Why I’m Thankful to Be a Jones Countian

Thanksgiving Column

When I think of being from Jones, the thing that I’m most thankful for is our history of fierce independence, to the point of hard-headed stubbornness. I’m thankful for those who found the wilderness here and stayed, because it meant just that, independence from social and religious and political constraints. From what I can gather these were men and women who pretty much thought for themselves and held suspect any politician, preacher, or social reformer with an agenda to reshape them. They didn’t have any more use for government or pious religiosity than they did slaves.

I’m as thankful for the Newt Knight deserters as I am for those who fought for the Stars and Bars and for the others who hiked down to New Orleans to sign up with the Union. I’d like to think that those, at least from Jones County, whatever tack that chose, did so because of stubborn principle and not because some fire-eating politician got them worked up or some government conscripted them or because the local preacher said it was God’s will.

It is said that New Knight, displaying his renegade Piney Woods spirit, came to the conclusion that the effort was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” after the large planters were exempted from service. True Jones County populism.

And I’m thankful for my ancestors who decided to fight not only in that war, but all the wars since. My grandfather who lost much of his hearing in the trenches of WWI, and my uncles who fought and died in the Pacific and barely survived German POW camps.

Those who slogged through the cold and mud of Korea. I’m thankful to my cousins who signed up to go to Viet Nam because they thought it was a good fight. And I truly believe they would have refused to go if it went against that stubborn Jones County sense of principle.

Paradoxically, I found these Jones County warriors to be the gentlest men on earth, and the most generous. Everything they had was yours. What they endured in war I cannot imagine, but when they came home, they never talked about it. They were just doing what they believed in. It was their choice.

It was not a duty to their country so much as a duty to themselves. Nobody owed them anything. They went back to work, farming, driving truck, stacking lumber, feeding their families, tending to their own wounds, letting others make up their own minds.

I’m thankful for my grandfather, a true Piney Woods spirit. He never thought to call a black person by anything other than the “N” word, yet when they worked for him as day laborers on his farm, side by side with his sons, he thought they deserved to eat at the table with the family; much to the consternation of his neighbors who followed custom and fed their hired hands out in the yard with the dogs.

Likewise, I’m thankful for those black Jones Countians, who, in spite of the odds, built a fortress of community strength that produced the likes of Leontyne and General George Price, Ralph Boston, Susie B. Ruffin and an army of doctors, lawyers, business people and artists who bestow honor upon the Jones County name world-wide.

I’m thankful for my father, who I believe was a true Jones Countian. He didn’t let ideologues of his time or the preachers from the pulpit of his Baptist church push him around. He gathered his own facts and made up his own mind. He gave others room to do the same.

Yet, he was as conservative as they come. When I grew my hair long in college, he put up a little sign on the mantle, “Keep America Beautiful, Get A Haircut!” He meant it.

In WWII Dad enlisted into the Navy at 17, lying about his age. He did so because he believed it was the right thing to do. That was all that mattered. We never heard much about his service as children. Just some snapshots of a young man in a sailor suit on decks of large ships and under palm trees in foreign ports, the wreckage of war visible in the background.

During Viet Nam, when my brothers and I were nearing eligibility for the draft, my normally reticent father called us in for a rare family conference. He said he would be proud if we served.

But if we chose not to, he would pay our way to Canada. Either way, the decision was ours to make.

“Because,” he said, “I’ve studied it, and I can’t say I believe in this war anymore. If you do, then go fight it with all you got.”

To me that is what makes Jones Countians so great. This fierce independence and stubbornness. Perhaps it rises from the single-mindedness that it took for them to endure on land the get-rich-quick speculators had written off as worthless. To stand with pride while other regions looked down upon them as white trash, Irish garbage, uncivilized primitives living off in the woods.

I don’t know why we are the way we are. I’m sure it’s much more complex than I could ever imagine. But I’m thankful for these people.

What mighty paradoxes from which we sprang!

The Other Side of the Story

MLK Day Column

People often ask why I focus so much on race in my column. Well, I think writers write about what they most want to learn. For me, race is something that I’ve been blind to most of my life, yet race has probably has shaped my identity more than any other factor.

You see, I believe that every child is born into a web of stories, myths and legends. And even if we are not aware of what those are, they still have the power to shape us. And until we learn the whole truth about those stories, we will never know exactly who we are and why we do the things we do.

I was born a white boy in Jim Crow Mississippi. And even though I didn’t create those circumstances, didn’t necessarily agree with them or disagree with them, they formed the man who I became. I think it’s amazing that something that happened before I was born, like Willie McGee or Newt Knight or slavery or my great-grandfather’s experience in the Civil War, has the power to influence my assumptions and prejudices and values today, without me even being aware of it. For instance one of the assumptions I was born into, and never questioned until I was an adult, was that what black people thought about things really didn’t matter.

In fact, I remember the first time I was taught the “irrelevance” of blackness to my white life. I was about eight and sitting under a tree in the backyard of a neighbor, an elderly white woman whom I much respected. That day she had hired an ancient black man to rake up her straw. As I watched him, I became curious as to why he was wearing a flannel shirt on such a warm, summer’s day.

I decided I would find out.

“Why are you wearing that hot shirt?” I asked. “Ain’t you burnin’ up?”

He looked down at me and smiled. He explained that he wore the shirt because it made him sweat and when a breeze came up, it was like air conditioning.

As I mulled over the wisdom of his reply, the white lady in whose yard we were chatting, exited her back door and approached us. Her name was Helen Callahan. When she joined her yardman and me, she asked sweetly, “What y’all doing out here?”

Minding my manners and wanting to make her proud, I said, “I’m just talkin to Mister Joe.”

Miss Helen knitted her brows and pursed her lips in a way that told me I had been “unmannerly” in some way.

“Joe’s not a ‘Mister’,” she corrected. “Now one day, he will call you, ‘Mister.’ But never the other way around.”

You may be shocked when you read this, but when it happened, I was pleasantly relieved. Suddenly so much in this world I was born into made sense. In that moment I understood why there were certain water fountains that I was not supposed to drink out of. Why blacks had to eat their food from the cafe in the alley. Why the shacks in colored town had no paint and the roads had no pavement. No longer did these conditions seem arbitrary. I finally understood that it was about color, and Joe’s color was somehow “wrong” and mine was somehow “right.”

I glanced up at Miss Helen. She was gazing sweetly at Joe. Her words had not been harsh nor her tone unkind. There was no villainy in what she said, only the Christian truth. It was obvious she cared for Joe.

Next I looked at Joe. He was also smiling pleasantly, nodding his head. I assumed his silence meant agreement. That settled it. This was the way it was supposed to be, I thought, and it was just fine with everybody.

In that moment, my world was split asunder. I was  on one side of the divide and Joe was on the other. His compulsory compliance rendered him invisible to me as a human being. Suddenly he was no longer Mister Joe. He was Miss Helen’s yardboy. His story, his thoughts, his experience at the moment became irrelevant.

My story was the only one that mattered.

Even today, I still can’t begin to fathom what Joe’s mandatory silence cost him that day. I am only beginning to understand how his invisibility was used to underwrite my sense of privilege and entitlement. His dignity and humanity was the price extracted from him so that an eight year-old child could feel superior.

How do I ever repay him? I don’t know yet. It’s too late to find out what Joe was really thinking at that moment, fifty years ago. But perhaps I can begin by taking the stories that shaped me and admit that maybe my truth is not the only truth. That there might be a bigger truth that I hold only a small piece of.

So that’s why so much of my columns are about race. I believe that folks like Joe, on the other side of that imaginary divide, might have a lot to teach me about who I am.

Christmas Strangers

Christmas Column

A few weeks ago I interviewed a black descendent of Newt Knight down near the Kelly Settlement, just north of Hattiesburg. Like most African Americans I’ve approached, she was curious to know “why a white man like me even cared?”

A funny thing happens when you begin asking questions that pertain to race—people get suspicious of your motives. They’re sure you’re up to no good. And I’m not just talking about blacks. Whites have an even bigger emotional reaction. Many are dead sure that you’re a troublemaker.

They may ask pointedly, “Why do you want to go around digging up the past?” or, “Are you trying to stir up trouble between the races?” It’s like folks want to know whose “side” I’m going to be on, the black side or the white side.

My mother put it more succinctly. “Aren’t you scared people are going to think you’re a ‘Negro Lover’?” That phrase harkens back to an era within even my own memory when such a tag would at the minimum get you socially ostracized and at the most get you killed. Either way, I think my mother was afraid for me, even in this day and age.

Driving away from the Knight woman’s home, I was still mulling over the question she had put to me, “Why do you care?”

I’m never quite sure how to explain what I’m up to. I usually mumble something about shared stories. About the need to listen to each other’s side of history before we can truly understand what the larger Truth is. I’m sure I gave the woman a similar glib response.

It wasn’t until I turned down the entrance ramp onto Highway 59, that I understood exactly where I was. It all came back in a spine-chilling rush. I was instantly propelled through time to the scene of a crime I had committed over a quarter century ago.

It had occurred just off this exit.

On Christmas Eve of 1972, when I was in college and still bad to drink, I had just shot by the Moselle exit when I passed out, ran off the road and rolled my mother’s brand new Caprice on the side of the interstate.

It was the dead of night. The lights of the car sliced weirdly through the piney screen, and WLS stilled blared on the radio. Except for the stinging in my face, and the fact that I was upside down, I tried to convince myself that everything was normal.

I crawled through the window and in the chilled, predawn light, I surveyed the wreckage. It was bad, and I was all alone. At least I thought I was.

Out of the darkness appeared two black boys, nearly stopping my heart cold. They asked politely if I was all right, and then walked me to their mother’s house, somewhere behind the curtain of pines that lined the interstate. The mother asked no questions. She gave me coffee and nursed the cuts on my face, providing sanctuary from the highway patrol, while I waited for my parents to come get me. Even though she whispered, I overheard her when she told her boys to go back down to my car. I suspected to steal whatever they could find. That was pretty much my impression of black folks then.

In fact, I had never been a guest in a black person’s home before. I had only knocked on their doors for business purposes, to sell them something or to collect their money. And I had never felt beholden to any. They lived in a very separate universe from me.

As I sat there, gulping one cup of sugared coffee after the other, planning what I would say to the law, and even more importantly, to my parents, I had the presence of mind to check my back pocket to make sure my wallet was still there. It was. I decided the boys were welcome to whatever they could scavenge from the car. I owed them that much.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the boys returned with sheepish grins on their faces. They had obviously found them something.

One walked over to me and then, lowering his voice so that his mother wouldn’t hear, said, “Mister, there was a bottle of whiskey in your car. I threw it in the weeds so the police don’t find it.”

Dawn gradually broke while I waited. The family gathered around their tree and commenced to exchange their Christmas gifts, with this white stranger in their midst.

I don’t remember much after that. Just my parents arriving with sullen expressions, some awkward thank-you’s being offered, and then my father taking over from there. I remained in the backseat of his car while he dealt with the officer who had arrived at the site of the wreck.

I remember listening numbly as my mother spoke of how kind those colored people had been, and announced that one day she would drop by their house and surprise them with a nice gift. The next week, I remember her buying a handsome, silver serving tray.

But of course it was never delivered. That Christmas Eve was one of those shameful incidents we tacitly agreed never to bring up again.

Still, over the last forty years I’ve found myself thinking about that Christmas Eve, that mother and her children, and wondering who they were. But I’ve been too humiliated to ever go around and ask, and now I’m sure I wouldn’t even recognize the house if I saw it.

Yet many years later, I feel a growing sense of gratitude to this family for the immense hospitality they extended to a very “wounded” traveler on the night before Christmas. And even though it’s not a memory I’ve liked to relive, it is one of the reasons I believe that I am drawn to themes of race. I believe that beneath this rubric of race and color, there exists in the world a shared aching for wholeness.

In my lifetime, there have been many such gestures of selfless generosity, countless reasons for gratitude across the color line. But because of my distrust, or lack of awareness, or perhaps even an absence of language, I have allowed them to go unacknowledged.

In the end, if I had to sum up what it is I’m doing, perhaps I can just say simply, it’s about the unfinished business of the soul.