Before he got old and started putting on weight and losing his hair, My daddy bore a strong resemblance to Andy Griffith in terms of dress and speech, and mannerisms. There was a time, in the seventies, when he wore sideburns down his cheek toward his chin, but Billy Nevill told him that looked silly, and that was the end of that. My mother had told him the same thing, but there are things a fella just needs to hear from another man.
Among Southern men of my dad's generation, Griffith was a pretty good model for behavior. Being white and male and from Mississippi was reviving criticism all over the world, so I can imagine many men seeking a way of saying, “I’m not one of those types of men.”
Another role model for men of his generation was Atticus Finch. Most lawyers I knew (and a fair portion of doctors) did their best to take on the airs of Gregory Peck. Peck’s portrayal of Finch was not only not offensive, he was positively heroic, and for men born in the twenties and thirties in Mississippi who had been through World War II and Korea, being heroic was just about all they wanted to do.
These men were in their thirties when the Civil Rights movement broke out in Mississippi. They were still too young and hadn’t ascended to their full adult potential economically, politically, or socially, but they would be judged their entire lives by what happened in those years.
For men who never ventured outside of Mississippi, it wasn’t so bad, but for men whose business took them to different latitudes and different longitudes, being from Mississippi could be used against you.
Daddy taught me to turn my accent on and off. Some people found it charming, while some people found it offensive, so I learned. My sister is better at it than me, but she’s also more charming than I am.
When I went to Los Angeles or Chicago for business, I had o be conscious of this. In Hollywood, once, a gentleman in his cups approached me and said, “I’m a Jew!”
Taken aback but also a bit in my own cups, I said, “Hello, I’m a Methodist.” Then he said, “If they had their way, people like you would kill people like me, wouldn’t you?”
He must have been an Irish Jew because he clearly wanted to have a bar fight. His accusation of me hurt me more than his knowledge that Mississippi was sometimes cruel to Jews hurt him, but not by much. We were at a stalemate.
I wasn’t going to fight this man. When you’re my size, you learn to either not fight or be thought of as less than fully human and certainly not a gentleman your whole life. I was already having a problem with that this night.
Even though I’d been raised with the Andy Griffith model of Southern manhood, that night, I switched to Atticus Finch and explained to this man the history of Jews in Mississippi, including the bombing of Beth Israel. I told him about Emmitt TIll and Medgar Evers. My plan was that if I owned up to what happened and showed that I fully understood the gravity of what happened, I could convince this man that I, Boyd Campbell, had no desire to kill any Jews, least of all the ones drinking with me on Hollywood boulevard while I try to imagine myself back in the thirties when some of the movies I love the most were being shot over on Gower Street.
I don’t know who young Southern men model themselves after now. I don’t know how many of them have even seen Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch or read the book. I suspect the prejudice against us still exists, though. It’s gonna take a lot for that to wear off.
“Buddy, you need to know that your accent can work for you, or it can work against you. You need to learn to control it and figure out what’s right for the situation you’re in.” Daddy and Andy Griffith are both gone now, but I figure that’s still pretty good advice
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