Chair Desks are Immortal

Moral Terpitude and coctail parties in Mississippi

The universe of people in the school furniture business is pretty small, so I had to maintain alliances where I could find them. If that sounds like I was willing to compromise my principals to maintain business contacts, my only defense is that selling contract goods to public institutions, even schools, in a place like Mississippi can be morally confusing.

Mr All-Wood Desk Company (a made up name) was somebody I had to get along with, whether I did or didn’t. It turns out that, if you don’t mind fossilized bubble gum and some statements impeaching the honor of Mrs. Patterson, who taught English, an oak chair-desk is damn near indestructible, and since schools often didn’t have funds to replace broken furniture, that made them popular.

A chair-desk is a chair with a flat writing surface attached that comes around one side, making an efficient and compact desk. Most were right-hand models, but there were left-hand models too. Made of oak with dovetail and mortice-and-tenon joints, they were more durable than the Titanic.

At a formal reception honoring somebody or another for something or another, Mr. All-Wood Desk Company decided to tell me, yet again, about the time he was at Ole Miss and James Meridith was assigned to live in the same dorm as he, in the floor beneath and he and his Phi Delta Theta friends took turns bouncing golfballs off the floor at night to make sure Meridith couldn’t sleep and if he couldn’t sleep he’d flunk out of Ole Miss, making a mockery of him and Kennedy and everybody involved.

I’ve heard this story from several people who were at Ole Miss in 1963, including some women, so it might be that it’s just a meme passed around from Rebel to Rebel and not actually true. The irony is that Meridith never actually slept there. He had an assigned room but was sleeping in an offsite safe house.

Mr. All-Wood Desk Company felt comfortable telling me the story because I was a KA, and everybody knows KAs are more racist than Phi Delta Thetas and I was doing my best to be falsely chummy with this guy because even though I wasn’t personally involved in selling chair-desks, some of my Dad’s best guys paid their mortgage that way, so he had me pinned down.

Before going to college, I attended a small, private Episcopal school that distinguished itself academically but will forever be footnoted as one of the very, very few private schools in Mississippi that wasn’t founded to escape the order to integrate as part of the Alexander vs. Holmes Supreme Court decision.

In this small school where we had to wear uniforms and attend chapel twice a month, there were twin boys in the classes younger than mine. Athletic and smart, there were whispers that they were the sons of James Meridith, a name we knew meant something but often didn’t understand exactly why because, even at this hotbed of liberal Episcopal thought, they didn’t teach us about the Civil Rights Movement until the tenth grade and our required Mississippi History course was taught from “Mississippi Conflict and Change”, written by a Tougaloo professor and a Millsaps professor and dared tell the actual truth about what happened here in Mississippi. It included a photograph of a much younger James Meridith, writhing in pain after being shot, but not killed, as part of a march to register voters who had the audacity not to be white.

To compound my moral turpitude, this fancy dress event was held at a private-home-turned-bed-and-breakfast-inn, owned by one of the most notorious racists in the history of Mississippi. “The Citizens' Council” was the official newspaper of the Citizen’s Council of America, an organization created for the sole purpose of keeping Mississippi Schools segregated, even if it meant making an entirely new school system to circumvent the intent of the US Supreme Court. He spent some time as its editor and wrote some of the most vile things published in it that you can imagine.

He married a woman I knew and thought highly of. Living in Mississippi includes forgiving people of their past because there are just not that many of us. I wouldn’t say that he ever atoned for the mistakes of his past, but he did his best to distance himself from them. Ultimately, his empire collapsed, and all the laws he tried to pass were defeated.

I could never adequately express to people that he was one of the most brilliant and best-read people I ever knew. If it weren’t for his past, I would have sat at his feet and absorbed everything he ever had to say as I do with Catherine Freis and Brent Lefavor now, but you can’t just say that the past doesn’t matter because it does, and as smart as he might be, something in him made a very flawed decision when he was younger, and I had to be wary of falling into that same sort of moral trap myself.

Mississippi can be a strange and confusing place. You take your friends and allies where you can find them because the environs can change overnight, leaving you wondering which way is up and what happened to the exit door.

Mr. All-Wood Desk Company took a job with the All-Wood Church Pew company and moved out of Mississippi before retiring completely. Mr. Mississippi Citizens’ Council sold off his Inn to a young guy with absolutely no connection to Mississippi’s past.

For a while, I had a nurse from the United Kingdom who was married to a woman who taught history here in Mississippi. In particular, she taught our history, Mississippi’s history. I always thought how strange it must be for him to be completely exposed to the things Mississippi has done and live here but be morally separate from any judgment that comes from living here.

It’s complicated living here. I’ve somehow ended up with personal connections to every side of all the major conflicts in Mississippi history. I’ve held hands with the daughters of three Mississippi Governors. At least one of them was a pretty terrible person as governor. I don’t know what God will judge us for. There’s so much on the plate here. I do know that oak chair desks with mortice-and-tenon joints are immortal, and by reading their surface, you can find out who sucked at Jim Hill High School in 1972.