Good mornin’!
I’m having a little Community Coffee. Feist Dog is layin at my ankles, complaining about his back. They’ve been roasting and grinding Community Coffee in Baton Rouge since 1919. The beans come into New Orleans from points in Central America and travel upriver by barge to Baton Rouge. People tend to conceive of Louisiana by visions of New Orleans. It ain’t like that. Baton Rouge is the place. Although the music’s not as good, it’s a better representation of the whole state than New Orleans.
People are peculiar about coffee. My sister gets a blend roasted and ground down the street at Cups in Fondren. Her palette is more sensitive than mine. If I had to pick an appropriate word for coffee, it’d be industrial. America’s drink. Something black with a tooth to it and enough caffeine that the guys working on the oil platforms drink Community Coffee after a night of hard beer drinking and whatever else they’ve been up to.
My momma used to get Community Coffee from the Kroger Store. They never had a Jitney Jungle in our neighborhood, and I don’t know why. They had Warehouse Foods, which was run by the same company, but it was a forerunner of the Sams Wholesale idea. It always intimidated me a bit to go into Warehouse Foods. They had these larger-than-lifesize fiberglass cows on each corner. For a while, they had a recording of “moooos” coming from the radioactive fiberglass cows, but I think the neighbors complained.
Me and Feist Dog might skip Sunday School. His back hurts and my stomach is being weird. The shot they gave me to lose weight was on backorder for several weeks because Oprah went on television to see that’s how she got skinny; now the whole goddamn world wants to get skinny, and I can’t get my shot. It finally did come in, but now I have to acclimate myself to this dosage again, which means not getting along with my supper for a while.
Yesterday, I had an orange and stuffed bell peppers. Today, I've had nothing but community coffee. When the shot was on backorder for so long, they started having decent tomatoes at the grocery store again, and for a while, I was making a tomato sandwich every day. Momma used to get tomatoes, horse corn, snap beans, butterbeans, Smith County watermelons, and green peanuts to boil from Doris Berry to the farmers’ market. I loved my momma, but Doris Berry was one hell of a woman.
Me and Hattie May Grant used to snap beans and hull peas while we watched that mean ole’ Dr. Smith fight with that Robot. My grandmother, who we called Nanny, never much approved of Dr. Smith and the Robot, but Hattie would roar with laughter. When I was seven years old, Hattie would call me “Mr Cameron.” I told her my name was Boyd, and she must call me Boyd.
She said, “Ok Mr Boyt.”
“Not ideal, but close enough,” I said.
I loved Hattie enough to put a knife in anybody who looked at her sour, but generations of oppression did a number on her. In my play, I’m trying to imagine conversations between Hattie and Fannie Lou Hammer. They’re about the same age and were both born in sharecropper cabins, but they developed very different ideas about Mississippi and about themselves.
They dragged Kathryn Stockett because “The Help” wasn’t written from the Maids' perspective. Kathryn’s a year younger than my sister. I don’t know if she could have convincingly told the story from the perspective of Aibileen or Minny, although I would have read it if she did. The great thing about using Fannie Lou Hammer as a fictional character is that there are enough of her actual words recorded to build a convincing portrayal of her.
Yesterday, I used the phrase “buckle shiner” in the story about Charlie Deaton. It sounds a lot more lascivious than it is. A Buckle Shiner is a woman at a county club who dances so close her belly shines a cowboy’s big cowboy belt buckle—refusing to explain what it meant made the phrase seem like a secret only guys who go to country bars know.
That was one of my ghost stories. Everybody in it, except for me and that waitress, is dead—been dead for ten years or more. I think it’s funnier that I couldn’t remember her name. It’s probably something simple and sweet, like Beth or Amy, but saying I couldn’t remember lets the reader fill in whatever country girl name they like—usually, it's something with two names.
Someone reminded me that some of the people in my stories have a horrible side. Not Deaton, but some of the others. That’s true. I don’t usually include it unless they are just evil, but it’s true. Men in Mississippi, born in the thirties, often had a horrible side to them. I sweat the details of those stories. Part of the problem is that I’m not making these people up. They have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I don’t want to be that guy who says, “Your paw-paw was a mother fucker, little Billy.”
Some people will point out that I seem to make an exception concerning Ross Barnett, Cliff Finch, and Kirk Fordice. That’s a fair criticism. In my defense, people who lead Mississippi are held up to closer scrutiny. I also keep in mind that we all face moral choices in life and are held accountable for what road we take. In a lot of these cases, I know the descendants of these men, and from what I can tell, they’re lovely and worthwhile people. I hate to be the one to break the news, but Paw Paw was a motherfucker.
After church, we’re gonna have a reception to say “goodbye” to Cary Stockett. They list the Cary part in parentheses. I don’t know what his government name is. The Methodist Church doesn’t let you keep a minister for too long. I suppose we wear them out. Although it hasn’t been that bad at Galloway, from what I can tell, the last ten years have been pretty rough as a minister in the United Methodist Church. As I write this, I’m trying to think what might have been a good time to be a minister in the Methodist Church.
I was born into a time of great turmoil in the United Methodist Church. We would rend ourselves into pieces over questions of who to include and who to deny. Sixteen days after I was born, Dr. W. F. Selah, who had been the minister at Galloway since 1945, resigned his post because the church elders refused to open its doors to people who weren’t white. WJ Cunningham baptized me. He would leave before my sister was born. In 1980, he published his memoirs under the title “Agony At Galloway.” For him, it seems to have actually been agony.
The Methodist Church is again rending itself apart over questions of who we will open our hearts and doors to. Not quite two years ago, two young pastors associated with Millsaps were defrocked for marrying two of our students. After a long and painful struggle, the United Methodist Church has codified more loving and accepting language into our Book of Discipline. It came at a great cost. Thousands of churches disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church over these issues.
This happened in the sixties. Many churches left the fold to maintain the right to close their doors to anyone not white. In the fullness of time, I have to think that those who made that decision wish they hadn’t. In the fullness of time, I have to think there will be Christians who are now choosing to bar some Christians from the sacraments of the church and will one day realize what they’ve done.
Sometimes, I like to wrap myself in the memories of the past and think of the days between the extremism of the sixties and the extremism of today, but then I think, why are we back here again? People died to get away from this, and yet here we are again.
I don’t want to be a political activist. I don’t enjoy that kind of conflict. Sometimes, the mantle chooses you, though. It’s not always something we have much choice about.
In the coming months, we’ll have a new ministry at Galloway and a new Presidency at Millsaps. Begin again, Finnegan, begin again. I look forward to the future because I remember the past. Me and feist dog, we’ve seen a lot more than we expected ever to see. I expect the show ain’t over yet. I don’t have nary a hair left on my head, and feist dog has lost almost all of his sharp teeth; it’s not time to give up yet, though. The show’s just getting good.