor, Pete patrolled its streets and its schools and its beaches and its graveyards and its whole backyard world of gardens and orchards and barns. At night he slept in bars or in pickup trucks.

He belonged to no man. Yet I perceived he was beginning to look me over. Whenever I drove into the station for gas, he would leap into my car. He relished driving around as much as Skip had. As we rode by the lush fields and sand dunes of the great Eastern littoral, he would sit there quietly, looking as if he were reflecting on me. Soon he started visiting me at my house, each visit longer than the one before.

One afternoon, however, he did not leave. Go back, Pete, I said. They expect you. He refused to go. If dogs carried traveling kits, he might have unpacked his razor, shaving cream, and deodorant then and there. It was a moment of rare consequence.

When, a couple of years later, I decided to leave the village on Long Island and return to my native Mississippi, to live and die in Dixie, I felt guilty about taking Pete, a Yankee dog if ever there was one, from his home soil. But tell me: Had I a choice? The car was loaded and I was ready to depart, for I had made my own aching farewells. Pete ruminated for the briefest instant, one transitory moment of profound Labrador reflection, then jumped inside. Did he have a choice?

He adjusted to the South, Pete did, although Oxford, Mississippi, was removed from Long Island in much more than mere distance. He took to the beauty and serenity of the Ole Miss campus, where I was the writer in residence. All the students knew him from our daily walks. In the summer, he had his own watering spot, a place in the woods where he sat twice a day in the stifling humidity for a long time. I thought I discerned a hint of y’all in the way he barked, and he even liked collard greens, which even Skip himself, disparate as he was in his culinary habitudes and a down-home dog if ever there was one, never did.

Pete eavesdropped on my telephone conversations, just as the gifted cat Spit McGee someday would. If we had not seen my son in several months, and I said, David Rae is coming tomorrow, Pete would rise and stretch and be ready to leave for the airport. As with Skip, we had a private language—often not words so much as gestures, expressions, intuitions. We shared ancient affinities. How would I have ever known then that against all expectations I would someday have a similar relationship with a cat? Surely certain things are not possible.

In our countless travels, Pete and I were trapped, snowbound, in a small town far away, chased by copperheads in the wooded hills behind William Faulkner’s house, watched Ole Miss baseball games from the left-field bleachers. Once Shelby Foote gave us a tour of the catastrophic Civil War battlefield of Shiloh, where at one point Foote, an incorrigible fellow dog man, said, Look at that! Pete’s wading in the Bloody Pond.

Shortly after we came South, Pete ran away. More accurately, he got lost. This terrible experience reminded me in horrific aspect of the time Old Skip in my boyhood days did not return home. As with Skip’s calamity, I drove everywhere looking for Pete. At night I left my back door open, listening sleeplessly to each rustle and sound. I contacted the mayor, the dog warden, and the constabulatory. I telephoned the governor. Was Pete disoriented in the impenetrable Mississippi woods? Lying dead in a ditch? Kidnapped? On the fourth day, stricken and hopeless, I sat in my house with a friend who comprehended my broken heart. She and I consumed a bottle of scotch.

Suddenly, from the crest of the hill beyond the windows, something flickered briefly in the corner of my eye. I went outside and peered through the mist. Pete was faltering down the hill. Then he saw me. As in a vintage Hollywood film, we walked slowly toward each other, old as time. He was wet, filthy, and bleeding. I embraced him there, in the middle of the road.

Pete was thirteen years old, the same age as Skip, when he died. He had grown slow and feeble. I had been taking him to the vet two or three times a week. From his suffering I knew he was fading from me. I found him one morning gasping for breath. His eyes were heavy with pain. I lay on the floor next to him. I held him in my arms and told him I loved him. He looked at me and weakly wagged his tail. Then he licked my face. After a time he stood and limped out the door. He lay down near the house. I sat with him there for a while, then left for a moment. When I came back he was dead.

Our friends made him a small oak coffin. Late that afternoon, in a dark and gloom-filled rain, we buried him on a placid old hill in the town cemetery, only a short distance from William Faulkner’s grave, for the mayor had given us dispensation to do so. A few people he had cared for gathered there. One of them read from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer:

They shall hunger

[chazzifrazz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Willie Morris writes from his heart and experience of going from an ailurophile (cat hater) to a cat lover, all because of a kitten he named Spit McGee (the name of a character in one of his children's' books) and finding himself married to a Cat Woman.

Growing up and always having dogs and coming from a family who had dogs, cats were never part of his life. Skip, his boyhood dog, was a big part of his life growing up. Later, Pete was his canine companion. Both were loyal, undemanding, accepting, consistent and willing to do what ever he wanted. A cat is none of these things.

Through this book you find how the relationship developed between Morris and Spit. Starting when the cat is first born and not doing good. Morris does what it takes to keep the kitten alive to the point of yelling, "Live, kid! Live!" From then on the cat and Morris had a bond...a thin one to start, but it grows over the years.

Morris finds that not all cats are horrible and to be avoided, like to ones he grew up with and had nightmares about. They each have their own characteristics and quirks and favourite people. Spit is all white, with one blue eye and one yellow eye, and Morris is his human of choice.

The book is written with a humourous and humane slant about a human and feline connection. A memoir and homage to a creature who became an important Fur Person in a human's life. I took my time reading it, rather than read it all in one sitting. It isn't a big book page-wise, but I think it is story-wise.

[yvonne.sevignykaiser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this for a Book Group in Omaha, NE. Had also read My Dog Skip by Mr Morris so I was looking forward to see how his story of his time with Spit McGee would go.

Loved the book and on of my favorite lines in honor of Spit - 'Had we but world enough and time." - Andrew Marvell

[lorireed_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Willie Morris, author of the popular book and movie My Dog Skip, admits that he hated cats - until Spit McGee came along. Spit McGee is a white cat with one gold eye and one blue eye named after a character from one of Morris's children's books. In this delightful book Morris tells the story about how he made the transition from cat-hater to cat-lover after saving the life of Spit McGee. Morris recounts his memories with remarkable insight and meticulous observation skills. My Cat Spit McGee is a light-hearted memoir of a man and his beloved pet. This book is a must for all cat lovers.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fun and engaging read of one man's journey from dog-lover and cat hater to lover of both. For anyone who's got doubts about either dogs or cats, or the worth of having a furry companion complicate your life a little, I'd recommend this book. Anecdotally, this book is priceless. My only possible criticism is that I'd like a few pictures beyond the basic chapter-beginning illustrations.

[pool_boy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable but not sappy book. Quick and easy and nice.

[vnovak_12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A touching but not overly sentimental story of a man who is transformed from a cat hater to an enthusiastic cat owner.