The Eudora At Fondern Public

 I got to spend some time with Brother Lewis today.  We darkened the door of Fondren Public.  I had a drink that a friend of mine named the Eudora thirty years ago.  A few fingers of Makers Mark and a little ice if you have it, alone if you don't.   Miss Welty, I think, took it with a little branch water.  I modified it some.  Ice melts, ya know.

Talking with somebody who remembers what it was like in Jackson and Millsaps thirty and forty years ago makes me happier than a warm puppy.  It kind of needs to be a guy, though, because one of the things we're gonna talk about is girls, lost, found, and the ones that got away.  The guys I can still do this with are getting pretty sparse these days.  There's Tom and Doug Mann and a few others, but we're at the age with a fair number of our population is dropping away.  Old white guys don't typically "pour one out for our homie," but if we had, we'd still be there.  Those of us that survive the gauntlet will probably live until ninety.  That's a frightening consideration.

Tom's Dad is a titan at Millsaps and Galloway and the United Methodist Church.  To some, TW Lewis was one-half of the righteous brothers.  To others, he was an agitator.  In Mississippi, it turns out that the only people that had any sense were the agitators.   At church, I like to listen to TW and Don Fortenberry talk.  They experience a level of Christianity I've never approached, and there's much to be learned just by listening.

Tom mentioned that a friend of ours was getting fairly irritated with the goings on in the Mississippi UMC conference and just might take a trip to Tupelo and speak his mind at the conference meeting this summer.  I don't have permission to say who it is, but if he goes, I might just go too.  I have some concerns about what's going on in our conference to, so maybe we can do some good.

Talking with long-time Jackson people, it's hard not to lament what's been happening to the city lately.  Of all the brilliant men and women we talked about, almost none still live in Mississippi.  Ray Mabus once said that Mississippi's biggest export is brains.  In Mississippi, we take our precious youth and work like hell to educate and train them; then, once they're on their own, we lose them because Mississippi can't offer them opportunities equal to the skills we've given them, so they find something bigger--maybe less complicated morally.

A lot of guys our age are thinking about giving up.  They're moving to Madison or Oxford, or Hernando and pulling the world up around them.  I can't fault them.  They fought to keep Jackson growing all those years I was hiding in a cave.  Maybe it's just my turn to get back into the fight.  

I have a real need to one day be able to tell Tom and especially tell his dad that everything is OK now.  Jackson and Millsaps are growing again, and the danger is past.  Millsaps is doing light years better than Jackson, but both have a ways to go before I'm satisfied.   Ultimately, I'd really like to make Mississippi the kind of place where parents don't have to worry about their children leaving for greener pastures.  I don't really know how to do that, but, ya know, not knowing what I was doing never stopped me before.  

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Ministers and Missles

A lot happened in 1965.  I was two years old.  Millsaps formally opened its doors to integration, following a federal mandate that no school remaining segregated would receive federal funds.  We used federal funds to build the Christian Center, among other things.  

June fourth, 1965 The Clarion-Ledger publishes an article from Bishop Pendergrass, delivered at Galloway, imploring all methodist congregations to stop employing ushers at the doors of the church, implying bouncers who kept negros out, but not mentioning it directly.  Pendergrass said directly that the church in Mississippi must come into compliance with the national church's position on integration without ever using the word "integration."

On the same page, they had a much larger article with a photograph of the Gemini V capsule preparing for launch that week.  Gemini V was the first space walk; For comments by the Methodist Bishop to take up as much space on the front page as the Gemini Launch meant something.  

My Uncle Tom was the editor of the Clarion Ledger.  I never discussed his feelings about integration or how the paper covered it.  I don't know that he would have discussed it with me.  He had a reputation.  Sometimes, it was fair; sometimes, it wasn't.  My grandmother, his sister-in-law, tried to explain it to me a few times, but for people of her generation, these things were difficult to speak plainly of.

One thing I'm getting from all this is a new respect and appreciation for our parents.  Not just my parents but everybody's parents.  There was just so much going on.  There were missiles pointed at us, we were in Viet Nam, the Russians wanted to crush us (and said so), and here at home, everything was coming apart.  

While I'm at rehab, upstairs from me are five people who were at Galloway in 1965.  Two left the Methodist discipline altogether.  Two stayed; one became an independent Methodist for a while but eventually reconciled with Galloway.  Seeing them makes it all very real.

When I go to Sunday School, I try to sit near TW Lewis and Don Fortenberry.  Ed King joins via Zoom.  All pastors fully engaged in what happened in 1965.  William Faulkner said of Mississippi, "The past is never dead. It's not even past"

What started me down this rabbit hole, partially, is this is was a part of my life that had huge implications in my life, but I was too little to understand it, and for a long time, not many people would discuss it.  My sister wasn't even alive yet.   My brothers were mostly concerned about baseball and tree houses.  Most of what I knew about the schism at Galloway came from my grandfather, who used it to frame the story of his childhood church in Hesterville, Mississippi, which chose to leave the larger Methodist church and go it on its own.  That was very painful for him.  His father built that church after the first church burned down.  His father and mother, and brother were buried there.  Since he moved to Jackson, he had no say in what happened there, even though his brother's estate was paying for the upkeep of the cemetery.  Granddaddy decided he wouldn't die on either hill during the fight for integration.  His task, as he saw it, was to employ as man negros as he could and see to it that some effort was made to educate them.  He would and did break bread with any man, but he saw all this fight over race was painful.  Necessary but painful.

Sixty is a nice round number.  The church, my church, again finds itself on the rubicon of deciding whether or not to fully open our doors to people who are unlike us sixty years later.  That decision is rending us into pieces, much like it did in 1965.  

Reading "Agony at Galloway," written in 1980, I get some sense that Cunningham is trying to align himself with the winning side now that the conflict is over, but I do strongly believe he was in genuine Agony in 1965.  Pastors tend to be more idealistic than practical.  That's one of the reasons they become pastors.  Having known some of the people he mentions later in life, I wonder if Cunninghman had taken a firmer stand on one side or the other if the situation would have escalated and truly ended Galloway.  

As it stands, between 1960 and 1968, Galloway lost 18% of its enrolled members.  That number was higher among those who actually sat in the pews every Sunday, but it was a survivable number.  I had always believed it was much higher.  It certainly could have been higher.  Cunningham may have felt personally tortured, but he piloted the ship through the breakers, with some damage, but we were afloat.  He didn't have the benefit of a crew with beeswax in their ears, but I do believe he was tied to the mast.

In today's conflict, Galloway, from what I have seen, is very unified, which is quite different from what happened in 1965.  The rest of our conference, though, is not nearly as unified.  There are painful days ahead.  What I get from all this is that we survived it before.  One product of the change in the sixties was the creation of the United Methodist Church.  It's hard to imagine that, out of a time of such hurtful division, so much growth was the product.  

I'm not a traditionally prayerful person.  I say the Lord's Prayer as instructed to keep the communication between myself and God open,  but I don't ever pray for specific things.  I figure that any God capable of making all this is also capable of seeing what I need and what the people I love need--without me begging like he was Santa Claus.  

What I write, either here or in my journals, is how I articulate the things I would pray for.  Even that is unnecessary for an entity that knows the number of hairs on my head (that one's easy, it's zero), but writing it and articulating it in my own mind helps me see things more clearly.  If that's praying, then I pray for my church nearly every day now.   Not Galloway so much because we're pretty durable, but for the larger church.  We're facing a crisis of conscious similar to that we faced in 1965, and we're getting beat up pretty good for it.   

I have faith that we'll sail through these waters alive.  I have faith because, even though I was very young, in my experience, that's what happened before.  My current pastor, and the two before him, are all within four or five years of the same age as me.  When the church last rented itself apart, all four of us were more concerned about what Captain Kangaroo had to say than Bishop Pendergrass.

I have no issue with following Cary Stockett wherever he leads us.  I've listened to his sermons for a few years now, and we are of like mind on most of the important issues.  His pastoral staff is vibrant and energetic and also of a similar mind and purpose to mine.  I suspect Connie Shelton, of all of us, will take the greatest heat from all of this.  It's already started.  One man felt completely content to lie about her on his website.  I sent him a letter but got no response.  I'm not worried for Connie.  She's pretty strong.  I am sorry she has to go through this.  She loves her church, and she loves us who are in it, and this has to be painful.  In church affairs, the leaders of the battle and the front line are the same.  When the arrows fly in anger, they will hit her before they hit me. I'm sorry for that, but I'm also appreciative of what she's doing for us.   This is the way.

Christianity was born out of one man's agony on a Roman cross.  In that, he prepares us for the far lesser agony that sometimes comes from following him.  Just like in 1965, most of Southern Methodism is girding its loins to fight on one side or the other.  I am, too, I suppose.  My church won't be on the front lines like it was last time.  I'm grateful for that.  Our pastor seems to have the idea that we can become a sanctuary for the battle weary.  Sanctuary, in the original sense, of a place free from attack, but also our architectural sanctuary.  Safety, in the lee side of the tempest.  I'm grateful for that too.

For thine is the kingdom.  Kingdoms are born of suffering.  

The Tartans of Mississippi

They say that associations make a man.  I don't know if that's just, but it certainly was true growing up in Mississippi in the seventies and eighties.

In most places, political party would be an essential association, but it didn't matter much in Mississippi.  Everybody but Wirt Yerger and Billy Mounger were Democrats, and Yerger and Mounger were generally considered mad priests screaming on the temple steps about this new Republican God.   A political trick got Thad Cochran elected, but nobody thought this Republican business would catch on--until Ronald Reagan.  

Mississippians loved movies with cowboys and war heroes, and Reagan made many of them.  Reagan told America its biggest problem was welfare moms, and he took the guns away from the Black Panthers in California.  Yes, Regan was for gun control--under certain circumstances.  These messages resonated in Mississippi.  The glacial ice around the Republican party began to melt.   Yes, they were the people who burned Jackson to the ground.  Yes, they were the people who imposed reconstruction on us for sixty years.  Yes, they were the ones sending revenue officers to raid the parties at Crystal Lake.  All of that is true, but ya know, he sure did show them Black Panthers what, didn't he?

We were a democratic family.  Part of it was just business.  The Democrats were in power all over our sales territory, and we made most of our money selling to public institutions.  It was also a moral decision.  Daddy felt, and I felt, that Mississippi is nearly entirely made up of poor people.  This middle-class bubble we lived in wasn't the real Mississippi.  The real Mississippi could barely pay their rent.  They had poor health because, even if they worked, they had no insurance, and they had no education because that cost money, and nobody had any.   Democrats were more interested in and more generous to poor people.  Democrats also had a better farm bill than the Republicans.  Reagan promised to "restore profitability" to Mississippi farmers by removing government intrusion.  Boy, was he wrong.  

Even though things weren't really working out between Mississippi and Ronald Reagan, this new Republicanism was quietly growing like a thief in the night.  Young Republicans could be identified by their highly starched Oxford cloth shirts, and their numbers were growing.  

From 1963 until the day Daddy died, every successful candidate for Governor of Mississippi had passed through my mother's doors to introduce the candidate to the new Capitol Street Gang.  (Every one, except Cliff Finch.)  I knew when Johnny Gore showed up in the afternoon with all of his bartending stuff, we were in for one of "those" parties.

William Winter and Herman Hines had alerted Daddy to this young fella named Ray Mabus.  He was one of the "boys of spring" who were either hated or celebrated in Mississippi.  He had a firm handshake and a burning intensity in his eyes.  The silent promise was that he would finish what Winter had started.

The party at the Holiday Inn on Millsaps campus, the one owned by Mike Sturdivant (who also had political aspirations), was not my first political victory party, but it was the first where I was old enough to be expected to wear a tie, so I did.  Ray's face was beet red, and sweat rolled freely from under his perfect hair.  He grabbed my hand and my shoulder, like a German butcher sizing up a fresh ham.  This was our new governor.  

Mabus lived up to his unspoken promise and continued the work Bill Winter started.  He was an education-forward governor, and he was winning.  Mississippi adopted new history textbooks on schedule but had no money to buy them.  Mabus made sure Mississippi school children had history and science textbooks written since we landed on the moon. 

Politically, we were successful, and we were happy, but this Reagan thing was growing.   Still, it had to be an anomaly.  One day, Daddy and Rowan and my brother and Doby Bartling used our company tickets to attend an Ole Miss game at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson.  The announcer said, "Please stand while the Rebel Band plays our National Anthem."  Wich everybody did.  "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to our distinguished guest, the Governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus!"  I could see Ray and his Wife standing in their box seat and waving, but then a sound came from the Ole Miss student section.  They were Booing the Governor of Mississippi, A Democratic Governor of Mississippi,  A Democratic Governor of the State of Mississippi who had graduated Suma Comes Loudly from the University of Mississippi--and they were booing him.  I looked at Daddy and said, "Are we in trouble?"

So, that was the day the Democratic Empire in the state of Mississippi fell.  The dragons had arrived, and soon we'd have our first Republican governor.  Party became an important association by which you judged a man.  For a while, it was, at least.  Lately, we basically flipped the situation that existed; all the white people are n the Republican party now, and all the not white people are in the Democratic.  

Politics were one way to judge a man; religion was another.  Wherever you went to church in Jackson, nearly everyone aligned themselves with five major churches.  Three of them were on corners of the new Capitol Building.  Galloway, First Baptist, and St. Peters.  Beyond that was Central Presbyterian which was replaced in power by First Presbyterian and Beth Israel out in North Jackson.   The other churches followed what these five did.  One thing I'm learning in my recent studies is that St Luke's had all the same problems that Galloway had, just on a smaller scale.   Don't let anybody tell you that Jews and Catholics had no power in Mississippi.  Look at the names of the people who served on the boards of the banks.  Jews from Eastern Europe and Catholics from Ireland were a force in our economic life.  Look at the names of the stores.  Names like Stein and Maloney.

That brings up the next most important way to judge a man.  Banks.  There were two.  You had to pick one.  You HAD to pick one.  Deposit Guarantee had more assets.  First National was more conservative—First National funded financials and retail.  Deposit Guarantee funded an awful lot of real estate and light manufacturing.   One day Jeanne Luckett considered the entrails of a sacred goose and renamed First National Trustmark National Bank, followed by one of the most extensive marketing campaigns in Mississippi history.   Gone were the plastic frugal banks and all the trappings of the sixties.  This was a new bank for a new decade.  Mainly it was done because there were so many "First National" banks all over the world.  It worked.  Shortly after that, she reworked our image as well, and we got rid of those awful orange block letters and got a nifty stylized "M" to represent us.

What college you went to wasn't nearly as important as what college you supported in football and baseball.  Daddy played football for two years at Millsaps and then two at Ole Miss.  He enjoyed Ole Miss Football, but it was mainly a way for him to spend time with us kids.  One of the problems with having a dad like mine was that it sometimes got really hard to spend any time with him.  The only way to do it was to figure out how to fit myself into his schedule.  We had tickets to every game at Veterans Memorial Stadium because we had installed the bleachers and were morally obligated to buy season tickets.  Ben Puckett was one of his best friends.  As much as Daddy was lukewarm about Ole Miss, Ben was very warm about Mississippi State.  

Rowan went to Mississippi State too, but in a culture that was obsessed with the major public university football teams, Rowan Taylor was solidly in a secretive, invasive cult called Millsaps.   I don't even know what lured Rowan into the Major's influence.  Toward the end of his life, it was the woman he loved, but I never knew about how it started.  He was deeply devoted to Eudora Welty.  Maybe that was it.

Daddy enjoyed football at Ole Miss, but he loved football at Millsaps.  You could tell because he'd skip an Ole Miss game if none of us went with him, but he'd go to Millsaps games alone, in the cold and the rain.  He would never really be alone, though.  If they were in Mississippi and in good health, Daddy would meet Rowan, George Harmon, and Jack Woodward at the same spot for every game.  There's a balcony/deck thing there now.  Then it was just grass.  

"Get me some peanuts, buddy.  Get one for Rowan.  Here's five bucks; get five."  I figured out if I was gonna get to know my Daddy, I had to meet him on his own turf.  

So, of the houses and tartans of Mississippi, I align myself this way:  Trustmark, Democrat (mainly because the Republicans are currently fuckin' nuts), Galloway, Ole Miss--but in the cult of Millsaps.  

Our culture doesn't really go by these rules anymore.  For one thing, When Warren and Elsie Hood retired, they sold off their Deposit Guarantee shares, so now they're owned by an out-of-state entity.  That's a whole other story.  I'm old-fashioned, though.  I like to pretend it's 1982, and I'm eighteen, and Jackson is growing like a weed...

Not really.  I'm pretty realistic about the world as it is.  I still like to think about the way it was.  That happens when you get old.  "You Damn Millennials are gonna run everything!!"  Actually, that's not true.  I kind of like the Millennials.  They have great potential.  

Creative Constipation

 For weeks, I was suffering from chronic creative constipation.  I tried talking to feist-dog, but he was mostly asleep and not at all interested in me.  If I can't make things, eventually, I'll die of starvation.  I think that's part of how I ended up flat on my back in the hospital.  I had given up on making things for too long.  If creation is my life force, then I was suffering from severe ataxia.

It took me fifty-eight years to become what I was born to be.  I don't blame anyone except maybe myself.  My parents had no more idea of what to do with me than if someone had given them a giraffe.  I stole that line from the movie Gods and Monsters.  You should see it.

After what seemed like an eternity of constipation, this weekend, I had a breakthrough and have been experiencing an abundant eruption of griffonage ever since.  A friend of mine read my piece about Lavender Graduation and said how much she enjoyed it, but it was "SO LONG."  

I told Sam that part of that was me figuring out how I'm going to write about certain things and certain people in my book.  My purpose isn't to expose anyone or excise any personal daemons (any more than I can help it). What I'm trying to create isn't journalism.  It's more like writing down a melody that's been haunting me for decades.  I'd like to say something about humanity, not individual people.

If I ever finish the goddamn thing, and if you ever read it, there will be times when you say, "Oh, I know him!" but you won't.  All the characters are composites of several people.  Almost all the events in my story are, or were, real; but I might move them around thinking it's more interesting if it happens to John rather than Peter like it did in real life, so there may be times when you say "oh, I remember that."  but, it'll be different from what you remember.  

Some of the people in the book aren't alive anymore, so I'm moving gingerly through the words because their memory is more important to me than any ten books, and they're not here for me to ask, "Is it ok to say this?"  Part of why I want to do this is because it's a love letter for people I can't speak to anymore.  That doesn't include fiest-dog.  

Without anything more logical, I'll attribute my late surge of creativity to Nicole Saad going to Greece.  Some of the plays I enjoyed working on the most were with Nicole.  For the most part, we love the same people and the same things.  That counts for a lot.   You don't get to share that with very many people in this world.  When it happens, hold them dear.

The myths of Greece, the plays, and the poems are as fundamental to my way of thinking as the Christian myths.  "Myth" doesn't mean "not true."  Myth means "A story of the Gods."  I have no problem mentioning Greek myths in the same sentence as Christian myths because the only commandment I have to deal with is "Thou shalt have no Gods before me." and I don't have a problem with that.  Zeus, as important as he is, won't ever supplant Yahweh in my mind or heart.

My love for Hellenistic culture I owe to several people.   The finer points and more intricate discussions I owe to Joseph Campbell's books in part, but a much, much larger part to Catherine and Richard Freis.  My dearest Martha Hammond gave me an illustrated Edith Hamilton book when I was in middle school, which helped a great deal.  Martha was one of the people who didn't give up on the idea that I could learn to read.  

My very first exposure to Greek Myth came on a Saturday night on the rug of my mom's house, with two boys around me and a baby sister in daddy's arms on the sofa.  Jason and the Argonauts came on television, and I was amazed.  Later in life, I would come to know the magician, Ray Harryhausen, who created the god Talos and the monster hydra and the army of the dead.  I've written a lot about my experiences with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman; this is how it began.

Nicole travels the world with a cluster covey of ladies like a younger version of The Golden Girls, but also like Sex In The City in the Suburbs.  They spread a bunch of Mississippi all over unsuspecting people in foreign lands.  It amuses and pleases me to no end.  I'd do anything for Nicole Saad Bradshaw.  I'm absolutely certain she'll have cocktails on the moon one day, and I'll see it on Instagram.

It's five o'clock in the morning, and I can't sleep because I need to make words.  They make themselves, I just jot them down.  I used to do this knowing that nobody but feist-dog would ever see what I wrote.  Now that I'm letting everybody see my scribbles, it's kind of weird.  This has changed from the way I communicate with God to the way I communicate with my friends.  Ironically, when I communicated with only God, my language used many more blue words.  I'm trying to cut down because my Aunt says I can do better.  She's right, of course, but I still like to slip on in here and there for emphasis--goddamnit.

I hope, when I die, it will be during one of these periods where the words flow freely from me, like a bubbling well, rather than one of these periods when I don't anything to say to anybody, where God and Feist-dog have both abandoned me. 

In Mississippi, practicing law or medicine will make you somebody, but writing will make you immortal.  Go to Hal and Mal's some time and see how many writers are on the wall.  We're almost as big as Elvis.  Go to Oxford sometime, and you can feel the words moving through the air.  There are many things Mississippi cannot do, but this we can.