Lunch At Primos

I had lunch at the Madison Primos today.  I ordered the shrimp remoulade and the gumbo.  Dishes I've had maybe five hundred times before.  As I understand it, the Primos family sold their interest in the business, although Kenneth sat just a few tables over from me.  The purpose of the trip was to see how well I could get around using Uber.  That part of the trip was flawless.

Before they died, both my grandmothers used a meal at Primos as a lure or reward for some task they had for me.  Primos #2 across from the baptist hospital for smaller tasks and Primos Northgate for heavy lifting or longer trips.  This continued from the beginning of my memory until their deaths, with a few trips to Morrison's Cafeteria and Shony's thrown in.  

Both the recipe and the presentation of the dishes I ordered had changed considerably from those days.  It was a bit unsettling.  The shrimp remoulade remained exactly the same most of my life, but today it was different, both the preparation and the dressing.  What I remembered was probably a recipe that Pop came up with in the thirties or forties, and that was what I was expecting, but I got something else.

What they brought me was good, but I couldn't help feeling the shifting of something lost.  There was a time when most of the restaurants in Jackson were run by Greek immigrants, and they had a certain style and a very recognizable taste, and I'm worried that flavor is edging over the night's horizon.  I tried to order a gingerbread man too, but they didn't have any.  They had plenty of fudge squares, but that wasn't the memory I was trying to defrost.  

Jackson peaked in the eighties.  The poverty and racism that plagued us since Lefleur started trading furs on the banks of the Pearl River were at an all-time low.  New construction was vigorous.  Deposit Guarantee and Trustmark were so strong that out-of-state banks struggled to find a toe hold in our market; most didn't bother.  It was the time of moderate democrat governors like Bill Winter and Ray Mabus and moderate mayors like Dale Danks.  

Maybe we flew too close to the sun.  The spell would soon break, and we began our decline that gained remarkable momentum as it headed groundward.  The simple answer is that black families had a slightly higher birth rate than white families, and in the nineties, the balance of race electoral votes shifted along racial lines, causing something of a white panic to get out of town. 

If you drive through Eastover or Woodland Hills today, there are actually more houses and more expensive houses than there were in the eighties.  The Bible says that the poor will always be with us.  It seems the wealthy are just as indelible.  The upper middle class seems to have grown at a fairly steady pace.  It's the middle class and the working class that fled.  There was a dramatic rise in gun violence after Katrina that started an alarm bell warning everyone who could to get out of Jackson as soon as possible, leaving South and North Jackson with property values dropping so quickly that some people had to start all over from scratch in Madison or Rankin county.  

In a sense, people panicked because people they knew also panicked, and nobody wanted to be the last one out.  There was no Moses for this exodus, but there were property developers snatching up every bit of bottomland they could find, as long as it wasn't in Hinds county.  There's this story that it was just the White middle and working class that fled, but that's not true, as many black middle and working-class people left as did white, leaving Jackson a city with very wealthy people on one end and very poor people everywhere else.  That situation isn't sustainable, as evidenced by the crime crisis and the infrastructure crisis we're going through.  

The mayor, I worry, has more allegiance to the pipe dream of the new Africa movement than he does to the idea of building a successful middle-class people where race isn't the only bonding factor.  I understand the impetus that began the New Africa movement, and I even sympathize with it. I understand his father's work in it and why he did it and had I been in his shoes, I might have done the same thing, but that was sixty years ago.  It wasn't a workable idea then, and it's even less workable now.  People died for that movement and nothing was gained.  

What does work now is finding a way to bond together the two broken halves of Jackson that can support and sustain a smaller population of poor and indigent.  We always had a blended culture.  It's time to recognize that, and embrace it, and recognize that it's our strength, not our weakness.  

The best times for Jackson were when moderate democrats who did their best to be colorblind on all issues were in charge.  Maybe it didn't last very long, but it did exist.  I'm not sure how we get back to that, but I'd like to.  I can't think of anything that's more bold or more new than a racially hybrid city, with a devoted focus not on the rich or the poor but on the working and middle class.  I can live with somebody changing my favorite shrimp salad or second favorite gumbo, but my home needs some loving care.  I intend to do my best.  Hopefully, I'll find some fellow travelers along the way. 

A Season of Loss

This isn't a very pleasant story.  I'm sorry.  Please stop now if you're sensitive.

Sixteen years old.  I was working out five times a week and had just begun experimenting with anabolic steroids.  I also began experimenting with women and took on my first girlfriend, who was more than just "do you want to go steady?"

I enjoyed the experiment so far.  I had someone to talk to, someone to focus all these crazy teenage emotions on.  Someone I could hold up as proof that I wasn't alone, even though I still felt very alone.  

School let us out on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, in case we had to travel, and Friday off, too, so we could drive home.  The dentist for my shiny new girlfriend wanted her to have her wisdom teeth taken out on Wednesday so, by Monday, she could go back to school.  

With her wisdom teeth out, she wouldn't be able to partake of much of the Thanksgiving feast.  She mostly took painkillers and remained in bed.  I was allowed to visit after my family finished their dinner, as long as we kept the door open.  My girlfriend wore the prettiest nightgown and robe she could find, but the sides of her face were swollen like I'd punched her.  

This was my first real test as a boyfriend.  I had to be compassionate and responsible but also respectful and gentlemanly and still somehow romantic, which I had no real experience in.  It was a challenge.

I sat and talked on the foot of her bed, with her family a few steps away in the living room.  We held hands and talked about passions we didn't understand.  A body passed by quietly in the hall.  "Hey, Daddy."  She said but got no reply.  The door to his bedroom closed, then locked.  We didn't talk for fear he'd hear us trying to be romantic.

Pop.

I'd heard that sound before.  My brother accidentally discharged his .22 once in his room while getting ready to clean it.  I recognized the smell.  

A mother's cry.  She called his name over and over and banged her fists on the locked door that wouldn't budge.  In an immediate crisis, the wheels in my mind spin, but find no purchase.  Another consciousness takes over my body that somehow has a plan of how to respond.

"Let me," I said and guided her to the side.  I shook the doorknob and pushed with no effect.  Although still drugged and very confused, my girlfriend stood at the door to her bedroom.

"Get back," I said and pushed the door again.  "Stay back," I said to both of them, with fear but mostly panic in their eyes.  My body had a plan.

I planted my feet shoulder-width apart and drew my open hands back, level with my shoulders.  After spinning up as much resolve as I could, I focused my eyes on a spot on the door and slammed my open hands there as hard as I could.  The privacy lock in the door handle snapped, and the door burst open.  Nobody moved.

Inside, I could see his legs sticking out of the bathroom door inside the bedroom.

"Stay there,"  I said.  Her mother froze, but my girlfriend made a step to see inside herself.  "STAY THERE!"  I said.  And she did.

I'd met this man maybe three times.  We shared maybe fifty words together.  A puddle of black-red grew on the bathroom floor.  An expanding circle of life and death.  One arm was twisted back in a strange way holding a pistol.  I won't tell you the rest of what I saw.  For years, I had no visual memory of some of it.  My brain was merciful to my mind, I suppose.  Eventually, it all came back to me, though.   A horrible image saved for a day when I could handle it, I suppose.

The police left around midnight.  I drove home to get a change of clothes, as I'd promised to spend the night on the sofa in my girlfriend's living room.  My mother and father were still up in the den waiting for me.  "Will you call my friends and tell them what happened?  I don't really know how to do this."  I asked.

"Of course."  Mother said.  After that, nobody really said anything.  I expected them to have something brilliant to say that would help me navigate these strange and treacherous waters, but all they could do was be there, which is what I was about to do.  I was going to my girlfriend's house to sit in her living room and say I was going to sleep, but not sleep, and just sort of be there as if my body would somehow fill the hole in their lives long enough to arrange a more permanent patch.  It took a while, but they did arrange a more permanent patch, and I could extricate myself from this trial without causing any further damage.

My mother insisted that I see a psychologist.  She'd done this before.  He was a pretty good guy; by then, we'd become pretty good friends.  He was instrumental in helping me resolve recurring panic attacks in my twenties, but beyond that, I don't think he was ever really able to heal me.  That I did myself.  Sometimes well.  Sometimes poorly.  

For the next twenty-five years, my mother would ask at thanksgiving if I was ok.  I was ok, generally.  I felt no pain or panic or regret.  All I felt was cold and empty, but that's better than pain.  Eventually, as other deaths passed and other losses were sustained, that coldness spread to Christmas and Halloween, and eventually, I quit celebrating the holidays altogether.  It was a season of loss, and I chose to endure rather than celebrate.

This week will be the first thanksgiving I've celebrated since before some of you were born.  I'm at peace with the past and look forward to the celebration.  I am, in time and in deed, thankful.