This project that I’m calling “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” has been openly banging around in my head for about a year and a half now. Quietly, these stories have been whispering to me for forty years. The funny thing about whispers is they sometimes say, “Go now!” and they sometimes say, “You better not.”
What makes this project interesting is these are real people with real stories, and they all have histories and are interconnected. I can put my finger down and say, “I want to start here.” in, say, 1963, but the story doesn’t end there; it feathers out like the Mississippi River Delta into time and space, spreading farther and wider, dropping more and more rich loam. What makes this project dangerous is that these fingers, these feathers of time, reach into real people with real lives and descendants. The story doesn’t stay in 1963; it reaches out through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and the millennium. It reaches until today, and if I write about things in the past that were painful, it could hurt somebody today.
For example, when I went to the McMullen Writer’s Workshop, the featured speaker was Andrew Aydin, a fascinating young guy who wrote a graphic novel about John Lewis. So, I’m going to the lecture, and I’m thinking this is really cool because I’ve been into graphic novels longer than most. Lewis was a guy who really interested me, and this is pretty important work, and one of the first things out of Aydin’s mouth was how much he appreciated the school putting him up at Fairview, and in the back of my mind, I think, “Oh.”
Fairview is beautiful and a great representation of what Jackson can be like, and the food is really good, but, to me, that was Bill Simmons’s house, and even though he and Ms. Corley from St. Andrews made it into this beautiful inn, it’s still his house, and his history is so deeply intertwined in everything “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” is about, that I can’t really talk about the story without talking about him. I can talk about pieces and fabricate whole sections that avoid him, but the story of how Mississippi moved from 1954 to 1994 involves Bill Simmons and some really unpleasant things about him.
Even writing just that sentence makes me nervous. I’m pleased about what’s happening with Fairview, and I wouldn’t ever do anything to damage their reputation, but going to Bill’s house and having him show me all his books on the Civil War and what I call the “questionable anthropology” he studied for twenty-five years are part of the story–part of my reflection on his story. The newspaper and radio program he wrote are part of the story. The schools he created are part of the story.
I can’t tell this story without talking about Bill Simmons; most importantly, I can’t tell the story of Bill Simmons without pointing out that I really liked the guy. I know many brilliant people who also liked the guy. As a writer, I can reconcile that. That becomes part of my story, but I'll be criticized as a historian (which I am not). Historians have written about all this. Stephanie Clanton Rolph wrote about it, and I’m reading her book now for reference. I think her work on this is much more important than mine, but Stephanie is a lot younger than I am, and she didn’t have all the sort of interpersonal connectedness I did. I can’t tell you how to reconcile the facts that Bill Simmons was this brilliant guy who appreciated art and music and history but also believed and taught some of the most putrid, hateful things I ever heard. Both statements are factual, though. Maybe part of why the universe draws me to this story is that somebody really needs to make the point that it’s a lot more complicated than just saying he was a horrible guy.
Another part of it is that I deeply love Galloway. It’s a part of me, like a limb I didn’t use for twenty years but really need now. People have already pointed out that there are painful parts of Galloway’s history in this, and if I loved the church, do I really want to dig all that back up?
The answer is that I don’t want to bring all that back up without strongly making the point that Galloway worked through it. Love and acceptance won out, even though getting there was rough. Goodness won out, and Galloway was much stronger in 1970 than they were in 1960 because of it. A sword has to pass through the fire to become strong, and we passed through the fire.
I wrote that long piece about why I was baptized by WJ Cunningham, not by W.B. Selah or Clay Lee, making the point that I never met Cunningham and didn’t really engage with his future in any way other than what I saw on paper, but it turns out that wasn’t true. Joe Reiff helped make the connection that he was Lori Trigg’s grandfather, and I knew Lori well. A guy in my pledge class was deeply taken with her; the rest of us were absolutely devoted to her. I very likely met her grandfather one of the years she was voted on the Millsaps Homecoming court, but I knew him as Lori’s grandfather, not the former pastor at Galloway.
Another thread that I’ve been interested in but can’t really make up my mind about is that Riverside Methodist Church didn’t die out. They took the money the Boy Scouts paid them for their building and built a smaller church in Rankin County. They have a website, and it's given me some tantalizing bits about what they’ve been up to over the last fifty years, but do I have the right to try and talk to them about some potentially painful and embarrassing things in their past?
I can’t actually tell my story without telling the story of other people, too. That’s one of the reasons why I post big pieces of it on Facebook, so people I know can pick it apart and correct me when I make mistakes and either privately or publicly challenge my perspective. It also gives them a chance to tell me pieces of the story I don’t know, which is really interesting because these stories are fifty years old, and I’ve been digging into them for at least forty years, but every time I write about it, somebody tells me something new.
My dad believed the only way to deal with Mississippi was to keep looking ahead. Tear down all that antebellum stuff and build modern new stuff. The past is but the past, and we’re all about the future. I understand his point of view, and sometimes I agree with it, but the past is the stock and the roux that binds this stew together. We’re not yet to the point where we can say the past has no hold on us. I know that my dad, and Mayor Danks, and Mayor Davis tried to put a modern face on everything so the world wouldn’t judge us for the sixties, but those stories are a part of us, and it’s important to tell them. I may not be the guy to tell them. I may be better off writing about Dinosaurs, Robots, and Space Ships like Ray Bradbury said I should. These stories don’t leave me, though. They percolate through everything else I try to do.
Even if I say I will stop working on “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” it won’t be true because there’s more to writing than just moving my fingers across a keyboard. I’ll still lay in bed, putting pieces together in my head while I wait for the alarm to go off. Photos of brilliant people I used to know hiding in a corner of Hal and Mals will still catch my eye.
I haven’t written about Feist-Dog in a while. There’s a million other dogs living here, so he’s running around sniffing butts. This is feist-dog’s story, though. The day Medgar Evers was shot, Feist-dog was on the radio. The day men ran Ed King off the road, Feist-Dog was on the radio. The day Rev Cunningham left Galloway and the days Bill Simmons and Jessie Howell opened their schools, Feist-Dog was on the radio. He’s just an imaginary dog on the radio, but this is his story. I’m just a little boy who saw parts of it, and tried to piece together the rest.
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