Mississippi: The Summer of 1964 (A Memoir)

[Lars Eighner]

Mississippi: The Summer of 1964 (Part I)

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.

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.

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 wheel 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.

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 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 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.

Afterwards, 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.

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 khaki's - 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.
Unlike a lot of so-called Goldwater Republicans, I 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 Glenn Nixon 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.

(to be continued)

[Lars Eighner]

Mississippi: The Summer of 1964 (Part II)

Glen 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.
Glen 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, Glen 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 Glen 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. He was allowed to remain in his room
in his 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 revised, 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 side-kick 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 heros 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.

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 me, 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 change his attitude very quickly. Perhaps he thought
this was evidence that Jimmy's opinion of me was correct,
not that it matter 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 Glen,
who was invariably the second-ranked student and as
thoroughly astonished as I was to be so elevated.) Glen
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
Glen - 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.

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.

(to be continued)

[Lars Eighner]

Mississippi: The Summer of 1964 (Part III of 3)

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 asses-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
fictious student lore had it - cadets mounted a valiant, but
hopeless defense of the town. 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. 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 "a very
serious matter" - 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 up stream were deposited. I'm not
sure I have this entirely right, but certainly the white
houses I saw in Port Gibson were not farmer's 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.

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. Glen 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 Glen.

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 Glen when we walked in, but evidently he
concluded that Glen 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, Glen 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 Glen 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, Glen 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
stop 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 Glen 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?" Glen 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. Glen
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 Glen slowly up and down several times.
Now Glen'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.

"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.

---XXX---