Gatekeepers

I’m working on a project.  I don’t know what to call it yet.  Part of it might be “Lies My Mother Never Told Me.”  For this project, I’ve made a timeline of all the significant events in my universe that involve the Civil Rights movement.  “My Universe” here includes Jackson, Mississippi, Millsaps, Galloway, Ole Miss, St. Andrews, The United Methodist Church, Prep, Casey, Murrah, The Jackson Zoo, Riverside Park, WLBT, WJTV, The Office Supply Company, Mississippi School Supply Company, First National Bank and Deposit Guarantee Bank.  

The timeline starts in 1954 when Brown V Board of Education was handed down, and goes until 1990.  Some might say 1990 is too late a date for the Civil Rights movement, but keep in mind how long it took to settle the Ayers Case, or, as I like to call it, Millsaps Alumni defend the State of Mississippi from its own mistakes.  

I suspected and confirmed by making the timeline that if you made a heatmap of events based on date and geographic location, there’s a significant cluster surrounding the day I was born.  A superstitious person might think I was the cause of it all.

I use Uber a lot.  I have a high rating because I’m polite and tip well.  Not long ago, I was meeting a lady at Bravo.  My Uber driver was a black man about my age.  Some of the drivers don’t talk at all.  This one did.  “Where you from?” He asked.  I said I was from Jackson.  I grew up here.  “Where did you go to high school?”  I said I went to St. Andrews but didn’t graduate in a typical fashion, so I went to college a little early.  “I went to Murrah.”  He said.

He noted where I was going and asked if I knew Jeff Good.  I said I knew Jeff Good really well, primarily through his dad, and I knew his wife primarily through her being a girl at Millsaps.  My driver explained that he and Jeff graduated from Murrah together.  

People who graduated with Jeff at Murrah aren’t just regular kids.  These are the kids who started public school in 1970, the year that the Department of Justice took control of Jackson Schools and a year after Alexander V Holmes County, where the US Supreme Court changed the wording of Brown v Board of Education from “all due haste” to “immediately.” All the schemes Mississippi came up with were over.  We had to integrate.  Jeff didn’t live in Mississippi yet; he lived in a state where this sort of battle didn’t have to happen.  My driver did, though.  He and I were born in the same hospital.   That class who graduated with my driver were the first Mississippians to have gone all the way through school without ever facing public school segregation.

You have to think about why fighting Brown V Board of Education was so important.  If you’re in a state that believes it’s better off if everybody is educated, what does it matter if a black kid learns to multiply fractions sitting next to a white kid?  There was no Civil Rights Act yet; you could still refuse to seat black diners at your restaurant if you wanted.

It mattered because our schools taught math and science. Still, they also taught language, literature, history, civics, and religion; these courses are all gateways to culture, and in Mississippi, the last thing people wanted was to admit Africans into the white culture.  

Schools are cultural gateways.  You’re given a mascot.  You’re taught to have “school spirit.”  You cheer for your school, mainly when it plays other schools.  More importantly, though, you form relationships, like my driver who wanted to tell a total stranger that he shared this cultural connection with a man I knew, and in many ways, that made us equal.

I’ve written extensively about when and why my parents decided to take me out of public school.  Had I stayed in public school, I would have spent most of my high school career with this guy.  We would have been alumni together.  Forty-five years later, it seems alien that anyone would try to keep us apart, but they did.  

Many people say that there’s no reason to write about these things, that there have been a lot of other people who wrote about it already, and obsessing over the past is no way to bring on a happy future.  You’re supposed to write about what you know, though, and write about what you feel.  What I know is what happened to Mississippi, and what I feel, more often than not, is haunted,

As a man, Jeff became a gatekeeper to a new kind of culture in Mississippi.  It’s been challenging and sometimes painful, but we’re forging a new, blended sort of culture in Mississippi.   James Meridith was the first African to graduate from the University of Mississippi sixty days after I was born.  Today, he walks around Jackson like a movie star, and whatever he did, it wasn’t really that big of a deal.  It was that big of a deal.  They shot the guy.  The only reason he lived and Medgar Evers didn’t was because some redneck had lousy aim.  Nobody knows who Aubrey James Norvell was, but they ask James Meridith to sign autographs for their grandchildren.  I’m okay with that outcome.  

Much has been written about why Mississippians were adamant about not allowing black faces through our cultural gateways.  Questions of why always matter, but in this case, the questions seem to go round and round in circles.  I’ve been told, my entire life, that Mississippi would have corrected itself eventually.  I don’t think I believe that.  Even with tremendous pressure, some men fought this to their graves.  

I’m not a very good gatekeeper.  I don’t like to talk to strangers, and I don’t like to talk to anyone at all unless I know you pretty well.  I prefer books to pickleball or cocktail parties.  I’m grateful that there are gatekeepers, though.  Some open restaurants, and some drive Uber taxis.  Both open the passages that allow us to blend our lives together now that the worst part is over.  

Third Graders in the Light House

Because I'm old, I take a diuretic to make sure my body doesn't retain water because my body works about as well as a 1982 Ford.  It's a tiny dose, and I split it in half, but even then, I still gotta pee for two hours when I take it.  

Normally I just make sure I don't have to be anywhere for two hours when I take it.  This morning, because I make bad decisions, I decided that I was a grown damn man, and I gotta go to church in 30 minutes, but I can still take this tiny little half pill and not have any problem.

I hate having to leave a room with something going on for a latrine break.  Once you've done it, there's the awkward business of retaking your seat.  About two-thirds of the way through Sunday School, it hit me.  I wasn't going to make it till the end, which I hated because it was a really good discussion about how we decide what morality is.  

After visiting the cis-gendered, handicap-enabled little boys' room across the hall from what most of my life had been the fourth and fifth-grade Sunday school, I decided there were only five or six minutes left in class, so rather than facing the walk of shame back into the room, I decided to find a spot in the sanctuary for the eleven o'clock service.

Getting settled in the sanctuary early, I got to see our youth minister working with her third graders as she explained to them the ritual of the church, presenting them with bibles.  I knew this was coming because I actually read the church bulletin email, but I wasn't really ready for the wave after wave of memory watching them produced in me.

Fifty-eight years ago, it was my turn to sit on the front row to receive a bible with my name stamped on it.  Five or six of my readers were there too.  They're much, much younger than I am, but we were third-graders together.  In the congregation were my parents and grandparents, who can't come anymore, just like Eudora Welty, Lance Goss, Ross Moore, and others, but there were some people there today who were also there fifty-eight years ago, Kay Barksdale, TW Lewis, Red Moffett and more.

None of my classmates were there.  Some are current members of Galloway, but they either attended the 8:30 service or didn't come today.  Others don't live in Jackson anymore.  Some are not even in Mississippi.  One runs the most famous restaurant in Oxford.

Membership in Galloway isn't a comfortable kind of Christianity.  As I study our history, I'm learning how many times Galloway was the steady ship in a bad storm with a hull thick enough to break the ice in uncharted waters delivering its cargo to calmer seas.  Yesterday, Galloway helped host over six thousand people for the Mississippi Book Festival.  Galloway is uniquely suited to do this, both because of its physical proximity to the Capitol but also because of its historical connection to Mississippi writers.

Most of the people in my Sunday School have Ph.D., MD,  or JD after their name.  One is a judge, and one is the first boy to become a Rhode's Scholar from Millsaps.  My daddy always thought he'd be governor one day.  That never happened, but he did fabricate governors all over the country.  He'd probably object to my choice of verb here, but if you're in his party and you want to win an election, he's your guy.  We're readers.  We read in several languages and look for things to read to challenge our worldview.  I can't think of a congregation better suited to the broad spectrum of thought that makes up the Mississippi Book Festival.  

Christianity is ancient.  It is the conduit of so many of our cultural threads going back through the millennia.  It connects us to all the wonders and beauty and pain and regret of the centuries.  Galloway acts as a light-house through time.  There are rough seas ahead, there were rough seas in the past, but Galloway provided a beacon then, and it provides a beacon now.  

It hasn't been easy forging a culture in this country, particularly in Mississippi.  We've made horrible, painful mistakes, but if you build your house on solid ground, you can weather any storm.  Matthew and Luke both recount the parable of building on solid ground.  

Galloway is built on an ancient site.  Did you know there was a graveyard underneath it?  A small plot with the mortal remains of some of Jackson's earliest residents, the sanctuary was built over it.  The graves and the gravestones still stand undisturbed, save for decades and decades of organ music.  We are a light-house to history.  Their history sits with us every Sunday.

Generations and generations of eight-year-olds have been folded into and made a part of our congregation.  There's so much more to it than just accepting the Lord and learning a few bible verses.  At eight years old, you become part of something ancient.  You're eight, so you don't understand this, but the thread of culture going back to the pharos continues through you.

My diuretic stuck again, and I couldn't finish Cary's sermon, but I listened to it on Youtube.  

Driving home, I thought, the world is a confusing, sometimes frightening place.  Bringing eight-year-olds into this ancient battle seems like such a strange thing to do, almost cruel, but it's an ancient and honorable ritual.  Standing up in front of your parents' friends and accepting the gift of a book seems like an odd thing to do, but it's the start of something.  It's the entrance into something very ancient that struggles to find the good in life and fight for it and fight for you as you fight for others.  You're eight, but now you're a light-house keeper.  Even if you don't stay here.  Even if you move far away and transfer your membership out of Galloway, you take some of us with you, and we keep some of you with us.  Don't be surprised if you look at your books when you're sixty and say, "Wow, that's my third-grade bible."  

The Ritual Killer Review

Last night my friend Tom messaged me that Morgan Freeman was giving a lecture at Millsaps in a movie.  “The Ritual Killer,” now streaming on Hulu, was shot in Jackson during the time when I was still really sick, so I guess I missed a lot of information about it.  The film was shot in Italy, Jackson, Clinton, and the Pearl River Reservoir.  It’s a psychological thriller with Cole Hauser from Yellowstone playing a Clinton, Mississippi Homicide Detective (the Clinton Police Force may not have homicide detectives.  It’s only about 20 guys.)  Morgan Freeman plays a professor of African History at a small college in Clinton.  There actually is a small college in Clinton, but they shot the film in Jackson at Millsaps instead.

The Ritual Killing referenced here is African shamanistic medicine, which in some instances, requires human body parts for the more powerful rituals.  There was a rash of these sorts of killings in Africa a few years ago.   In the film, a powerful businessman hires an African shaman to come to Clinton, Mississippi, where he lives, and conduct these rituals to make him more powerful, rituals that require the sacrifice of two children and a teenager, which is where the homicide detective comes in.

Morgan Freeman plays an anthropology professor.  The first scene with him has him lecturing in the Heritage Lecture Hall in the Ford Academic Complex.  With all its geometric shapes and brick patterns, the building photographs really well.  One of the students in his class is Claire Azordegan, who was in the Spring Show last year.  She doesn’t have any speaking lines, but she does a good job of looking like she’s studying really hard.  I expected to recognize other players in the production, but most were out-of-towners.  Bill Luckett as the crime scene scientist, did make me smile.  Bill died two years ago, and we still haven’t anyone like him yet.  Covid and other issues delayed the release of the film.  

The writing credits for this film look like a house party.  IMDB lists seven different writers.  None of the writers are from here, which is why, most of the time, it feels like they just threw a dart at the map and chose to set the film in Clinton.  Although they did a fair amount of research into African Culture, they did zero research into Southern Culture.  This film could just have easily been set in Chicago or Fresno, or any city.

To write a film about voodoo killings and not even have some of it set in New Orleans is a huge missed opportunity.  There are a few exterior shots toward the end that were apparently shot in Baton Rouge (there are no riverside warehouses on the Pearl River.)  A film about African culture set in Mississippi is such an obvious opportunity to discuss the exchange between African and European cultures that makes up the state culture of Mississippi, but one the screenwriters completely ignore.  There’s absolutely no story-driven reason to set the film in Mississippi.  It’s just a place.

That being said, they photographed Jackson and Millsaps beautifully.  There are a few exterior establishing shots actually done in Clinton, but nearly the entire film is shot in Jackson, including a police chase through the Lamar Life Building and a couple of really good scenes shot in Hal and Mals.  I feel like the Mississippi Film Office just gave them a list of filming locations, and the director said, “Sure.”  It works too.  The film feels very much like it’s set in Middle America, which I suppose was the objective, but they left an awful lot on the table.

Most of the scenes shot in Italy could have been shot anywhere too.  The writers don’t seem to have any sense of place at all.  It’s like they wanted an excuse to spend two months filming in Rome, so they wrote it into the movie.  I know a guy who actually did that.  The movie is 20 Million Miles to Earth.  Check it out sometime.  Shooting it in Rome gave Ray Harryhausen a pretty great honeymoon.

Morgan Freeman’s role is very similar to the character he played in Se7en and Kiss the Girls.  I”m sure Cole Hauser can be a fine actor, but in scenes with Morgan Freeman, you can tell he’s scared to death and comes off as really wooden and not committed to the scene at all.

As a psychological thriller, I’m pretty pleased with the film.  It has a nice, even tension to it, and you end up feeling pretty strongly about the leads finding a resolution to the action.  It’s kind of like dinner at a Chinese restaurant, though; you’re hungry an hour later.  If you’re from Jackson or at all involved with Millsaps, it’s worth watching just so you can pick out locations you know.  

With New Orleans so nearby, nobody has ever done a movie about Voodoo in Mississippi before.  We have it, though.  There was a time when one of our store managers fired an unreliable delivery guy, and there were chicken bones left in the doorway to the building for a month.  

Nearly everybody has Hulu these days.  It’s worth a night at home watching movies.

I Became A Bully

I became a bully.  I didn’t mean to.  I didn’t want to.  I think it happened because I didn’t do enough to make sure it didn’t happen.  I learned early on that the bullied kids often became the best bullies.  That key bit of information should have been enough to keep me out of this, but it didn’t.

Now that we’re all in the third quarter of our lives, I’ve heard my classmates say that our school had a problem with bullying.  I don’t know how to tell if that’s true.  We certainly weren’t as bad as you saw in the movies, but it sure felt like something wrong was happening when it happened to you.  

We were a small school.  Education in Jackson became fractured over the issue of integration, and St. Andrews decided early on to try and go their own way to avoid both sides of the argument.  They also chose to pay their bills with tuition rather than depending on large donations, so it ended up being the most expensive school in the state.

In the fifth grade, I began to grow faster than my classmates.  A York barbell set lay dormant in our playroom from when Coach Jack Carlisle wanted my brother to move with him from Murrah to Prep, and he wanted him to put on muscle weight, hence the barbells.  My brother found much more to occupy his time at Prep than football, so the barbells gathered dust until I discovered them.

Beamon Drugs in Maywood Mart had a different selection of magazines than the Totesum nearby.  They hadn’t any comic books, only things older kids and adults might read.  Architectural Digest caught my eye.  My dad liked my AD magazines so much that he subscribed.  I also found Strength and Health and Iron Man.  Beamon Drugs also had a godawful early form of milk whey protein powder and a broad selection of dietary supplements.  I decided I had no interest in making my body a temple, but a bulldozer might be useful.

One of the first people to notice the effects of my growth spurt and weight training was Jack Carlisle, who lobbied me to switch to Prep from the fifth grade until my second year in college.  For a guy with only one leg, he was pretty tenacious.  

We were pretty isolated from the Junior High kids in fifth and sixth grade.  They had a reputation, but apart from some taunts across the football field that separated us, their reputation had nothing to do with us.  That all changed when we were in the seventh grade.  We moved from our safe, isolated part of campus into their midst. 

My introduction to seventh grade was that a boy from Prep sent out word that, for him to have an adequate position at Prep, he would have to fight me.  That made absolutely no sense, but after sizing him up, I decided it wouldn’t be so bad.  Word went out that we were supposed to meet at Mr. Gattis Pizza (now Amerigo) for the big fight.  None of us could drive yet, so getting a ride to Mr. Gattis without betraying the purpose was probably the most complicated part of the mission.

I had never been in a fight before, so I let him start.  He threw a few punches that landed but didn’t seem to make much difference.  In the movies, if you hit a guy in the jaw, he passes out.  That didn’t happen.  Maybe I was immune.  I’ve been hit in the jaw a lot since, and it never made me pass out.  

I didn’t want to hit him because that didn’t seem gentlemanly, so I tried a hold I had seen on television.  I knew wrestling was fake, but I figured the moves were authentic, so I turned him around and wrapt him in what I thought was a full nelson, only I’d done it wrong, and I was pressing his arm against the arteries in his neck in, what the wrestlers called, a sleeper hold.  

Just as his body began to go limp, grownups ran out of the pizza restaurant to make us stop.  It’s probably a good thing because sleeper holds are actually quite dangerous, and neither of us knew what we were doing.  Our unimpressive encounter satisfied my opponent, and he never challenged me again.  I’d gotten through my first real fight without any damage and an overestimation of my abilities.  The grownups stopped before it ended, but I had the advantage.

Back at St. Andrews, the boys taunting us safely across the football field were now a few steps away.  That changed things considerably.  Most of the eighth and ninth graders weren’t bullies, but some were notorious, and the notorious ones loved nothing more than waiting for us seventh graders to try and gather outside the classroom.

Winter in Mississippi is more of a concept than a reality.  January of that year was unusually cold despite our reputation, and one morning, while we were in class, it began to snow.  When the lunch bell rang, everybody ran out of the upper school buildings looking for enough snow to make a ball to throw at each other.  Soon, we used up all the snow around the buildings and the bleachers, and intrepid snowball fighters moved out onto the football field and its fresh coat of snow.

We seventh graders got there first, but that made no difference when the ninth graders began to move in.  Soon, the biggest bullies found my friend Walter and started tripping him so he’d fall into the snow and mud, pushing him when he tried to get up while his three bully friends roared in laughter.  Something broke in me.  “I’m bigger than him!  I’m bigger than anybody!” I thought.  I ran to Walter’s antagonist and shoved him with all my might.  “I’m tired of you!” I shouted as he stumbled back.  “I’m tired of your shit!” I said his name. “STOP!”  I shouted and slammed my foot on the snowy earth.  I’d heard people say, “I put my foot down” all my life without knowing it was a natural response when you loudly wanted to make your point.

The moments that followed lasted forever.  Nobody expected this.  Lots of people joked about “what would happen if Boyd lost his temper?”  “What would happen if Boyd got in a real fight?”  That moment was here.  Walter’s antagonist was shocked but ready.  He came at me with vengeance and arms flailing.  One, two, three punches to the face.  He was stronger than the boy at Mr. Gattis, but hitting my face wasn’t a sweet spot.  He grappled me, and I wrestled back.  Young, untrained, but unrestrained bodies were testing their limits.  

One edge of our football field ended in a steep hill that led down into some undeveloped woods.  Our pushing and grappling landed us on the precipice of this hill.  I got enough leverage to slam him on the ground by twisting him over my hip.  His glasses flew off.

I pulled him up from the ground and pinned his arms behind him,  I could tell I couldn’t hold him long, but while I had him, I shouted, “Somebody get his glasses!”  Fighting was one thing; breaking a boy's glasses could get you in real trouble.  Walter’s nose was still a little bloody and red when he slipped in to pick up his bully's glasses.  He wanted the bully to know he was a part of this.  Bob Trent and Mrs. Sergeant ran in from the blind spot behind us to break us up.  “Boyd!  Stop!  Stop!”  They yelled for me to stop, not the boy I was fighting.  That made me feel horrible and guilty.  

I didn’t get in trouble, but I got a lecture.  “Your body is changing, Boyd.”  “You have to be careful.”  “You could do some real damage.”  “There are always better ways of solving things.”  We never discussed it, but I always wanted to ask Bob Trent why I didn’t get in trouble.  Was it because he knew how the fight started, or was it just because fighting wasn’t as serious as I thought?  Even though I stopped the fight to save that boy’s glasses, I felt very guilty.  I told my father what happened, thinking I’d be in trouble.  He said I did the right thing.

I don’t think you could say I won either of these fights, but I didn’t lose, and in kid parlance, that meant something.  What I didn’t know–what I had no real reason to suspect, was that if you stood up to a bully, that made him want to befriend you and make you one of them.  I suppose that’s what hazing is all about.  You pass some sort of test, so you become one of them.  My former enemy, now new friends, fully expected me to bully my old friends, and I hate to admit it, but sometimes I did.  

I don’t think I was prepared to be asked to join them.  What bothers me now is that maybe a part of me saw this as a social promotion.  Sitting with the bullies might make me look cooler than sitting with the nerds, even though I had nothing to talk about with the bullies.  Spending all day talking about whose breasts had gotten the biggest and speculating about who was doing what with whom wasn’t nearly as interesting as figuring out how the muppets operated or all the cool things the Ultra Seven Warriors could do.

Bullying was pretty easy.  Find a trait of the person you’re picking on, it doesn’t really matter what trait, exaggerate it and draw it out in a funny voice, and they’ll get mad.  They might get really mad, but what were they gonna do?  I was the strongest kid in three schools and had a team of meaner bullies behind me.  For one boy, we changed the “i” in his name to “eeee, " which was enough to bully him.  Another boy had a big nose and a funny voice, so we called him Gonzo after the muppet monster on the Muppet Show.  

I didn’t like bullying, but it became my place in our little society.  I was the bully victim turned bully himself.  Maybe they all were.  Maybe being bullied is what made you become a bully.  

One of my new friends played football with me.  Before games, Coach Clark was determined we spend two or three hours with our teammates in quiet reflection, thinking about football and the lord.  During one of these quiet sessions, one of the biggest bullies of all told me about what his father did to him.  I believed him, too, because when we played, his father would shout the most horrible things to his son from the sidelines.  Nothing he did was good enough.  He tried shouting at me too, but I just looked at him like, “Who the hell are you?” He never addressed me again.  Without a doubt, whatever this boy was doing to seventh graders at Saint Andrew's was nothing compared to what his father did to him at home.  I never thought of him as a bully again.  He was a victim.  He still did and said the most horrible things, but more horrible things were happening to him than anyone knew.  

A famous artist sent his daughter to school in ninth grade with us.  I’m not really qualified to speculate on this, but something was very different about her.  I suspect it may have been some form of autism, but nobody ever told us anything.  Maybe even the teachers didn’t have a very complete diagnosis of her as this was still the seventies.  She also had terrible scoliosis and had to wear a bulky back brace to endure sitting in the classroom all day.  

I don’t know what to tell you about this girl’s intelligence.  She made it through her classes with us ok, but she found socializing nearly impossible.   Her hygiene was inconsistent and awkward at an age when most girls were obsessed with their looks.  She soon found herself bullied by almost everyone.  Even some teachers turned their faces away from the painful spectacle in the high school courtyard every day.  They weren’t prepared for it either

She preferred Bea Donnelly and Jerry McBride and ran to them when we upset her. They tried to help her, but I always thought the school was at something of a loss about how to handle this.  Had any of the teachers explained to us what was happening, we might have been kinder or even just said, “Hey, we’re in kind of a spot here with this girl; can you help us out and be nice to her?” but no one did.  Maybe they didn’t know themselves.  

You know kids are being cruel when they replace somebody’s name with the word “The.”  For the entire student body, her name was not “Laurie”; it was “The.”  We said “The Gadd,” but what we meant was “The Monster,” “The Outsider,” and “The Misfit.”  I’ve spent forty-five years wishing I’d tried to understand this person rather than make fun of her.  I supposed that’s going to be my burden.  

My time as a bully didn’t last.  I realized it didn’t feel right.  I’d rather be the kid that tried to stop his friend from being bullied than being a bully myself.  I’ll always think that maybe life wasn’t cruel enough to me for the urge to bully to stick.  Everyone has some pain in their lives, but to stay a bully, I think there has to be more pain than reward.

I never saw most of the kids I bullied again.  I had a speech ready in my head if I ever did.  My artist friends told me how important The Gadd’s father was in the world of Mississippi artists, and my heart sank.  I could have made a difference.  As big as I was, maybe I could have turned the tide and shielded her from some of the poison other kids threw at her.  I didn’t, though.  I didn’t add to it, but I didn’t stop it.   Not stopping it when I could have made me feel more like a bully than anything else I ever did.  I stood up to these boys when they pushed Walter into the mud and snow; I could have stood up to them again, but being accepted among them changed something.  I was no longer as interested in what was right as I was in what my social position might be.

There are a million books and movies about high school and college because that’s when you go from what you really are and try on different masks to see what you will become.  For a time, I wore the mask of a bully.  I didn’t care for it, and I don’t think I was any good at it, but I learned to be cruel.  Being popular was more important than being right, at least for a while.

Smith Park Fence

In the original 1820's map for Jackson, roads were set up on a square grid pattern, starting with the intersection of Capitol Street and State Street in front of the old Capitol building and extending west toward Raymond and Clinton.  Livingston Park, the future site of the Battle of Jackson, was on the Western border of the city.   The northern border was the highway we now call Woodrow Wilson, with the farm that became the Jackson College for Negros and then Millsaps College on the very northernmost border.  The state Sanitarium, now UMC, was just outside of the city limits.

In the original plan for the city, every few squares on the grid were left green to beautify the city.  While done with pure intention, this plan irritated business owners because people would use these green patches to pasture their mules and cows.

Just before the Civil War, considering its position near the Methodist Cemetary (now Galloway Sanctuary) and one of the state's only Catholic churches, a furniture dealer named James Smith donated $100 to erect a castiron fence around one of the greenspace parks to keep the mules and cows out, which was later downgraded to a wooden fence when future donations didn't materialize.  In gratitude for this enormous sum of money, the city named the park after him, and it is today still called Smith Park.  

I've tried several times to find photographs of the fence before it was torn down and maybe some information on why it was torn down, without much luck.  Smith Park occupies a significant space in Mississippi history.  Some of it isn't talked about very often because, for some time, it was one of the only places where gay men could meet, more or less in secret, without considerable harassment, although there was some.  

One of the problems I have with the whole "give up on Jackson" crowd is they'll be losing so much remarkable and varied history.  There was about a twenty-year period, starting in the mid-70s, when business leaders in Jackson began tearing down sites that were significant to the civil rights movement, replacing them with modern buildings, and completely repurposing the site.   This is why you have so many "Civil Rights Trail" signs where there is no building.

All of the men who made these decisions are gone now.  Most of them were pretty legendary.  They believed the best way for Jackson to get beyond the racial strife of the sixties was to get beyond it and act, almost like it never happened.  While I respect their efforts and their point of view, I don't believe that's the best course.  The past creates the present, and understanding the past, all of the past, the good and the bad, is our best bet at creating a better future.

You don't see a lot of people grazing mules and cows in downtown Jackson anymore.  Understanding that they once did and that it was something of a problem helps us fill in the blank spaces on our historical portrait and keeps us mindful that this is a living place with a living history that we should keep alive.

The Citizens Council and the Republican Party

 The genius of the Citizens Council, the thing that made them both the most effective and the most evil, was that they equated segregation with good citizenship.  It was in their name.  Fighting to keep our schools segregate equated to patriotism and cultural loyalty.  If you read their literature, that was clearly the message.

The Citizens Council started in the Delta, in areas where the black population outnumbered the white population, areas where the idea of “separate but equal” was as problematic as the idea of integration.  They didn’t see these descendants of slaves as peers or equals or fully citizens and saw the interference from the federal government, both through the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, as an impingement on their sovereignty.  For them, this was the heart of “states’ rights.”  

In Jackson, the Citizens Council was, at first, fully accepted in business and social circles.  Doctors, Lawyers, and Bankers all became members, along with tradesmen of every sort.  The Citizens Council was a great equalizer with regard to the issue of class but the most significant divider with regard to the issue of race.  

By the mid 70’s, the social and economic tides turned against the Citizen’s Council.  The rest of the world began equating the Citizen’s Council with the Klan.  Jackson's business, legal and religious leaders began seeing it the same way.  There were men in Jackson who remained loyal to the Citizens Council, including some prominent physicians, but by 1975 they saw their professional progress hampered by their membership in the CC.  Offers for board memberships and professional advancement started slowing and stopping.  Thompson, who had been Mayor of Jackson, was in the Citizens Council; he was replaced by Davis and then Danks, who were not.  The tide was changing.  

The idea that the federal intervention in our culture, our education, our economics, and our society didn’t go away though, but it did change names.  Mississippi had been a yellow-dog Democratic state ever since the civil war, but by the mid-seventies, a growing number of Mississippians saw the Democratic party as against us, an interference in how we lived.  

When you look at early adapters of the Republican Party in Mississippi, I can just about promise you they never sat down and discussed the “Southern Strategy” as such.  They didn’t have to.  Saying you wanted to get the federal government out of your business, even if your business is oil, banking, insurance, or the like,  Nobody ever had to say, “Boy, we sure would have been better off if they left our damn schools alone.”  Nobody ever had to say it because the great majority of Mississippians believed in their hearts and still do.  

There were guys out there who believed in an evolved Democratic party and believed it was good for Mississippi.  Guys like Charlie Deaton and Bob Fortenberry built their careers trying to apply these new, expansive ideas of the Democratic Party to the boots-on-the-ground situation in Mississippi.  They had some success, but the most successful was William Winter.  Winter and his Boys of Spring were the last great stand for the new Democratic Party in Mississippi.  

Likened to Camelot, both the play and the Kennedy administration, Winter’s tenure as Governor of Mississippi was, and is, seen as a golden age of progressive politics and moves to equalize, at least educationally, the experience of white and black Mississippians.

Ray Maybus rose out of Winter’s team and became governor at a time when a lot of Mississippians thought we were turning over a new page and Mississippi was changing.  It was not.  Toward the end of his term, preparing for his next move, Maybus ran full force into the rising Republican Revolution in Mississippi.  The Young Republicans were becoming more popular than over-starched Oxford shirts at Ole Miss, and at an SEC game in Jackson, Mabus was booed when the announcer asked the crowd to greet him before the game started.   

In my mind, that moment when a bunch of guys my age began to boo a sitting governor at an Ole Miss game loudly was a sea change in Mississippi culture.  I’d seen them cheer Ross Barnett, both before and after his tenure as governor.  I’d seen them cheer Cliff Finch, even knowing that all the stories about Finch were true, but they were booing Ray Mabus–Herman Hine’s son-in-law, a champion of education and public benefit in Mississippi, a genuinely nice guy with a career drive like nothing I’d ever seen before somehow equated to a bad thing among my peers.  To them, being in favor of Mabus and his pro-education platform was unpatriotic.  I still don’t get it.  Not even a little.  In my heart, I will always pin some of that moment on feelings about the Democratic Party forcefully integrating Mississippi.  

Even today, there are people in Mississippi who straight-up blame the Democratic Party for changing the Mississippi State flag, even though every single person involved in pushing that move through our legislature was Republican, and it was signed by a Republican governor.  People don’t want the truth.  They want somebody to blame.  

I was five years old when the Jackson Citizens Council started sending out fliers saying they would accept students into their five different schools.  Council Schools were priced considerably lower than Prep, JA, St. Richards, or St. Andrews.  They were actually priced too low to pay their bills using tuition money.  The Citizens Council promised fund-raising efforts to make up the difference, and for a while, they did, but they couldn’t sustain it.  The business community distanced itself from the Council, limiting its ability to raise money.  Pretty soon, the council schools began closing.  

What happened next is a matter for the history books.  Much of Jackson’s white population did what they must to pay and send their children to Prep, JA, St Andrews, and St. Richards.  That made Jackson Public Schools the majority black.  Dr. Walker, the superintendent, retired almost as soon as integration began.  He was replaced by a series of men who didn’t stay until Bob Fortenberry came back to Mississippi to take the job.  Bob fought for Jackson and for JPS, and he did a great job, but he was ambitious and wouldn’t stay forever.  

By the 90s, with Dr. Fortenberry retired, people who couldn’t afford private school began leaving Jackson for cities in Rankin and Madison counties that still had a majority white population.  This created an avalanche of white flight out of Jackson that we’re still dealing with.  Jackson is still losing population, even though we were at an all-time high in the 80s.  

Life is like a series of domino pieces standing on end.  When you knock one over, it knocks the one next to it over, and that knocks over the one next to it, and so on, and so on, until you get to a space quite a distance away from where you first tipped over a domino, but the causation remains the same.  

A lot of people want to say that what happened in the sixties and seventies has nothing to do with what’s happening now.  That’s just not true.  What’s happening now is a direct result of what happened in the sixties and seventies, even though we had to go through many steps to get here from there.

Free Textbooks To Academies

 In 1940, Governor Paul Johnson pushed for a change to the Mississippi code to allow for the state to pay for free textbooks for Mississippi undergraduate students.  Many other states had similar laws, and Johnson wanted Mississippi children to have the same educational opportunities as children in other states.

Using Texas as a model, my Uncle Boyd applied for and made a contract with the relative textbook publishers to maintain and operate a textbook depository in Mississippi.  Publishers would print the books, mostly in Nashville, and ship them to our warehouse on South Street, which is now the Cathead Vodka distillery.  The state of Mississippi would pass laws specifying the funds available for textbooks, and the schools would apply to the State Textbook Commission to make an order for the books they wanted.  We would ship them and bill the state of Mississippi.  When the state paid us, we kept eight percent and sent the rest to the publishers.  This is how textbooks were bought and sold in Mississippi until the change in the Mississippi code in the 90s, which abolished the State Textbook fund and allowed schools to order textbooks out of the general education funds.  

When students got their books at the beginning of the year, they had a stamp on the inside front cover that said, “This Book Is The Property of the State of Mississippi and is assigned to:” and then a blank for the student’s name and the year.  The state of Mississippi owned your fourth-grade reading textbook and let you use it for a year.  The next year, they added a name to the stamp and let another student use the same book.

This system worked great for quite a while.  Even schools like St. Andrews and St. Richards qualified for free textbooks as long as the students were citizens of Mississippi.  In 1964, the United States passed the Civil Rights Act and its several chapters.  Chapter Six of the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use federal funds for segregated programs.  

“Section 601 provides that recipients must comply with the mandate that no person, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any federally funded program or activity.” That’s where Mississippi ran into a problem.  Our schools were still very segregated.  That segregation of public schools would soon be struck down, in some parts because of chapter six, but Mississippi would attempt to escape segregating its schools by creating new, private schools that could still legally segregate because they didn’t receive federal funds or state funds.

After salaries and insurance, textbooks are the next largest yearly expense for most schools.  Many of these private schools tried to make a case that they were still eligible for state textbook funds.  The first case came in 1970 in Tunica.  A young lawyer from Oxford made the case that the Superintendent of Tunica public schools was ordering textbooks for the public schools but delivering them to the Tunica Institute, a private academy.   The case went before Judge Keady, who ordered that the practice not continue but didn’t rule on whether or not it happened in the past since Tunica Institute was only six years old and is generally considered one of the very first segregation academies.  I don’t have access to our records from 1969, but I’m pretty sure we shipped textbooks to the Tunica superintendent that ended up a the Tunica Institute.

Almost two years later, the Mississippi Association of Private Schools sued the State Textbook Commission because parochial schools were receiving textbook funds, but they were not.  Bill Goodman had a team representing the Textbook Commission, Ed Bruini had a team representing us, and the judge was Bill Coleman.  This was pretty serious stuff.  The private school association tried to prove that since they had no verbiage about segregation in their charter, they should be allowed free textbooks.  The state’s position was that the parochial schools were, in fact, integrated, even if they didn’t have very many non-white students, and at that time, none of the Association of Private Schools members were integrated, even though they had no verbiage in their charter preventing it.  Missco, for their part, sat in the corner, trying not to offend anyone as both sides were our customers.

Coleman ruled in favor of the state and said the academies would not get any textbook money as long as they were defacto segregated, no matter what their charter said.  

None of this was very flashy news.  There are one or two articles in the Clarion Ledger about either case; none were very long as there wasn’t much public interest.  There were some hurt feelings, though.  The next year we were subject to a Peer Committee review and audit.  They said in their report that we were a “paragon of efficiency” that became part of our marketing material for years after, but the message was still pretty clear.  “Choose your friends, and stick with them.”  We honestly didn’t have much choice.  The public schools were much bigger customers, and we were doing our best to stay very well within the letter of the law.

Another outcome of the case was that we could no longer charge adopted textbook materials to private schools.  They could order books from us, but they had to pay cash lest we get accused of mingling adopted textbook money with their accounts receivable.  Many of the academies ended up buying their textbooks by mail order, partially out of spite but also because that way they could get 120-day dating on their invoices, and in those early days 120, day dating on invoices was a heck of a gift.  

I was a kid when most of this happened.  Most of it I know about from talking to the principal players years after the fact and looking it up on microfiche at the Millsaps Library.  Mississippi went to great lengths to avoid cooperating with the spirit of the Civil Rights Act.  At the time, people thought they had beaten the system, but here fifty years later, I wonder if maybe we didn’t break the system.  

I don’t think there’s anybody left alive who is still angry about decisions my dad or anyone at Missco had to make in those days.  There were at the time, but that was a long time ago.  The state of your public schools has such a major role in the quality of life in a community.  It’s so easy to say that the state of Jackson Public Schools is the Mayor’s fault or the city council’s fault, but as much as I respected him as a person, I’m looking much more at the decisions Dr. Walker and Mr. Howell made in 1969 as an explanation for the state of Jackson Public Schools today.  A lot of people will point to the Citizens Council, and I will too.  I knew those guys too, but our educational leaders honestly should bear a special burden here because they had the most reason to know better.  Bob Fortenberry had a big role in keeping Jackson Public Schools in a workable state, but after he moved on it was, and still is a struggle to find anyone to take that position.

Stock In Academies

People talk about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and how the South converted from Yellow-dog Democrats to the world’s most conservative Republicans.  Nixon was taking advantage of a situation that was already developing.  In 1969, most of Mississippi blamed the Democratic party for our position on the Rubicon of integrating our public schools and the panic that ensued.  When I look at the list of names of the men who formed the Board of Directors for Jackson Preparatory School in 1970, it’s really easy for me to see the seeds of a revolution.  I can’t look at a single name on that list and say, “I did not love this man,” but the truth is the truth, and the Republican takeover of Mississippi started in Jackson, and it started with those men, and it started over the issue of integration.

A lot of people are already tired of discussing the birth and growth of private schools in Mississippi around 1970.  I think it’s important we do discuss it because it has a lot to do with the state of our schools today, and the state of our schools today has a great deal to do with the state of our state.  It’s also important to remember that we were just children.  Nearly all of the people who made these decisions passed away ten years ago.  

You’ll often hear said that St. Andrews and St. Richards were parochial schools and shouldn’t be included in this, and JA was started as an alternative school that taught phonics in early reading as an alternative to what JPS was teaching.  All of these things were true.  These three schools were started under very different conditions than what happened in 1970.  When the purpose for them was formulated, the idea of most of white Jackson abandoning the public schools wasn’t a consideration.  When these schools began, nobody believed we would be forced to integrate.

St. Andrews, St. Richards, and JA all experienced massive growth in 1970.  While these schools weren’t created as an alternative to integrated public schools, there were parents who considered that, if they were going to leave the public schools, they would rather their children attend a school like that rather than a school like Prep or Manhattan.  My parents were one of these.

The superintendent of Jackson Public Schools told my grandfather to “tell Jim he better get those boys into private schools because I don’t know what will happen next year.”  Next year in this story was the year Murrah would be forcefully integrated.   Normally, a comment like that would be of concern, considering what my father did for a living; it was a paradigm shift and a huge amount of pressure beyond just wanting to do the best he could for his children.  For the superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, my father’s biggest client, to say he should move us out of the JPS system was disturbing on many levels, disturbing enough that this is what my parents decided to do.

My oldest brother went to Prep because his football coach was also going to Prep.  The same coach noticed my early growth spurt and the size of my arms and asked me when I was going to prep every time I saw him until I was a sophomore at Millsaps.  He caught me with a pitcher of beer at Mr. Gattis Pizza in the 10th grade and asked when I was going to Prep.  The rest of us, my other brother, my sister, and I, went to St. Andrews.  In the late 70s, there were some concerns about what was going on at St. Andrews, so my sister transferred to Prep, just in time to miss David Hicks.  That’s another story.

With integration, there was a lot of pressure for both JA and St Andrews to add a high school, and neither had the money.  St. Andrews spent a great deal of money building what remains one of the most attractive lower schools in Mississippi.  There were still loans out for it, and nearly all the sources they had for large gifts were tapped to build it.  

The high school St Andrews eventually built looked like it was erected by an entirely different organization than the lower school.  One building had a second floor that could never be used because the building inspector wouldn’t approve it, so the planned staircase was never built, and those rooms were used for storage.  Every so often, you’d see Jessie on the maintenance staff haul a broken chair-desk up an extension ladder to store it in this unused portion of the building so that it could be used for parts later on.

There was a struggle for a while to decide what the future of JA would be.  Many saw it as a feeder school for Prep.  Prep already had a preferred feeder school in First Pres, though, so the relationship became strained.  JA was also working under a different educational paradigm than Prep.  Prep was very traditional, basically, the same curricula as Murrah (since that’s where most of their staff came from), whereas JA was interested in more modern curricula (at least, more modern in terms of the 1960s). More than ten years into it, JA decided they, too, must have a high school, but where would they find the money?

While most of the banks had the motivation to loan these new schools money, they still required some backup to the loans.  More often than not, these came in the form of personal guarantees from board members.  Often, a willingness to personally guarantee a banknote was how one became a board member.  The money for these banknotes paid the construction companies, companies like my dad’s that provide chairs, desks, and blackboards, and most importantly, the salaries of the teaching staff, almost all poached from the public schools.  Some people will take offense that I use the word “poach” here.  I hold nothing against anyone who left a job in our public schools for a job in our private schools.  These people, mostly women, were excellent educators, and considering the stories I’ve heard about the chaos in the administrative side of Jackson’s public schools at the time, I don’t know that I can blame them for switching.

The idea of offering stock in the school as a way of raising a little extra money was a part of nearly every school other than St. Richards and St. Andrews; both of those had already built most of their lower school and had a more stable economic situation due to their parochial nature.  Many of these personally guaranteed notes were called as the need for money soon outstripped the money coming in from tuition.  Everything was happening so fast; this was almost guaranteed to happen.  Some of these men, who had to pay out of their pocket for the loans the school could not pay, took stock in the school as payment.  That way, for quite a while, when a new student would enroll and buy stock, they were buying it from Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, who still had five hundred shares left from when he had to pay off the school's banknote.  

The question of integrating the schools was a complicated one.  Prep, Woodland Hills and Manhattan had no interest in integrating, they couldn’t legally refuse to admit anyone based on race, and there were parents who tested the waters, but no black students were enrolled.  JA had staff members who were very open to integration, but the cost of attending prevented it for many years.  Glenn Cain and I discussed this several times.  He even showed me some of the applications from black parents to prove he was telling me the truth.  Glen, I think, at times, was in an impossible situation where everyone wanted something different from him, and his own vision for the school became difficult to manifest.  Jesse Howell found it easier to realize his vision and get others to back him up.  Part of that was just his magnetic personality, but part of it was an unwillingness to challenge the status quo.  For many people, Prep was the new Jackson Central High School, but without any of that integration nonsense.  If you look at the board and the faculty, you’ll see the names of an awful lot of Central alumni.

St. Andrews and St. Richards were both very motivated to integrate on orders from their respective religious organizations, but again cost became an obstacle.  St. Andrews ultimately became the first private school to integrate willingly.  They were, and are now, pretty proud of that.  While he was a good student and well-liked, there was still an enormous economic gap between white and black parents, and the cost of attending St. Andrews prevented him from graduating there.  His presence started something, though.  Soon, every grade would have at least one black student, and the number grew every year.  James Meridith sent his sons to St. Andrews.  During my entire tenure at St. Andrews, there were talks of merit-based and need-based scholarships, with experiments with both.  While nearly everybody was in favor of it, paying for it was an obstacle.  It was expensive enough to keep the doors open; adding that sort of expense on top proved too difficult.  

A lot of us noticed that black students would drop out around Jr High School.  Part of that, I think, was the idea that, if their parents were going to spend that much money, it’d be better invested in the early grades so their children got a good foundation.  I’m sure the idea that being around other black students as a part of social life was also more of a consideration in the upper grades.  

The baby boom had already stretched Jackson’s educational resources thin.  Although considerably larger, Murrah wasn’t nearly the architectural marvel of Bailey or Central.  The cost was the primary consideration.  Jackson barely had enough money to meet its public school needs and then voluntarily put on themselves the added burden of duplicating it as private schools.  Considering just how much of a task this was, regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, makes me have some respect for the people who did it.  It was, however, a horrible idea.  None of the terrible things predicted to happen at Murrah happened.  There were no murders in the hallway, and the drug problem at Murrah was considerably smaller than the drug problem at the private schools.  The kids who stayed at Murrah got every bit as good of an education as the kids who went to Prep.  The difference is, Prep is well-funded and going strong today, but Murrah struggles to meet the basic needs of its students.  Murrah is far more segregated now than it was in 1975.  We’ve struggled to keep a superintendent of Jackson Public Schools every year since 1970.

A lot o people don’t want to talk about this.  “It was fifty years ago.”  “We were children.”  “The world is different now.”  All of this is true, but when I look out at what’s happening educationally now in Mississippi, what I see are the scars that were left when most of Mississippi abandoned the public school system.  Scars that won’t heal unless we talk about this.  A lot of people think they’re safe from all this as long as they can send their kids to private schools.  It’s not that simple.  Our culture and our economy depend on the families who can’t afford to send their kids to these private schools.    Your kids who went to private schools will be left with the same unanswered questions we were left with by our parents, and the longer we take to address these issues, the more our society will become polarized and dysfunctional. 

Prep, St Andrews, and JA all seem pretty well-heeled now.  That’s an illusion created by fifty years of investment.  The first few years, the schools looked nothing like that.  Mississippi still struggles to meet its basic educational needs.  If you look at the money spent on our private schools, it might become clear where the money went.  The cities that are now mostly white won’t remain so.  We didn’t escape the problem of integration; we postponed it.  Sooner or later, those chickens will come home to roost.

Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Mustard Seeds

There was no Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame for the first half of my life. The Jackson Touchdown Club met once a year in the ballroom of the Walthal Hotel and handed out awards to guys who used to play football. 

My father won it for "leadership." I guess he wasn't that great at football itself. My Grandfather won it for his 30 years as an SEC Referee, where he was also blessed with three fuzed vertebrae when an LSU player tackled him and the man with the ball at the same time and spent the rest of his life walking with a cane and listing to the right.  

The Touchdown Club was kind of a good ole' boy thing but a well-thought-of one. Their meetings usually consisted of about ten tables and maybe forty people. The one I went to Saturday had around sixty tables and at least a thousand people. There are very few places in town with a ballroom big enough to hold that crowd.

Michael Rubenstein started working in Jackson when I was in my later teenage years. He was from Boonville, but many people thought he was from New York because of his name. Rubenstein was a reporter for WLBT and quickly took over the sports department. All three stations had a sports department, but Michael decided to distinguish channel 3 and himself by simply working harder.

Rubenstein was kind of a solitary guy. I'd see him sitting by himself at the bar of George Street and later at Hal & Mals, but I almost never saw him pile into CS's with the rest of the WLBT News crew at the end of the ten pm broadcast. My friend Doug Mann used to get drunk and say, "Hey, Look! It's Bob! Bob Ballou!" Referencing the Desi Arnez song when Howard Ballou came in. Ballou took it in good spirits, but I'm sure there were times when he thought, "What the hell?" to himself.  

When Rubenstein took over at WLBT, the city had just built Smith-Wills stadium. Some people want to call it the Hank Aaron Stadium. I'm against that. Aaron was born in Mobile and played in Milwaukee and Atlanta. He had nothing to do with Jackson, whereas both Smith and Wills were well-known characters in our history.

Smith-Wills existed because Con Maloney was an Irish Catholic guy with a lot of drive, motivation, and money, and he wanted minor-league baseball in the capital city. I think the world of Con Maloney. He was a Millsaps boy who left the school with his feet running. They ran him to the State Senate and the boards of everything from Millsaps to Trustmark to St. Dominics. 

In the corner of the Smith-Wills complex was a high-school league field, and besides that was a tiny museum dedicated to Dizzy Dean. That was the start of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Michael Rubenstein had an active mind and a lot of ambition. He used his position as Mississippi's top sports broadcaster and the business connections he made through Con Maloney to start the idea of a "Sports Hall of Fame Museum" to take up a spot in the parking lot of Smith-Wills, that was at one time considered for another High School field.  

They showed the drawings for the proposed Museum on the television, and I thought, "Boy, that's gonna be a lot of money." Even then, I was getting jaded by guys showing off impressive architectural renderings for things that never happened. Mississippi didn't have a lot of money. Jackson didn't have a lot of money. Getting this thing built was gonna be a considerable challenge.

I underestimated the sheer tenacity of Michael Rubenstein. It took about six years, but the Museum was built. Next door to it, Jim Buck Ross started putting together his plan for an Agricultural Museum, and pretty soon, that part of Lakeland Drive was pretty impressive. Part of his vision was to evolve the Jackson Touchdown Club into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, which is where I was Saturday Night.  

A lot of Millsaps guys have been part of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame since its inception. Saturday night was important to me because it featured two guys who were at Millsaps when I was at Millsaps. Saturday, they announced the first recipient of the Bill Hetrick Community Service Award. Afterward, they inducted Coach Jim Page into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Jim has coached baseball at Millsaps for thirty-four years, starting not long after I graduated. That's a remarkable run. In the modern world of sports coaches, that kind of tenure is unheard of. When I met these guys, Jim played, and Bill watched and sometimes kept team stats. After that, we'd all end up at the Texas League Champion Jackson Mets games, usually on the third base side, where a guy with a cooler would bring you a beer. That's about all the luxury a man needs.  

Mississippi is a humble place. Jackson is a humble place. Millsaps is a humble place. Never underestimate us, though. Michael Rubenstein's passion project intersected with so many lives of the people of Mississippi. I've watched this story grow from the smallest seed. In Mississippi, you really need to stick around to see the end. The parable of the mustard seed can show up in unexpected places.

Sunday Sermon July 30 2023

 The governor came to church today.  It’s good for the church when he comes, and it’s good for him when he comes, and I don’t mean politically (although that might have been a consideration.)  I can’t promise there weren’t twenty people around him praying that Jesus would remove the scales from his eyes, but I’m pretty sure he knew that was part of the job when he took it.  

There’s a lot going on in his life, including a second run for governor of Mississippi.  A little bird told me he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his reception at the Neshoba County Fair, so that might have something to do with him being butt in the pew this morning.  To my way of thinking, a candidate who is a little dissatisfied with the job he’s doing is a lot more beneficial than the guy who thinks he can do no wrong.

I like Tate.  We have a lot in common.  When he was a student, I used to talk to Matt Henry about him when they were both KAs at Millsaps.  Matt liked him too.  I wish I could talk to Matt about anything again.  A lot has changed for Tate since he left Millsaps.  A lot of his views have gone from fairly moderate to, I don’t know what to call them now.  I honestly don’t believe in my heart that Tate honestly believes in a lot of the things he’s been pushing for lately, but I think the men pulling his strings and making promises about his future career that they’ll never keep are leading him astray of his own judgment.  

I’m not the guy who’s gonna say Mississippi needs a Democratic government because, quite frankly, considering the state of the Mississippi Democratic Party right now, other than about four people, I wouldn’t trust them to organize a fish fry.  A lot of people think Presley can turn it around, but that’s an awful lot to put on one guy.  We’ve had strong Democratic governors before, but they served when there was a strong Democratic Party backing them up.  People call William Winter Mississippi’s greatest governor, and maybe he was, but he had a team of some of the sharpest guys I ever met behind him, both on his staff and in the legislature.  

With a word, Tate could do more good than I could with a year's effort.  Good for Mississippi and its people.  With just a few words, he could make huge strides in healing the schism in the United Methodist Church in Mississippi and solving the hospital crisis in Mississippi.  I don’t think that word is coming.  I think there are men with a very impractical vision of Mississippi holding carrots in front of Tate’s nose and dangling swords over his head.  Those words aren’t coming.  

Not long ago, a senior member of Tate’s party told me he thought “market forces” would solve the problem of Mississippi hospitals.  It was a moment that took my breath away a little.  I didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was, “Dick Wilson came to me thirty-five years ago and said you wanted to run for office, and you were a solid conservative, and I should give you a listen–which I did.  Somewhere along the way, you and some other guys changed the definition of what a conservative means, and now you’re as useless as tits on a bull when it comes to solving Mississippi’s problems.”  I didn’t say that, not because I’m a gentleman, but because I don’t think he’d listen to me, and I didn’t want to get in a fight in front of people.

After Sunday School, I thought, maybe some of us who Tate either knows or knows of should go see him with hats in hand and talk to him about what Jesus wants for Mississippi, and I don’t mean what Jesus wants for the unborn babies of Mississippi, because right now being a born baby in Mississippi can be a pretty sketchy proposition with way too high of a chance for a horrible ending, and he’s much more able to solve this than me or any of my friends.  I’m not good at begging, but I’d beg for the people of Mississippi.  I’d beg Tate Reeves to remember what he was taught at Millsaps and make choices based on what the people who are trying to live here need, not based on what some conservative talk show host says is important.  You going on Fox News isn’t going to save one malnourished baby or one heart attack victim living in an area without a hospital.  

Going to church should mean more than just going to church.  Cary was sick today, so Susannah delivered the sermon.  Her sermon was about presenting a welcoming face to the world and the good it can do.  In it, she discussed her time ministering to Aids victims at a time when most people weren’t very educated about how Aids spread, and there were few effective treatments for it.  She made the point of how powerful a simple human embrace could be for someone whose own family is afraid to hold them for fear of the disease.  She didn’t know the governor would be in the pews before her this morning.  She didn’t even know she would be preaching.  I know he heard what she was saying.  Whether it reached into his heart is between him and Jesus.

If I could talk to Tate today, I’d tell him that his heart is a lot more likely to tell him the truth than whoever is whispering they’ll send him to Washington in his ears.  Hopefully, he realizes he’s not the first guy they did this to.  Tate’s smart enough to pass comprehensive exams at Millsaps.  He’s smart enough to figure this out.  He just needs to listen to a higher power.

Moonwatcher and Oppenheimer

In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke introduces the character of Moonwatcher, a proto-human and the alpha male in a tribe of ape-men who are in conflict with another tribe of ape-men over access to a water source.  A fight for survival.

In filming this section of the book, Stanley Kubrick used the same actors and the same ape-men costumes to represent both Moonwatcher's tribe and their enemies.  Moongzer's mask was different, more articulate, and more detailed than the others, but all the other masks were taken from the same mold.  Kubrick calculated (correctly) that by having the actors play double roles, both as the protagonists and the antagonists, it would look like he was using more ape-men than he actually was.  

Despite Kubrick's clever means of filming the sequence, Clarke had a different point in mind.  Clarke wanted to show that these proto-humans were extremely similar genetically; what tiny differences there were made them mortal enemies, and extrapolating that point out tens of thousands of years, Moonwatcher's tapir bone weapon used to kill his enemy becomes a satellite loaded with thermo-nuclear weapons, pointed at earth.   There are minute genetic differences between us and the Russians, and yet we stand (as we actually did stand at the time of the film) moments away from destroying each other.  Moonwatcher is both Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Although we see a leopard kill and eat one of Moonwatcher's tribemates, the real threat, the difference between extending his genetic material and oblivion, was the other ape-men.  

A principal theme of the 1960s was xenophobia on many levels.  Arabs hate the Jews.  Russians hate the Americans, whites hate the blacks, and North Koreans hate the South Koreans; all genetically very similar, but all are perceived as a mortal threat by their counterpoint.  In 1967, when Kubrick and Clarke were making 2001, in Mississippi, some white men in a truck set bombs in the office of Perry Nussbaum in the Beth Israel synagog in Jackson.  After tens of thousands of years, ape-men were still willing to kill each other over access to water they could have shared.

Clarke was a very prolific writer.  Much more prolific than I.  Of all his works, 2001 remains his most famous by far.  It's hard to say if it's a hopeful work or not because the aliens make us take the next evolutionary step even though we still have death pointed at each other.  He discussed the matter further in 2010, but not that many people read it, and even fewer saw the movie.

This weekend, when Oppenheimer comes to Jackson, I'll see it at the Capri.  I'll also spend some of the time thinking about Arthur C Clarke and Moonwatcher.  We can't seem to escape what he said about us.  

I Didn't Like The Nursery

I always felt like being an introvert like I am was such a disappointment to everybody, particularly my mother.  She tried so hard to get me to socialize with other kids, and it almost never worked.

We tend not to think of kids with learning disabilities as "disabled", but if you can't speak normally, or read normally, you feel far more different from the people around you than you really are.

I remember when I was five, and my sister was two, my mother took us to the nursery at Galloway, so the rest of the family could attend church in peace.  Jim Wilkerson and Jim Moffett were already in there running around like they owned the place, knowing exactly where all the toys were and how they worked.  My sister was over with the toddlers, organizing a group of ten, planning a day when they'd all wear the same color pull-ups and the rubber pants with the lace ruffles on the bottom.

I don't remember who the other women were, but my mother was talking to Mrs. Keyes and pushing me out in the play area, pretending I wasn't resisting.

"I k...., I Ka...., I k-k-k a, I can't go over there!" When I'm nervous, my words don't come.  They especially didn't when I was little.  Normal stuttering, I don't mind.  I'm older than Moses now, and I'm used to it.  Those times when the words just won't come though, when I can't get past the first two or three syllables without having to start over, even now, that makes me feel inadequate.  When I was little, it made me feel like an alien.

I looked up at my mother, doing my best to plead with my eyes without actually crying.  Crying would just make it worse.  "Please take me home," I thought.  "Please, please, please take me home."  I tried this playschool thing.  I really did.  I wanted to be a good boy, but my words broke, and now I'm gonna cry, and if I cry, what's next? Will I wet my pants too?  "please take me home.  Please, please take me home."  

One of the things that started to drive a wedge between my mother and me was that she pushed me to the very limits of my disability.  It was absolutely the right thing to do.  Without it, I would have remained hidden where it was safe forever and never sought out ways around my disabilities.  It separated me from my mother, though.  She was no longer the place for safety and comfort.  The only place where I found safety and comfort was being alone, and that's where I stayed most of the time for the next fifty-six years.  

You really can't question a mother's love.  She might have even known that pushing me beyond my boundaries might push me away from her, but it was more important that I go out and stretch my wings than staying cuddled under hers.  That's a horrible choice to make, but sometimes life is about horrible choices.

You can't really tell that I stutter now.  It seems like an illusion to me like I'm putting on some sort of performance.  If I let my guard down, or if I'm caught by surprise, my words still break sometimes though.   It's absolutely unnerving, even now.  Working through my stutter conceals my shame and provides me with false confidence.  When the illusion breaks, I feel dishonest, like a magician might if a curtain falls down unexpectedly and his entire illusion apparatus is exposed.  

I'm sixty yeas old, but I still stutter and I'm still dyslexic.  It's who I am.  I learned ways to disguise it and work around it, and even sometimes make it work for me, and that I owe to my mother, who made me stay in the nursery, even when I was terrified and begged to be brought home.  

An Elven Messenger In The Woods

Sometimes I run into people who, even if we never interacted so much before, my life and theirs intertwine like the roots of two trees in the same patch of forest, deep and wide pushing through the same soil, pulling out the same moisture and nutrients to keep our leaves alive and send out new buds.

Wanting to be a writer, calling myself a writer, and actually being a writer are all very different things.  I can, and did, type a thousand words a day for forty years, but I'm still not a writer because unless I offer those thousand words for anybody to read, it's not communication; my typing is a dead message with no listener.  With no listener, there is no writing.  

When the prospect of turning sixty came into my sights as a reality, I decided that regardless of whatever health challenges I have left (which get fewer every day), I should mend this situation.  God created me wanting to type a thousand words a day, more than wanting to--needing to.  If I don't get my words out in a day, I feel incomplete, and if I go two or three days without it, depression starts to set in.  I don't know how much I believe in the idea of "God's Plan," but I don't believe that much of a compulsion to do something would come without there being some purpose in it.  

I knew I could do the work.  I've been doing it as long and sometimes much longer than I've known most of you.  Other than my brother and sister, there's a pretty small fraternity of people who knew me before Mrs. Kitchings suggested I learn to type.  Doing the work and getting it out in the world are two different things, so I decided that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to start making connections with writers.  I grew up seeing Willie Morris and Larry Brown in bars and Eudora Welty at parties and socialite functions, but that's something different.  I needed to make connections with people who were trying to do the same thing I was doing, only better and with more confidence and more experience, who could show me the way.

Since today's prospective college student consumes twenty times more new media than traditional media, one of my strategies for the past two years has been to identify and amplify the social media message from organizations that are important to me.  I know how this works.  The social media companies "publish" millions of messages every day and decides how many people to show this message to by how much engagement the message gets and how much engagement the sender normally gets.  That means if I like, comment, and share the social media messages of the organizations I care about, then it greatly increases the chances that the social media company will serve the message to another target of the message, in this case, prospective students and prospective donors.  

This might sound dumb, but tapping "heart" or typing "Great Job" on the stuff Millsaps posts makes a huge difference.  Every time you do it, you increase the algorithm score on both the message and the school.  As a side benefit, whenever I log into social media for the day, I get a pretty comprehensive run down on what's happening on campus, a task I used to accomplish by strolling around campus or just talking to Joe Lee Gibson while he emptied the garbage cans.  

This way, I end up knowing, every day, what's going on with the Phi Mu's, what's going on with Food Services, the Baseball Team, Campus Pride, The Many Adventures of George Bey, and what was the original kernel of this story, whatever Liz Egan and the Writing Center was doing, which one day included a one-sheet about the McMuling Writing Workshop.  Having just seen it that morning, I mentioned to my sister in church that maybe I should go to that.  She said I should.  Having that conversation at that place at that time with that person probably meant something.   I was still basking in the blessing Cary transmitted to us at the end of his sermon, so when I got home, I shot off an email to the address on the post, which I assumed would be Liz or one of her students.

Preparing for the course, I sent in the possible first chapter of a book I'm working on, and the first person to respond to it was a woman who I knew worked at Millsaps named Isabelle Higbee.  Even though it said "Ezelle" in her Facebook profile, I wasn't yet making a connection with who she was.  Isabelle had just retired from a position at Millsaps that I always knew as Jack Woodward's office, so that's a pretty big connection there, but there was still a lot more I didn't know about yet.

Part of the writing workshop is reading to the other participant's pieces of what we're working on.  Sharing your work with other people doing the same sort of work is an important part of the creative process.  Isabelle's project is stories her mother told her about how her parents met during World War II in what became occupied Belgium.  As she told the story, my ears began to tingle.  Holy Shit, did James "Paddy" Hearon have a daughter I didn't know about?  James worked for my father for most of his life and took a special interest in me when it became clear that I was drowning in my professional life and struggling to find a place where I belonged.  

"Who was your father?" I asked.  "Robert Ezelle," she said.  I still wasn't making the connection.  I said that her story was so incredibly familiar to me that I knew a guy who had almost the same life story.  "James Hearon?" She said.  Her mother and James' wife Paulette knew each other and spoke frequently as the only two Belgians living in Jackson.  Then she said something about Mississippi Bedding, and the pieces started falling into place.  "Do you mean Bob Ezelle?"  I said.  I'd known her father and her brothers my entire life, but I had never heard the story of how her mother came from Belgium during the war.  

I'm ashamed to admit this, but sometimes little sisters get overlooked.  I always thought I tried not to do that, but I guess I missed one.  Isabelle's brothers were a huge part of Galloway Youth Ministries and a huge part of my youth.  They and the Gobers pretty much ran the place.  There's more to the story, though.  Part of our business at Missco was selling furniture for dormitories at schools and (unfortunately) furniture in prisons, and each of those furniture sets required a pretty durable mattress that we always bought from Bob Ezelle.  We laughed; even though Franklin Dorm is mostly used for storage now, I'm sure there are still a bunch of mattresses in it that came from Mississippi Bedding.  Our lives had roots that had interwoven for years, and because I'm sometimes completely socially blind, I had missed her.  Deciding to take this course in writing mended that.  Now that I've been given a second chance in life, I'm paying a lot closer attention to the trees around me, and this was one of them.

In The Lord of the Rings, it means something where there's a member of the Elven race in the woods.  They're this powerful class of being with magical forces that tie them deeply to the roots of Middle Earth, and their presence means something important is happening.

One of the first faces I picked out of the crowd when I attended the McMullin Writer's Workshop was Jeanne Luckett.  I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Jeanne Luckett was.  Even though she was considerably younger than my Daddy, he was incredibly impressed by her, not only because she was a Millsaps kid (which she was) but also because, on a professional level, she was involved in everything he thought was important, so throughout my life, whenever we would discuss these major campaigns going on, like the re-naming of First National Bank, or giving Millsaps a new look, or giving Missco a new look, her name was part of the conversation, and her work was not only evident but prevalent.  

To be honest, she always kind of intimidated me.  One of Daddy's business associates, whom I never got to fish with or drink with, was always kind of a mystery to me.  But I knew that everybody who knew her loved her, including some really important ones like Suzanne Maars and Rowan Taylor.  During the night, when Graphic Novelist Andrew Aydin lectured, I saw him talking with Jeanne.  Passing to my seat, I touched his elbow and said pretty cheekily, "Don't let her fool you; that's one of the most important marketing people in Mississippi history."  I meant it too, but I think I embarrassed her.  Having grown up at the feet of people who had remarkable careers, most of them didn't impress me with what they created, but she did.  Just driving around town, even now, I can look at things and say, "She did that.  She did that.  She did that too."

On the last day of the conference, I came early because I always try to go early to things now.  I spent so long not going to things at all that I figured I needed to start going early so I could catch up.  Going early, I had a chance to get Jeanne alone for a few minutes.  Talking like that, one on one for a good spell, really for the first time ever, I learned that our lives overlapped and intertwined in so many ways.  It means something when you love the same things and the same people, and that's something I share on so many levels with Jeanne Luckett.  For me, her face will still always mean that there's an Elven messenger in the forest, but now I'll always know this was someone who drank from the same well I drank from, someone whose history is part of my own.

One of the last things Ellen Ann Fentress said before I left at the end of the conference was, "Why don't you try putting together a short story."  I've always liked short stories, but I never thought I could write them, even though I've had some great teachers in short stories, including Austin Wilson and Suzanne Maars.  

Even though they ordered in some really great sandwiches from Broad Street for the conference, I made a tomato sandwich when I got home, just because we're rapidly running out of tomato sandwich season, and holding it over the sink to eat it so I don't get tomato seeds and tomato goo on my shirt, I started putting clay on the board and poking around at it with the idea of what sort of short story I could write.

Ray Bradbury's name came up over and over during the conference.  One of my peers, Kate, who was a very recent Millsaps Graduate, is taken with him too; she should be; he's Ray Bradbury.  One of the things Bradbury told me at the House of Pies, with Uncle Forry across from us, was that I shouldn't worry about writing, that I loved robots and dinosaurs, so I should be ok.  With that in mind, I started turning over ideas of robots and dinosaurs and rocket ships and Martians in my head, and what I heard was a whale song, and I knew I had my story.  

I've already written a crap ton this morning.  God knows if anyone will read this.  I have my idea for a short story.  Hopefully, I'll have at least the skeleton laid out by Monday.