Joseph Campbell, not my brother, but Professor Joseph Campbell, who taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, studied epic poetry and compared its forms across cultures. His experiences in World War II and his exposure to Carl Jung led him down a path that culminated with the creation of his theory about The Hero’s Journey or the MonoMyth.
In the Hero’s Journey, a character travels from a state of unenlightenment and naivety through trials and challenges and arrives at a point that not only transforms him but also has a transformative or explanative impact on the culture he came from.
The Hero’s Journey begins with hearing the call. Menelaus calls Odysseus to fight the Trojans, Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, and Obi-Wan tells Luke he must learn about the force. My fifty-year journey has been about discovering where I came from and what made me–what familial, cultural, and accidental influences made me what I am. Normally, this wouldn’t be a hero’s journey, but in my case, the forces that shaped me are the forces that shaped the country and, in particular, shaped Mississippi and Jackson. The impact of these forces is what makes this a hero’s journey. It’s not about what made me as much as it’s about what made us.
The call to action in this story came from my teachers when I was sixteen. Before my encounter with them, I was satisfied only to learn the parts of the story that were unique to me and not look around the corners to see the whole image. It was talking with these men that made me understand there was something fundamentally different about people in Mississippi who started school in nineteen sixty-nine, and talking with them made me want to understand it. I heard the call.
Sometimes, you can hear a story many times and still only understand it once the right person tells it. We know the universe through stories. That’s what Campbell was getting at when he wrote A Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Stories are made of moments. Moments are statements of being: The bird is red; The soup is cold; The dog ran out. When you combine these moments, it makes a story. “The red bird flew past our chair on Wednesday.” Stories and emotions compose everything we know. Everything else is just matter–the dust left after the universe made the stars.
Turning 16 was not a good year for me. My mother believed it best to try and treat my brother’s schizophrenia at home, which made being at home uncomfortable at best. I found refuge in spending as much time as possible in weight-lifting gyms, primarily the downtown YMCA and Gordon Weir’s new Natalus-equipped gym.
My school, a private Episcopalian school, was in quite a bit of trouble. We had three headmasters in four years, and the new headmaster saw it as his mission to reshape the community and culture at my school completely. That meant getting rid of several faculty members and quite a few students he saw as distractions and unleadable. Feeling my community under attack, I felt honor-bound to do something about this, which seems ridiculous now since I was only sixteen and not a very good student. The only thing I had going for me was that I was twice the size of my new headmaster. He never missed an opportunity to point that out. I’m pretty sure, in his heart, he believed he could take me and, later on that year, would put that theory to the test. I also knew that my father’s name carried some weight, but I refused to bring that up as this was my fight, not his, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d back up my argument.
Part of reshaping St. Andrews meant that David Hicks, my new Headmaster had to replace the entire high school science department, having found issue with the existing one. Two of his new hires became very important in my life and genuine beacons in my lonely existence. They told me things and asked questions that made me hear the call to adventure.
The first was Mitch Myers. Coach Myers was, at best, twenty-three years old. From New York, his attempts to get into medical school weren’t going well, so he took a teaching job in exotic and remote Mississippi. It’s not unusual for medical schools to turn down the application of young people in the sciences their first two or three times. While Mitch was in Jackson, he applied to the University of Mississippi Medical Center. His performance at St. Andrews impressed the parents at our school enough that they ram-rodded his application through UMMC. Mitch got his MD in Jackson and stayed to practice medicine here for many years.
Mitch became very interested in physical culture in New York, particularly weight-lifting. That became the common ground of our friendship. Most of the weight-lifters I knew were tradespeople. A surprising number were in law enforcement. Mitch was one of the few serious weight-lifters I knew who were also educators and communicated at that level, even if he did have a strange accent.
In 1979, sports drugs were just beginning to be an issue. In Mississippi, there weren’t yet any laws against them. A doctor in Jackson was even testing and prescribing anabolic steroids for the linemen at Ole Miss, a practice that would get the team suspended these days. I was buying Dinabol from a gentleman who worked in law enforcement. He was a bodybuilder, and I was a weightlifter. He was a friend of Heavy Herb Anderson, if that helps you understand where this man fit into the world.
Mitch Myers was also my football coach. We discussed training techniques. He liked trying crazy things like doing a thousand crunches in a day and suffering for a week. His knowledge of chemistry and biology gave him a pretty informed opinion on steroids. He was against the idea but didn’t tell me to stop. He did make me promise to discuss it with my primary physician, which I did, and not to exceed the doses we discussed. Steroids themselves aren’t addictive, but their results can be. I wasn’t always very good about staying within the dosage guidelines Coach Myers and my doctor set for me.
During the year, Jackson Academy announced that they would add a high school the following year. Since some students weren’t happy with David Hicks, there was talk among us of a group leaving St Andrews and going to JA. One afternoon in the gym, Coach Myers asked me, “Those academies, they just for keeping the black kids out. Right?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I knew some academies were made for just that purpose, but by this time, most of them had gone out of business or were headed that way once it was declared unconstitutional for the state to pay parents an “educational grant” to send their kids to private school. Where JA was concerned, I didn’t know the answer. In the years hence, I learned that Jackson Academy was unrelated to the Citizens Council Academies. JA was started when Jackson Public Schools switched from phonics to whole language and from old math to new math, and for some parents, this was inadequate. There are people still who believe whole language and new math were communist-inspired.
“I don’t know, coach,” I said. “They might be different, but I don’t know. I’ll find out.” I don’t know that I meant for that to be a promise, but it ended up being one. “Finding out” why private schools started in Jackson, their difference and their effect on the larger public schools became a life-long journey. One I’m still on. I didn’t start the journey that day, but I heard the call.
Dr. Hicks hired a midwesterner to take over our biology classes. Dan Rose was born in Illinois but traveled the world, including a stint teaching English in New Guinea. Playgirl magazine named him one of America’s most eligible bachelors. He died just as eligible as he was when they named him such.
The biology classroom had a storage room, which Rose converted into a private office. Unbeknownst to David Hicks, Dan Rose received guests in his “office” between classes, with the door closed, where he would tell you stories and share cigarettes and whiskey with you, if you had any, as long as you pet his dog. That sounds like something I entirely made up, but more than a few can attest to its veracity.
Normally, when you’re sixteen, adults talk to you like you’re sixteen and tell you a lot of bullshit rather than the truth. Dan Rose wasn’t like that. Dan spoke to me about cigarettes, cigars, whisky, marijuana, and mushrooms. He said to me about women. Oh, he loved talking to me about women, and I needed to be talked to about women because I hadn’t a single clue what I was doing in that arena.
One day, Dan told me the story about Jesus and the pearl of great price and asked me if I understood what he was saying. I took a sip and said I did. He grasped me by the shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want you to forget every girl in this goddamn school and focus all your attention on Paige.”
I told him I agreed, but so did nearly every boy I knew, and she had been complaining loudly about their lack of gentlemanly patience, so I resolved to (at least as far as she was concerned) be extra gentlemanly so that she would know I appreciated her in more ways than these other guys understood. Even though it got me friend-zoned back to the cretaceous, I still think that was the right decision. There were a number of shitty men in her life, but I wasn’t one of them.
One day, Dan Rose asked me, “What about Jackson Prep?”
“It’s mostly a feeder school for Ole Miss,” I said. I still stand by that statement.
“I heard it was a bunch of pricks who wanted to keep the negros out.” He said.
I’d never heard an adult lay it out so plainly before. I’d rarely heard other kids lay it out so plainly. Dan Rose put the meat on the table and the ball in my court. I respected him so much and wanted to respond well, both truthfully and as frankly as he had been with me.
“I don’t know what the rules are there,” I said. “I know they don’t have any black students and never had any black students. I met the headmaster but didn’t know him very well, and their coach tried a few times to get me to switch schools, even though he had gotten in a fight with my brother.”
I felt ashamed. This was a very important issue, and I didn’t have the answer. St. Andrews, I knew, had at least one black student in every grade, but I didn’t even know their policy about admitting students who weren’t white. Now, I can look back and forgive myself for being just sixteen and not filling my head with these things, but that day, in Dan Rose’s stockroom office, I felt that I had let him down.
“Let me ask around,” I said. “I feel like I should know this, but I don’t, but I think I know how to find out.” That part was a lie. I didn’t know how to find out. I could have just gone to my dad and asked him to explain it, but that puts him in a spot both as a parent and in his job. If I was going to find out which schools were about racism, and which schools were about something else, and what started it all, and where it all might lead, I’d have to do it on my own. I heard the call to adventure. I’ve been on this adventure for more than forty years, and I’m not done yet, but this is what started it all.
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