Reconciling Segregation Academies

Ellen Ann Fentress has a really cool project where she's illuminating the histories of Mississippians who attended the many "segregation academies" that arose at the end of the sixties and the start of the seventies.   I spent most of the twilight hours last night digging through it.  

When I was really too young to have their respect, I asked both Jesse Howell and Glen Caine about this.  The only thing I had working in my favor was they both knew I was the third generation of a family that had served Mississippi Schools since the end of the First World War.  Working against me, they knew I was on friendly terms with Bob Fortenberry, William Winter, Charlie Deaton, and Ray Mabus, and I might feel some sorta way about the schools that sprang out of segregation, and I did.  

I myself had gone to St. Andrews.  One of the few private schools in Mississippi that didn't spring out of the segregation wars.  One of the reasons I went to St. Andews was that the superintendent of Jackson Public Schools had told my grandfather that "Jim better get those boys into private schools because I don't know what's gonna happen."  He wasn't long before his retirement date, so I guess he felt some sort of freedom of speech in that.  He was also pretty involved in the efforts to keep Jackson Public Schools separate for as long as they were.  After he retired, we went through three or four superintendents until Bob Fortenberry decided to return to Mississippi and take on the task.  

Glen Caine was a lot more forthcoming with me than Jesse Howell.  Glen gave an awful lot of his time to Millsaps after his tenure at Jackson Academy, and I'll always have a lot of warm feelings toward him.  Both men told me the same thing.  Their goal was to create something like Memphis University School in Jackson, and there were many reasons to create a new school than just segregation.   I believe they were telling the truth, but I also believe we can't really hold MUS faultless in all this.   

They were both very determined that I know their school had no connection with the Citizens Council.   While that was true, it's also true that no white person in Jackson was very far from the Citizens Council.  In my studies of the time when Galloway UMC split in two, a lot of the names were members of the Citizens Council.  These were people I knew; some of them were people I respected and liked.  This is a very confusing history, one that will take a good bit more than the seventy years we've had to sort it all out.

I've heard many times the story of when Mr. Howell tried to buy land for the school from Mr. Westbrook and offered him a price, to which Mr. Wesbrook said, "If that's all you got, you better go talk to Gus Primos about some of that swampy land his dad bought in Rankin County," and that's what he did.  That's how Prep ended up where it is.  

I asked both of them why they built metal commercial buildings rather than conventional construction methods.  Their schools, in the early years, were basically warehouses with air conditioners.  Both of them told me the same thing.  That style of construction met their needs, both in terms of capital outlay and expedience and that's what struck me: why expedience? Why was there such a hurry to get the school built, and why didn't they have more time to build up their capital beforehand.  

I have an awful lot of respect for both of these men.  They educated a hell of a lot of people I know and did it well.  There's still a dangling sword in all this, though.  It may be that my generation can't really address this adequately, although Ellen Ann Fentress is trying to.  People like Cindy Hyde-Smith, clearly don't give a fuck.  There's also the issue of what taking 90% of the white kids out of the Jackson Public Schools did to the system that was left after and what responsibility we have to redress this.  In a lot of ways, Jackson Schools are as segregated now as they were in 1960, and it has an impact on the quality of education you can get in Jackson and the quality of life for the people who live here.  If a city can't offer quality public education, they might as well give up on attracting young couples to the city.  

The sins of the Father is a really complicated issue for Mississippians and not one we handle well.  It has a tremendous impact on the quality of life we can offer now too, even though we're all pretty old and the fathers are mostly dead.  I don't believe in the solution of moving everybody to Madison and Rankin County and starting all over.  I don't think that solves the problem; I think it moves it further down the road.  Sometimes moving the problem further down the road can make it much more formidable when you do face it.  

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What Motivates Amanda

It's my hope that I can show you more than I tell you in my book, but since these are imaginary people, I have to decide what to tell you before I show it.  Although my characters are all imaginary, they all have qualities and histories that match people I've known in real life, but none of them have the same combination of qualities and histories as people I've known in real life.  It's kind of fun to say, "What if they're like John but with a father like Mary and a smoking habit like Tom?"   

Some of the faculty and administration do have pretty close to a one-to-one correlation with real-life people, like George Harmon and Lance Goss.  I even include Frank Hanes just so I can give him a happier ending.  None of them are exactly one-to-one, but they'll be recognizable.  None of the students or their parents match up with any living person in every aspect.  They're all amalgamations.  They're all imaginary and not meant to be taken as my opinion of any real person.

 Amanda Moore is eighteen.  At 5'8" she considers herself tall for a girl.  She'd much rather be six inches shorter.  She has light brown hair, with tremendous hazel eyes, and a few acne scars that aren't nearly as noticeable as she believes they are.  Most would say she was pretty, but she practices not looking friendly or approachable.  Her looks get her attention, and she knows how to work that, but her looks give her very little satisfaction or confidence.  

Other parts of her personality get in the way of her education.  Without that, she'd make a remarkable lawyer one day.  If she had any confidence, she could do just about anything, but despite the attitude she projects, she has none.  She's always done well in school because she was usually the brightest one in the class, but now that she's in a school full of kids who were the brightest ones in class, she's lost her seat at the table.  

Amanda is from Pascagoula, between Camille and Katrina, and before gulf coast gambling.  She's the only child of her mother, who was the second wife of her father, who now lives with his third wife, who is twenty years younger than him.  She has three half-brothers and sisters, including the four-year-old, that now gets all her father's love.  At four, he's decided that this will be the big strong son he always wanted, even though he's only four and still eats his boogers.

A modern psychologist would diagnose Amanda with Histrionic personality disorder.  Amanada's only ever seen one psychologist, a marriage and family counselor, ordered by the court when her mother sued her father for more support.  Since then, Amanda has refused to see any "head shrinkers," even after she started cutting her arms and thighs at fifteen.  Her mother, who is never sober after five o'clock, accepts Amanda's promise to "get help at school," even though her school counselor isn't a psychologist.  She's not even a counselor.  She's a nice Christian lady her private academy hired because she had an education degree and the right political attitude.  

Amanda has been experimenting with sex and drugs since she was fifteen.  A pretty girl can always get free drugs.  Sex gets her attention but never warmth, passion, compassion, or companionship.  Sex sometimes gets her better drugs and more of them.  

Amanda chose Marsh for college because her father and grandfather went there.  Her mother sees it as a chance for a new beginning, away from those nasty boys who she knew were leading her precious only child down the wrong paths.  Her mother went to community college.  She was her father's secretary before she became his mistress and would have probably remained his mistress had she not confronted Amanda's Father's first wife with a tremendous pregnant belly and some bad news.   Her father's first and second wives are now pretty good friends who mix a drink and call each other on the phone to talk about how much they hate the third wife and her stupid son.

Marsh College could be a fresh start and a new beginning for Amanda.  Her life could be very different, but she doesn't want that.  She wants more of what she had in Pascagoula, only this time with smarter boys, better drugs, and nobody to talk her ear off if she comes home four hours late.  

I'm trying to figure out ways that Amanda can eventually find happiness and peace later in life.  With all my characters, I'm telling the story of the moment but showing glimpses of both their past and their future.   That's kind of the point.  College isn't a destination.  It's a transitory point between the future and the past, even for the people who work there.  I'd like to say that what happens in the book is a painful moment that passes, and life becomes better; I just don't know how I'm going to do that just yet.  I'm not going to leave Amanda in the state she's in, though.  These are my creations, and I do have a fondness for all of them.  

Amanda will come off like a bitch, and somebody you don't want to be around.  It's my hope to show that she really never had a chance.  The cards were stacked against her.  Bradley tries really hard to find some good in her, but he's looking in the wrong places.  His attitude comes from an unstated belief that women are always good at heart, and men are always bad at heart, and someone like him has to mediate a safe place between them.  That's kind of the premise of being a gentleman, a myth Bradley believes more than he believes anything else and tries to apply in his life, but never with the results he hopes for.  People are never good or bad.  Their choices might be, but they themselves aren't.  Everybody tries to do good, even if they're wrong about what good is.

Amanda and Bradley, and Laurel aren't real, but I want to make them feel real.  That's one of the reasons why I'm setting them in a place that's very real, so real that some of my readers will recognize even the trees and the hills.  I'm not promising solutions to social problems.  This is just a story about people.  These are just observations about things that are in all people.  I'm not strong enough to shape a solution to what happens in the world, but I can maybe tell you about it.  I hope readers will see something they can sympathize with and understand in both the nicest and the meanest characters.  

Book Title

Since the action of my book takes place around a college production of Mid Summers Night Dream, I'm thinking of calling it "What Fools These Mortals Be" or some variation of it, maybe even just "What Fools."

This means I will spend the next few months reading criticism of the play to try and discover themes I can use that I hadn't already picked out on my own.  It's probably presumptuous to borrow a title from Shakespeare, but when Faulkner did it, it left an impression on me, so maybe it will have a similar effect if I do it.  You're also supposed to write what you know, and theater is something I know.

I constantly worry that if I write about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, even though they're imaginary, somebody will point out that I'm no prince either, and they'd be right.  That's the point, though.  I'm not writing about evil people.  I'm writing about ordinary people faced with situations that don't match any of the good and evil scenarios their parents taught them at a time when most young Americans got their morality from television, and on television, America's favorite dad was Bill Cosby.  

I have stories with a pleasant ending, but this isn't it.  The best I can say is that everybody survives by the last page.  Some learn from the experience.  Some don't.  I'm not even trying to teach my readers anything.  It's an image of an echo of a time.  I hope to make somebody care about what happens to my imaginary people, even if the imaginary people don't get what they want or even what they need.  

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.