The Day My Mother Lied To Me

 Sometimes in my youth, a mother's desire to shield her child from the unpleasant truths of our condition meant that sometimes I had to be lied to.

By the summer I turned ten, I taught myself to operate our eight-millimeter film projector and often would, with and without permission.   Being the third of four very active children and far too shy to do anything performative worth filming, I wasn't in very many of these films, but I loved them nevertheless. 

That this unlikely-looking machine could turn thin strips of plastic into a show, tantamount to a time machine, was nothing less than magic to me.   I would eventually learn that some years my father sold more Bell & Howell film projectors than Sears and Robuck.  

One reel I particularly enjoyed showed my brother Jimmy when he was five or six, playing in the wading pool at Riverside Park with my cousin Libby.  They looked to be having such fun, and the pool was packed.  I recognized the structure.  That's where we sat and had bag lunch in the summer when I was in Y-Guys.  Riverside Park was a great place for a summer day camp because it offered the occasional visit to Dead-Mans Gulch off near the nature trail.  

By the time I knew and used the wading pool, there was no water in it, and the paint was faded and peeling off.  It seemed a relic of some bygone civilization.  But here in this film, just a few years before, it was filled with water and happy kids.  What happened?

"That looks like fun.  Why don't they put water in the pool anymore?" I asked.

"It leaked."  My mother said.  

That was a lie.  It was a lie to cover up a truth about living in Mississippi that she believed I wasn't ready for yet.  There would come a time when she would tell me the truth about this and many other things, but that summer, she hoped to let me hold on to my innocence a little longer.

In truth, Riverside Park and every other city-owned pool were closed because Jackson lost a court case forcing them to integrate the parks and pools, and rather than dealing with white and black kids swimming together, the city closed them all, no matter how much money they invested in building them.

I was always very interested in this part of our history.  Jackson abandoned several really nice facilities to spite the courts trying to force us to integrate.  The biggest were Livingston Lake across from the Jackson Zoo and Lake Hico, which rested on the sixteenth section land and served to cool the production facility for Mississippi Power and Light.  

I asked a man involved in the Lake Hico decision about it once.  "My job was to provide electrical power to the people of Mississippi and deliver a dividend to my shareholders, not worry about whether or not some negras wanted to go swimming."  He told me.  That seemed harsh, but not wanting to deal with "the troubles" became a common refrain in Jackson.

Whatever reason Hico was initially closed, it remained closed to leisure activities because MP&L had no desire to deal with the insurance and liability of keeping it open.  It cooled the water used to operate their natural gas-powered electric dynamos, and that was that.  

In Mississippi, a film-strip time machine sometimes opened doors and initiated discussions nobody wanted to have.