I always had horrible migraines. It is one of the two constants
of my life, so far back as I can remember, until I reached middle
age — when migraines usually become less frequent, and more
to the point, when ibuprofen became an over-the-counter drug and I
could take as much of it as I needed. I am told there were
unexplained crying spells when I was an infant, and of course as
soon I was able, I began to complain of headaches. And that set me
on my course to Mississippi.
My mother was an intelligent woman in a difficult position, but
her intelligence had limits and one of her limitations was her
abiding faith in experts. She had once considered a career in
medicine herself, and to that end attended Rice Institute (now Rice
University), her admission being somewhat facilitated by the fact
of many men of college age being away at war and her having an
uncle on the board of regents. But failing quantitative analysis
three times running put an end to her thoughts of a medical career.
Nonetheless, she eventually completed a degree in biology, which
when hard times came served her (and me) by allowing her to become
a high school biology teacher with an emergency teaching
certificate. Being the woman she was, she soon undertook to remove
the "emergency" from her certificate by taking the required
education and psychology courses. She believed everything she ever
read in a textbook, and perhaps in the case of the psychology
textbooks, this was not a good thing.
(pullout)
There was another rumor too. It was that three
civil rights workers had been killed by the Klan and the FBI would
never find their bodies because they had been buried in a dam.
For my part, I gave them every reason to think I was autistic
— well, every reason but one. Of course, there wasn't any
autistic in those days, at least not outside of learned journals.
It was "brain damaged." But they had observed a few things about
autism even then.
Everything I got that had wheels I would turn upside down so I
could spin the wheels. I cannot explain my fascination with
spinning wheels, entirely, but a part of it was that when you apply
a force to a spinning wheel, it tends to react in what seemed me a
very counterintuitive way. It just did not seem right to me, and it
never did seem right to me. That cost me when I got to high school
physics, but that, as they say, is another story. I can also
explain, but only to a point, why I sometimes stared at bright
lights. Light is very painful to migraine sufferers. But as nothing
really helped the pain, and the pain was so intense, sometimes I
would stare at the light. What I had in mind, although I was out of
my mind in pain, was something like the thought that I could burn
out the pain circuits in my brain, if I looked into the searing
light — that the pain would stop if I let whatever was
hurting be consumed by the light that was hurting it. Of course it
did not work. Nothing worked. I would have plucked out my eyes if I
had thought that would work. I did not think that would work, but
there were times I thought of plucking out my eyes anyway.
Spinning wheels and staring at bright lights. Not conclusive,
you know, but often observed in brain damaged children. What did
not fit was my intelligence, which seemed considerable as measured
by every instrument the experts had at that time. And my mother, as
I have said, believed in experts. Well, autism might have been
right. We now know that there are higher functioning autistic
people, although what the experts knew then, I cannot say. The more
I read of Asperger's syndrome, the more I think it possible that I
had it, but at this stage in my life, it no longer really
matters.
Meanwhile, my migraines brought me to brain damaged by another
route. I was in medical hospitals many times, sometimes as an
inpatient for up to a week, for nothing more that tests. I had more
EEGs than I can count,
and all kinds of chemistries, and so forth. The best of this I
recall, was being wheeled in a chair to the radiology lab, where I
sat for a while, and being wheeled back to my room. The next day
they wheeled me back to the radiology lab, where a young whitecoat
positioned a sort of pointy cone thing in front my throat. I was
about seven at that time. "You won't find anything," I told him,
"because you didn't give me the isotope when I was here yesterday."
I thought he would faint.
When he had composed himself, he looked at my chart, which
evidently said that I had been given the isotope, and he went back
to positioning his instrument, which in the fullness of time, of
course, revealed not a trace of radio-iodine in my throat. He left
the room cursing and yelling. Then of course there were a lot of
whitecoats and suits with many questions about the "very special
pill," and whether I was given it, whether I spit it out, and so
forth, and they would give each other significant looks when I
insisted on calling the "very special pill" an isotope. Finally one
of them asked me how I knew I had been supposed to get an isotope.
I said that the place I was taken said "Radiology" on the door, but
they had not X-rayed me the first day, and when I came back the
second day, the doctor started pointing that thing at my thyroid
— what else was I supposed to think? And that was the end of
the questions.
Well, you know, I really did not know any anatomy, and had the
concept of thyroid somewhat confused with Adam's apple, but nuclear
medicine was a big damn deal at the time, and America was saturated
with propaganda about every possible peaceful use of Our Friend the
Atom including many films, so I didn't even have to read very well
— although I did read rather well for a seven-year-old
— to obtain the facts I needed to startle them. I think it
was remarkable that I could make the deductions I made in those
circumstances, but I really did not know much about what was going
on, or what they were doing to me. They could have made a million
different mistakes (and perhaps they did) in which I would have
been none the wiser, but they happened to make one where I knew a
few facts. I had no idea what a thyroid did, or why they were
interested in mine, and I was not a medical Rainman or anything.
But it cut out the I-am-dealing-with-an-infant bedside manner of
some of the whitecoats, although in some cases that was replaced
with I-may-be-dealing-with-a-Martian, which I still reckon was an
improvement.
Eventually the EEGs
did come up with something. They called it a "left temporal spike"
and prescribed Dilantin™. Now I do not know whether they were
entirely frank with me in suggesting that my migraines were related
to what they found on the EEGs. Aside from my migraines having
started in early childhood or infancy, that I was male, and that
the so-called "Ramparts Syndrome" — the jagged shimmering
zigzags in my field of vision — seemed to occur independently
of the headaches instead of as their precursor, I have classical
migraines. I am not so sure now that they thought treating the
spike would help the migraines, or whether they held out that
promise to try to get me to comply with the treatment for the
spike. At the time, I took them at their word, took the
Dilantin™, and when after several weeks I had a migraine
anyway, I stopped taking the Dilantin™ on any regular basis,
which I accomplished simply by not reminding my mother to give it
to me. Occasionally she would realize it was time for a refill, but
the bottle was still full, and she would threaten me with the
possibility of a seizure — which threat she also used from
time to time to prevent my going swimming or something — but
since I'd never had a seizure, I was unimpressed by the threat and
eventually the issue of Dilantin was forgotten as were the threats
of seizures.
(pullout)
it was discovered that the diplomas he had on his
wall were all forgeries
The experts, however, had convinced her that I was brain damaged
— which was true so far as it went — but it set her
even more firmly on the course of consulting all kinds of experts,
and my life was punctuated with all kinds of medical and
psychological testing and interviews with numerous, mostly
unpleasant, experts. In the meantime I became an adolescent, and a
fairly unruly one at that. I was in serious trouble in school
several times, and sometimes I did not come home at night.
So it was that some time in the spring of 1964 I found myself in
the office of yet again another psychologist. But he was not a
psychologist, you know. A year or so later he was accused of
interfering with some patients and it was discovered that the
diplomas he had on his wall were all forgeries, and fairly crude
ones at that, and that he had been receiving kickbacks for some of
his referrals of troubled youth to various private schools. He was
a perfect gentleman with me however, although by that time I had
been around the block a few times and I knew an old queen when I
saw one. And it began with the usual battery of tests. He had them
all, and I had taken all of them before. Some place in there he
slipped me the psycho test. This is the one that tries to determine
if you are a pathological liar by such subterfuges as asking you
whether you always tell the truth in all circumstances and then on
the assumption that you will tell the truth tries to determine if
you are a psycho by asking you flat out whether you torture little
animals much or have set fire to a nursing home recently or whether
the voices in your head often ask you to kill anyone in
particular.
I recognized this test, so I knew right away the homo questions
would be in it. Now I had always lied about the homo questions
before. Indeed, when I first got EEGs, when I was six or seven, my
main concern was that they could read my mind and tell I was gay.
That was not entirely a fantasy of my own making as the
Donovan's Brain scenario was a staple of science
fiction at the time. And of course it was the '50s, so if they
could tell I was gay, I knew my life would be as good as over. But
by the spring of 1964, the few close friends I had knew anyway, and
I had read the old queen who was giving the test, and basically I
just did not give a damn anymore, so I answered the homo questions
honestly.
Afterward, I had the supposedly super confidential interview
with the pretend psychologist in which anything I said would not be
relayed to my mother, which I did not believe for one second
— but I never could tell if he had told her, and it was
really rather dry. You're a very bright young man, yadda, yadda,
yadda, indicates you can accomplish anything you set out to do
yadda, yadda, yadda, entirely normal except you indicated you have
had some homosexual experiences, is that accurate? And I said, yes
it is accurate, and I was very surprised that that was that.
Interview over.
Port Gibson
To this day, I don't really know what was in his mind, but he
prescribed summer school in a military academy in Mississippi.
Since, as was later revealed, he got kickbacks for this kind of
referral, there may be no point in trying to read anything into it.
Still — summer school in an all boys school in Mississippi
where there was no air conditioning and everyone runs around in, at
most, underwear except to go to class or meals, communal showers
— don't throw me in that briar patch! But I did not quite
appreciate all the better points of the situation until I got
there, so I was strongly opposed. But the guy had a diploma on his
wall and my mother, as I have said, believed in experts. About the
only redeeming thing about the situation was that in the summer
they did not do the military thing, so there wouldn't be any
drilling and saluting and stuff. There wouldn't be real uniforms,
but we would wear khakis — which would come back from the
local laundry like cardboard. They did not tell me about the starch
beforehand. It was an unpleasant surprise when I receive my first
laundry back, mitigated only by the fact that it was the first time
in years that I did have to do my own laundry.
Now I have a confession to make. It is something very shameful.
Those of you who have read my account of my first meeting with
George Bush, the current one, know it. In 1964, I was a Republican.
Okay, I have a ton of excuses. In those days, in the South, the
Democrats were the party of racism and I was an anti-racist from
early childhood. I was, in 1964, a Goldwater Republican, which
would make me in today's political map, a libertarian. I had read
Ayn Rand and everything. Unlike a lot of so-called Goldwater
Republicans, I also had actually read Goldwater's stuff. I knew
when he said "states' rights" he really meant "states' rights." But
when he said "states' rights" most everyone else heard "Jim Crow,"
because "states' rights" was the code word so many of them used for
"Jim Crow" in those days. It was many years before I understood
that Lyndon Johnson really was the force that passed the Civil
Rights Act and really was an FDR Democrat. So when summer
rolled around, I shoved my footlocker which was covered with
"Goldwater '64" stickers into the luggage compartment of the bus
and I was off to Mississippi.
I met Chet MacArthur (not his real name; he had another famous
surname) on the bus. I recall his name because of the associations
of his surname, but he was certain he was no relation. He was going
the same place I was, but I don't remember if I ever knew what got
him committed to this fate. He had raven hair and olive skin, but
with perfect English and a Scottish surname, he would pass —
something that never occurred to me on the bus, but upon which my
life would depend.
Chet was from McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. He spoke
English without a trace of an accent, and neither of us spoke Texan
— which is to say, neither of us had a discernible Southern
accent. Although I think he had some experience with boarding
school, and certainly seemed to have more experience traveling on
his own than I did, he had never been to the school we were
traveling to before. We never became great friends, but we were the
only boys on the bus and it was a long ride — longer for him
of course since he had started in the Valley — so we sat
together in the back of the bus, chain-smoking and talking.
The bus stop in Port Gibson, like many of the stops in tiny
towns, was a flag stop at an ancient gas station. We arrived after
dark and an old man in a battered station wagon came to collect us.
We were a day or two early for the start of the summer session and
the hour was late so we were put in a room together on the ground
floor of a barracks and told not to settle in too much because we
were likely to be moved when the room assignments were handed
out.
The old man — called "The Colonel" by everyone although I
think he had introduced himself to me by name — it turned
out, was the ROTC instructor in the
regular session and with his wife had an apartment somewhere in the
barracks. Chet and I had the rest of the barracks to ourselves. My
first unpleasant discovery was biting flies. The second was that we
were not allowed to smoke anywhere on the campus — which I
discovered when the headmaster appeared at our door. The smoking
policy was a new thing and was soon revised when the other boys
— including many who had attended before under the previous,
permissive smoking policy — arrived, but in the meantime,
Chet and I would have to sneak around in the bushes for a few
puffs. In this process, we discovered that the headmaster — a
tall angular fellow with an explosive temperament — was given
to sneaking around in the bushes and spying through windows, which
I suppose he could pass off, if caught, as supervision.
This was the Chamberlain-Hunt Academy. But we had no idea of the
lay of the land that first night. Evidently there were several
other barracks, and in one of them was another boy, one who had no
place to go between sessions and more to the point was a bugler of
sorts. At any rate we had reveille at the crack of dawn, which was
really quite irksome, but both Chet and I were happy for an early
breakfast since we had nothing but bus stop sandwiches the day
before. The downside to breakfast was grits. It was
Mississippi.
This was my first experience with culture shock and the constant
"nigger this" and "nigger that" soon had me numb. There was, of
course, pervasive, thorough-going racism in Houston, but nothing
like at CHA. Now, I
will grant that perhaps my observations of CHA were somewhat skewed by being
made in the summer session. It was after all summer school, and as
a rule the better students would not be attending. Although I was
poor student in the Houston schools, I was not attending CHA in the summer for
academic reasons, but was there because of the quack psychologist's
prescription, as an experiment to determine whether I should be
committed to CHA for
the remainder of my secondary education.
CHA was not yet,
and I don't know if it ever became, one of the grand "white flight"
academies of the South. Of course public school integration was not
yet a reality in much of Mississippi. As the other boys arrived it
became clear this was a huge nest of slackjawed yokels of the
redneckiest variety. I hated CHA — mostly on account of
the weaselly headmaster — and was appalled by the culture of
the Deep South in general and Port Gibson in particular. But the
truth to tell, I really wasn't as miserable as I thought I ought to
be, which owed mostly to my making two or three fast friends,
almost in spite of myself.
One of them was the bugler, who it turned out was a Cajun boy. I
would give worlds to remember his name, but I don't, so I will call
him Jimmy. Jimmy lived at the school year-around for he had no
place to go on holidays and intersession breaks. Whether he had a
family, broken or not, and if he did not have one who paid his
tuition and board, I do not know and did not ask. He was allowed to
remain in his room in his familiar barracks in the summer, in spite
of it being closed because of the reduced number of students in the
summer session. He had the place to himself except for the young
instructor and his young wife who had an apartment in the barracks
and were the subjects of some of Jimmy's bawdy stories because of a
loophole in a door in their bedroom which was otherwise sealed off
when their apartment had been created.
When the smoking policy was returned to normal, the designated
smoking area was a small dungeon under the ancient main building.
That was where all of the smokers could be found at any unregulated
time of the day (and many regulated ones) and a number of the
nonsmokers went there too for the company. One day when I had been
at CHA a couple of
weeks, Jimmy and I and a very slight, very pale boy, who I will
have to call Hank for not remembering his name, were in the smoking
room between classes. The only remarkable thing about the situation
was that there were only three of us. As we all got up to attend
our next class, the little boy — quite out of the blue
— spun on his heels and punched me in the face with what must
have been as much force as he could muster. He explained later that
in that moment he decided that I must be a queer, which of course
was an accurate observation that I wouldn't have argued with except
that it bore no relationship to anything that had happened in the
smoking room or the civil conversation we had just had. At any rate
Jimmy promptly bloody Hank's nose.
The boy who had hit me complained that it was none of Jimmy's
business and I should have defended myself in a fight that Jimmy
had no part in, and what right had Jimmy to defend a queer anyway.
Jimmy explained to Hank that I was "class" and a "gentleman"
whereas Hank was white trash — which didn't address the queer
question exactly, but was no doubt what Jimmy sincerely believed,
and Hank did not ask more questions because Jimmy was the top boy
both by virtue of being more familiar with CHA and of being by far the most
athletic and admired boy in the school.
Now of course when you say "the South," everyone thinks race.
And it is race. But that is too simplistic. Class counts for a lot.
I observed the same thing many years later when I was in Atlanta
for a week for a speaking engagement. Above a certain level, there
still is race, but everyone contributes to maintaining the illusion
that race is not an issue. At any rate, class is a big issue, and
you did not have to go very far up in those days to encounter the
attitude "I'd rather deal with an honest nigger than with poor
white trash."
Anyway, I had been wondering why Jimmy had anything to do with
me, and then I knew: he thought I was a gentleman — and by
the standards of CHA,
I suppose I was a near approximation. Jimmy and I had a regular
mutual admiration society going, but he admired me for noble
reasons, and I admired him because he was physically beautiful. So
who was the gentleman?
This seemed to be a theme that was often repeated in my life.
For some reason — perhaps because I made a nonthreatening
confidant or an amusing sidekick or perhaps for better reasons
(some of them really did think I had a fine mind) — I got
along well with the leaders among men — not necessarily the
ones with position, but the ones who were first among men because
of the men they were. This often was taken as an affront by the men
of the second rank, who thought it inappropriate for their heroes
to look with favor upon me. They always want the place at the head
of the table and they think they can get there by first making
their way to the right hand of the man in that place. They never
considered that, perhaps, I was at the right hand precisely because
I deeply and sincerely did not want my companion's place. Oh, yeah,
there is some Biblical stuff about this, but I had not read it at
that time. I just naturally took my place at the back of the line,
and when I was called to assume a place of honor, it was never my
intention to humiliate those who had placed themselves ahead of me.
Humiliated, they were, but it was their own doing.
(pullout)
Hank had managed to inflict a cut below my eye as
well as a glorious shiner and Hank was bleeding profusely
Hank had managed to inflict a cut below my eye as well as a
glorious shiner and Hank was bleeding profusely, so Jimmy insisted
we both go to the nurse, consequences be damned. I did not think my
injury was at all serious, but Jimmy knew how things were done at
CHA, so I went. I was surprised that there was a little infirmary,
and there was a woman who was called "the Nurse" on duty. Later,
when I had migraines, I was referred to her. She could, of course,
do nothing for migraines, but I could lie down in the infirmary and
I would be left alone at times that lying in my bunk would be
forbidden and I would not have been left alone if I had.
Two bleeding boys showed up at the same time, and she drew the
obvious conclusion, which was wrong only in that I had not hit
Hank. "What happened to you?" she asked me, as if there was really
any question. "I ran into a door," I said, without any expectation
that she might believe it. "A door, huh?" she said, and looked me
in the eye. "Yes, a door," I said and I winked. Once she understood
that I did not take her for a fool, but had a story I would stick
to, she lightened up a bit.
My only purpose was to avoid more trouble, but this transaction
impressed Hank — who had expected me to tattle. He changed
his attitude very quickly. Perhaps he thought this was evidence
that Jimmy's opinion of me was correct, not that it mattered
whether it was correct. Jimmy's opinion was backed by Jimmy's
muscle, and muscle is the most convincing sort of evidence to guys
like Hank. My relationship with Hank never became what you would
call warm, but thereafter he always took my side, and was more than
sociable even when Jimmy was not around. The nearest we had to an
altercation thereafter was a dispute occasioned by Hank's
insistence that women had one more rib than men — on account
of Adam, you know — a dispute that I suggested we put to the
biology teacher (who was the young instructor in Jimmy's loophole
stories). Unfortunately, the biology teacher refused to provide an
unequivocal answer. It was Mississippi.
Now I should point out that CHA, at least at that time, was
nominally a Presbyterian school, although Presbyterian of the
southern kind. That made it about as liberal a sect as Christianity
in the South offered. That the biology teacher at such an
institution dared not to commit himself to a point of gross
anatomy, seem to me to be a very telling thing. I am glad I was not
enrolled in biology. The Colonel was my math instructor. He was a
bit more frank with me, although he might well be since math was
relatively safe from controversy. He detained me briefly after
class one day and told me not to raise my hand anymore. He said he
knew I always knew the answer and that he was sure I realized I was
surrounded by morons. Well, I did know that, but I hadn't been sure
he knew it.
I lied to the Nurse because I wanted to avoid trouble. By rights
I should have been in trouble everyday. I would sneak off to town,
I would cut study hall, I would get "lost" went we walked to town
for church on Sunday and be "found" after services. Actually I had
attended church once. It had a golden finger pointing skyward at
the top of its spire, and more to the point, it preserved the
shackles in the slave pews "for historical purposes," and that
sickened me far more than the thousands of Christian sermons I had
been forced to listen to ever had. I skipped breakfast, and so
forth. All these infractions are very tame by modern standards, but
were taken seriously at the time.
The problem was that we had weekly examinations in every
subject, and our rankings were announced at each Wednesday's
assembly, which were often jarring juxtapositions of a small
devotional service and unseemly school business. I always had the
top ranking both in my subjects and overall. I was the model
student. This seemed as peculiar to me as it was embarrassing to
the headmaster. I was told that for a time he insisted on reviewing
my examinations himself and he entertained the notion that I was
cribbing from other papers until it was pointed out that I often
had the only correct answer to an item, which made it manifestly
impossible that I copied. Something obviously had to be done.
The problem of study hall was solved with a new rule that
excused the two top-ranking students from mandatory study hall for
the following week. In that way, I was never guilty of cutting
study hall again. (And neither was Chet, who was invariably the
second-ranked student and as thoroughly astonished as I was to be
so elevated.) Chet studied a little, but I never did except to skim
the few literature assignments that I had not read before. The few
times I had been apprehended and physically escorted to study hall,
I had made a great show of not studying, sitting the whole time
with my books closed on the desk in front of me and staring at the
proctor. Everyone knew I did not study. So perhaps it was better
for the other students not to be reminded of that by seeing me idle
in study hall.
Church was a deadlock. When the headmaster threatened to drag me
to the church himself, I told him that if he did, I would sit in
the slave pews. That was the end of the discussion of church. I
would leave for church on Sunday, but I would never get there.
There was no way to paper that over. I don't know that I influenced
any of the others, but after a while there were about a half-dozen
boys who did not attend church but who hung around in the little
town on Sunday morning. This, in a town which called its main
street Church street and claimed to have more churches per capita
than any other town in the world. There was even a synagogue on
Church street, although of course it had been burned out, painted
with swastikas, and was only a ruin.
The headmaster really, really hated me. I think his name was
Crutchfield — although that may not be right. Like any such
school in the South, CHA afford him the opportunity of
corporal punishment, but nothing happened to me. Evidently there
had been an incident with a previous student, which was especially
vicious and Crutchfield had ignored the school's own standards for
physical abuse and he, or what ever board governed him, had found
it wise to delegate such punishments to the Colonel. That would
afford Crutchfield no satisfaction, for he wanted to strangle me
with his own hands, and for that reason or some other, I was immune
from corporal punishment.
We, meaning my roommate and myself — eventually it was
Chet again — detected him a couple of times when he spied on
us through the bushes outside our window. Thereafter, we
occasionally turned to the window and said "Hello, Dr.
Crutchfield." Of course most of the time we did not know whether he
was out there or not, but we were pretty certain we nailed him a
few times when we really hadn't heard anything. He startled us a
few times, too, by suddenly appearing in our door, in spite of the
creaky boards in the hall floor.
Crutchfield aside, CHA was a spooky place and there
were ghost stories. The stories went that either Mr. Chamberlain or
Mr. Hunt had killed somebody or been killed by somebody in an
impromptu duel over some election results which displeased one or
the other of them. I don't really remember except that the upshot
was that Mr. Chamberlain's ghost haunted Mr. Chamberlain's large
Bible, which was supposed to be somewhere in the institution, and
so forth. Very early on, the rumor spread that Lee Harvey Oswald
had attended Chamberlain-Hunt — remember this was the summer
of '64, some seven months after the assassination of John Kennedy.
I did not pay much attention to the rumors, but one Wednesday
assembly Dr. Crutchfield took note of the Oswald rumor enough to
deny it, although he admitted Oswald's older brother and
half-brother had both attended.
Lars 1966
There was another rumor too. It was that three civil rights
workers had been killed by the Klan and the FBI would never find
their bodies because they had been buried in a dam.
I do not believe I saw a television set the whole time I was in
Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The barracks I saw at
Chamberlain-Hunt Academy had no lounges, but several of the
barracks were closed for the summer except for the apartments that
instructors had in each barracks. Rarely I had a glimpse of one of
those apartments when someone went in or came out, and by what I
saw, they were furnished to be quite homey, but I do not recall
seeing a television set. I do not even know whether there was
broadcast television that would reach Port Gibson. Perhaps the
school library got newspapers. I never knew where the library was,
and heard of it only as being the repository of Dr. Chamberlain's
Bible and his ghost which guarded it.
A few of the other boys did read, and we exchanged James Bond
novels. One of the boys had a collection of Wonder Warthog comics
which were quite novel to me for I had never seen anything other
than above-ground comics, save for a couple of Tijuana bibles. But
I imagine being the librarian at Chamberlain-Hunt was the loneliest
job in the world.
I had a little nine-volt transistor radio with an ear plug. I
used it to listen to the Republican convention on one of the
clear-channel stations. I was not much of a music fan, and
certainly not of the sort of music I could receive over the air in
Port Gibson. I suppose I might have searched for news, but I
didn't.
So when late in June the rumor went around that the Klan had
killed three civil rights workers and buried their bodies in a dam
where the FBI
would never find them, it was mixed up in my mind with all other
kinds of lore, ghost stories, and claptrap. I didn't get real news
— the sort of thing that was read by Chet Huntley — and
somehow if it did not come from a television set, I guess, it did
not quite register with me in the same way. Before Watergate,
network news was an exercise in the journalism of credulity, but
for a city boy like myself it had a stamp of authenticity. When I
was cut off from the networks, it seemed to me there was no news. I
did not understand that in a small, timeless town in Mississippi,
rumors were the news.
Port Gibson was the seat of Chamberlain-Hunt Academy and the
ass's-end of the universe. It was landlocked. The local lore was
that it once had indeed been a river port, but the Mississippi had
walked away from the town in the middle of the night and never
returned. Smart river. The local lore was that Grant had called the
town too beautiful to burn, but if there were a germ of truth in
that, nothing special remained a hundred years later. Church Street
was nothing more than the name the locals gave the highway as it
passed through town. CHA was at the southern end of
town, on the highway, on a slight elevation, where — the
totally fictitious student lore had it — cadets mounted a
valiant, but hopeless defense of the town (in fact, the school had
not existed at the time of the Civil War). North, and downhill, on
the highway was the First, and so far as I could tell, only
Presbyterian Church with its gilded steeple giving the (index)
finger to God. Across the highway was the burned-out, desecrated
synagogue, and further down the highway were the churches of other
protestant sects.
When I first started ducking Sunday services, I would break off
with the other boys who claimed affiliations with other sects
— and then of course I would duck out on them. This worked
until I fell under Dr. Crutchfield's close scrutiny when he
researched my records to discovered that nominally I was
Presbyterian.
Two streets to the west of the highway was Main Street, in spite
of the obvious fact that the highway was the main street. But Main
Street had the obligatory Confederate statue and a little country
store where the boys who ducked out of Sunday services would drink
Cokes and buy cigarettes and cigarette loads. The store did a brisk
business in cigarette loads, for bumming was a way of life among
the students, and there were several who always bummed, and giving
one of them a loaded cigarette was an entertainment that it seemed
would never grow old until Jimmy declared one day that it had
gotten old. They also sold a liquid breath freshener called Tips in
tiny bottles. I suppose Tips™ had some very slight alcohol
content, but it was said you could get high by mixing Tips™
in your Coke™, and I suppose we all tried it once, but there
were some boys who always had Tips™ in their
Cokes™.
No black people lived in Port Gibson, so far as I could see.
There was a black settlement somewhere off to the north and east,
which is where all the maids, chauffeurs, janitors, and cooks came
from — and whether it was technically within the bounds of
the town I do not know, but — so I was told — if any of
them were on the white streets after dark, no matter the nature of
their errand, it would be considered "very serious" —
pronounced in ominous tones. There was a controversy about an old
invalid white woman who wanted her maid to live in, in order to
assist her at night in case of an emergency, but if that matter was
ever resolved, I don't remember hearing what the resolution
was.
Almost everything I ever knew of Port Gibson I picked up at the
little store on Main Street. At the mention of a swimming pool my
ears pricked up. It was summer in Mississippi. But after all, I
came from Houston where I had never had air conditioning, so I did
not find the heat unusually oppressive. But I did miss swimming. As
it turned out Port Gibson did have a municipal swimming pool, but
it had been closed to avoid integrating it. There was a move
underway to try to form a private (i.e. whites only) country club
which would buy the pool from the city for a nominal sum, and of
course all white citizens would be admitted to the country club for
a nominal fee, and of course the members would have unlimited
privileges to admit white guests. The plans seemed to be stymied by
provisions that park land was dedicated to the public in
perpetuity, yadda, yadda, yadda. In any event, I couldn't go
swimming.
I never quite knew the economic basis of Port Gibson's
existence. All the white houses I saw seemed to indicate ample, if
not lavish means. The land was very rich, for this was what they
called the Delta. Now my impression from my geography classes back
in Houston, was that a delta was the land deposited at the mouth of
a river. But in Mississippi, the word seemed to mean all of the
flood plain where nutrients from upstream were deposited. I'm not
sure I have this entirely right, but certainly the white houses I
saw in Port Gibson were not farmers' homes. I could not see the
businesses to account for jobs for all the white people, not to
mention that anything like real work was done by black people. What
is more, I was assured by the locals in the little store, that the
comfortable homes I saw were extremely modest in comparison to the
means of the occupants. I concluded that the principal occupation
of white people in Port Gibson was being rich.
I won't dwell on the horrors of racism. Three years before the
thing I most wanted to do was to become a Freedom Rider. I had
hated racism from the time I was very small child and had
frequently been in trouble because of that. But in the summer of
'64, in Mississippi, I don't know what happened to me. I had not,
of course, developed any sympathy for the racists. I was absorbed
in my own problems, cut off from news from the rest of the country,
and numb from the constant assaults on my sensibilities. And not to
put too fine a point to it, I was too cowardly to speak out where
there was simply no hope of finding even one sympathetic ear.
Still, in the mess hall, when the boys said "nigger" in front of
the serving women, I flinched. But the serving women didn't. I
marvel at their incredible strength.
(pullout)
Vicksburg, you see, had fallen on the 4th of
July
The 4th of July was to fall on a Saturday. Almost all of the
boarding students were from within the state and were to go home
for a brief recess. Jimmy had no home he could go to. Chet and I
were not going home, for once you deducted the bus trips from the
recess, there wouldn't have been much of a holiday left. Jimmy
apparently was fairly well known to the townies, and he arranged
for us to have a ride to Vicksburg for the 4th of July celebration
there, and even obtained leave for us to go. Apparently Dr.
Crutchfield was happy to have us out of the way, for he did not
look too deeply into our arrangements. The secret of this trip was
that we had no way back, for the gentleman who promised us a lift
was not returning right away. Our plan was to hitchhike back, and
since it was only 25 miles, if worse came to worst, we could
walk.
We were warned not to expect much from the 4th of July in
Vicksburg. Vicksburg, you see, had fallen on the 4th of July, and
the previous year had been the centennial of that event. The
Mississippi Delta was a kind of time warp in which a hundred years
was but a blink of the eye, and people did not think of the Fall of
Vicksburg as history, but as something in their own experience.
Nonetheless we were taken to a levee on an oxbow lake where we had
a commanding view of a skydiver trailing smoke and landing in the
lake and few pitiful fireworks. Jimmy thought we should get drunk,
and this seemed agreeable to me and Chet.
Jimmy found a little diner by the highway, and told us to let
him do the talking. The man behind the counter looked very sharply
at Chet when we walked in, but evidently he concluded that Chet was
white, or white enough. When Jimmy ordered beers the man laughed at
us. But we were the only ones in the place, and he served us
anyway. I think we had three or four beers there, and I suppose we
would have had more, if we had not run out of money. For some
reason Jimmy put salt in his beer. I'd never seen such a thing. But
we did the same. I never learned why Jimmy put salt in his beer,
whether it was some kind of regional thing or his own idea.
I was quite lightheaded by the time we left the diner, but no
one seemed to be drunk. While we were in the diner it had become
quite dark. Nonetheless, we stood by the highway and stuck out our
thumbs, and in a very short time we were picked up by a black man
in an old fashioned fat black car. The driver took us a few miles
and stopped on the shoulder by a honky-tonk. He told us he would
take us ten miles more if Jimmy would buy beer for him. You see,
the driver was fully an adult (and then some) but he could not go
into the honky-tonk. Jimmy was fifteen or sixteen years old, but he
was white, and he could get the beer. The driver gave Jimmy the
money and Jimmy went in and bought two six packs. True to his word,
the driver took us another ten miles and gave us one of the six
packs to boot.
We sat by the side of the road and drank the beer. We were
somewhat dehydrated from sitting in the sun to watch the somber
festivities in Vicksburg, and I — being very fair — had
burned, and after more-or-less a six-pack apiece, we were somewhat
unsteady on our feet, Chet perhaps a bit less steady than Jimmy or
I was. Jimmy said, as something of an aside to me, "Did you notice
we haven't seen a single car pass in either direction since we have
been here?"
We reckoned we had no more than fifteen miles to go, and
possibly as few as ten. But it looked like we would have to walk
it. The road was hilly, so we proceeded from hill to hill and at
each crest we lay down on our backs in the middle of the road and
looked at the stars, which were, of course, quite breathtaking, as
we could not see any man-made light in any direction. Although we
had mo more beer Chet seemed to get drunker and drunker, and for a
few hills Jimmy and I had to walk him between us. When we lay at
the top of one hill, and it was time to move on, Jimmy and I
happened to sit up simultaneously and found ourselves face to face
and eye to eye. Maybe it was the beer but for once I didn't look
away. When I didn't look away, Jimmy's eyes got bigger, my eyes got
bigger, Jimmy's eyes got bigger again. I am certain that was when
he first realized that gentleman though I might be, Hank had been
right about me, and it was the first time I realized Jimmy had not
known all along. "You know," he said, "if things were different
…."
That was all he said then. I had heard the speech in full before
and I would hear it again several times, several times too many in
my life. In the weeks ahead, Jimmy and I talked about it again,
without ever actually saying what it was. Fortunately, Chet seemed
to get his second wind, and we were off again. As we walked
ourselves stone cold sober we realized we had no idea how late it
was, or how far we had come. But at last we saw headlights coming
toward us from the north and we stuck out our thumbs
enthusiastically. It struck me that the odds were very long indeed
that the only car to come along since we were let off with the beer
would stop for us. But sure enough, it look as if it would. We
rushed towards the car. Jimmy was ahead of me.
When he came up even with the passenger-side window, Jimmy
stopped dead as if he had seen a snake. It was not a snake, of
course, but the barrel of gun, as I saw when I caught up. I nudged
Chet when he stopped next to me, to be sure he saw the gun too, but
then all we saw was a bright light in our eyes. "Where y'all boys
from?" Chet and I said Texas, and Jimmy said Louisiana. There was a
whispered conversation in the car. "Y'all don't sound very Texan to
me."
Well we didn't. Beside my broad faggot accent, I seemed to speak
Midwest, which was as much a puzzle to me as to anyone else as I
had lived in Houston since I was three. Chet didn't have any
distinctive accent at all. I wished he had the sense to fake a
Mexican accent — I'm sure he could have done it —
because I thought even in Mississippi a Mexican would count as
white enough. Or would it? Would it be worse if he were a Mexican?
Then I was glad he didn't have a Mexican accent. And then I just
didn't know.
The light played Chet slowly up and down several times. Now
Chet's hair was black as coal, but it was straight, and I don't
mean processed straight, I mean flat as week-old pop. There was no
denying he was dark, but my mind was screaming "Look at the hair!
Look at the hair!" I knew that was nearly hopeless. In Houston,
there was an Indian girl in my school who was called "nigger" and
not in any jocular vein, because she was so dark, in spite of her
wearing a sari and having a tilak, and having a better claim to the
word Aryan than any Nazi in the world.
"Y'all sound Northern to me. You boys wouldn't be any of 'em
civil rights workers, would you?"
Jimmy said we most assuredly were not, but fortunately he said
it more Cajun than that. There was more whispering in the car. "Are
you a Cajun boy? Talk me some Cajun."
Jimmy reeled off something in his native patois, and I don't
believe any of us, inside the car or out, had the least idea what
he said, but it sure as hell sounded Cajun.
"That boy with you ain't no nigger, is he?" And there were many
other questions, including where we had been and finally where we
were going. When Jimmy said "Port Gibson," that seemed to settled
the whispered discussion in the car. "Hell, you boys are from
Chamberlain-Hunt. Why the hell didn't you say so in the first
place?" And you know, that one seemed to be a pretty good
question.
The light went off and the car sped away.
(pullout)
History records that on August the 4th, the FBI
recovered the bodies of three civil rights workers from an
earthwork dam.
"Damn, damn, damn. They might have killed us." I don't know
which of us said that first, but we all said it over and over as we
walked south. The sky had seemed wide as we lay on our backs and
looked at the stars. Now the sides of the road began to close in on
us. That wasn't the pathetic fallacy. It was only the kudzu.
At first light we were spotted by an old townie who recognized
Jimmy. He picked us up and took us to his home, where he showed us
his extensive collection of Civil War memorabilia — display
case after display case, for here a hundred years is but the blink
of an eye — while his wife cooked us a big breakfast with
plenty of grits beside the sausage and eggs.
History records that on August the 4th, the FBI recovered the bodies
of three civil rights workers from an earthwork dam. Only this week
did I realize — but I knew they were in a dam on the 4th of
July. On that dark road we had talked of how we might have been
buried in a damn too. Everyone knew. Everyone in Mississippi,
except the FBI, knew. They all knew. I knew.
There was a tear on Jimmy's cheek when he hugged me goodbye.
