The Life Of Boyd Campbell Jackson Mississippi
Charles Addams and his wife before College Hall, the structure at the University of Pennsylvania that inspired the mansion seen in the Addams Family cartoons. Known as a "ladies' man," Addams married several beautiful women, none of whom were murdered.
For quite a while now, I’ve been collecting the urban legends that emanate from students and employees at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Now that I live next door, I’m looking for some new ones. Urban legends are similar to myths. They tell a story that’s usually related to something historical or factual but doesn’t have to be, and the story reflects some sort of moral value, as interpreted by the culture the story comes from. They are cautionary tales that are disguised to not look like cautionary tales.
Being told in Mississippi by Mississippians, there’s some effort to make the stories more vivid, more interesting, and more local than, say, stories from the University of Pennsylvania Medical College, no offense to Pennsylvanians. Stories generated in Mississippi will have our unique flavor and perspective on things like race, sexuality, gender, religion, and people from Mississippi State University.
I’ve been doing this for around forty years, and there are a lot of stories. These are the categories I’ve organized them with.
Stories about Cadavers: Like the Greeks, UMMC students are obsessed with the moral implications of death, the relations between the dead and the living, and the influence of living morality on the dead body. Stories about cadavers often have the elements of ghost stories but are couched in a medical scenario to give them extra vitality and credence.
Stories about Swelling and Exploding Cysts: What goes into the body must come out of the body, and what more interesting way to come out of the body is there than exploding cysts? Often, these stories involve elements of new ties/shirts/suits that are destroyed by detritus shooting out of a cyst. These are often tales of how dedicated a young doctor might be who sacrifice his new tie or designer glasses to open the cyst, often on some fat woman’s taint.
Stories about Catheters: The Greeks did this, too. Stories about the phallus and its misadventures are both the stuff of comedy and morality. A malfunctioning phallus and what must be done to make it function can encompass all sorts of memes about morality, culture, and body horror.
Stories about Aids: Although they’re not as prominent now, there was once an entire genre of stories about Aids. To the myth-maker, aids was not only a disease but a moral judgment against the people who violate the cultural mores about sexuality and gratuitous sexual encounters. Stories about men, often upstanding citizens, who got aids by cheating on their spouses were common.
Stories about Strippers and Prostitutes: Much like the aids stories, these are stories about sexual morality and the perils of wanton sexuality. Strippers and prostitutes make a lot of money, but they end up at the hospital with fatal diseases or gunshot or knife wounds that prove fatal. These stories are precautions both against using prostitutes and becoming one.
Dumb Mistakes/Darwin Awards: There may be no greater cautionary tale than “Don’t do dumb things.” Especially in the South, stories about “y’all watch this” or “y’all hold my beer.” are perfect for urban myths, and their arrival at the hospital with fingers/testicles/teeth/ears/toes blown off make great stories.
Crime Doesn’t Pay: Stories about criminals who show up at the hospital after the police or other criminals shoot them are pretty common. While there’s sometimes a racial element to these stories, they all have moral implications. If you hadn’t have been doing that, you wouldn’t have ended up here with a gunshot wound.
Because University is a communal experience, they are great places to generate stories, particularly myth-building stories. Most of the stories I’ve collected about UMMC I can’t reprint here because they’re either really gross, really depressing, and sometimes obviously bigoted. There are guys who spend their entire lives and careers studying the memes broadcast in stories like these. It’s a fascinating area of study.
Ken Stribling messaged me last night with corrections about a piece I wrote at 3:00 a.m. What would I do without friends who can’t sleep either?
Janie messaged me during coffee hours with some really vital information about an aspect of my Mississippi History project. If this thing ever comes together, it’ll be due, in large part, to her input and influence.
Nearly all the boys I knew fell in love with Jane at one point or another. If you ever saw her, you’d know why. I did, too, but when a girl takes your friend’s heart, there are rules a gentleman must follow, or at least try to.
I told her that I thought seeing Ruma’s photo at Hal & Mal’s was an omen. Ruma had been the city attorney at a very young age. She was an unusually brilliant lawyer and a valuable asset to the city. A boy I knew loved her more than anything. When she died so young, a lot of us felt like we lost a limb. Jackson’s in constant trouble now. The kind of trouble where the advice of a good lawyer could make a really big difference.
Ruma loved Mississippi. She died exploring it. If I were to meet her in heaven today, I’d have to explain why I let Jackson get as bad as it is. Maybe that’s what an omen means. It’s a reminder of where your course lies.
Jane and I were born into a kind of bubble, a gilded age in Mississippi history. We had very politically and socially active parents at a time when the worst of the Civil Rights stuff had passed, and Jackson’s population was growing at a pace never experienced before. We had two very strong, locally owned banks. Our electricity came from a company based here in Jackson. Our clothes, our shoes, and luggage all came from stores based here in Jackson, where we’d see the owners at parties. Millsaps was at its peak enrolment, and the academic world was falling over itself trying to copy the success of George Harmon. The entire medical profession was amazed at the success of a bunch of nuns from Chicago who moved to Mississippi. William Winter and Ray Mabus were governors–without a scandal in sight. At certain parties, you were fairly likely to see Willie Morris, Eudora Welty, Michael Rubenstein, and Dale Danks wandering around. Long-neck beer was a buck at CS’s, Cherokee, and Dutch Bar, and the Jackson Mets were Texas League Champions.
Bubbles don’t last, though, and when bubbles break, it can break your heart. The city of Jackson is facing the possibility of their insurance increasing by 300% because they can’t seem to manage their affairs. My beloved Zoo is valiantly fighting to hold on, but I’m basically watching it die. Violence in the city is at terrifying levels, and nobody in the city government seems to be taking it seriously–at least not to the level that the situation would seem to warrant, and nobody seems to have answers.
Her children, my step-children, my nephews, and the children of nearly all my friends are asking if they should stay in Mississippi and will we be hurt if they don’t. It’s not their job to worry about how we feel if they leave Mississippi; it was our job to make sure Mississippi is a place where they felt like they could grow–and I guess we didn’t do that.
Some people, like Jane, tried to keep building Jackson and Mississippi a lot harder than I did, and I feel pretty bad about giving up for as long as I did. I guess I thought maybe I was the problem, and if I stepped out, smarter and better people would take over, and that’d fix everything. It didn’t. The bubble around Jackson broke, and we were left naked, looking around and saying, “Oh. I don’t think I know how to fix this.”
I think my plan was not to be here at sixty still, looking at all this. I think part of me wishes I’d left this mortal coil when the bubble around Jackson broke. That was a pretty shitty plan and a cowardly move on my part.
When I look at Jackson now, I see so many green shoots. The signs of life and growth are everywhere; we just have to provide the right environment for it to thrive. There’s nothing that says there can’t be more than one Gilded Age. Seeing that photo of Ruma reminded me of the path I’m on and energized me to keep pushing.
Keep correcting me while I post parts of this project on Facebook, and keep messaging me these details that I missed. The past isn’t the only avenue to the future, but it’s the only one I understand.
It’s been about a year since I started letting the world read my daily journals or significant parts of them. I began writing them forty-five years ago, or more, then one day, when I was still too weak to sit up in bed, I thought, “I really should let people know I”m alive,” and started posting extensive excerpts from my journal on Facebook.
It’s been a fascinating process. The response has been truly overwhelming. Having kept all this hidden for so long, I had no idea I could get anyone to read me unless I wrote about big things like dinosaurs and spaceships, like some of my idols.
Earlier today, the question arose about what the women in my life thought of my writing. The answer is pretty simple: they didn’t know anything about it. Some knew I was doing it, but since I said it was my journal, and none of them knew how to find things on my computer, none were ever read.
I’d only ever planned for there to be one woman in my life. Instead, there were like twelve. I think part of the problem was that I was never very honest with them, not nearly as honest as I am with the people who read my blogs. I think that was a vital mistake. Even if being more honest wouldn’t have kept any of them in my life, it was still the moral thing to do.
I always tried to project that I was a counter to whatever challenges were in their life. No matter how storm-ravaged their existence, I was indomitable and immutable, and I could form an impenetrable barrier between them and whatever was hurting them. That’s a lie, of course. I could keep it up for a while, but not forever, and let’s be honest, once the storm passed, it made me obsolete. Maybe, if I’d shown them the things I write in the hours when the sun struggles over the horizon, it would have opened up a new era of understanding. Maybe I would have proved more valuable in the long run.
There was one woman; her name means “honey” in an ancient tongue. She was the only woman I ever courted who knew me from work. Not from Missco or the ABoyd Company, but from my real work, in this instance, theater and painting. We played chess and drank coffee and discussed many things. I don’t know that giving her access to my journals would have changed the trajectory of our lives, but I would have deeply valued her perspective on what I wrote. I’m really a bit angry with myself, now that I think of it.
She had the voice of an angel. Her hands were tender, and her eyes shown brighter than the moon, but I missed having such a brilliant critic and soundboard available before the ink dried on my copy. We were so horribly star-crossed, I don’t think anything could have made us end up together, but imagine what a difference learning that other people wanted to read my words would have made if I had trusted her to read them.
There’s another woman. I write about her often. She had a gigantic smile and bushels of blonde hair, and the world would have thought she was the most cheerful person in it while she was flaying the skin from her own bones in secret and doing whatever she could to numb the pain from it.
That was almost forty years ago, but even now, I feel genuine pangs of guilt for not clearing a path out of the tangled morass of rose thorns she surrounded herself in. Saving her wasn’t my job, but it was the only thing I wanted to do, and it’s still the one thing I wish I had accomplished that I didn’t. People tell me all the time that this wasn’t my responsibility and what happened to her wasn’t my fault, but no, that’s a scar that I’ll carry on my back until the day they close my eyes for good.
My plan was to show her that I was stronger than anything that happened to her, stronger than anything she might do to herself, and all she had to do was be calm and let me pull her out of the cutting weeds that grew around her. That failed. It failed utterly.
Maybe, if I’d shown her my words, maybe if I’d let her see that I saw and felt the same darkness, the same cold and isolation that she felt, that maybe we could have made a connection there, and maybe somehow knowing she wasn’t alone in what she was feeling might have made her hold on to herself long enough to climb out of the hole she was in.
I’m aware that I’m describing a scenario where I might have found a way to succeed at something I failed at, and not a scenario where someone from my past would have wanted to stick around and be someone in my present, but it’s really hard to twist my mind to thoughts of what I need. I don’t think that’s going to change. At least, in this one instance, the world would have been just a little better if I’d won this battle I fought for somebody other than myself.
Although I’ve had all these other people playing that role in my life, there’s just the one woman I ever really loved. We met as children, young enough that we got to see each other’s body change and grow tall.
Her hands were slender and strong. Her eyes were the deepest brown, like staring into your coffee and seeing the world reflected in it. She took my arm many times and escorted me whenever there was a fine thing I had to attend, but I never once tried to express to her how special she was to me. Asking her might mean she’d reject me, and as long as I didn’t ask, I could always tell myself, “It might have.” Fifty years later, “it might have” means nothing to anyone but me.
The funny thing is, she studied literature. While it’s not what she ended up doing for a living, it’s something that was dear to her and important to her. Imagine what might have happened if I had said, “Hi, these are my words. I’d really like to know what you think of them.” Imagine the impact of arranging a meeting between the thing I loved the most and the girl I loved the most. It was impossible, of course. I wasn’t willing to show my words to those who didn’t matter; showing them to someone who did matter would have been such a huge risk. I would have fainted from the anticipation.
Some of my former dance partners read my words here. Sometimes they ask questions and clarifications of a point. I haven’t yet gotten into trouble for revealing something I shouldn’t have. I try to be sensitive. I have been scolded for not saying this or that twenty years ago. That’s to be expected. I do choose my words differently, knowing someone might read them. That’s also to be expected, but I try to retain the candor I had when I was writing for myself.
If I could tell a younger version of me something, I’d tell him to be honest. Trust that people want to see the truth. You can’t be strong enough to heal the world. Its enemies are stronger than your arms, no matter how strong you make them. You hide this precious thing every day, thinking the world has no interest in it. You’re wrong; your words are what the world made you for.
Forty burgeoning adolescents, four parents, one teacher, and one bus driver, in the woods, with a ghost town and a graveyard overnight; what can possibly go wrong?
The tiger trap is a device said to be of Indian origin, consisting of a deep pit dug in the ground, then covered with enough vegetation to hide it. Tigers would walk on the leafy covering, and fall into the pit below where they couldn't escape. The Viet Cong used the tiger tap with some success against our forces in Viet Nam.
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| Antebellum Graves in the churchyard |
My Scout Troop used the site a year before, and I learned you could use a burning ember from the fire to light your own farts. There's no merit badge for that, but there should be.
My Junior High Class had a very loving and very optimistic parent group who got the idea that we could manage a co-ed camp-out there and make it back home with everyone intact.
Mr. and Mrs. Lyle were itinerant and experienced campers. They would keep us alive. Mrs. Seargent was our young history teacher. She was who all the boys dreamed about, and all the girls wanted to look like. She must have loved us because she took us to Washington DC by bus the following year. I hope someone reading this can remember the name of the school's Haitian bus driver. He was a super sweet guy who also drove us to football practice every day. Rounding out our team of fearless leaders was Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They tried to get me to call them Tim and Sarah for forty-five years. It's still not happening.
The plan was to take the bus from school to Rocky Springs, make camp, have lunch then explore the old trace. We were to have dinner while the sun was still up, then visit the ghost town at dusk, come back to camp for the night, have breakfast the following day, and take the bus back to Jackson. That was the plan. We were never that great at sticking with the plan.
Early on in life, I recognized there was something about Mr. Jone's eyes telling me he was a fellow member of my tribe. He must have noticed the same thing because we had a few adventures together.
In the little abandoned town of Rocky Springs was an old church with an ancient graveyard. The plan was to hike as a gang from our campsite to the old cemetery at dusk, have a spooky adventure among the antebellum graves, and return to camp with flashlights in the dark. That was the plan.
Mr. Jones had the idea that he and I would sneak ahead of the bunch and hideout so that as they were hiking back in the dark, we could jump out and scare the bejesus out of them. It would be so funny and so cool. That was the plan.
On the way there, we spied a circular split-rail fence with a placard saying "Old Homesite" with some bushes and kudzu overgrown in the center. That would be my hideout. This was a great plan!
The old church and graveyard among the Spanish moss dripping trees was a pretty great adventure, with lots of giggles and dares as we awkwardly tried to figure out the best way to navigate inter-gender conversations in the dark surrounded by confederate ghosts.
With the sunlight fading, Mr. Jones and I sprung our plan into action. We quietly slipped away from the rest and headed toward the fenced "old homesite" to set our trap. "Hurry!" he said before the rest of the class began their way back.
This was going to be SO COOL! They were gonna be SO SCARED! With a hop, I was over the split rail fence. One step, two steps, one more, and I'd be hidden in the bushes, ready to pounce! This was such a great plan!
By "old homesite," they meant this was the site of an old home as part of the little town of Rocky Springs. The wooden structure was long gone, but the root cellar remained. Nobody told Mr. Jones or me about the root cellar. That eight-foot-deep root cellar lay completely hidden among the bushes and kudzu. The split-rail fence was supposed to keep us out of it.
One step! Two steps! Three... WHOOSH! and I was in total darkness with a thud. I can only imagine the look on Mr. Jones's face as I vanished into the greenery.
"Boyd?" I could see him looking over the edge down at me with his flashlight. "Are you ok?" I was absolutely unhurt. The bushes and kudzu vines themselves cushioned my fall. It took a few seconds for my brain to process what happened, then I bust out in uncontrollable laughter. So did Mr. Jones.
Moments later, the rest of the class caught up to the site of our misadventure. I could see their shocked and amused faces peering down at me over the edge of my pit with a dozen flashlights illuminating my predicament.
I was already over two hundred pounds by junior high school and bench-pressing over three hundred. Getting me out of this tiger trap wasn't going to be easy. As we had no rope, a human chain made by nearly the entire class was chosen as the best option for rescue.
Soon, Mrs. Seargent's hand reached down for me. In her twenties and deeply tanned, Mrs. Seargent was just about the prettiest thing I ever saw. Touching her hand was way out of my pay grade, but I had no choice.
With a solid tug in unison, my class rescued me from my antebellum dungeon. I plucked kudzu leaves from my hair, pants, and shoes on the way back. The plan was to scare the class, but in the end, the only ones who got scared were Mr. Jones and me.
And, that's the story of how the eighth-grade class saved me from my own eagerness and an ancient tiger trap.
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| Photo By Kim Wita |
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| photo by Kim Wita |
