Troop Zero

 Mckenna Grace is one of the most popular actors under twenty working today.  She has produced at least one major role per year since she was eleven, with Ghostbusters and Young Sheldon being the most famous so far.  Hopefully, she’ll escape the dreaded child star syndrome because I really do enjoy her work.  She plays nerds, particularly science nerds.  While typecasting is never good for an actor, the type of roles she plays can mean a lot to awkward kids dealing with some of the same issues.

The Voyager Space Craft, launched in 1977, did something no other mission in any of the terrestrial space programs did before.  It openly made an effort, no matter how futile, to communicate with intelligent life outside of Earth.  This was the very first time any governmental program admitted to the possibility that we are not alone.

The purpose of Voyager 1 and 2 was to conduct near fly-bys of our gas giant neighbors, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and send back photographic and radiometric data.  Since the devices would continue to function as they left the solar system, physicist Carl Sagan suggested affixing a message to the spaceships in case some distant intelligent life encounter them.

A committee led by Sagan developed the idea that they could make disks to affix to the spacecraft, made of solid gold so it never corroded, with mathematical principles and a map to our solar system on one side and the other side a phonograph, with messages from earth.  One of these messages being a recording of a child (Carl Sagan’s Son) saying, “Hello from the Children Of Earth.”

Playwright Lucy Alibar, most famous for “Beasts of The Southern Wild” and “Where the Crawdad Sings,” wrote a play in 2010 called “ Christmas and Jubilee Behold The Meteor Shower.” which became the basis for the film Troop Zero, which she adapted for the screen.  

In it, Christmas Flint, thirteen years old, spends most of 1976 missing her recently passed mother while living with her earnest but unsuccessful father in a trailer park in Wiggley, Georgia.  Christmas is played by Mckenna Grace.  Christmas spends every night staring at the stars in the Milky Way, hoping for some sign of alien life, believing that her mother is with them, out in space.

A man from NASA comes to her school to announce that a recording to go on the Voyager record will be recorded using the voices of whoever wins the Birdy Scout (Girl Scout) Jamboree in the Spring.  The actual recording was made by Sagan’s young son, a year younger than me, but that’s not important to the movie.   

Obsessed with space and science and the idea of communicating with aliens, Christmas is determined to win the Jamboree and have her voice be the one going out into the universe to welcome the aliens and (she believes) her mother’s spirit.  

Being a socially awkward misfit and living in the trailers, the Birdy Scout troop laughs at Christmas when she says she wants to join.  Undaunted, Christmas gets a copy of the Birdy Scout handbook from the library (her favorite place) and learns that if she can get four more girls to join and an adult sponsor, she can make her own troop to compete in the Birdy Scout Jamboree.

Christmas gathers together other misfit girls living in the trailers and asks her father’s seldom-paid secretary Rayleen (played by Viola Davis), to be the troop's den mother sponsor.   When she approaches the school principal who sponsors the main Birdy Scout Troop that rejected Christmas, she’s resistant to the idea but can’t find anything in the rule book to prevent Christmas from having her own troop.  As rude as the girls in the main Birdy Troop, Miss Massy assigns the new troop the number zero and admits them into Birdy Scouts.  If the members of Troop Zero can earn one merit badge each, then they qualify to enter the Jamboree, where Christmas hopes to win a spot on the Voyager record.

The next two acts of the film follow the misfit members of Troop Zero as they each find the thing that makes them special and uses that to earn their merit badge, despite the efforts of the other girls to prevent it, including constantly calling Christmas a “bed wetter” which she denies, even though she has been having problems with incontinence when she gets nervous since her mother died.

Coming of Age stories are usually a version of Campbell’s monomyth where the hero finds their special ability through a series of mentors, tests, and challenges.  Alibar follows that pattern here pretty closely, with the Viola Davis providing the meeting with the mentor in the narrative.  The scene in the belly of the whale takes place when Christmas is determined to win her wilderness survival badge.

I was attracted to watch this film because the trailer had a shot of the Voyager record, which I recognized.  The fate of the Voyager spacecraft is the subject of a fair amount of science fiction stories, including the first Star Trek film.   

This essentially is a story about misfits finding their place, not a story about science, but there’s enough science in it to keep me interested.  The end of the story has Christmas looking out into space during the Perseid Meteor Shower of 1976, which was exceptionally vivid, with between six and twelve meteors crossing the night sky per hour.  I know this because I was thirteen years old in 1976, sitting in the backyard of my mother’s house, watching the meteors and wondering about aliens.   

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.

Knight-Errant

Every once in a while, somebody will say, "yeah, Boyd, but which one did you love the most?  There were a lot of them, but which one do you think about the most?"  That's a challenging question.  Obviously, I think about it often, but do even I know the answer?

Some of them came to me because I was headed in the same direction they were headed, and it's nice to have somebody walk with you for a while.  These were a lot of fun, but they weren't my favorite because, as nice as they were, there just wasn't the passion I was looking for.  They were great companions for a while, though, and I'm very grateful for their time.

Some of them found their lives in a jam and needed somebody who had more than they needed, so they could have some of mine.  Those weren't my favorite, but they were right, I had more than I needed, and they were in a jam, so it worked out. 

Some looked down the road ahead and were really very worried about what they saw ahead.   They had a pretty good idea about how much they could take, and what was ahead looked like it was much more than that, so they needed a bigger, stronger friend to walk with them for a while and soak up some of the arrows so they could get to the peaceful part of the road, a little further down.  That's not my favorite either, but I didn't really mind, and they were right; I could absorb more arrows than they could, at least for that part of the road.  

Some thought I'd be very different from what I was.  They thought they wanted somebody like my dad, and while I can sound like him sometimes, I'm a very different person.  These were nice, but they weren't my favorite because they never really got to know me very well.  They moved on once they found out I wasn't what they thought.  

Some lived their lives drowning in a puddle of pain.  The world didn't always see it, but it was always there.  Sometimes, under the right conditions, I could act like a sponge and soak up some of that pain and wring it out away from them, and for a while, they could live free of the puddle.   Those could have been my favorite because it's really rewarding to see somebody in pain live without it for a while, but it was always just a while; no matter how hard I tried, the pain always came back and filled in where I had taken it away.  

I don't think I was ever supposed to love one the most.  I think I was supposed to be a bridge through uneven terrain for people who were afraid of what lay on the road ahead.  You're not supposed to stay on a bridge because that blocks the other people who need to use the same bridge.  Bridges can be really cool and really beautiful, but they're not a destination.  They're a way to a destination.

For the most part, I'm happy with the role I've played in all their lives.  There are some companions where I wish I could have done more, but that's kind of my nature; I always think I could have done more.  I never asked to be a knight-errant, but I've never been unhappy with the role.  Alonso Quijano lost his mind and became Don Quixote, but some would say he found it.