Changing the Sails

Last night, I was going through some old drawings, trying to decide which to frame and which to keep stored away in a portfolio, and Julia Chadwick made me cry.

Messaging my computer, she asked if I remembered when she was my fifth-grade teacher, and she came up with all these different ways for me to express my education because the traditional ways weren’t working.

When it came time for me to divorce, one of the reasons my wife listed for seeking one was that she couldn't ever tell if I loved her. One of the main reasons I started letting people see the things I wrote was that I’m pretty terrible at saying what I feel or adequately expressing gratitude when I’m with them.

Although I eventually overcame it, I spent some time as a non-communicative child. I could speak with my mother and Martha Hammond, but not many more people. Stuttering can make you afraid of talking to people. It made my father laugh. He said I was just shy.

Before fifth grade, my school experience was mostly memorizing multiplication tables, spelling words, identifying parts of speech, paying attention, and sitting, sitting, sitting, quietly. For a child with ADHD and Dyslexia, that’s pretty much torture.

In second grade, they sent me for testing. Weir Connor was probably the first doctor in Mississippi to study developmental disabilities in children. Even though I was Dr. Alexander’s patient, Dr. Connor could and did diagnose me. Years later, I would visit him in hospice. Even though he sometimes didn’t have the strength to open his eyes, he remembered me and asked me about Millsaps since he knew I had become involved again.

Even though I had a valid diagnosis, in the 1970s, nobody really knew what to do then. There were places where you could get special education classes. I visited them. My father said he absolutely would not allow me to be put in a special education class. I was grateful because those kids were in much worse shape than me. I was afraid of what my life would be like if I couldn’t go to school with the kids I knew. Staying in regular school, my mother and I had to depend on the kindness and patience of my teachers, who got me through their classes, but my grades were pretty horrible.

In the fifth grade, our teachers tacked to the starboard and changed the sails. The school experience became less about memorizing and more about thinking. They called us “middle school,” and we had an entire wing of the building, clear on the other side of the school from where we’d been. Besides Julia Chadwick, we had Elizabeth Goodyear, David Smith, and Susan Ferrall.

At the time, we all thought they were impossibly old. Looking back at their pictures now, I realize only Elizabeth Goodyear was much older than what my nephew is now. They were impossibly young. Looking at the photos of the men and women I grew up with, men and women who are now parents and grandparents on their own, in fifth grade, they were just children.

In fifth grade, another element was becoming evident. Even though my picture was taken by the same camera and the same photographer as everybody else, I was already starting to take up more of the frame, both horizontally and vertically. Big, clumsy, distracted, and stupid doesn’t make one the ideal fifth grader.

My fifth-grade teachers, particularly Mrs. Goodyear and Mrs. Chadwick, started to think maybe there was something else going on. Maybe I was secretly smart, but I was having trouble finding ways to express it.

Mrs. Chadwick taught what we called “social studies,” a gumbo of culture, history, and government. In the years to come, I would become obsessed with these subjects. I still am. I suspect Julia Chadwick lit a fire nobody else knew was there. She asked me to invent a country, draw maps, and invent languages, religions, and cultures in my imaginary country. That summer, I read The Hobbit. The next summer, I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. It took all summer. Years later, I thumbed through my copies, looking at the maps and tables Tolkien invented for his Middle Earth, and realized he was doing the same thing Mrs. Chadwick asked me to do. Mrs. Chadwick handed me off from Middle School to Suzanne Seargent in Junior High, who again solidified my fascination with “social studies.”

In fifth grade, my father did the most typical Jim Campbell thing possible—he served on the board. He eventually asked to be rotated off early because a court ruled that St. Andrews was qualified for Mississippi Textbook money as it was voluntarily integrated, but none of the other private schools were eligible for the money because they were voluntarily segregated. People blamed him because he ran the textbook depository, and his children went to St. Andrews, even though both he and the State Superintendant of Education testified in court that it wasn’t his decision.

My father missed most of my school functions. At thirty-two, he assumed all the positions and responsibilities my Uncle Boyd had at sixty-three. He managed it, but there were only so many hours in the day. Daddy believed this wasn’t just his job; it was his responsibility.

We had a musical program featuring patriotic music. I’m sure it was pretty awful—I know my part was. My father attended, though. It was one of the few times he or my mother ever saw me on stage.

After the show, Daddy met up with Leland Speed while parents and children were matching up in the parking lot. They grew up together in Belhaven. I can’t tell you how many times Mr. Speed recounted the year that my grandfather bought my father a cart with a goat to pull it. Mr. Speed’s father was mayor. When he asked his father for a goat cart like the one my father had, Mayor Speed suggested that Leland ask Jim if he could rent his goat for a week for a quarter, feeding and cleaning up after it for a week before getting his own goat. After a week of sweeping up goat poo and trying to get a disagreeable animal in a harness, Leland Speed decided maybe he didn’t want a goat cart after all.

Talking to my father, he said, “You know, Boyd’s the smartest one. I don’t understand why he struggles so much.” I was mortified. For one thing, his own son, one of my best friends, was right there. My mother had tried to say I was smart and talented for years, but mothers have to. For someone else to say it, I just assumed he was lying because he felt bad for me being so stupid.

When we started talking about getting a divorce, my wife said that she felt deceived because I wasn’t even trying to be the kind of man my father was. I decided not to contest the divorce. I decided not to say anything to anyone for quite a while. I moved back into Jackson and hid away in a tower downtown for what seemed like a lifetime.

One of the last conversations I ever had with Leland Speed was when I was going for a late lunch on Capitol Street, and he was angrily headed to a meeting with the city government, who he wasn’t getting along with all that well. I had put on a lot of weight and was dressing and living like a hermit.

“When are you going to get over yourself and start leading the life you were born to?” He asked me. It felt like he hit me in the chest with a baseball bat. “Your city could use you.” He said. I wasn’t ready to hear it. I spent a few more years waiting for death until the day it came to me, and I decided I wasn’t ready yet. I loved Mr. Speed, his wife, his mom, and his children more than anything, but I wasn’t ready for what he was trying to tell me.

If you ever name a child for somebody who made an impact on the world, it’s terribly important to make sure they understand they have to find their own way and not to try and copy whoever they were named for. That’s hard to do because there will always be people who will say they need you to be what your forbearers were.

Mrs. Chadwick had an idea that I might be good at things that were different from what the other kids were good at, and maybe I could use that to complete my educational journey rather than trying to do what the other kids were doing. It took me quite a long time to understand and believe what she was trying to tell me, but I never forgot it.

Sometimes, the waters and the winds are against you, and it feels like you’re making no progress. Someone tried to teach me that the best plan was to change sails and tack in a different direction. You can make all sorts of headway, then.

In the years that followed, I looked back on what my old school became with considerable pride. My fifth-grade teacher instilled an interest in history and culture in me that led me to study and uncover the history and challenges my little school faced when Mississippi was still fighting with the devil over what it would become, and they overcame it.

I don’t know when I’m going to get over myself and start leading the life I was born to, but I believe this business of telling my story is a part of it. I was a broken child, trying to survive among the feet of giants, but I had considerable help along the way.