Dot Kitchings and the Keys to the Kingdom

I'm not yet ready to bury my past.  You'd be surprised how rarely people ask if I'm ready for anything.  Me being ready or not, has no impact on the progression of life.  

My sister called this morning to ask if I was going to the funeral for Dot Kitchings.  It's the same day as the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame induction for Jim Page, famed Millsaps Baseball coach.  I told her the logistics might be challenging, but I was going to do my best to do both but that I would be at the funeral for sure.

I don't much care for funerals.  In the years I was in the crystal cave, I attended none of them, missing even important ones.  A ritual celebrating the end of a remarkable life sometimes feels like just "the end" to me.  

When I look at St. Andrews now, it's grown so much from the school I knew.  They have all these really cool opportunities to build confidence and broaden horizons.  We didn't have that in the seventies.  One thing I learned as an adult was there were times when it was a struggle to keep the doors open and make the payroll.  We didn't have a lot of the impressive things the campus now boasts, but we did have people like Bea Donnelly and Dot Kitchings.

I entered Mrs. Kitchings' class, having been behind every year in language, history, and math.  Anything that required reading or writing, or calculation was a cold mountain for me, so I spent a lot of time in summer classes trying to catch up.

My mother suggested a trick using an index card to block out most of the text on the page of a book, so I could focus on just the one line I was trying to read.   That made a surprising difference.  Although I was behind, I went to the first day of Mrs. Kitchings's class, having read "The Hobbit," The Narnia Books, "The Martian Chronicles," and "I, Robot."  A girl I liked read "Slaughterhouse-Five" while I struggled with "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe."  I don't think she was showing off.  She was just lucky in an area where I was not.

I think Mrs. Kitchings understood that I loved reading; I just couldn't do it very well.  She taught us "The Foghorn." I explained the connection between "The Foghorn" and the movie "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" and how Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen were childhood friends, and I had written Harryhausen a letter.  

My problem came in two parts.  The reading part I'd made some progress on, but the writing part was still really a problem.  Some of my old teachers read these essays sometimes.  They have my great sympathy for ever having to read my handwriting on tests or papers.  I'm aware of how bad it is.  An awful lot of effort was put into improving it, but it proved fruitless.

One day, Mrs. Kitchings was talking to my mother and told her that the Education Center, right next door to St. Andrews, offered classes in typing.  Maybe I could attend class there one or two days a week.  If I learned to type, maybe my papers would be at least readable.  

Without realizing it, she handed me the keys to what would become my life-long passion.  Touch typing broke the link between my eyes and my fingers where dyslexia was confusing them.  Typing made me free.  Free in ways I never dreamed possible.  I had so much I wanted to express, even if nobody ever read it, that had been completely impossible before, and now I could not only do it, I could do it well.  I had never had the experience of doing anything well other than lifting weights in my life.  This changed everything.

Now in my sixties, I write between one and two thousand words a day, every day, even Sunday.  Dot Kitchings' idea made an entirely new person out of me.  It would still take a few years for what I could do to really manifest, but once I was through that door, I could do anything, and I got through that door because of her.  

I always sit in the back at funerals.  My face may not express that much emotion, but my tears do.  I'm not very good at saying goodbye, but I'm very good at remembering why I should.  

Quentin Compson Leaves Home.

Mississippi never leads nor follows.  It intensifies whatever fears and prejudices are already present in the larger society as if to say, "We can do it too," worried that, if we don't, we might be overlooked or forgotten about.   

"Do you hate blacks and queers?  We really, really hate them.    We'll prove it, and boy, will you be impressed.  Do you want to stop abortion?  We really want to stop abortion.  We'll do anything to stop it.  Boy, will you be impressed!"

It's not that we can't change, or be loving, or human.  We once tried to kill James Meridith, but now he walks those same streets as a hero.  People ask him to pose for a photo with their children.  It's almost as if we proved our point about integration; now, we can go back to being human again.  We never really hated the guy; we were just trying to show how dedicated we were to this idea, even though those who did lead were leading the entire country in another direction.     

Maybe, ultimately, it's a matter of confidence.  Maybe if we had more of it, we wouldn't be so determined to lead the way on the most prevalent negative emotions.   Maybe then we could say, "That's too much.  We don't want any part of that."

Yesterday we had a lecture from Donna Ladd, formerly the founder of the Jackson Free Press and now Editor of the Mississippi Free Press.   When I first started blogging, some of the people who now run very political blogs recognized me as having once been very political and tried to win me to their side by impressing me with how much they hated and disagreed with Donna.  Now that the face of journalism is changing, I worry that those same guys are having a much larger impact than they deserve.  That's not to say we didn't suffer from horribly biased news before, but for a while, we had almost liberated ourselves from that.  

Donna has launched more young writers than I've even met.  That makes her the perfect addition to the McMullan Young Writers program.  Donna's from Philadelphia, Mississippi.  She's just a couple years older than I am, and I was born in 1963.  If you think about what happened in Philadelphia in 1964, then you can't really blame her for feeling some sorta way about Mississippi.  

Those feelings made her want, more than anything, to escape Mississippi and never come back.  I know of a lot of people who had the same feeling, some really famous ones like Oprah Winfrey and Leontine Price, and Tennessee Williams.  Williams didn't go far, but in the 50s and 60s, New Orleans was an oasis of its own.  There were only a few places in the country where he could be what he was, New Orleans was one, and Mississippi was not.

At one point in her lecture, Donna asked the question that I spend a great deal of time thinking about.  "How many of you want to leave Mississippi when you graduate?"  More than half of the hands went up.  Some with energy and enthusiasm.  

I talk about this with my friends a lot.  "How do you keep your children here?"  So many of my generation face this.  Some of the young people in the forum that day were actually children of people I've known for a long time, raising their hands to say they want to leave Mississippi--to my mind, they want to leave those who love them more than anything.  I can't really blame them.  We invest so much treasure and time and energy and blood into raising these children, working so very hard to make sure they become remarkable people, and when they do actually become remarkable people, can we really ask them to stay here knowing that they might have to clip the wings we spent a lifetime giving them?

So much of what happened in Philadelphia that summer in 1964 touched my life.  Even though I was just learning to walk, it was so close to me.  My father always told the story of how the FBI called and wanted forty desk sets in forty-eight hours and how he struggled to fill the order.  Ben Puckett talked about the day the FBI called to rent equipment to dig up an earthen dam.  Clay Lee was a passionate young minister who the conference moved away from some pretty terrible things in Jackson, at Galloway, and sent him to a quiet country church where the troubles of Mississippi wouldn't upset his promising career, and they sent him to--Philadelphia Mississippi, just months before June of 1964.

I can't really blame Donna for leaving Mississippi.  We didn't exactly lay an appetizing table before her.  It's a miracle we ever got her back. 

When I was at St. Catherine's, I would have coffee with some guys, and one of them told the story of how they longed to leave Mississippi and see the world, and did, but when he saw in the newspapers that Rabbi Nussbaum's office and synagog were bombed, he figured he needed to go back to Mississippi.  He never hated Mississippi, but he never thought he'd get such a loud call to come back to her, either.

Many of Faulkner's characters spend a great deal of time turning over in their head what it means to be from Mississippi.  In Absalom, Absalom! my sometimes favorite novel, Quentin Compson struggles with his feelings about his home.  Throughout Faulkner's books, the Compsons often represent the moral heart of Mississippi.  Far from home, he says, “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”  I've never really had a Quentin Compson moment, but it's been close.  I've known a lot of people who did, though, and acted on it.  It's our own fault, really.  Everybody has a chance to make it better, but not everybody does. 

Photo Prompts

For my writing workshop today, we were assigned to bring in photo prompts for some free writing.  I have a folder on my phone of a couple hundred photos I use as prompts for drawing and painting.  These are images I don't know that much about, but I thought they looked cool.  I can write about that.  

Then I started thinking about maybe photographs where I do know the backstory.  Maybe those would be an even better writing prompt.  I chose two; one is of Bob Addams in front of the observatory.   I honestly could write an entire book about the observatory and the things that went on there, but if I did, there are people who wouldn't speak to me afterward.   Lately, though, I've been thinking it might be shocking if their children found out their parents did these things, so I shouldn't write about that, but their grandchildren will soon be old enough to think it was pretty cool.   I also really love Bob Addams.  

The other is a fairly famous picture of Ed King at the Woolworth sit-ins.  I picked that because I was born a month later.  Less than two years later, some thugs would run Rev. King off the road and forever change his face.  I never knew him before the accident.  He was quite handsome.  I don't remember a time when Ed King wasn't around somewhere.  He didn't rest after the sixties.  He stayed involved in everything, particularly everything I was involved in.  When I was an undergraduate, I'd see Ed show up at Millsaps, and I knew somebody was going to get a dressing down.  He didn't make many social calls, but when he felt like there was something going on, he addressed it.  A lot of guys from the Civil Rights Era were punished for it in the 70s and 80s.  Mississippi wanted very much to separate itself from its racist past, but Ed King was made chaplain of the University Medical Center, the biggest gem in the Mississippi higher education system.  I'm not really privy to how that decision was made, but it sent a very clear message.  

If my free writing is any good, I'll post it here.  I can produce words like mini muffins as long as I can type, but they're not all worth reading.  

The Quiet Crisis

Every coeducational college in the world secretly has a problem with rape.  They do a much better job now of educating the community about the problem, and that makes a considerable improvement, but it still happens.

It happens because you have a population of young people who are almost all away from home for the first time in their lives and living with almost no supervision for the first time in their lives.  Add to that lots of people using drugs and alcohol (sometimes for the first time) and lots of small enclosed spaces where couples can be alone, and it's a tinderbox.

There's also a problem in that sexual experiences can become social currency.  It's worse for boys, but girls do it too.  There also becomes a pretty serious problem where the accused is very popular, and the accuser is not.   That by itself can lead to serious problems with achieving a just outcome.

Even now, most rapes go unreported.  Girls blame themselves or don't want their private lives exposed, or for any number of other reasons, they choose to swallow this trauma rather than deal with it.  

George Harmon had an unwritten rule that if you were accused, you were gone.  It didn't matter if the boy was legally charged or convicted; he considered them a liability and didn't want them around.  If he considered a student to be a threat to the institution, he could be ruthless at getting rid of them.  Sometimes, the accused's lawyer would force his hand, and the school had to accept back a student who was accused but not charged or convicted.  

Another reason he wanted these people out of the community was that if somebody is accused of rape and then returns, there's a pretty good chance that somebody is going to take the girl's side and take a poke at the guy's chin.  That actually happened once.  I had to break it up.  

I'm thinking, more and more, that this sort of event might be the climax of my book.  I cover a lot of these issues, particularly that of the accused being very popular and the accuser being very unpopular.  I can write that kind of action pretty well, I think.  A fight can be an exciting thing to read.  It might also give the reader some sense that justice was served, even if it's really hard to tell if it actually was or wasn't.

Donna Tartt's first book dealt with a murder on campus.  Mine has a crime too, but considerably less dramatic.  I'm hoping that makes it feel more real.