A Place To Hang Out

 Sometimes, the worst thing you can do to somebody is to say, “You can’t hang out with us.”  Several years ago, some of my friends on the internet were having trouble with this one guy.  His behavior was really erratic, particularly with women.  Eventually, we asked him not to hang out with us anymore and told him that he should pick another lobby.  When he refused, we got the admins to ban him from our lobby.  He took this bit of social rejection so sorely that he spent the next ten years stalking and harassing our social group.  It really kind of ruined his life.  He was arrested twice for violating a restraint order a woman in our group from St. Louis put on him.  He moved from Georgia to Tennessee to Texas, trying to stay ahead of some of the trouble he caused for himself, all because we said we didn’t want him to hang out with us.

Social rejection has always been a problem at Millsaps.  The Greeks have always been the social lions on campus, and the students who weren’t involved with them have many times felt under-served.  It particularly becomes a problem when you consider that the Greeks are overwhelmingly white, leaving independent black students with limited social options sometimes.  There’s really no way to deny that they had a very different experience at Millsaps from the white kids who were in a Greek Letter social organization.

I don’t know how many of you remember the great war between George Harmon and Kiese Laymon, but that’s what it was about.  Kiese wrote articles in the Purple and White campus newspaper about the differences in the social lives of white Greek students and black independent students like him.  Most of his criticism seemed to focus around the idea that the Greeks were loud and they were drunk.  Speaking as somebody who used to get drunk and fire off cannons at three o’clock in the morning, I can say he was probably pretty accurate.  (That’s one of those stories where some people will say, “You’re full of shit, Boyd, nobody shoots cannons at three a.m.,”  while others will say, “Man! I miss those days.” So believe what you will.)  

The white part of campus took what Kiese wrote as a sort of accusation.  For a bunch of nineteen and twenty-year-olds to have anybody question how and where they spent their free time probably sounded like a return to high school.  The idea of “I’m grown; I can do what I want!” was probably foremost in their mind.  They even had a town hall about it.  I don’t think KIese meant it that way.  I think he just wanted to write what he saw and be as truthful about it as he could.  That being said, there were other people on both sides of the issue who decided to use what he wrote to stoke the flames of their own pet issues, but, in my mind, that’s not really his fault either.  

Ironically, one of the people who agreed with Kiese’s position the most was George Harmon.  Since Harmon came to campus, he wanted to limit the power and growth of the Greek organizations.  He considered them a serious distraction from the school's primary purpose.  He also considered them a huge pain in the ass.  The board, on several occasions, held back some of his efforts to limit the Greeks.  My dad, even though he had been Number One of the KAs and most of his adult friends had been KAs with him, either at Millsaps or Ole Miss, was pretty open to Dr. Harmon’s ideas about putting the breaks on the Greeks.  Part of that was because, as chairman of the board, he’d get a call every few years from somebody saying, “My precious daughter just failed out of sorority rust.  I’m gonna sue Millsaps, and Chi Omega, and George Harmon, and Jim Campbell.  You can’t do this to me!”  Then Daddy would call Bill Goodman and say, “We got another one.” 

I’ve known a lot of lawyers.  Bill Goodman was probably the most impressive.  He was the lead counsel for Millsaps, and he was the lead counsel for the state of Mississippi in the matter of Jake Ayers vs Bill Waller, one of the longest-running, most influential legal cases in Mississippi history.  By the time the case was settled, it was Ayers vs Kirk Fordice to give you an idea of how long the case churned in the Mississippi legal system.  Privately, Goodman would tell you Mississippi didn’t have a very defendable position.  Publicly, he successfully defended Mississippi’s position against some remarkable pressures for over twenty years.  The settlement he eventually brokered was not only mutually beneficial but opened an entirely new chapter in the history of public HBCUs in Mississippi.  

For my part, this was a time when I had returned to campus for the state purpose of working on my writing–only what really happened was I became something of an unpaid assistant for Lace Goss.  From the time I was a teenager, Lance was somebody that meant a lot to me.  On my return to Millsaps, I immediately became aware of and concerned about the fact that, as he got further and further from sixty years old, Lance lost more and more of his confidence in himself.  

The year before, Lance produced “A Few Good Men.”  It was the last new play he ever directed.  Everything else he directed from then until the day he died was a repeat of something he’d done in the sixties or seventies, his “golden age.”  I spent between an hour and two hours every day talking with Lance, but we rarely ever talked about the future or even the present; all we talked about was the past.  

Repeating shows he had done decades before, Lance usually wanted them done the exact same way he and Frank Hains did it back in 1968.  I think this was a source of frustration for Brent Lefavor.   Brent never knew Frank, but everybody who knew both men knew that Brent was more versatile and more talented as a designer and technician.  There were a few times when Brent made it pretty clear that he was the more talented artist and pushed Lance to try something new, but most of the time, he just swallowed his pride and did it the way Lance wanted to.

I felt like the right people were in place to handle the Kiese thing.  I liked and trusted his faculty advisors.  I liked and trusted the Dean of Students.  People would always make a face when I said I liked and trusted George Harmon.  He was a remarkably difficult human being, but he was also brilliant, and nearly every decision he made worked out well for the college.

George Harmon had a short temper, and he considered students’ social complaints, no matter what they were, an annoyance he shouldn’t have to deal with.  Sometimes, being his Dean of Students could be a thankless position because of that.  Had he stopped to consider it, he might have seen that he and Kiese wanted the same thing, but he didn’t stop to consider it.  Once the Purple and White ran into financial mismanagement problems, having spent their budget for the year in two months, he shut it down for the year and hoped it’d go away.  The open conflict went away, but the hurt feelings didn’t.

The next year, Charles Sallis had lobbied for a while to delay the Greek Rush.  Harmon thought we should have it the second semester or just not have it at all.  He’d been quoted a few times as saying, “Why can’t we just pick the names of who goes into what fraternity?”  After much hand-wringing and negotiation, they ended up moving rush into the Middle of the Fall Semester.  That must not have worked out very well because they didn’t keep it that way very long.  

Bid Day finally came.  Bid Day for girls is about white dresses, giggles, and hugs.  Bid day for boys is more than a reasonable amount of alcohol, stripping down to your gym shorts and painting your body either purple or your fraternity colors.  The KAs had a tradition called “The Great Wazoo,” which I, and some of my larger friends, were a part of.  

For people not a part of the Greek system, I can see how this would have been a major annoyance.  There were cannons firing, music blaring, and over a hundred half-naked boys covered in greasepaint causing problems.  One of those problems ended up being with Kiese's girlfriend.  Words flew back and forth; threats were made, and security was called.  Normally, just the fraternity boys would have gotten in trouble, but Kiese went into his room, got what they called a baseball bat, and brandished it as a weapon.  To me, it looked more like a police baton or something that size.  Apparently, it was something like the bat they use for kids' T-Ball.  Had it been a full-sized baseball bat, he might have been able to stand his ground, but with what he had, I was glad he didn’t use it because the fraternity guys would have swarmed him, and a bad situation would have been worse.

George Harmon was already on campus.  He would often hang out in his office on Bid Day, just in case it went to shit, which it almost never did, but on that day, it really did.  By lunchtime, he was on site.  By four o’clock, Bill Goodman showed up to get the story from the security guys and see what, if anything, the security cameras caught.  For the moment, everybody was suspended, and everybody was sent home.

This was on a Saturday.  By Tuesday, Bill Goodman brought Ruben Anderson in to help negotiate the case, and everybody said, “Oh shit.”  Kiese and his girlfriend were represented by Chokwe Lumumba Sr., and even he said, “Oh, shit.”  Bill Goodman was a brilliant strategian.  One of his tactics was to take away the opposition’s weapons before they had a chance to use them.  George Bush called this “shock and awe.”  Bringing in Judge Anderson on a case like this was Shock and Awe.  It was as if Bill Goodman had brought a shotgun to a card game and laid on the table saying, “Y’all play nice and friendly-like.”  Nobody on either side was going to question Anderson’s presence or his judgment in this matter, nor would our alumni or the press.  It was, or should have been, a finishing move.  

Anderson’s job was to negotiate between the parties and oversee sensitivity training for the fraternity boys.  The idea was to demonstrate how seriously the school took this issue without risking damage to anybody’s academic career.  As long as everybody kept their noses clean for the next year, nobody would get hurt.

In 1985, Bill Allain appointed Anderson as the first black judge on the Mississippi State Supreme Court.  Bill Allain served in between William Winter and Ray Mabus.  His governorship wasn’t a continuation of Winter’s policies, but it was pretty close.  My dad, Rowan Taylor, and some other guys decided that they were gonna take this nomination of Anderson and really make it stick and inject him into every center of power in Mississippi they could reach.  

Before Anderson had even been sworn in, I came home one day to see my mother preparing for a dinner party.  She said it was for Ruben Anderson and his wife, Phyllis, to help facilitate some social introductions for them.  I asked who the guest list was.  She said Bill Winter, Rowan Taylor, Brum Day, Bill Goodman, Herman Hines, and Charlie Deaton.   

I asked her if I could stay and help serve drinks with Johny Gore.  Gore’s official job was with one of the downtown law firms as a sort of messenger, but what made him famous was knowing what every businessman in Jackson drank and their wives and their girlfriends.  Besides Cotton at the Sun and Sand, Johnny Gore was probably the most famous bartender in the history of Jackson.  Hiring Johnny Gore wasn’t cheap, and it demonstrated that whatever was happening at that party was pretty important.

I asked my mother what she was serving, and she said, “Shrimp and Grits.”  I made a face.  There was no way she was serving the judge grits for supper.  What my mother knew, that I didn’t know, was that she and Jane Lewis had just read Bill Neal’s “Southern Cooking” cookbook, and they would be among the first to serve gourmet shrimp and grits–a dish that soon was on the best menus all over the South.

Back at Millsaps, The plan was for the fraternity boys to be on super, double-secret probation, and Kiese would be, too, since he had brought a weapon.  I made a couple of visits to KA chapter meetings to make sure they understood this was serious business; if they fucked around, they would be gone from Millsaps without hesitation.  Everybody involved, including me,  believed it would be one of the fraternity boys to fuck up and get expelled.  The thought was that once that happened, it might defuse the whole situation, and everybody would feel vindicated and justified, only that’s not what happened.  

Kiese owed a bunch of money in overdue library fines and lost his library privileges until he paid them.  He could still go to the library; he just couldn’t check anything out.  His girlfriend asked him to bring her a copy of one of the school's old annuals from the library.  I'm not even sure what she was thinking.  It clearly wasn’t helping him stay out of trouble.  Unable to check the book out, he tried to sneak it out and got caught.  They even had him on a security cam.  

The lawyers were again convened, and the feelings of the group were that they had set out the conditions of the probation.  Everybody on probation from this incident knew what was at stake, and as much as it was a shame to waste such a promising student over a library book, he was expelled, lest the other students on probation charge the school with violating the agreement they made.  And that’s how the story of Kiese Laymon went from him writing about limited social options for black students to him getting expelled.

I honestly think Dr. Harmon felt some sort of relief.  The last two things he ever wanted to deal with were Greek stuff and race stuff, and this was both.  His vision for the college had nothing at all to do with social issues.  Some people would say that part of his success was due to his ability to put blinders on and block out everything except what he wanted.  What he wanted here was to finish the refit of the student union and the PAC and NOT to deal with any of the social issues of the day.  

A protest was organized under the potted oak in the bowl.  Kiese was not present, but his friends were.  It was pretty clear they were outnumbered.  I think the idea was that other black students would stand up for him, and some did, but not that many.  The press came, but it wasn’t a very big story.  One of my friends made it a mission to get the phone number of the woman sent from WAPT and did.  I think she kind of liked him, but young reporters get moved around a lot, and pretty soon, she was moving to New Jersey.

The part of this story I don’t tell very often is that I was a witness to the whole incident that led to everybody getting put on probation.  I had parked myself on the veranda of Ezelle to watch the Bid Day antics, and it all played out to my right.  

The way I see it, Kiese and the current governor have both staked their reputation on what happened that day, and I’m more than willing to let them battle it out.  Their version of the story is far more important than mine.  At the end of the day, nobody really cares about the perspective of an older, moderate white guy.  There’s nothing I can say that will bring any more satisfaction or justice to anybody involved.  I’ve told a few people what I saw and heard.  Dr. Harmon, of course.  Bill Goodman, my sister, and her husband, Lance Goss and Doug Man.  I don’t think I’ll ever commit it to writing, though.  I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of chewing and digesting this over the years as a community, and I’m willing to leave it that way without trying to change anybody’s mind.

This was almost twenty years ago.  Since then, George Harmon retired and died.  Lance Goss retired and died.  We’ve had two presidents since then, and we’re getting ready to start with a third.  We still have an issue with balancing the social opportunities of black and white students, though.  It’s gotten better, but we’re still far from getting rid of it. 

The second oldest building on campus is a structure that’s been known as “The President’s House,”  “The Dean’s House,” and “The English House.”  In preparing for this year’s homecoming, there were a number of invitations to tour the “Black Student Union,” which is the current designation for that structure.

The last time I was in that structure, it was pretty ragged, so the first thing I asked Keith Dunn on Saturday at homecoming was, “‘what kind of shape is the building in.”  He assured me that, before turning it into the Black Student Union, they had gone in and reworked all the major systems (plumbing, electrical) and that the building was in pretty good shape.  That made me happy.  It’s a beautiful old house, and now it has a pretty significant history of its own.  There have been a couple of times along the way when it was slated for destruction.

I’m guessing that the Black Student Union will function like sort of an all-gender fraternal organization in an attempt to provide as many options for social gatherings for black students as there are for white students.  It also gives people who are interested a place to celebrate their cultural uniqueness and maybe organize community involvement.  

Sometimes, trying to provide an organized social experience for students doesn’t work out so well.  For the most part, most students basically want somebody pretty to make out with, someplace to party without getting in trouble, and somewhere to play Fortnite without getting disturbed.  Trying to provide a wholesome alternative to that can backfire, and nobody shows up.  Sometimes, it works great, though, and becomes a real asset to the community for quite a while.  Don’t be dismayed if the success or failure of this venture fluctuates.  Every four years, you get a new batch of students, and everything is new again.

Ultimately, I’d like to get to the point where there’s no real difference between the social life of white and black students.  It’s better now than it has ever been, and the Greek system is more integrated than it’s ever been, but it’s clearly not enough.  Fraternal organizations tend to be very culturally based.  I don’t know if there’s a way around that other than to continue to blend the cultures.

I think it's important that the school be proactive on issues like this.  As the black middle class and upper middle class grow, they’re going to be more and more of a significant part of the Millsaps community.  There was a time when most of the black students at Millsaps were the first generation of college students in their families.  While that still happens sometimes, more and more of the kids I meet at Millsaps are second and third-generation college students in their families, and that sort of thing is a real sea-change.  

There have been times when I felt pretty bad that we weren’t able to provide a more equal experience between white and black students at Millsaps.  We have pretty good luck with white and Asian students, particularly Indian students, but the gulf between white and black is still a significant challenge.  My entire life, we’ve had people, deep in the heart of Millsaps, working on these issues.  I guess I always thought it would progress faster than it did, but I’m very grateful for the progress we have made.

I used to complain to my dad about the size of a task before me, and he’d say, “You know how you eat an elephant, don’t you?  You eat them one bite at a time.”  At Millsaps, as far as race and culture goes, we’ve been eating that elephant, one bite at a time, for quite a while now.  Whenever I don’t feel satisfied with the progress we’ve made, I remind myself that it was an elephant to begin with, and a bunch of it is eaten already.  

Uncle Frank - Film Review

 Alan Ball is a playwright and screenwriter from Mariette, Georgia.  He's a Southern gentleman of a certain age (six years older than I am).  This and other factors mean he often writes on issues that travel in my lane.

His most famous work was the film "American Beauty" which won the Academy Award in 2000 for Best Original Screenplay and for a while was considered one of America's best films until it was revealed that its star, Kevin Spacey, was about as creepy in real life as some of the characters he plays.  Among actors, this is a phenomenon known as "DUH!".  This isn't really a rule among actors, although it happens fairly often.  Vincent Price, for instance, was an exceedingly gentle creature, a dilettante and a gourmand; the only characteristic he had in real life that he shared with the roles he played was that he could be something of an effete.  In life, Price always kept his sexuality as a very private matter, but after his death, his daughter revealed that Price was a gentleman who enjoyed the company of other gentlemen.  Are you surprised?

Alan Ball is an American Buddhist.  He claimed that the inspiration for American Beauty was the trial of Amy Fisher and an experience he had watching a plastic shopping bag floating in the wind, a scene that was included in the film and attributed to one of its characters.  Critics felt that American Beauty helped redefine and conceptualize masculinity in the previous century as we cross the threshold into this century.  

Amazon Prime offers his newest film, Uncle Frank, free to Prime members.  Like American Beauty, Uncle Frank concentrates on the second half of the previous century but goes back thirty years before American Beauty and sets the film in the early 1970s.  Uncle Frank tells the story of a man in his mid-forties from a small Southern Town who found that a small Southern town could no longer contain him, so he moved to New York and became an English professor.  

Noticing a kindred spirit in his young niece, he encourages her to do well in school so she can choose any college she wishes.  She chooses the one where he teaches.  At a party at his New York apartment, Frank and his niece Betty (now choosing the name Beth) hear the news that Franks's father, Beth's grandfather, has died.  At the party, Beth also discovers that her beloved uncle is in love with an Arab Engineer named Walid.  She and her aunt are the only people in the family who know Frank is gay, and Beth is the only one who has actually met Walid, who they call Wally.

Frank and Beth borrow Wally's car and drive to their small Southern town for Frank's father's funeral, only to discover that Wally has rented a car and has been following them.   Wally fears that Frank may need his support on this difficult journey.  He knows something about Frank's past that might make this trip extremely painful for him.  They agree that Wally can come along, but he has to keep himself hidden from the family.

Wally knows that, as a boy, Frank's father caught him kissing another boy.  His father said he had a sickness, and God hated him.  Confused, Frank writes a letter to the boy he kissed, saying he can never see him again, with disastrous consequences.   These are the demons Frank must face when he returns home for his father's funeral.  

Any time you have a story where the characters spend a great deal of time traveling from one place to another, the story is either a travelogue or an accounting of a transition from one state to another.  In this case, it's a story about a man who never faced what happened between himself and his father but is forced to deal with it when his father dies.  He uses a lot of the elements of a traditional Heros Journey to describe what happened to Frank.

Uncle Frank isn't nearly as complex and sometimes disturbing as American Beauty.  It's much more emotional, though, and you end up much more sympathetic to its characters.   Paul Bettany, who you probably know as Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, plays Frank.

There's a line in Tennessee William's play "Orpheus Descending" where Carol Cutrere says, "Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind."  I always think of that when I read work by Southern writers; they tend to leave bones and skins and clues in their work so that their kind can follow their kind.  Ball does that with Uncle Frank.

The issues of gay men, born in the South in the thirties and forties, ended up being something I found out a lot about, even though I never pursued it.  These men recognized something in me that made them believe I would hear their stories without the sort of prejudice they often faced from straight men in the South, so they told me their stories.  Sometimes, very happy stories, and sometimes very painful stories.  

In their sixties, seventies, and eighties, they told me stories about when they were young and beautiful and living a secret life in a world that would kill them if they knew.  Watching Uncle Frank reminded me very much of those stories.  For men of that generation, there could be a real brutality that men pressed onto other men, be they fathers, lovers, or just others who would judge them.  

Beth mentions Truman Capote several times as a writer she admires.  The character of Frank would be around ten or fifteen years younger than Capote would have been in real life.  In the sixties, Capote was the darling of New York intelligentsia; by the seventies, they had cast him out.  He was constantly drunk and paraded on the Tonight Show as something of a freak.  I think there are aspects of Frank's character that are intended to be echoes of the younger Capote before he became a parody of himself.

Ball writes the script in a way that people who would hate Frank for being gay would most likely hate this movie.  For people who, like some of the characters in the movie, are able to accept Frank's sexuality as just one aspect of a complex life, I think you might enjoy this.  It doesn't leave you as drained as American Beauty did, but that's okay.  Sometimes it's okay for a story to not tear your guts out.  

Secrets in the East

I’ve been delaying working on this for a few days.  Sometimes, what I have to say makes me uncomfortable.

My father had eight children. Four were human: my two brothers, my sister, and me; four were not human: Missco, Mllsaps, Trustmark, and St Dominic’s. He tried his best to balance his time between us, but sometimes, living things are difficult to balance.  In the five or six years before his death, I would regularly meet my father and his office for a drink after work. He alone understood how dangerously unhappy I was and blindly helped me search for the solution neither of us could see.  On those nights alone with my father in his office, he told me many things as he reflected back on my own history and the history of my city.   

One day, not long before he died, he told me that he had searched as far into the west as he could see to remove anything that might be a danger to his children in the future, but he failed to look very far into the east. Anyone who grew up in a prosperous and successful and growing Jackson and then expected that to continue in their lives probably understands what he meant. Nobody expected the city to die. We were doing great, but we didn’t look into the east.

I always knew that my dad kept secrets.  I also knew that he kept these secrets because if he didn't, somebody would get hurt, and that made me sad for him.  What happened to Jackson, why it grew so rapidly, then broke and started to shrink, is a story he was deeply involved in.  Some of it he told me, and some of it he kept secret. 

To understand what happened to Jackson, you have to understand what happened in 1969 and 1970 when nearly half the white students abandoned the Jackson Public Schools and started something else.  I wanted to resolve, in my own mind, what his role was in all this.  He told me a few things through the years, but I wanted to validate what he told me through other sources.  I wanted to see his role in what happened to Jackson the way other people saw it.

My dad was in the school business.  Even if he weren’t in the school business, he would have been right in the middle of all this because that’s how he lived, trying to build his community.  He told me many things, but there were many more I had to find out on my own.  

I had dinner with my sister this weekend.  There are things in my universe where she really is the only person alive who can understand what I’m saying.  After everyone else had left, she waited with me for my Uber to arrive.  I talked to her about how I’ve spent over twenty-five years digging deeply and researching what happened to Jackson, our home.  I always felt like, because of who our family was and because of who I was, I might be in a fairly unique position to understand what went on here, why, and what the results were.

There’s been so much written about what happened in Jackson and in Mississippi during the “civil rights era.”  It’s become this really complex mosaic of different points of view and different perspectives, and I’ve tried to consume it all, to try and understand what happened in a way that satisfied my own mind.  Doing this for so long, I’ve cultivated a pretty substantial body of knowledge.

I told my sister I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with all this history I’d accumulated.  I could write a scathing tell-all that exposes all the secrets of Jackson’s society and its racist underbelly, but the story was so much more complicated than that, but even if it weren’t more complicated than that, even if it were just the story of a bunch of unreconstructed racists screwing things up, nearly all those guys are dead, and the ones who aren’t dead are in a memory care facility now.  There’s nothing I could write that could bring anybody justice, and there’s nothing I could write that would change the past or change the future.  Most of these guys are dead, but their children aren’t; their grandchildren and, in some cases, their great-grandchildren are still very much with us, still very much a part of Jackson.  Did I want to be the guy who put down in a book that somebody’s beloved Pop-pop did something horrible long before they were born?  

I still want to tell this story, but I have to be careful and be gentle with the memories people have of the people who lived here.  I have to try not to be a hypocrite here because I have already said some pretty rough things about Ross Barnett and Alan C Thompson, and I very much know their families and descendants, but I’m trying to make allowances for people whose histories are already part of public discourse, and people (like Barnett and Thompson) who made a particular effort to make things difficult.

That being said, in my studies, I’ve found that some of the people everyone assumes were the villains might not be.  My entire life, I’ve heard people from every angle blame what happened in Jackson on Billy Simmons and the Citizen’s Council.  I can’t posit that Billy was anything like a good guy.  He said, wrote, and broadcast some of the most vile racist stuff that I’ve ever been exposed to.  He was pretty bad, but If you look at the number of kids who ended up enrolled at the three Jackson Citizen’s Council Schools and the fact that they were out of business by 1981, you can’t really say they caused the problem.  There just weren’t enough kids in those schools to account for the nearly 50% drop in white student participation in Jackson Public Schools, and even if they were, they were out of business before the first class of kids who had never been in public schools graduated.

In 1981, former Nixon Aide and lifelong republican operative Lee Atwater was recorded as saying: 

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N____r, n____r, n____r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n____r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N____r, n____r.”

Here, he lays out the infamous “Southern Strategy” pretty plainly.  It was never more relevant than in 1969 and 1970 in Jackson, Mississippi.  There were guys who believed everything Billy Simmons believed but didn’t like the way he said it.  In their minds, as long as you didn’t say “N____r, n____r, n____r” then you were in the clear, even if that’s what you were thinking.  These guys wanted schools that ticked all the boxes that the Citizen’s Council schools ticked but without being affiliated with the Citizen’s Council.  They managed to introduce class into this gumbo of race, class, and gender.  They considered themselves in one class and Billy Simmons and all his Citizens Council pals in another.  I have a problem with that.  Billy Simmons had the courage to tell us what he was.  These guys who were the same thing but tried to tell us they were something different were less of a man than Billy, in my opinion.  I can’t say that any of the things he believed were right or decent, but he had enough respect for other people that he would at least be honest and upfront about it and not hide it behind dog-whistle words like what Atwater was talking about.  

One of my fraternity brothers, a man by the name of Dick Wilson, tried to tell me not to judge Simmons too quickly.  “He’s a lot smarter than people realize,” Dick told me.  It took me a while to understand what Dick was saying, but he was right, Billy Simmons was kind of a genius.  You can look at his library now at the Fairview and see evidence of this.  What might tempt a guy with such a vast intellect down such dark avenues is something I don’t understand, but I’d really like to.  I’m fascinated by his story.

The influence of Kappa Alpha Order is waning in the world, and I think that’s probably for the best.  In 1969, it was at its peak.   When I look at the names of the men who organized and funded these non-citizens-council segregation academies in Jackson, a good two-thirds of them were KAs, mostly from Ole Miss.  We’ll be judged for that, and I think that’s fair.  These guys were community and business leaders; they could have said, “Let’s take all this money and effort and dump it into the public schools, and the Justice Department be damned!” but they didn’t. 

In 1969, most of these guys considered themselves at war, not with black Mississippians, but with the federal government.  Kirby Walker, superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, had a plan to gradually integrate our schools.  In interview after interview, he was proud of the fact that he had introduced black students into every school without incident.  I honestly think Mayor Thompson wanted a big, violent confrontation like what happened in Oxford.  He kept buying equipment and building up his forces to be ready for it, but it never happened.  

In the Alexander v Holmes County decision, the court decided that “justice delayed, is justice denied” and ordered the Mississippi schools to be racially balanced immediately. And in some cases, like Jackson Public Schools, they put the Justice Department in charge of it.  Kirby Walker spent ten years out of a thirty-year career trying to desegregate Jackson Public Schools.  He believed he had done a good job, only to have it torn from him and given to Washington Bureocrats.  In 1969, he retired rather than serve under the federal Department of Health Education and Welfare.  Upon retiring, he told my grandfather to say to my father, “Tell Jim to get those boys into private schools.  I just don’t know what’s going to happen with Jackson Public Schools.”  

That caused a bit of panic in my family.  Both my mother and father were products of the Jackson Public Schools.  They were our best and most profitable customer, and even with Dr. Walker retiring, my dad had many friends who still worked at Jackson Public Schools.  At the same time, nearly everyone he knew from Ole Miss was sending their children to either JA or Prep, and his fraternity brothers served on every board.  There was a time when four members of the Jackson Prep board of trustees had consecutively been the president of the Ole Miss Chapter of Kappa Alpha after my father.  For good or for evil, in the second half of the twentieth century, we got mixed up in everything that happened in Mississippi.

Announcing that the Justice Department was taking over our schools caused a full-on panic.  In it, with pressure from his own father and his father’s friends, I think my dad also panicked.  In his mind, sending us to St. Andrews quieted the voices, yelling that he had to do something while not giving in to the pressure to join a “segregation academy.”  Without a doubt, there were parents who were sending their kids to St. Andrews because it was almost entirely white, but there were also parents who sent their kids to St. Andrews precisely because it wasn’t entirely white.

There were heroes in those days, although we don’t talk about it very much.  Andy Mullins couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five or twenty-six when he fought off efforts from without and from within to force St. Andrews to join the Mississippi Private School Association, so boys at St. Andrews wouldn’t have to worry about playing football against any black boys.  Andy went on to fight a number of important battles, but that one must have been pretty tough, considering how young he was and how uncertain the times were.  As I understand it, St. Andrews still plays in the league he got us into.

I’ve made no secret about how much I fought David Hicks when I was at St. Andrews, but there’s something important I need to say about him.  David pretty quickly assessed the situation in Jackson and what was going on with the other schools almost as soon as he got here.  He very firmly drew a line in the sand and said, “This is what they’re about, and this is what we’re about.  Don’t ever get it confused.”  The school still operates under that principle today.  

In 1950, Jackson had one of the most successful and friendliest public schools in America (so long as you were white.)  By 1970, nearly half the white students in Jackson Public Schools abandoned it rather than stay and be a part of the Justice Department's efforts to balance the school’s population racially.  They left, and they never went back.  People who couldn’t afford to keep sending their kids to private schools left the city.

I often think about what would have happened if the scores of families who left Jackson Public School had banded together and decided they were going to make the best of whatever the Justice Department had in mind.  I think, within just a few years, they would have realized that they could handle this, and with a strong public school that everybody supported, there never would have been the massive white flight that decimated Jackson.  There were efforts from several prominent private school educators in the 80s and 90s who returned to the public schools and tried to undo the harm they had done.

Jesus talks to us about shifting sands.  There’s even a pretty great song about it.  Mississippi twice built its house on shifting sands.  Once, when we started importing people from another part of the world to serve as slaves here, and then again, when we decided that we had to keep these former slaves under our thumb and forever separate from us socially and politically after slavery ended.  What Jesus said about building a house on the shifting sands was true; our foundations came tumbling down.

None of the people in this story meant to choose the wrong thing.  That choice was made decades before they were born.  The people in this story were trying to navigate the world as it was left to them.  Their biggest sin was not questioning the assumptions they were working under.

In the story of what happened in Jackson, there were bad actors, that’s for sure.  Because I’ve been doggedly pursuing this story for thirty years, I’ve uncovered a lot of them, even the ones my father tried to keep hidden from me.    Most people weren’t bad actors, though.  Most were regular people trying to do the best they could for their families during a time when nothing made much sense, not the world they knew before and not the world laid out before them.  Faced with a very uncertain future, a lot of them just panicked.  Moving their kids out of the public schools into a private school seemed like the safe thing to do, and when your children are involved, nearly everyone wants the safe thing to do.

So, here we are.  Fifty years later, and I’m keeping the same secrets my father kept.  Maybe that’s my legacy.  Maybe that’s what he was trying to keep me away from.  What I know is this:  there were bad men.  There were many painful and ignorant and short-sighted things–but most people were good.  They may have been short-sighted or misguided by our tangled and snarled culture, but they all wanted something better for their children, even if what they were afraid of wasn’t even real.  

Jackson survived.  It just moved to Madison, Brandon, Pearl, and Clinton.  The city itself sits like a scar on the landscape.  A reminder of the good we failed to do.  I wanted to know what happened to my city.  I wanted to know if my father or I were culpable for what happened.  I think he was, and I am, but so is everyone else.  People use the word “simple” to describe Mississippi.  “We’re simple.”  “We have simple minds.”  “We have simple lives.”  None of that is true.  There’s nothing simple about living here or about being born here.  Our history is a mass of rose thorns, kudzu, shards of broken stained glass from churches where no one meets anymore, cornbread, and piercing sunlight.  It’s really hard to make any sense of it unless you were brought up in it.  Look as far as you can to the West, but look to the East too, when you can, and sometimes decide to keep secrets.

Ghosts of the King Edward Hotel

 Most "professional" writers produce between one and two thousand words a day.  On a good day, I can easily do between five and ten thousand.  Even if half of that is garbage (which it often is), I'm still ahead of the game.  

What kills me is the process of going back and not only correcting grammar and sentence structure but deciding what stays and what goes.  I'd rather have dental work than spend a day doing that.  Most of the time, for blog and Facebook stuff, I don't do it.  For that writing, I'm just making words for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it.  

My other Achilles heel is that I'll often get eighty percent finished with a project and have not one clue on how to close it out.  Most people like writing with a dramatic conclusion to the conflict, but you almost never get that in life, so I'm not very good at imagining it.  As a result, I have about two dozen pieces in a folder named "unfinished" because I couldn't figure out how to end them.

One of these pieces I started a long time ago.  Before they renovated the King Edward Hotel, young people who weren't very good at balancing risks and rewards would sometimes break into the abandoned hotel and explore.  I always found that block of West Capitol Street fascinating.  There were all these really cool buildings with nothing inside them.  I knew they had histories, and I would often imagine what they were.  

One of these long abandoned buildings had an elaborate green and white mosaic in front of it that read "Bon Ton Cafe."  There were several places around West Capitol Street that had inlaid tile decorations like that.  The Mayflower has probably the most elaborate mosaic, but even Lott Furniture had one.  The Standard Life Building has one, but it uses big cut sheets of stone rather than square tiles.  I imagined, back in the 20s or 30s, there was a guy who went from business to business, selling his skills at laying mosaic tiles.  

Back before the explosion of the internet, if I wanted to find out something about Jackson's past, I had to go to the library.  I could ask the librarian, but if they didn't know off the top of their head, they pointed me to their extensive collection of Jackson papers on microfilm and microfiche.  I got pretty good at using those machines.  While they were fascinating to use, there wasn't such a thing as a text search feature.   The papers were organized by date, so the best you could do was to go to the date you were interested in and scan whole editions to see if they had the information you wanted.

Without a specific date in mind, I tried just pulling random dates in the 20s and 30s in hopes of finding maybe an ad or a review of the Bon Ton Cafe.  No such luck.  Since I had to make up a lot of the details anyway, I decided to make up all the details and create a false history for the Bon Ton Cafe, based on what I knew about The Mayflower, Primos, The Rotisserie, and The Elite.

Now that I have access to newspapers.com, I've gone back and checked for real information about the Bon Ton Cafe, and it turns out a lot of my guesses were right, but some were terribly wrong.   Since every restauranteur I ever met who got their start before 1960 was an immigrant from a Mediterranean country, I assumed the guy who started the Bon Ton was too, and said he was Lebonese.  That was wrong; he was from Germany.  The imaginary menu I came up with turned out to be exactly right.

Between the end of the war and 1960, businesses on that block of West Capitol did pretty well.  With the train depot on the other side of the street, they could always count on business.  They couldn't always count on the depot, though, by 1960, passenger travel dropped off considerably.  Dumas Milner bought the King Edward in 1955.  He modernized it by replacing the grand staircase with an escalator, then considered fantastically modern and impressive.  By June 1967, he locked the doors on the King Edward, never to open it again in his lifetime.  

Milner was a friend of my grandfather, and in all my studies of Jackson's history, he's the most interesting to me.  There were always rumors that Milner was connected to the mob.  Those were kind of true, but mostly not true.  My father explained it to me once.  In the old days (before 1980), all the banks had a policy that automobiles were not considered fixed assets (because they moved), so dealerships who borrowed money based on the value of their inventory had to pay off the entire note once a year, and then once the old note was paid off, they would write a new note so they could buy new inventory.  If the time came to pay off the annual note, and a dealership didn't have the cash on hand, it wasn't unusual for Jackson dealerships to borrow the money from New Orleans bootleggers or Memphis merchants and then pay them off once the bank wrote a new note.  If this sounds convoluted and unnecessary, the banks eventually decided it was too.

Even though Milnew owned hotels and restaurants and Pinesol, he made most of his money from selling cars, so when he had to, he would borrow money from these guys.  Besides all that, being in the hotel and restaurant business in Mississippi before 1966 meant you had to deal with New Orleans bootleggers because every hotel in Jackson had a bar, and selling alcohol was illegal (although, if you did, you had to pay tax on it) and at one point, Milner owned The King Edward, The Robert E Lee, and the Sun n' Sand.  To get around the laws against serving booze, these bars were all legally set up as clubs.  To gain membership to the club, you paid the hotel clerk a buck or two, and you got a card saying you were a club member and you could drink.  Milner owned the Patio Club, among others.

The King Edward Hotel Died because Mississippians quit using passenger trains, but they switched to America's new obsession, getting every human being in the United States to own a car, which Milner also made money on, so no matter what, he was in the good.  By the time I met Dumas Milner, he had retired after a stroke.  Most of his businesses were either sold off or closed down.  The Sun 'n Sand was still going strong.  My grandfather loved him and loved the fact that a guy who could be successful at so many different things lived here in Jackson.

I'm going to try and finish my piece on the Bon Ton Cafe this week.  It's an utterly meaningless story, but I enjoyed it.  It reminds me of being a little boy and eating at the Mayflower or Primos downtown.  When they reopened the King Edward Hotel, a whole bunch of ghosts flew out.  Maybe one of them wanted me to write this story.