Till Justice

People are upset that Carolyn Bryant Donham died without ever being prosecuted for her part in the death of Emmett Till.  They're hurt because the scales of justice were never balanced in his death.

They're missing the point.  Because the scales of justice were never balanced is what gave the Till story its power.  Because Emmett Till was denied, justice moved the country to begin taking action on civil rights in the South and racism throughout the whole country.  That may not have ever happened if Till's death was met with equal justice when it happened.  

Sometimes the entire point is that a thing was broken.  Consider the crack in the liberty bell or the leaning tower of Pisa.  Were these things whole, you would never have known about them.   Emmett Till never received justice.  That imbalance, that brokenness of purpose, moved the entire world.

Good Ole Boys

Big parts of Mississippi politics are pretty wholesome. We don't have much money, so everybody kind of goes along to get along. Some of it could easily be an episode of the Andy Griffith Show. We do pretty well on issues about gender. The most powerful mayor in Mississippi is a woman, and Evelyn Gandy was once the most powerful person in the state, even though she couldn't get elected governor.

We get along pretty well on most things until it comes to issues of race, and then it gets murderous. I'd say improving the lot of Mississippi's black citizens was our third rail, but hardly anyone in Mississippi has ever ridden a subway, so they don't get the metaphor.

Why can't we have hospitals in the Delta? Black people live there. Why can't we have money for Jackson? Black people live there. Why did a football star, a professional wrestler, and a governor think it was ok to steal money for the poor? Black people are poor.

What ends up happening is in these districts that are mostly black, nobody wants to work with them, so they elect people nobody wants to work with, so these districts like the Delta and Jackson that need cooperation from the state don't get it. They end up electing candidates who are really good at civil rights rhetoric instead of economics and industry, and civic administration, which is what they really need. Jackson is the best example of this.

My uncle Boyd and my Dad were acolytes of Ivan Allen. Allen was the mayor of Atlanta, and he believed that there were too many black people who lived in Atlanta for the city to ever prosper if he, as mayor, continued with such brutal oppression as they experienced in the past. By today's standards, Allen didn't do much for the poor blacks of Atlanta, but what he did do was give Martin Luther King Jr. and his church enough room to breathe so that they had room to grow and whatever happened in Selma or Jackson or Memphis, they had a safe place to grow in Atlant, and that changed everything.

Mississippi has got to realize that the only way we're ever going to lift ourselves off the bottom of everything is if we enable our large black subculture. It's not going to be easy to incorporate a subculture that's been oppressed for hundreds of years with the culture that did the oppressing, but that's out only viable path forward.

What I'm writing sounds like it could have been said in 1960, and it was in several of my Uncle Boyd's speeches, then again in some of my dad's testimony on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce in the seventies. It's been sixty years, and the message isn't getting through.

It doesn't do any good for me to call for a Mayor for Jackson that's better at facilities management, economic development, or real estate because so many people in Jackson are more concerned about having their basic civil rights protected, and they have reason to. They're less interested in developing an effective police force because they're more concerned about what the police do to their people. I would be too.

I don't have any answers. That's gonna have to come from somebody wiser than I. What Ivan Allen said is true, though. We're never gonna rise unless we take everybody with us. Without that, we're gonna stay on the bottom.

When We Remembered Zion

 I had lunch on Zoom today with a friend who's thirty-two and lives in Seattle. She's Ashkenazi, a descendant of grandparents who immigrated from Russia in the twenties. She made a joke about how a Jew like her must seem very alien to people in Mississippi.

So, I told her Jews aren't aliens here at all. They came in fairly large numbers during the cotton boom and settled all over the South. I told her about Beth Israel Cemetary, where we told ghost stories when I was in college and how it was the most immaculately manicured cemetery in Mississippi.

Then I told her about what happened to Rabbi Nussbaum when I was a little boy. How the klan had bombed the Beth Israel Temple and Rabbi Nussbaum's home, and she had a look of confused pain on her face.

Then I showed her a clip of Driving Miss Daisy, which she'd never seen and didn't know was about a Jewish woman. I showed her the scene where Houke tries to drive Miss Daisy to temple, but the police turn him back because someone had bombed the temple, and he tells Daisy a story about a man who was lynched.

I explained that the scene in the play was inspired more by a similar bombing in Atlanta in the fifties, but the impact was the same as the one in Jackson. To preserve their closed culture, men in the South would destroy places of worship.

A tear rolled down her cheek. In her young life, where she lived, the persecution of her people never really seemed that real. Somehow, me telling her the story made it feel real, and she wept.

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion.

Men will do terrible things if you make them believe their culture is in danger, and there's great political power in making people believe that danger is real, even when it isn't.

I wish bigotry and hatred of the other were only limited to race and religion, but it goes so much deeper than that. There's always somebody willing to say, "They are dangerous because THEY are different," and someone will do something terrible because they believe it.

When I was a child, about the same time as the Beth Israel Bombings, even my church split apart over race and culture; now it's happening again over sexuality. Nobody's set off any bombs yet, but it's not a far journey.

You don't have to be "woke" to be afraid of what bigotry does to your community. You just have to be good at history.

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Sleeping with Feist-Dog

Sleep has always been optional for me. Part of ADHD is living, knowing that the slightest sound or change in light or temperature can keep you awake for hours.

Your mind starts pulling at the loose threads of the world, and once it starts to unravel, it's very difficult to stop. I would have made a great hermit monk with no possessions but a bowl for kind people to put rice in while I ponder the eye of God.

I'm certainly not qualified to make this assessment, but I often wonder if ADHD isn't aligned with, or perhaps an entry into, Autism Spectrum Disorder. My frontal lobes work; if anything, they sometimes overwork, but it's actually impossible for me to experience life the way you do.

I used to share a bed with a woman who would ask: "why do you hold your arm up in the air?" and I would say, "I do that when I'm thinking." and she would say, "What does your arm have to do with your thinking and why aren't you sleeping?" and I would say, "I don't know."

Fortunately, a woman can still love you when you're completely fucking weird, and I've experienced that. Loving someone with a complicated and conflicted mind can't be easy, though. So far, they've all found a way to say, "I can't do this anymore." and I don't blame them. My mind tortures me, but it's ok because it's my mind. It's not fair to let it torture somebody else.

I have feist-dog. I've had him since I was a little boy. I stole him from a man on the radio. Like our governor, Feist-dog has an uncomplicated mind. I can read my strange sentences to him, and if he turns his head to the left, I know I'm onto something. If he lays his head down and closes his eyes, I know I'm not.

Jim Neal sounded like a country fella on the radio, but he was pretty learned. He served in the legislature and made literate references all the time. I'm pretty sure he stole Feist-Dog from William Faulkner. Although he changes the spelling several times, Faulkner puts a feist-dog in several of his books, but none more famously than in Go Down Moses, which includes the story of The Bear Hunt, which includes two famous feist-dogs.

The first dog he gives no name. It's a smaller dog who has no sense of fear and manages to track Old Ben, the legendary massive bear, but can't corner him. Sam Fathers finds a new dog, a muscular feist-dog with some airedale mixed in him they call "Lion." Lion is savage and dangerous, so Sam starves him until he can be pet, then shares a bed with him until Lion imprints on Sam, and they go after Old Ben, together.

Both in metaphor and in reality, dogs are our companion animals. They become eyes for the blind and comfort for the shell-shocked. An infection made my Uncle Robert's leg grow shorter than the other one. When he was very young and his bad leg very weak, my Great Grandfather, Old Cap, trained a dog to pull a cart to take Robert to school. Old Cap had only one arm, and I don't know where the dog came from, but this was a famous story in the farmlands outside of Kosciusko, Mississippi, in the twenties. The pictures I've seen show what looks like a golden labrador mix, but I'm pretty sure he's part Feist-Dog.  That dog carried Robert long enough for him to give his life trying to save soldiers in France in World War I.  Sometimes dogs are your companions, but the journey isn't very long.

When I was little, my dad's best salesman was a man by the name of Doby Bartling. Doby had a fine springer spaniel who carried a belly full of pups.  Daddy had a baby girl in diapers, and our previous dog got run over, so Doby figured to give Daddy one of these prize pups along with the papers to file with the American Kennel Club.

What Doby didn't know was that his prize Spaniel bitch had been carrying on with somebody other than the Spaniel stud he intended for her, and by the time these pup's hair started to grow out, it was obvious that their daddy was a feist-dog and not a Springer Spaniel. Since their daddy wasn't who he was supposed to be, those AKC papers would have to wait for another litter.

We named him "Mugsy" because my grandfather thought it sounded funny, but called him "Puppy" because that's all the baby girl in diapers could say. Puppy was a feist-dog, and he was my companion from short pants until college. One day he hid under a chair in the living room, and Puppy was no more. Houses had living rooms back then, a variation on the Southern Parlor, where parents drank with their friends and children had to wait for an invitation to enter.

You'd be surprised how many of my friends are anthropologists. Is that weird? Anthropologists will tell you that sometime in the dim past, a wolf began to share a camp with men, and that's where dogs came from. I have no idea if that's true. It sounds true, but you never know. What I do know is that God sent feist-dogs to men because men need a companion with an uncomplicated mind to help them navigate the world.

At the party celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Saint Andrews School, a friend cornered me while I sought refuge from the noise in the parking lot. "Is Feist-dog real?" They asked. That's a tricky question. Everything I write is real, and everything I write isn't real, and a lot of it used to be real but isn't anymore--some of it might yet become real someday. Farmer Jim Neal was real. Puppy was real. Doby Bartling was real. Go Down Moses was real and available on Amazon if you're looking for a book that offers you an entry into the difficult world of William Faulkner.

I can't limit my writing to what's corporeal at the moment. That's not how my mind works. Feist-dog is, was, and always will be "real." Can you see him? No. I'll try to let you get to know him, though. He's a part of nearly everything I've ever written. He's been my companion since the first day I tried to say a word but came out with only stammers. He's been my advisor since the first day I tried to read but couldn't. When the teacher yelled at me because I couldn't sit still, feist-dog sat silently beside me. Nothing can hurt me because I have my dog. I'll always have my dog.