My Cat, Spit McGee

October 4, 1999
Morris named his cat Spit McGee after a mischievous, resourceful boy in one of the children's books he wrote. All white with one blue eye and one golden eye, Spit disproves the erroneous belief that a cat with two different-colored eyes is born deaf: his keen ears "could pick up dinner conversations in Memphis two hundred miles away." A quirky iconoclast, Spit will win the hearts of both cat lovers and those who are cat-neutral, in this enjoyable sequel to My Dog Skip, an account of the fox terrier of the author's boyhood that was made into a movie. Even cat haters may come around after meeting this playful, cranky and clever individualist who often sleeps on his back with all four legs sticking straight up. Morris, a novelist and former creative director of Harper's magazine, whose books include Faulkner's Mississippi and The Ghosts of Medgar Evers, once despised cats and almost broke off an engagement after his fianc e announced that she intended to get a kitten. With self-deprecating humor and Southern charm, he charts his metamorphosis from ailurophobe to "valet, butler, and menial" of Spit, now eight years old, and a menagerie that at one time expanded to nine cats, but now totals three. As Spit and the author take automobile jaunts around Mississippi and converse together, Morris doesn't ask the reader to dote on his cat as much as he and his wife do; instead, he uses his intense relationship to probe the universals of cat psychology and behavior.