A Letter For The Millsaps Kids

The last play the Millsaps Players put on was “Picnic” by William Inge. Lance Goss liked this play, and it was funny because when Sam announced he was doing it, all these people started saying, “I remember when we did that in 1950!”

I went to the Sunday Matinee, which is traditionally followed by a strike party, not because I’m particularly useful in a strike but because I’d take any excuse to spend an afternoon with Brent and Sam. More than that, I wanted to get to know the kids in the show as kids in the show, not actors. They’re young now, but one day, they’ll be old, and some of them will remain part of the Millsaps experience for the rest of their lives, and that’s what I wanted to get to know.

I’m fully aware that to most Millsaps Students, I’m either this creepy old guy who’s always hanging around or this benevolent spirit who seems to know everything about everybody, even things they don’t know about themselves. Both are true, but one, I hope, is considerably more true than the other. Like a lot of people before me, I’m kind of a silent gateway to the Millsaps experience.

There aren’t that many people left who know Millsaps from my perspective. There are the two Lewis kids, one of which lives way far away. There are three Woodwards, one of which now feeds every living soul that goes through Millsaps. I don’t think you can get more connected than that, and there are the Ranager boys. There used to be two, but now there’s only one. I’m still not adjusted to that. It doesn’t seem fitting that I’m here, but neither Ken nor Bonehead are. There are other names I could add to that list. One would make me cry. Life is beautiful, but it can be cruel.

Watching these kids take down this beautiful set Cody Stockstil designed, I know some of them better than others, but I know something about them all, and I know more about each of them than they realize. Some of them, I knew their folks or their family, and I know a little something about how they ended up at Millsaps and a little something about what they hope to accomplish there. Two of them, I knew their grandfathers much better than I’ll ever get to know them, and that’s part of this story.

Brent and I look at these kids and make a joke about some play Lance would have wanted to do with them. We laugh because it’s an inside joke, and the kids look at us like we’re the ones who are confused. We’re not confused; we just have the perspective they will one day.

My story at Millsaps begins when I was a child, but my story as a student begins on the day we all picked up our Greek bids. I ended up “asleep” in a tree beside the Chi Omega house with Michael Jarat’s boa constrictor around my neck. The events that led up to this particular consequence are complicated, but it’s a verifiably true story. The boa constrictor made it home safely. So did I, thank-you-very-much.

The Chi Omegas realized I needed looking after and decided to do so. In return, I cut their grass, performed light carpentry and electrical repairs, and listened when they cried. A lot of my most interesting stories involve Chi Omega girls from Millsaps, but I can’t ever tell them because a lady deserves her privacy, and one of them is no longer around to give her consent. I lost her once because we couldn’t get along, and then I lost her again because the world couldn’t. I don’t consider that fair.

Part of this story is that, for a while, things weren’t going very well for the Millsaps Players, and it was decided to put the major in abeyance. That was a pretty difficult blow for me to accept. The Millsaps Players as a company survived because Anne McMaster and Stacy DeZutter decided that it should be so. I owe them both a great deal.

One day, when I came back into the world, I was still in rehab because my body was broken, but I got a message from Brent saying that the Theatre Department was coming back, and they hired Sam Sparks as a professor. “My Sam?” I said, sounding an awful lot like Frodo.

Two of the first fresh young faces to show up for the “New” Millsaps Players were kids I immediately recognized as having deep roots in Jackson and Millsaps.

When I was a child, the cultural revolution in Iran was big news, along with Watergate, the Moonshot, Roller Disco, and Olivia Newton-John. They didn’t explain to us very much about what happened, other than the Muslims were bad, they took American hostages, and Carter couldn’t get them out but Reagan did. Finding out exactly how Ronald Reagan got the hostages out of Iran felt like I was losing my virginity as an American.

When testifying before Congress about the Iran/Contra deal, Ronald Reagan said, “I don’t recall,” a hundred and fifty-four times. At the time, I assumed he was lying. Within a few years, we learned that in his last two years in office, he had progressive Alzheimer’s disease, and he may not have recalled after all.

They didn’t tell us kids much about America’s part in what happened in Iran because the truth didn’t make us look so good. What I did know was that there were all these Iranian families, mostly professionals, moving to Jackson, and suddenly, their kids were in my classes. Two boys, I can remember, barely spoke English, and they absolutely hated it here. One of my teachers said they’d be killed if they ever tried to go back. I have no idea if that’s true or not.

In my thirties, I started listening to a radio comedian named Phil Hendrie from Los Angeles. Between his comedy bits, he’d deliver a more serious monologue. He really liked history and was a good student of it. One day, he explained the true history of the British Persian Oil Company and mentioned a book about the history of Iran in the twentieth century.

Iran is one of the oldest, most accomplished cultures in the planet’s history. It was part of how Israel and Greece became what they were. Among other things, it invented modern nautical navigation, which is why there are European people living in the Americas.

Free of the Turkish empire, Iran was on the road to regaining its former glory. After World War II, it started to look like a pro-Western, liberal socialist would be elected Prime Minister of Iran, and the investors in British Persian Oil Company (BP) started to freak out that they might become communists and nationalize the oil fields, so they conspired with the CIA to overthrow the elected Prime Minister and install the Sha of Iran. This isn’t Alex Jones conspiracy theory stuff. This is a known history that just wasn’t told to us as children because it made the US look bad, and once the Islamic Brotherhood took control of the country from the Sha, it really made us look bad.

When I saw Claire Azordegan’s name on the program last year, I knew immediately who she had to belong to. Her dad and her aunt had been at Millsaps when I was there. They’re younger than me, but not much. Both were super smart and won all the awards at Millsaps. Her aunt left a trail of anguished and rejected swains behind her because she’d have nothing to do with any of them. I was pretty firmly in the web of a Jewish girl and had just escaped the clutches of a Lebanese girl, so I just watched the whole thing with some amusement.

Claire’s childhood beau was a name I recognized because I remember when he was born. Jack Sewell grew into a giant, which amuses me. I don’t know what they fed that kid. One day, Sam was having him move some heavy things around, and I asked Jack how much he remembered his grandfather. Not much; it seems he was so little that he barely knew him.

I can appreciate that. As much as I hear about my Uncle Boyd, we completely missed each other in the time stream, and we were never in the same room together.

There’s a thing I call “Mississippi Camelot.” It’s about a period in time when things went from really shitty for Jackson, Mississippi, to pretty good and then back to pretty shitty again. I call it “Camelot” because it’s partly a myth I’m trying to sell people and partly a period of unbridled optimism and a belief that the people who lived here could do anything.

There was a time in Mississippi when you belonged to four families. You belonged to your birth family, which included your mom, your dad, and your Aunt Libba, who made deviled eggs. Then you had your church family, which included your pastor, and there’s Libba’s eggs again. In most circles, you also had a college family; there were Libba’s eggs again in the grove, but then there was your bank family. Everybody had a checking account, so they were part of a bank family, but some people were more involved in their bank family than others. The Campbells were way, way involved in our bank family going back generations, for good or for bad.

Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin decided that robber barons and unbridled trusts were crushing the economic life out of our country, so they passed laws to restrain them. Some of these laws restricted interstate banking, which made banking thrive, even in very poor states like Mississippi. Every state had one. In Lousiana, it was Hibernia. It was First National in Mississippi, followed by the upstart Deposit Guaranty. If you lived here and if you were involved in business in any capacity, you were a member of one of these banking families. They both had gigantic buildings downtown, but Deposit Guaranty ended up with the most giantest building. A lot of people didn’t know was that there were two secret passages between the Trustmark Building and Deposit Guaranty Plaza.

Ronald Reagan promised to break the back of inflation and bring interest rates down by balancing the federal budget. Yeah, that was a lie. Turns out, he lied a lot. What he did do to bring down interest rates was to kowtow to big eastern banking interests and tear down the interstate banking regulations that had for generations protected First National and Deposit Guaranty from marauding pirates from other states. I was all of seventeen. I asked my dad about it, and he said, “We had provisions for that,” meaning First National. He must have been right because it’s been fifty years and First National still hasn’t succumbed to out of state pirates, long after Deposit Guaranty and Hybernia banks did.

After Dad died, I started taking lunches with Warren Hood and Stuart Irby. I think they missed my dad, but I think they missed the way Jackson used to be more. A lot of people in Jackson were worried about me. I was having a hard time finding my place in the world and I felt like I was dying on the vine, and I didn’t much care.

In a lot of ways, Warren Hood was to Deposit Guaranty what Bob Hearin was to First National. If you asked him, he’d say he was in the lumber business. If you wanted to talk about the bank, you’d have to ask his wife. A lot of that was true. In the end, what ultimately happened to Deposit Guaranty fell on Elsie Hood.

I know more about this story than I can tell. A lady deserves her privacy. Some pirates came from Alabama, and their sites were set on Deposit Guaranty. As pirates go, they were pretty decent sorts. Elsie didn’t want to make the deal, but she asked these Alabama Pirates if they would protect her top guys if she did what they said. They agreed, and she made the deal. As far as pirates go, they respected the deal they made with Elsie Hood, but the pirates who replaced those pirates didn’t, and that’s how the top guys at Deposit Guaranty ended up at Millsaps.

Charles Sewell was generally known as a financial genius. His specialty was putting together large and complicated commercial real estate deals. His talent literally reshaped Jackson. A lot of what you see when you look at the Jackson skyline at night is the work of Charles Sewell. First National had a pretty successful commercial real estate department, too, but they were more conservative and more risk-averse. As a result, they financed smaller projects but got screwed over less. Ultimately, both were printing money for a while.

Because the second group of pirates that took over Deposit Guaranty had no honor, Millsaps ended up with Howard McMillan, Charles Sewell, and Herman Hines as part of the Millsaps Else School. Sewell became the “executive in residence.”

Things started to go south for the president, who replaced George Harmon. She was brilliant, but she lost sight of the star she was using to guide the college, and McMillan took over as president of Millsaps for two years.

One by one, these men began to die off, including George Harmon. It became clear to me that whatever Mississippi Camelot had been, it was coming to an end if it wasn’t over already. It was also becoming really clear that I absolutely had to get divorced and was starting to not much care what happened to me after that. Of the great kings of the Mississippi Camelot period, William Winter was the last to die. Once he was gone, I knew things would never be the same.

I always see something different in the Millsaps kids than what they see in themselves or in each other. When Casey Parks was at Millsaps, I was preparing to box up my toys and go home. Things weren’t going in the direction I believed we needed to be in. The other kids saw in Casey this mohawk-wielding, angry lesbian who took over the English department. She had a lot of energy, which is how she made the impression she did. What I saw was this powerful but wounded creature. I was curious about what wounded her, but I was on my way out, and she didn’t know me from Adam. Considering when she was a mohawk-wielding lesbian, I had a pretty good idea of what might be happening there.

I read Casey’s book, “Diary of A Missfit” and for a lot of it, I had a sort of “oh, that explains that.” sort of moment. More people read what Casey writes in a week than will read of what I write in a lifetime. I feel like her time as a Millsaps kid helped create her as she is. I feel like that’s what Millsaps does.

After this spring, Jack and Claire will wander off into wherever they’re going in the universe. They’re brilliant kids and remarkably talented. I will miss them because I’m pretty sure Mississippi can’t keep them. Sometimes, there’s just not enough here for a brilliant kid to live on. Casey’s way out West. I suspect, seeing what’s going on in this country, that what she writes will take on a newfound importance in the days ahead. Her words are powerful enough to save lives. That’s not an exaggeration.

I’m meeting the new theater kids. I met the new electric kid. I met the new Erin who is actually named Jasmine. I met the actors and the writers and the “I dunno what I wanna be” kids, and I met a kid who is studying government.

When I was a student, back when Jesus was a Jew and the Grand Canyon was just a creekbed, there was a government teacher named Howard Bavender. Bav was legendary, but he couldn’t drive. His students would literally do anything he asked, so when he needed a ride somewhere, he asked one of us.

One Saturday afternoon, when winter was turning into spring, Bav came to the KA house to meet the boy who was going to take him shopping. Sitting on the porch, some of us invited Bav to share a whiskey and a pipe with us. (not that kind of pipe) Bav didn’t drink that much, but he wasn’t a Baptist, so he drank in front of us.

Some of the brothers had built this stereo system from parts we got at Radio Shack, including these indestructible speakers that we would sometimes hang out of the windows and provide dance music for that end of Fraternity Row and the steps of Ezelle.

People tend to think of eighties music as silly, but most of it was very political. It took fifty years for people to understand that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was a war anthem. On the steps of the KA house, Howard Bavender began to explain our music to us. Seeing what was going on, boys from the Sig and Pike house began to trickle over. One of the cool parts about how the houses were arranged in those days was that we could really see what each other was up to, and throw water balloons if necessary.

Released in 1983, by the spring of 1985, one of the top songs in the world was from an Irish Band called U2. The lead singer for U2 is kind of an asshole, but that’s not part of the story. Although he taught government at little Millsaps College, in Mississippi of all places, Howard Bavender was one of the world’s leading experts on terrorism, and in 1985, the world center of terrorism wasn’t in Iran or Palestine; it was in Ireland.

It begins with a really aggressive drum beat…

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away
How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? How long?

'Cause tonight
We can be as one
Tonight
Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street
But I won't heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Alright, let's go