History is Lunch at Woolworths

 In 1960, a previously unknown writer out of South Alabama published a work that presaged the monumental changes that lay ahead for the American South.  It was called, To Kill a Mockingbird.  You've probably been assigned to read it at some point in your life.  If not, if you're from here or choose to live here, you should read it and read the old testament.  Anything else you read from there will have solid roots.  

There are, so far, three actor's editions of To Kill a Mockingbird.  The first is the screenplay by Horton Foote.  Foote wrote something like thirty stageplays but won an Oscar for the Adapted Screenplay he penned of Harper Lee's novel.  Rights for his script are complicated to get and not really written for the stage.

Christopher Sergel published an acting edition in 1970.  Newstage has done this version, I believe, three times.  Several of my friends were involved in these productions, and they were all brilliant.  If you've seen To Kill a Mockingbird on stage in the last fifty years, it was most likely this version.

In 2016, Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing and A Few Good Men, revived Mockingbird with a new script that holds the current title for the most successful straight play in terms of audience in the history of Broadway.  

Sorkin's script features extended scenes with Tom Robinson and especially Calpernia, trying to broaden the cultural perspective of the play so that it's more than just the white man hero that Lee's book is often criticized for.  

Today at History is Lunch, a writer discussed his book about the sit-ins at Jackson's Woolworth's lunch counter on May 28, 1963.  In four days, this will have been sixty years ago.  In twenty-three days, I will also turn sixty years old.  

I was, reportedly a very difficult pregnancy.  My mother was sent home for an entire trimester to rest because her doctor could not find a fetal heartbeat.  Having miscarried twins eleven months before I was conceived, my mother was anxious about my pregnancy.  Had it failed too, her plans were to stop trying, as carrying children for two trimesters and losing them in the third was taking a toll on her.  The riot at Woolworths on Capitol Street, where white men attacked nine protestors attempting to break the color line in Jackson, was very big news when she was at home, not knowing if I'd be born alive or dead.

I was going to attend the lecture in person, but it looked like rain, so I watched over the internet.  I knew, going in, that I would know some of the names involved.  

The first was Allen C Thompson.  Thompson served as Jackson's Mayor from 1948 until 1969.  He was preceded by Leland Speed, who developed Eastover and whose wife gave me three sculpting lessons in her home on Eastover Drive for free.  He was followed by Russell C Davis.  When I knew Thompson, he was an older man living near my grandfather.  I was too young to remember any of the horrible things he had done, and until I took Mississippi History under Jerry Mcbride at St. Andrews, nobody had ever told me.  I can't begin to list the many times that Thompson was on the wrong side of history.  I believed that HE believed he was doing the right thing.  Nothing in my memory of him says he was willingly an evil man.  Sometimes, it's doing what you perceive as the right thing that can be the most evil.

The other name I recognized was Jim Black.  A recent Supreme Court ruling specified that Southern Police could not enter private property to arrest protestors unless the owner advised them a crime was being committed.  On May 28, 1963, nobody at Woolworth advised the police that a crime was being committed at the lunch counter, so the police stayed outside on Capitol Street.  Some have suggested this was intentional, as it left the protesters inside at the mercy of the angry white mob that was forming.

The police chief in Jackson sent Black, a young inspector, into the store in plain clothes as an undercover agent, just in case things got bad.  Then things got bad.  White boys pulled protesters off their lunch counter stools and began kicking and beating them.  Having then witnessed a crime, Black arrested both the attacker and the attacked, charging one with assault and the other with disturbing the peace, an unfair charge for the protester who hadn't broken any law, but it stopped the attack on him and saw him safely transferred to a police van where the mob couldn't attack him further.

When I knew Jim Black, he was Chief of Police for Dale Danks.  As my brother's illness got worse, he had several encounters with the police; Chief Black had known my father since High School and did everything he could to help Jimmy.  By the time Black ascended to Chief of Police, the worst of the civil rights era incidents had passed.  He served during Jackson's most extended period of growth yet.  I was probably spoiled by growing up during this period and knowing the men and women who orchestrated it.  If you ever see me lose patience with Jackson's current government, it's probably because it's difficult for me not to compare them to our "glory days."  

The third name I knew in the lecture was one I knew I'd hear going in.  Ed King was involved in nearly every significant civil rights incident in Mississippi.  He paid a price for it, but he never let that slow him down.  King is the young man in the clerical collar seen in the photos below.  I don't remember a time when Ed King wasn't around somewhere in my life.  He is ubiquitous.  He's in the Sunday school class I joined at Galloway and attends by Zoom.   Some of the best legal and religious minds in Mississippi over the last hundred years are in that class, including King.  I've been on both sides of the aisle with King.  

Most of the time, I stand with him, but there came a day when Abortion Rights activists wanted to meet at Millsaps, and Ed King was against it.  I sat in a meeting with Stuart Good, Wayne Miller, representatives of the Clinic Defense League, and Ed King to discuss the issue.  Knowing that I was on the opposite side of King was one of the more intimidating moments in my life.  His feeling was that, as a religious school, we had no business butting into this political and moral issue.  My position and I think Stuart's position was that Millsaps was not taking a stand on the abortion issue, even though our students might, but we were renting one of our spaces (the heritage room) to an outside organization.  The event happened despite King's challenge.  

There weren't any incidents, and Rev. King didn't do anything to interfere, but I felt the heat on the back of my neck that day.   I've always believed you should try and understand the viewpoint opposing yours, and I believe I understood where Rev King was coming from, but to me, the students who felt strongly about preserving their reproductive rights were more important. Having to stand up to somebody you idolized is a pretty tough lesson.  I don't know if he ever knew what I was going through.  I'm sure to him I was just Jim Campbell's boy, sticking his nose in where it didn't belong.  I'm pretty good at that.  To be fair, so is he.

I don't have an ending for this, mainly because it's just not over.  Woolworth's is a parking garage now, built by the son of the Mayor who preceded Thompson.  Mayors Davis and Danks were both accused of trying to tear down all the monuments of the Civil Rights Movement.  If you look at downtown Jackson today, there might be something to that.  The Civil Rights Movement probably won't end in my lifetime.  For some of my youngest friends, it might end in theirs.  At least, I hope so, but something tells me "no".

Ray Mcfarland will say he's too old, but I'd love to see him in a new production of Mockingbird using the Sorkin Script.  He's not too old.  He's the same age as Jeff Daniels when he originated the role on Broadway.  I don't know if Francine is up for yet another production of Mockingbird, but they've done something like eleven million performances of Christmas Carrol, so maybe it won't hurt.

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.