Lunch At Jitney

 I made my way to the fabled Fondren Jitney for the first time from the new digs today.  It's called something else now, but who cares.  For my generation, the Fondren Jitney was even better than Jitney 14 because that's where Mr. Henry lived and personally oversaw the day-to-day actions.

I got "yessuh'ed" twice today.  In Mississippi, being told "yes sir" means something entirely different from what it means in other parts of the world.  It happens because I'm very old and very white, and even with my beard and my fake biker's vest on, you can tell by my eyes what part of town I come from.  

People have been saying this phrase to me all my life.  I asked my Grandmother about it once, and she said it was a sign of respect.  I said I was eleven; why was this grown man respecting me?  It should be the other way around.  "That's just the way things are."  She said.  I think a lot of grandmothers gave that answer through the years.

One was a woman my age, and she was actually serving me from the plate lunch line, so I kind of understood it.  The other was a young fella, no more than twenty, who was just passing by.  That kind of bothered me.  

Most of the serious change between the races happened in the years around when I was born, some, particularly in the year that I was born.  By the time I was nine, the steam had run out of the engine, and it was just moving chess pieces around the board after that.  

Some guys tried to make substantial changes with the Ayers case, but it languished in litigation hell for thirty-five years.   To get everything on their wish list, Jackson State would have had to give up a lot of the uniqueness that made it an HBCU, so I think the settlement they ultimately reached was probably the right one, although, by the time they reached it, hardly anybody remembered what it was about, to begin with.

Mississippi can be a pretty amazing place but with a fractured soul.  That fracture holds us back at everything.  I love the people here, but I try to be as honest as I can about our past and our present condition.   Despite all that, we produce some remarkable people.  We generate Pulitzer Prize winners like they were cornbread muffins.  

Hell, a girl not ten months older than my Nephew just won one for Journalism.  I have life-long friends on that side of the aisle in her story, and I'm at a loss as to why they haven't yet fixed the things she wrote about.  They think they can get away with it because it's so hard for a Democrat to win anything in Mississippi, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to count on that because I just don't think you really can.

All I see are ghosts of the past now.  I was in Fondren Jitney when it looked like it looked in "The Help"  Most people don't have all-day domestic help that rides in and out on the city bus anymore.  That doesn't mean attitudes have changed all that much.  

My dad's mentor was a man named Ivan Allen, Jr., who was once the Mayor of Atlanta, besides being one of the most successful stationers in the country.  Allen famously said that "There are too many negroes in Atlanta for us to progress and prosper unless they did too."  One of the things he did to encourage this was to force the Atlanta Police to keep their foot off the neck of Martin Luther King, Jr. so he could do what he was doing.  He removed the "white" and "colored" signs from all public property, and when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, he made sure there were plenty of photographs of them eating together.

A month after I was born, Allen was invited by President Kennedy to speak before Congress in hearings that ultimately led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was the only significant white Southern public official to testify.  I know all this, not because I learned it in school, but because he was a legend at National Office Products Association meetings, and my daddy made sure I met him and knew what he'd done.  

I don't think you're going to see much more significant change to come out of my generation.  We're pretty set in our ways.  We ended up being born in sort of the middle years in the battle for America's soul.  Big things will come in the generation after mine.  I can see it in their eyes.  It may not seem like it, but this place is worth saving.