Horse Corn

Whenever I would talk about getting a car that was too expensive, or buy a suit that was too expensive, or chase a girl who was above my station, my father would always remind me that my grandfather was a dirt farmer in Atalla County before he came to Jackson, and whatever happened since, I had no business putting on airs.  

The suit thing was kind of a trick because one his best friends was Billie Nevill, who owned the Rogue and sold me the suits and then advised I get the good Allen Edmunds shoes; still, the point remained:  I was twenty, I was from Mississippi, and it was morally bound to remain humble.  Daddy wasn't the only one.  I knew guys who bought the most expensive suits at the Rogue and even traveled to Memphis and New Orleans to buy clothes but kept a cheap suit handy for when they went before the public because they didn't want anyone to think they thought more of themselves than they did the people they represented.  

My grandfather didn't actually farm dirt.  He, and his father, and his grandfather farmed white corn, called "horse corn" in Mississippi, because it mostly was used to feed horses and cows.  The Campbells and the Boyds were humble people all the way through their lives in Atalla County, Mississippi, all the way back to Scotland; they were farmers or laborers. On my mother's side, the Bradys of Learned Mississippi also grew horse corn and tobacco and whatever vegetables they needed for the table.  The simple country store a cousin built is now the hippest place to buy a steak in Mississippi.   I know people who brag about the kings and dukes and famous people that lay in their family tree; there are none in mine.  We're humble people from humble stock.

My father never used the word hubris, but that's what he was warning me against.  People resent it when you think too much of yourself, he told me.  That actually wasn't a problem for me.  I thought very little of myself.  I struggled mightily academically, and stuttering and other issues made socializing very difficult, and my weight would make wild fluctuations.  The only trait I felt confident about was physical strength.  My other talents, more creative talents, remained hidden most of my life.  Some people, who lack self-confidence, try to cover it by putting on airs; expensive clothes and cars and exclusive club membership mask a sense of insecurity.    Not only was I discouraged from that, it was absolutely forbidden.

My family was divided on the issue of what temperature meat should be served.  Half believed it should be served the color of dry concrete.  The other half believed it should be the color of watermelon.  My mother sided with the concrete faction, so whenever she cooked a roast it was--grey.  Mother was otherwise an excellent cook, but beef was not a specialty--unless you also liked your meat grey.  

This meant that my father and I were on our own, and the only time we were able to express this was with grilling.  I watched Justin Wilson and Julia Child religiously, so I knew something about cooking, and our school library had two books on grilling, so I became quite good at it.  Every so often my father couldn't take it anymore and he'd drag me to the grocery store to buy meat to cook.  Half the steaks were cooked properly, the other half were cooked until they were the same color as the grill itself.  Sometimes I'd cook for my dad's friends too.  That meant they were nearly all cooked properly except for Ben Puckett, who liked steak basically raw.  It also meant I got to both make and have whiskey or vodka.  Daddy preferred vodka; I preferred whiskey.  Rowan Taylor taught me the finer points of good whiskey--I retain this to today.

What my mother lacked in cooking beef, she more than made up for in cooking vegetables.  Two of my siblings rebelled against eating just vegetables, so we didn't do it that often, but when we did, it was glorious.  My mother and her friends were devoted customers of Alice Berry at the old Farmers Market off Woodrow Wilson Road.  She would buy butter beans, field peas, snap beans, and green peanuts, and Mrs. Berry was one of the few places where she could find the horse corn my father loved.

She'd come home with brown paper sacks full of fresh Mississippi vegetables.  My grandmother, the maid Hattie and I sat in front of the television, shelling peas and snapping beans for the country feast ahead.  Mother taught me how to husk the horse corn and pull the tassels off the kernels while she got her biggest pot ready.    She boiled enough corn for everybody to have two ears, plus butterbeans, plus boiled okra, plus fresh, ripe tomato sliced with mayonnaise.  My grandmother made cornbread in a skillet she got from her mother who got it from her mother way over in Learned, Mississippi.  

My father, who taught me to eat sardines in a can, vienna sausages on crackers, cow tongue, snails, beef  and chicken livers, sause (otherwise known as head cheese), had a plate of just horse corn and tomatoes and was in heaven.  No matter what he attained in life, he struggled to keep in touch with the idea of humble food for humble people.

Like Ireland and Scotland, Mississippi is a humble place.  We're a people who work the land but remain fiercely proud.  It's important to be humble.  It's thinking you're better than somebody that starts most of the problems in this world.  

Mo Mhàthair

Desiring to be the best mother she possibly could be, my mother read every book on parenting she could get her hands on.  In the sixties, there were many.  When I was seven or eight, she sat me down to explain what the middle child syndrome was.  Middle children, she said, suffered from a lack of time.  Older children are first doing things that require mother's time; younger children are the most recent at doing things that require mother's time, leaving middle children feeling left out because there's not enough time.

I'm not sure why she told me this.  I wasn't feeling left out.  By the time he turned thirty-five, my father's career was moving at a frightening pace.  This parenting thing would be left to my mother because the world needed my father.  Daddy had coached pee wee baseball for my brothers, but when I got old enough, there wasn't time.  Nobody even asked if I wanted to play. I wasn't recognizing this as a loss, but I think my mother did.

In the early seventies, children born with ADHD and dyslexia had few options.  There were special schools where they could send me, but that would separate me from my friends and my family.  There were drugs, but my father was adamant that I not be given amphetamines or tranquilizers.  One of his associates had a son in my class who was given Ritalin, and his father said it made him a zombie.  I was given tutors at school.  My mother already had an education degree from Belhaven.  She would and did teach herself how to educate a dyslexic child.

Most of what my mother used with me was what we now consider the Montessori Method.  She tried everything she could imagine to give me another way to understand and comprehend letters and words, and sentences.  Since I also had untreated ADHD, these sessions seemed like torture for both of us.  Even though I was the middle child, my mother was spending more time on me than she did the other three.  It didn't seem like loving attention, though; it seemed like a struggle for both of us.   It cost a great deal of effort to teach me to read, but the greatest cost was it began to drive a wedge between my mother and me.

The women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies meant that wives were no longer expected to stay at home.  Modern women got out in the world.  My father's career generated sometimes challenging social obligations for my mother.  On top of that, there was pressure for society women to leave the home and get jobs.  One of Mother's closest friends started the Every Day Gourmet, and my father would ask when my mother was going to do something like that.  

When my parents began dating in high school, my mother made an attempt to maintain a presence in the Presbyterian church she was born into while also holding an equal presence in my father's Methodist church.  She maintained this practice until I was seven or eight, when it just became a matter of not having enough hours in the day.  She dropped her membership in the Presbyterian church she was born into so she would have enough time to teach me to read.  

My grandmother lived with us for six months of the year.  She helped with laundry and cooking.  My mother had a maid named Hattie May Grant.  Children with ADHD can become very introverted because it's difficult for the world to comprehend them.  Hattie was my friend, though; she liked to watch Godzilla movies and watch Dr. Smith chase that robot around like I did.  

Burning the candle on every end, my mother would sometimes just run plain out of energy.  With her mother and Hattie in the house, she'd sometimes sneak off for a nap.  Sometimes, I would crawl into her room and sit on the floor beside her bed and watch her hand over the side of the mattress and listen to her breathing.  I had my mother to myself without distractions and without reading exercises.   Soon someone would need her, or the phone would ring, and the world would take my mother away again, but I had that time.  It mattered.

My mother enjoyed crafts.  Her sister became something of an accomplished painter well into her forties.  Our playroom doubled as my mother's sewing room.   After dinner, Daddy would usually return to work, or some work function, and Mother would commandeer the breakfast table to cut out patterns.

"What are you making?" I would ask.  I was pretty crafty too, although nobody really noticed it yet.

"I'm making a dress for your sister."  

"Can you make something for me?"  

"What would you like?" She smiled.

"How about a cape!" Dracula had a cape, superman had a cape, and magicians had capes.  That would have been so cool.

"I don't know how to make a cape," she said.

"What about something else then?"  If my sister could get a cool dress out of the deal, maybe I could get a cool coat or shirt.

"They don't really make patterns for boy things."  Mother said.  She was telling the truth too.  If you look at the Butterwick website today, they have very little for men.  Maybe a few vests, but not much more.  Even though men's bodies are made of simpler shapes, apparently, our clothes are more complicated.  I'm pretty sure a man made it that way.

They did have a few Halloween costumes.  Pilgrims and elves and clowns.  Mother made a clown costume for my brothers that was passed down to me and my sister.  There's nothing worse than telling a monster-obsessed kid that he had to be a clown for Halloween.

Mother was better at doing girl things because she was a girl.  I think the assumption was that my father would do boy things with me, and he clearly made an effort with my brothers; there was even a photograph in the Clarion Ledger of him swimming with my brothers; by the time I came along, though, he was out of time.  It was basically me and my mother and my Hattie, and neither of them knew how to do boy things.   Daddy did eventually end up spending a fair amount of time fishing with me, but I was nineteen when he first tried and was able to not only load and unload the boat but also able to fix drinks for him and his friends.

The middle child syndrome probably was hitting me really hard, but I was an extraordinarily introverted kid, so a lot of times, I just didn't notice.  Noticing that I had an interest in art and theater, my mother made sure I had a ride to lessons and rehearsals.  She wouldn't stay, but she made sure I got there.  Often my art teacher were women she knew socially.  The first one was Alice Riley, Dr. Carter O'ferral's daughter.  So far, I've done something like a hundred and fifty plays.  My mother only ever attended maybe seven of them.  At first, it was because she just didn't have the time.  Later, it was because we were becoming estranged.

When I was very young, there wasn't much that meant more to me than watching my brother be my brother.  I copied everything he did, everything he touched, everything he watched.  Whatever he could do, I wanted to do.  When we lived on Northside Drive, he and Lee Hammond built a treehouse.  To reach it, you had to climb two-by-four steps nailed to the tree like a ladder.  I was too little to reach.  I could see them in the treehouse, and it was all I wanted out of the world to be with them, but I couldn't, so I cried out of frustration.  I was left behind.  

I came to understand that this feeling of being left behind, left alone and forgotten was the primary symptom of middle child syndrome.   I made it considerably worse by being so introverted.  The world was more interested in other people, so I found other ways to occupy my time.  I socialized and mimicked the experience of human connection through my art and, eventually, through my writing.  We didn't know it, but my mother would soon face the greatest crisis yet.

My brother, for all his greatness, began to develop addiction problems.  Because I couldn't bring myself to blame him, I blamed my mother.  Whatever cracks there were in our relationship from this middle child business, I put a spike in them.  When his addiction problems became emotional and psychological problems,  I drove that spike deep into the heart of my relationship with my mother.

I think maybe I was trying to force her to ask me to come back to her, to say, "Let's start over.  You're still my little boy."  I think she was overwhelmed.  She tried to rationalize all this with me, which didn't work because I wasn't feeling rational.  This disease had taken my brother from me and replaced him with a stranger, and I was angry.  Being looked over, being left out, these things I could handle, but now they were taking things from me, and I had no recompense.   My mother tried to explain all these things to me, but I was angry and hurt and not listening.

Like she had done with me, Mother decided to educate herself about my brother's problem.  She returned to college to get a degree in psychology at Millsaps.  Her only intention was to apply whatever they taught her to healing her firstborn.  Our relationship was strained, and now she had even less time to spend with me.  My father flew to Washington several times a year and worked until eight or nine o'clock.  Without mentor or council, I drove in the spike even further, splitting the bond between myself and my mother.  In my mind, she left me and was devoting most of her time to this imposter that looked like my brother.  Pushing myself further away, maybe I thought she'd notice and come to find me.  She didn't.  

We never talked about these things.  We argued.  We argued quite a bit, almost entirely about how none of the things they were trying with my brother were working; his condition was getting worse and worse.  I surprised her by changing the focus of my anger.  "Stop Smoking!" I shouted.  "Haven't you seen what they're saying about cigarettes?"  She didn't stop, so I began hiding her cigarettes.  We argued so much this became the only way I could still tell my mother I loved her.  Eventually, smoking is what killed her.  I wish I had tried harder to make her quit.  I couldn't make her quit, so I started.  When she died, I doubled my own smoking, hoping it'd take me too.

When my sister got married, Mother designed and orchestrated a wedding for nearly a thousand people, filling both Galloway and the Country Club.  When my brother got married, she arranged a smaller wedding in the Galloway Chapel and dinner for fifty at the country club.  When I got married, she had dinner for eight at Nicks's and bought me a cake.  I told her not to do anything.  A weak attempt would hurt more than nothing at all.  It did.

When my father died, it should have driven me closer to my mother, but it drove me further away.  It drove me further away from everyone.  We argued constantly about how to handle his estate while the rest of the world argued over the power vacuum he left.  Both of us needed comfort and consoling and companionship, but so much had passed between us that we couldn't bridge that gap.  I lost my father, but I lost my mother too.  

When I tore my ACL in a theater accident, she insisted I stay at her house after my surgery.  We argued constantly.  I'm not a very good patient.  When her COPD started to threaten her life, she began asking that I stay with her overnight in case she had to be taken to the hospital.  Twice I did end up having to take her.  As her health got worse, so did my marriage, then the imposter who had replaced my brother developed cancer.   In the space of fourteen months, I lost him, then my mother, then my wife.  

Introversion had always been my response to stress.  I went home and locked the door, and refused to see anyone or go anywhere.  I had my books and my movies, and my computer, and that's how I intended to die.  

They say that the problem with a middle child is there isn't enough time.  Older children require time because they do things first; younger children require time because they do things more recently; little girls require more time than little boys; middle children get overlooked.

I don't think I was overlooked nearly so much as I was difficult to see.  Things happening within me made me withdraw from people, even as a child.  My mother loved me, but she suffered from a chronic lack of time.  I went from being her son with the most problems to being the son with the least problems, and I  chose to separate from her because I always chose to separate from people.  It's easier for me to go away than it is to solve the complex and painful connections between people.

When I was six or seven, I developed the chicken pox.  It felt like my skin was burning off.  They demanded I not scratch it because that would cause scars.  My mother gently covered my skin with pink medicine that felt cool when it went on and drew my skin tighter as it dried.  Unable to find relief, I cried and cried.  "Be brave," she said, "Don't scratch," she said.  Miserable, I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't stop itching.  My mother sat on the floor beside my bed and spoke softly to me.  She stayed all night, then the next night, by the third night, the itching wasn't as bad.

My mother loved me.  She taught me to read.  She carried me on trips to lessons and rehearsals and practices and trips to the tote-sum store so I could get comic books.  Life became complicated, and I ran away from her because I always found shelter alone.  Even a mother couldn't salvage the things that were breaking in me.   I can't take any of that back.  I can, at fifty-nine years old, see a lot of it for what it was.  That's some relief.  Time was my enemy.  Now her memory is complex and beautiful, and painful.   My mother loved me.  Time is fleeting, but love endures.

Madonna della Pieta

In world art, no theme is more prevalent or more important than that of the mother.  Mother Earth, Mother Goddess, and Mother Creator, she represents creation, fertility, and compassion.   There are masculine fertility representations, but they lack the sense of nurturing that the mother symbols do, which makes them less common and less popular.

Western Art tends to compress all of its thoughts and feelings about Mothers into the singular character of Mary, The Mother of God.  In parts of Europe, every church and nearly every home has images of Madonna and Child--Mary, the mother of God, holding and codling the infant Jesus, innocent and unaware of the life he would lead.

The second image we have of Mary in Western Art is La Pietà, "the compassion."  The dolorous image of Mary the Mother of God, holding his lifeless body, wearing for her lost son, before laying him to rest.  It's one of the most powerful images in all of Christendom.  Mary, who the angels told would bear the Son of God, holds his broken and dead body in her arms, wondering what went wrong.  People talk about the perfection of Michelangelo's statue of David.  For me, Madonna della Pietà is not only the greatest work of  Michaelangelo but possibly the greatest statue of all.  

In Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lucy and Susan represent Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdelene when they come upon the dead body of Aslan, still tied to the altar table.  Weeping and in pain, they beseech the mice to help free the dead body of Aslan from the ropes that bound him.  Susan cradles the dead king's head in her lap.  The cruelty of life has taken their most precious from them.

No mother should ever endure the loss of her son, but how common is it that accident, disease, addiction, depression, and most of all, war takes the son from the mother.   No other cause has separated more mothers from more sons than war from the beginning of time.  On Mother's Day, remember your mother, but remember the mothers who lost their progeny and issue.  Nothing can ever fill that void.

Nourishing Mother

Off and on, I've been attending commencement celebrations at Millsaps since around 1970.  There are a few people who have attended more than I have, but not many.  Contenders would be people like Don Fotenberry, Bob McElvane, and David Woodward.  

As a child, I would watch my father practice speeches in front of the mirror in his bathroom.  Eventually, he got so accustomed to it that he quit using a mirror and would just do it in his office or in bed.  Until I got to be around nineteen, I rarely got to see any of Daddy's speeches because he delivered them at places that didn't allow little boys.  Millsaps did.   Afterward, I could run amock among the bushes, and nobody cared because Millsaps was just about the safest place they could think of, and there were so many trees to climb.

Weary of the world, I quit going to Millsaps for anything for a long time.  Until today, the last Millsaps graduation I attended was the one Sam and Erin were in.  Waiting to enter commencement today, A woman approached me.  "I bet you don't remember me!"  The shape of her face was familiar, but my wheels were spinning and not finding purchase.  It was Avery Nicholas's Grandmother.  The last time I saw her, she was attending football games where I played in the class between her two sons at St. Andrews in a year where we only won two games.  (Why St. Andrews struggled in football is another story.  It's an honorable story, though, one where Andy Mullins made a just choice rather than a convenient choice.)

Like my nephew Campbell Cooke, Avery is a third-generation Millsaps Graduate.  I'm sure there were others, but I also got to see another third-generation Millsaps Person.  Mary Ranager's father and uncle graduated from Millsaps, and her Grandfather coached football and baseball there for many years.  One of the points of a Millsaps education is that, whether you're third-generation or starting your first generation there, the Millsaps experience reaches back through time, connecting each graduate to generations before.  I spoke to one family where their child was the first in their family to ever go to any college, and they chose us, and now that graduate starts their multi-generational journey with Millsaps.

At Commencement, Provost and Acting President Keith Dunn awarded Stacy DeZutter the Distinguished Faculty Award.  One of my friends commented that Stacy was the new Darby Ray.  While I would never compare the two, Stacy does seem to be having the same impact on Millsaps that Darby did.  Both were like a comet that traveled through the Millsaps Solar system, with a gravitational attraction so strong, they changed the course of other bodies in the firmament.  I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to Stacy for nurturing the flame of theatre at Millsaps and keeping it alive until Sam could get there, and she did it on top of her already packed work schedule.

Thanks to Stacy's presence, two members of Alpha Psi Omega graduated today, and another two theater kids who weren't inducted.  Ryan McDougald and Michael Montgomery were in the first new class of Alpha Psi Omega initiates since the major was put into abeyance many years ago.  Best friends, their last performance at Millsaps was alone together in The Universal Language by David Ives.  Although he didn't have enough points to get into Alpha Psi Omega (having never acted before) Trey Clark also walked today.  He tells me he plans to attend Jackson State as a graduate student this fall.  Hopefully, he'll continue acting.  Amelia Savaric, who worked in both plays this semester, spent her senior year at Millsaps, but as an exchange student, she received her degree from her university in France.  I honestly wish I'd written down its name.  While every department at Millsaps had a graduating class this year, it's been a while since Theater had one, so I'm especially proud of them.

The Founders Medal is the highest academic award given at Millsaps.  I was never remotely a candidate, but my cousin Anne Powers was.  She was the only Campbell who left Hesterville, Mississippi, who ever achieved a high level of scholarship.  Most years, we only have one Founders Medal Winner.  It usually represents a perfect academic score at Millsaps.  We've had Five winners before.  Today we had four, the second-highest number ever.  This from a class who saw their second semester at Millsaps interrupted by covid and subsequent semesters interrupted by the Jackson Water Crisis.  I suppose adversity can yield excellence.

I got into an argument once with someone who told me not to value the opinion of students too much because, in the academy, students are transitory; the faculty is what matters.  I got sort of frustrated and didn't know how to respond at the moment, but it's been almost twenty years and I'm still thinking about what that means.  Students ARE transitory.  That's the point, isn't it?  They're traveling through time at a point in their life where time seems endless, and they chose us because, at Millsaps, they believe their transitory experience can transform their lives--and it does.  At the hooding ceremony for the Else School MBA class, Monty Hamilton talked about his transmission at Millsaps transformed his life.  I was there for part of it.  I can think of so many people I've seen who came to Millsaps as one thing, and left as another.  They were transitory.  We all are.

At graduation today, I saw a very muscular woman who wore only a sleeveless vest so she could show off her intricate tattoos and her shaved head.  I thought to myself, "This is someone determined to forge her own way in the world and create her own identity from whole cloth."  That's what Millsaps does for you.  It gives you the materials you need to forge your own identity--whatever you believe it should be.  One of the bigger things that sets us apart from other private colleges is that we don't give you values; we give you the tools to create your own, and people who create their own values serve them far better than those who accept what was given to them.

Alma Mater means "nourishing mother."  Bet you weren't expecting that.  The nourishing mother of our minds are our studies, and our studies achieve greater heights at our Alma Mater.  Loyal Ones are we.  When I graduated, that was changed from "Loyal Sons are we" because people noticed we weren't all boys anymore.  One class leaves, and another class arrives.  The Nourishing Mother remains.