The Pornographic Ring of Hell

 When Lance Goss held auditions for a new play, it was his custom to tell the story of the play briefly for the students wishing to audition so they would know what their characters were up to.  When he held auditions for the Williams play “Orpheus Descending,” he told both the story of the play and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, on which the play is based.  

“The myth of Orpheus,” he said, “was one of galloping romance.”  Lance liked adjectives with a flair.  In studying the Williams play, the myth, and the plays and poems that tell the story of the myth, I learned that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was what Joseph Campbell called a monomyth, or Jung’s archetypal unimyth.  It was a story repeated in several different and divergent cultures and might have meaning deeper than what the bare facts of the story might suggest.  

To my way of thinking, you could explain why this story appeared in so many different cultures because when someone they care about is in jeopardy, young men often feel compelled to travel into the jaws of peril and rescue their lady fair.  The story of Orpheus became the blueprint for many tales of the knight-errant and a model for generations of young men with a feeling for galloping romance.

When I was young but still a man, some friends called me le Dauphin–the heir apparent.  I’m sure my behavior warranted it.  Because of my father’s place in society and my physical size, I felt like I could talk to grown men in any way I wanted, as long as I was polite and telling the truth.  When I was just nineteen, this led me to ask well-known educators why they built a school with nothing but white kids in it.  As long as I was doing it for the right reasons, I felt like I could talk to anyone like an equal because, at the end of the day, I could easily hold them over my head and throw them a ways.   I was pretty much a jerk.

There came a time when I found myself looking for ways to help a guy who I didn’t know very well because I had promised his child that I would.  That’s really about the extent of it.  Not really knowing how to help him, I cast a wide net, hoping to catch ideas.  One of the fish I caught in my net was a man named Dewey Edwards.  Edwards traveled regularly in the circles I needed help from.  He also knew the man I was trying to help.  Not knowing where else to turn, I decided he was elected, and I called him asking for a meeting.

I had a card up my sleeve where Dewey Edwards was concerned.  Whatever he had done with his life since then, Dewey Edwards was in my father’s class at Central High School.  In Junior High, my father talked Edwards into getting baptized and even attending a few Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings.  Whatever Edwards got up to before or since, my father once made an effort to save his soul, and even though it didn’t seem to take, Edwards remembered it.

In Mississippi, pornography, prostitution, methamphetamines, topless dancing, motorcycles, and gambling all functioned on the same level of society.  Originally, bootleg alcohol occupied the space where methamphetamines eventually went, but booze was legal now, and these guys had to figure out a way to make a living, so meth became a thing.  

Dewey Edwards was the king of pornography in Mississippi.  In the days before the internet, pornography was a physical product, like a hat or a chair.  You had to go somewhere to purchase it.  Edwards owned three adult “book stores” in Jackson and a pornographic distributorship that supplied all the pornographic retailers in the state, mainly on the Gulf Coast.  Edwards was a pretty good businessman and built an absolute empire out of this.  

His “bookstores” sold a lot more than books.  They had paperbacks with filthy storylines and racks and racks of dirty magazines wrapped in plastic, so you couldn’t get a peek without buying first. He also had racks and racks of what they called “marital aids” to avoid trouble with the censors, but were really sex toys, shelves and racks of sex toys of every description, all that traveled through his warehouse in the southwest part of downtown Jackson.  He also dabbled in what some people called “head-gear,” which was pipes, bongs, papers, and things associated with the smoking of marijuana. Still, his bread and butter was good old American pornography (made in Sweden.)    

This was in the late eighties.  By the end of the eighties, an engineer at Compuserve developed what he called the “gif.” Graphics Interchange Format was an algorithm that allowed your computer to store and display graphic images.  The first ones were limited to sixteen colors, but the format grew and grew.  A few years after my encounter with Edwards, I spent a great deal of time with a girl named Sue Ellen, who sat with me as I scrolled through the exciting new GIF forum on Compuserve and looked at the names of all the different GIF images you could download.  One Of these files had a particularly salacious name.  Sue Ellen said, “What is that!?” with a giggle.  

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Let’s find out.” and I clicked it.  After fifteen minutes of downloading, we had a small, black-and-white, but very clearly pornographic image on my computer screen. Sue Ellen laughed loudly.  We didn’t know it, but we witnessed what would soon drive guys like Dewey Edwards out of business or into another business altogether.  Getting pornography at home, silently and privately, meant nobody would ever again have to travel downtown to a seedy bookstore with questionable hygiene to purchase pornography.  

The City of Jackson and the State of Mississippi made a couple of attempts at running Dewey Edwards out of business.  There was no shortage of money in what Edwards did for a living, so he hired the best lawyers he could find–that would have him for a client.  In this case, that meant Sebastian Moore and a young Bobby DeLaughter in the Magnum PI Moustache phase of his life.  For a while, Bobby was a personal hero of mine.  For a while, the whole world saw him that way–and then he screwed that up.  Ultimately, Edwards always found a way to make the First Amendment protect his livelihood, and DeLaughter got his name in the papers for the first of many times.  

When I called to ask Mr. Edwards for a meeting, I led with, “You might know my father.”  I didn’t know where he currently stood with baptism and Methodism, but I gambled that he’d remember my father’s efforts and receive me kindly.  It worked.  He invited me to his office, in the same building as his wholesale operation, in a part of downtown I didn’t visit very often.

I parked my Ford LTD next to an enormous, copper-colored Caddilac.  I assumed it was his.  I laughed to myself, “Boy, you’re about to walk into a whole warehouse full of dildos.” and so I was.  

I hoped to enter quietly and, exit quietly and finish my entire business in less than twenty minutes.  Dewey Edwards had other ideas.  I don’t know how often he had visitors from my side of town, but he seemed really pleased to have the son of the man who tried to baptize him walking into his kingdom, and he was intent on showing me the entire thing—starting with the warehouse.  

Right off the bat, we passed an entire palette of plastic phalluses with a belt attached.  I assume the idea was to wear the belt around your waist and the phallus where they would normally go, but I wasn’t having any of that.  It might be funny if you wore it on your head like a unicorn, though.

An old black man was resting on a metal stool in this dimly lit pornographic dungeon.  We were introduced, and he shook my hand, saying, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cameron.”  “Call me Boyd.” I insisted.  It was traditional in Mississippi for black men his age to call white men my age “Mr. Last Name” and sometimes “Mr. Fist Name,” but I really wanted to be just “Boyd” and leave it at that.  Also, there was the issue of Africans of a certain age in Mississippi who heard my name as “Campbell” but pronounced it as “Cameron.”  I’ve never devised a workable theory as to why this happened.  I’m sure there was a world of cultural clues and takes on our twisted history in it, but I never understood it.

Mr. Edwards continued the tour, showing me boxes and boxes of dirty magazines in antiseptic plastic bags and three different types of blow-up dolls, with their plastic faces visible through cellophane windows cut into their display box.  

There was a showroom of sorts, with a display of perhaps twenty plastic devices designed to be inserted into the human body.  Some were designed to look like human organs, others with more abstract designs, some with whimsical faces on one end.  He also had racks of his latest big money maker, pornographic VHS video tapes.  He planned to turn two of his stores into a video rental business featuring both pornographic and regular video tapes.  He was in a race to open the first video rental place in Mississippi.  Video Library, in the Deville shopping center, beat him by just a few weeks.  

In his office, he told me stories about going to Central High School and how great Jackson used to be.  All of the air-conditioned rooms in his building were covered in cheap seventies woodgrain plywood.  I felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all on the issue I’d made the meeting for, and I was pretty anxious to get out of there.  I was polite enough to act like I was very impressed with his warehouse full of dildos, but, in reality, I knew I was where I shouldn’t be and was anxious to go home.  I’d traveled into the pornographic layer of hell and even met with Hades himself but found nothing there to help Eurydice.  My mission was a failure.

Driving home, I looked back to see if anyone had followed me to the mouth of Hell, but I was alone.  I never saw Dewey Edwards again.  We didn’t travel much in the same circles.  My boldness gained me nothing, but I’d seen things I never thought I would, so maybe that was the point.  

Fox In A Trap

When I was a boy, I heard the story of the fox who chewed his own leg off when it was caught in a trap.  I have no idea if this ever actually happens, but the story was applied to many things, particularly stories about girls you didn't mean to get with and guys who played football for Mississippi State and kept chewing off the wrong leg.  

In my second year in college, I became entangled with a girl from the Mississippi Delta.  She was descended from Washington County royalty and knew it.  She could, and often did, out-shoot and out-drink me.  Our time together nearly got both of us kicked out of college.  After that, she left Millsaps for Mississippi State to get sober and marry a boy who wanted to be a dentist, but never made it out of dental school.

After that, I figured keeping one special girl was asking for trouble, so I avoided it and adopted them all, mostly Chi-Omegas, but I married a Kappa Delta.  

There was, of course, one special girl, but apart from a few wanton glances and moments of electric passion when we touched in ways we weren't planning to, we never discussed it.  Not discussing it didn't keep me from getting written up several times for staying too late in her dorm.  There were more than a few nights when Ken Ranager and I would together seek an escape route without getting caught.  He was really very good about it and about as willing to go out a window into the limbs of an adjacent live oak tree as I was.  Trees and climbing things were intricate parts of my college experience.  

After college, I tried again to make one girl more special than the others.  A lot of my friends were doing it.  She turned out to be a pretty neutral experience.  Lots of fun and not much drama.  I wasn't the only boy on her dance card, but she wasn't the only one on mine either.  After about a year, it was pretty clear this wasn't going anywhere, even though she talked me to sleep on the telephone nearly every night.

After that, there was this girl who was going to be a sophomore at Millsaps.  She wasn't really my type at all, but she kept talking to me and asking about my day, what I did with my life, and what happened to that girl who called all the time.  She was very pretty, and she was absolutely determined to be a part of my day if not part of my life, even though we had absolutely nothing in common.  

Her hair was a mass of blonde curls, enormous and rigid, like a light helmet, but attractive if you didn't try to touch it.  Bid day was coming up, and she labored mightily all Summer for Phi Mu to make sure they had a great year.  There supposedly was a boyfriend somewhere in her life, but he was in-again and out-again, and on bid day, he was out-again, so I told her I'd take her to dinner, and then we could go to the KA house and CS's to see her pledges running around.

Taking her to dinner at the Mayflower, she began to cry as we passed the courthouse.  I pulled over and held her hand while she got her cry out.  Asking her what was wrong was fruitless.  "A bad day" was all she said.  I assumed it had something to do with Mr. out-again, who was at Mississippi State.  Even though she lived here, she'd never been to the Mayflower before.  After dinner, we went to the KA house to watch the madness, where I pointed out to her and the active members where we planned to put the addition with the concrete room and the fancy patio behind.  I would spend the next two years raising money for that and getting it built, even though the architect seems to have screwed us over on some aspects of it.

At about two in the morning, I took her to where she parked her car by the library under the Academic Complex.  For a little over an hour, I leaned against my car and held her as tight as I could.  Lightly kissing and lightly talking, it seemed really important to her that I hold her and keep holding her as the night hours slipped by.  "It really must have been a bad day," I thought.  This was a wounded creature hiding in my arms in the night air.  I'd experienced that before.

About a week later, a mutual friend asked if I was going to see this girl again.  "I dunno.  Maybe." I said.

"I just feel so bad about what's happening with her daddy."  My friend said.  This was the first I heard anything about this.  Maybe this is what was behind her "bad day."  Her father, it seemed, was in a federal prison in Texas, having been sentenced at the courthouse we passed on the way to the Mayflower.  

In high school, my steady girlfriend's father shot himself, and I found the body. I spent two years unsuccessfully trying to fill the hole he left in her life.  Now God sent me another broken bird with a missing father.  I didn't mean for this to be something I did with my life.  It wasn't fair, though, for me to have more than I needed when some people didn't have enough.  

I called for another date.  This time to Scrooges.  In the parking lot, before we got out of the car, I held her hand and said, "I know what you've been going through, and I just wanted you to know that I'm your friend."  

I'm sure she intended to tell me sometime, but she wasn't ready for me to know without her telling me.  There's some embarrassment in people knowing your daddy is in prison, on top of all the devastating emotional losses that come from him losing his liberty; all of these feelings were crashing over her like a flooded creek in a rainstorm while she gripped my hands for her very life and did her best to push out the pain by grinding her back teeth together, lest she scream.

Fortunately, she didn't wear much makeup, despite the elaborate engineering that went into her hair, so it didn't take much effort to repair her face in my rearview mirror when the tears stopped and we went inside.  This was during the era when Scrooges had a different quiche every day, despite the popularity of the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche."  I had that, and she had a chicken sandwich, and we talked.  We talked in the sort of way that people who no longer have secrets talk.  Even though it hadn't happened yet, we talked in the way that people who had seen each other naked in the stark reality of daylight talked.  

"If Daddy doesn't come home, I don't know if I'm gonna make it.  If my life doesn't get better, I don't know what I'll do."  She said.  "I'm doing the best I can, but some days, I just can't."  She said.  Was that a threat?  Was she saying she might do something if her father didn't come home?  Would something happen if he didn't?  Would she break?  Why was this happening in the path of my life?  Was I supposed to do something?

I let her talk.  I wanted to hear all of what she was thinking and what her plans were.  Forever after that, I became something of an expert at gauging her emotional health by the words she used and the way she moved her face and hands.  

After dinner, taking her back to her car, which was outside my apartment at Pebble Creek, I again leaned against my car with her deep in my arms for an unnaturally long time.  "Look," I said.  "I'm only twenty-three, and I've never done this before, and I really don't know what I'm doing--but I'm going to do my best to get your daddy home.  You're not going to make it the end of his sentence."

She pushed her face deep into my chest.  Soon my shirt was wet with her tears and then my skin underneath as her nearly silent sobs floated out into the night air.  I wasn't really that interested in this girl, but she was in a great deal of pain, so I committed myself.  No one should feel that much pain.

Over the next year, I talked with lawyers and judges.  Sometimes as a personal favor, sometimes for a fee.  I educated myself on the consequences of federal drug charges and the parole system.  I knew something about parole from my brother's experience, so I wasn't starting from scratch.  It didn't look good.  He had prior convictions, which was part of why his sentence was the way it was.  From what I could tell, it looked to me like he was covering for somebody else.  I knew about some of his associates, and they were pretty unpleasant guys.  

That next Spring, she told me she might not be able to go back to Millsaps the next Fall.  Something had gone wrong with her student loans, and she didn't know what she was going to do.  I called Jack Woodward and asked if I could buy him lunch.  He said he was gonna eat at home but to come by his office.  In his office, we discussed the situation, and he was able to find some more money.  What shortfall was left, I'd give him a check for, and he'd put it in one of his many spent-out scholarship funds and award it to her without her ever knowing I was involved.  We'd made that deal before.

With her junior year at Millsaps assured, I moved on to work on her father's upcoming parole hearing.  It didn't look good, even though he'd been a model prisoner.  What happened next, I can't really talk about.  There were other people working on his parole hearing for very different reasons from mine.  We were able to come to an understanding.  There were no guarantees, but the outcome looked much better than it did before.  

The next time I saw the friend who had originally told me this girl's father was in prison, I told her that I thought there might be a chance he'd be home before Christmas.  Then I said, "If this happens, then I'm going to separate myself from this girl as much as I possibly can.  I've gotten in way over my head, and it's not going to end well no matter what I do, but if I end it now, then it won't be that bad."  I'd developed feelings I never intended to have.  I developed them by spending a year trying to pull this girl's oxcart out of the ditch she found herself in, and now I was stuck.

Going into exams for the Fall semester, I met with her to say that in a few days, she would hear the outcome of her father's parole hearing, and I was praying for them both.  I gave her an envelope with two one-hundred dollar bills in it, with instructions to use it to visit her dad in Texas before Christmas to help restore her mental health.  Within a few days, she received word that he was paroled.  She and her mother and little brother used the money I gave her to go pick up her father so the family could be home together for Christmas.  

In my mind, my part in this story was over.  I'd stuck with it long enough to see happen what I said I wanted to happen.  My own well-being was in jeopardy, so I formulated an escape plan.  I went to Albrittons and got a drop with an opal surrounded by diamonds and amethyst.  These parting gifts were a pretty silly ritual I'd adopted to end relationships.  After New Year's, I arranged to meet her at The University Club for dinner.

One of the reasons The University Club didn't make it was because they were never very full.  By the end of dinner, we were the only people in the restaurant, but the bar was pretty lively.  I ordered a cigar from the girl with the cart, lit it, and pushed the gift box in white paper toward my friend.

I explained that we'd accomplished what we had set out for.  I fulfilled my promise, and it was time for me to go.  She began to cry.  She didn't understand.  "Look, I can't have feelings for you when you don't have feelings for me.  That's a disaster that can only get worse.  You have to let me go.  Your life is pretty good now.  That guy from Mississippi State wants to talk again.  Your daddy's home.  It's time for me to go."

"No." She said.  "There has to be another way."

"Look," I said, "I'm not going to hang around like some sort of mascot.  There's probably somebody out there who wants to be as devoted to me as I was to you.  If you don't let me go, I won't ever find them."  That part wasn't true.  The future didn't hold anyone who had that kind of devotion for me.  At twenty-four, I thought, surely that's how the world works.  I'd put myself in harm's way enough times that surely there would be somebody who just wanted me to be comfortable and was devoted to that.  I believed that if you gave life enough time, accounts would balance out, and life would be fair.  That wasn't the case.    

For months this woman tried to talk to me, to hug me, to ask about what was happening in my life.  Eventually, it started to really bother me that she wouldn't just let me go.  I felt like I'd been really fair with her and really done my best for her.  I deserved to have enough space to get over all this and move on to whatever was next in my life.  She didn't understand that.  Slowly, I started to really resent it.  I started saying really hateful things when she tried to talk to me.

One day, she said, "Sometimes, when you look at me, it looks like you hate me!"  

"I don't hate anyone," I said.

She threw her arms around me and wept.  She wept with the same passion and resignation she had that night we went to the Mayflower.  She was back with the boy from Mississippi State again full-time.  She knew that I knew that.  Soon she'd be showing everyone the ring he got her.  

Through her tears, she said, "I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry."  Still crying, she pulled away and said, "But I understand."  And I didn't speak to her again for five years.

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When my father died, a great mass of people came to the reception at the funeral home.  I stood in line for most of the day, shaking hands and receiving well wishes.  Most of it wasn't really very emotional to me, mainly because of the sheer volume of people coming through.  Although my friends came too, there would be what seemed like hundreds of my dad's friends between them.  I was holding up pretty well.

Toward the back of the line, near the staircase, I caught a glimpse of blonde curls.  "I really hope that's not her."  I thought.  I didn't look back again.  Soon, I could feel her presence.  I focused on the people in front of me so as not to betray my emotions.  Suddenly, she was the face before me.  I froze.  The muscles in my back began to twitch.  I could smell her.  

She reached up and threw her arms around my neck.  We both began to weep.  The line stopped, and then, realizing we were in a moment, they began to move around us.

"I'm sorry,"  I said.  "I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.  I didn't mean any of those things I said.  I said some really hateful things to make you go away.  I didn't mean them."  I said.

She held my face with a trembling hand and kissed me one last time.  "I believe you."  She said.  "I understand.  Please be happy."  She said, and pulled me tight, and held me for what seemed like hours.  Then she turned and walked away, and I never saw her again.

From other people, I would learn that her father returned to prison and would die there.  Her marriage turned out pretty well.  Her sometimes boyfriend decided to be full-time.  Some people thought my story was really sweet.  Some people thought I was a fool.  To me, she told me she didn't think she would make it if her life didn't get better.  Her life did get better, and she did make it.  Whatever part I had to play in that didn't really matter because I wanted to make sure she made it.  It was her life, not mine.  What I got out of it was the story.  I can't say that a story is as good as somebody who loves you and takes care of you forever, but it's not bad.  She was never my type anyway.  

UMMC Urban Myths

For quite a while now, I’ve been collecting the urban legends that emanate from students and employees at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.  Now that I live next door, I’m looking for some new ones.  Urban legends are similar to myths.  They tell a story that’s usually related to something historical or factual but doesn’t have to be, and the story reflects some sort of moral value, as interpreted by the culture the story comes from.  They are cautionary tales that are disguised to not look like cautionary tales.

Being told in Mississippi by Mississippians, there’s some effort to make the stories more vivid, more interesting, and more local than, say, stories from the University of Pennsylvania Medical College, no offense to Pennsylvanians.  Stories generated in Mississippi will have our unique flavor and perspective on things like race, sexuality, gender, religion, and people from Mississippi State University.

I’ve been doing this for around forty years, and there are a lot of stories.  These are the categories I’ve organized them with.  

Stories about Cadavers:  Like the Greeks, UMMC students are obsessed with the moral implications of death, the relations between the dead and the living, and the influence of living morality on the dead body.   Stories about cadavers often have the elements of ghost stories but are couched in a medical scenario to give them extra vitality and credence.

Stories about Swelling and Exploding Cysts:  What goes into the body must come out of the body, and what more interesting way to come out of the body is there than exploding cysts?  Often, these stories involve elements of new ties/shirts/suits that are destroyed by detritus shooting out of a cyst.  These are often tales of how dedicated a young doctor might be who sacrifice his new tie or designer glasses to open the cyst, often on some fat woman’s taint.

Stories about Catheters:  The Greeks did this, too.  Stories about the phallus and its misadventures are both the stuff of comedy and morality.  A malfunctioning phallus and what must be done to make it function can encompass all sorts of memes about morality, culture, and body horror.

Stories about Aids:  Although they’re not as prominent now, there was once an entire genre of stories about Aids.  To the myth-maker, aids was not only a disease but a moral judgment against the people who violate the cultural mores about sexuality and gratuitous sexual encounters.  Stories about men, often upstanding citizens, who got aids by cheating on their spouses were common.

Stories about Strippers and Prostitutes:  Much like the aids stories, these are stories about sexual morality and the perils of wanton sexuality.  Strippers and prostitutes make a lot of money, but they end up at the hospital with fatal diseases or gunshot or knife wounds that prove fatal.  These stories are precautions both against using prostitutes and becoming one.

Dumb Mistakes/Darwin Awards:  There may be no greater cautionary tale than “Don’t do dumb things.”  Especially in the South, stories about “y’all watch this” or “y’all hold my beer.” are perfect for urban myths, and their arrival at the hospital with fingers/testicles/teeth/ears/toes blown off make great stories.    

Crime Doesn’t Pay:  Stories about criminals who show up at the hospital after the police or other criminals shoot them are pretty common.  While there’s sometimes a racial element to these stories, they all have moral implications.  If you hadn’t have been doing that, you wouldn’t have ended up here with a gunshot wound.

Because University is a communal experience, they are great places to generate stories, particularly myth-building stories.  Most of the stories I’ve collected about UMMC I can’t reprint here because they’re either really gross, really depressing, and sometimes obviously bigoted.  There are guys who spend their entire lives and careers studying the memes broadcast in stories like these.  It’s a fascinating area of study.

Terror At The Carnival Ball

I originally wrote this about twenty years ago and reprinted it because my sister didn't remember it.   I did it pretty quickly, without much research, because for many years, this was just something of a family joke. I have newspapers.com now, and research is easy, so I reworked the entire piece to reflect more and more accurate information.

When I was a kid, my mother was deeply involved in the Jackson Junior League.  I’m not sure who the Senior League was, but the Junior League consisted of women under forty who became involved in civic events.  They did many cool things, including fairy tale theater and puppet shows, which I loved.  In 1970, when I was seven years old, the Jackson Junior League sponsored the Carnival Ball.

The Carnival Ball was the primary fundraising effort for the Jackson Junior League. They sponsored many charities for disadvantaged children and young women in trouble, but the primary goal of the Carnival Ball was to raise money for that year's Arts Festival, which, in turn, raised money to build an arts center downtown.  They’ve had other fundraising efforts through the years, and the current main fundraiser is Mistletoe Marketplace.  In 1970 was the thirty-eighth annual Jackson Junior League Carnival Ball.  Lance Goss directed the entire event, and Frank Hains was the technical director.

My mother wasn't the kind of person to join a volunteer organization like the Junior League without doing any actual volunteer work, so one year, she ended up in charge of all the costumes for the Carnival Ball, and my brother was enlisted as a page boy. I remember racks and racks of costumes filling the living room and the dining room of our house and strangers in and out to try them on. 

That year, the King of the ball was Doctor James Hardy, the famous surgeon who pioneered heart and lung transplants at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.  In 1963, two months before I was born, he performed the first Lung Transplant on a dying inmate from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the first successful operation of its kind.  The next year, he successfully transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into a dying man, also the first successful operation of its kind.  Isabel Poteat Lutkin, wife of Donald Lutkin, the new president of Mississippi Power and Light Company, was the queen.

The theme that year was Echo 1890, where the floor of the Mississippi Collesceum was transformed into a facsimile of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1890.  While everyone at the Carnival Ball wore costumes, special attention was paid to local “celebrities.”  Lt. Governor Charlie Sullivan came dressed as Diamond Jim Brady.  Mayor Russell Davis dressed as an 1890 Jackson Policeman.  Al Simmons, head DJ at WSLI (and father of newscaster Scott Simmons), rode in on a balloon as the “observer.”  Governor John Bell Williams dressed as one of his personal heroes, Teddy Rosevelt, with a retinue of young Jacksonians as his Rough Rider soldiers.  Attendants to the "princesses" wore Gibson Girl costumes and wigs, and page boys wore knickerbockers.

While my mother handled all the costumes for the major characters, It was John Bell Williams who made an impression on the seven-year-old version of me.  Williams was a World War II hero and lost one arm in battle when his bomber crashed. Sometimes, he wore a mechanical prosthetic arm that ended in two curved metal prongs, but I didn’t know that. 

Williams was an old-style Democrat and previously served in Congress in Washington. He supported segregation, but, as governor, he didn't fight the court order (Alexander v Holmes County Schools) when it came down to desegregating Mississippi public schools immediately, but others did.  Williams distanced himself from the Citizens Council, but by then, the damage was done.

Arrangements were made for the Governor to come by our house and try on his Teddy Rosevelt costume before the ball. My dad supported Williams' opponent, William Winter, in the governor's race, so this was a slightly delicate moment. 

My mother pulled us kids aside to tell us that a very important man was coming to the house, and we were to be on our best behavior and be very polite and say "yes, sir" and especially not to stare because he had only one arm.  “Only one arm,” she said, and that was all she said.

Determined to be a good boy, I spent the next day and a half preparing myself to meet this important man with one arm. I wasn't going to stare, and I wasn't going to say anything stupid like, "Nice to meet you, we voted for William Winter." or "Hey, mister, where's your arm?".   This man was a hero, and he sacrificed part of his body fighting those rotten nazis.  I was going to be a good boy and a solid scout.

The big day came, and a nicely dressed older man came to the door in a dark suit with a hat. I was seven years old. Now, my mother was wise to warn us about meeting a man with one arm, and I was ready for that, even though I'd never met a man with one arm before. I was prepared for there being no arm.  I wasn’t prepared for what there was.  What she didn't tell us was that he had replaced that arm with what looked to me exactly like the gleaming metal HOOK like Captain Hook had in Peter Pan!   

I’d seen both the animated version of Peter Pan by Walt Disney and the Television version with Mary Martin.  In both versions, Captain Hook was a bad guy who wanted to poke holes in little boys with his sword, so I ran and hid in the many racks of costumes taking up space in our house, not to come out until after the Governor had left.  My mother hadn’t lied to me, but she left out some important pieces of information.

In the years to come, I would have more gentlemanly encounters with Governor Williams when he spoke to my Boy Scout Troop and other functions.  Charlie Sullivan would be a regular visitor at our house during his ill-fated run for governor.  I would buy honey collected by former Mayor Davis in the years ahead.

I think my mother missed being in the Junior League.  Her life was much simpler and much more exciting then.  There was considerable pressure on white moms in Jackson in 1970 to move their kids out of the public schools, and there were other conflicts, but my Mother’s life would become much more challenging in the years to come.