Cutting My Throat

abortion politics in Mississippi

Because of my size, there have always been men who thought they might accomplish something if they managed to intimidate me. What their sisters could easily do, they never could. There were men who could intimidate me, but it had to do with how they lived their lives, not their propensity to do violence.

For a time, to get anywhere in Jackson, Mississippi, you had to date at least one Lebanese or Greek girl. Their fathers were always connected. Fortunately, there was a broad selection of them living here. Far more than the market required.

Among God’s most perfect creatures, some of us developed a reputation for seeking out these raven-haired sirens. We became known as collectors. When it came time for college, most of them went to Ole Miss, forcing me to discover Black Irish, Hispanic, and Delta girls. It worked out.

Known to be socially and politically backwards, Mississippi embraced the sexual revolution. Birth control and abortion access were common topics among teenage girls and boys. One surprising result was that, having control of their fertility meant that the hunted suddenly became the hunter in the game of sexual politics, a move that left many of us boys wondering what the hell happened.

Abortion wasn’t a new issue in Mississippi. The 1930 novel, “As I Lay Dying,” tells the story of the Bundren family as they travel to Jefferson, Mississippi, where their oldest daughter, Dewey Dell Bundren, seeks an abortion. The doctor gives her a sugar pill and tells her that it will only work if she lets him do what got her in that condition in the first place.

For the most part, protestants didn’t have a strong position on abortion. One could argue that the Old Testament approves of it, under certain conditions, and with a priest performing the procedure. Catholics had strong feelings about birth control, including abortion, but there weren’t that many Catholics in Mississippi.

Arriving in Mississippi, Greek and Lebanese immigrants found no Orthodox church to join, so many of them became some variation of Protestant or another. My friend Lesa (not her real name) became a Southern Baptist.

Mediterranean girls had the reputation of living under their daddy’s watchful eye, but they also had the reputation for keeping their own council and having their own minds. Lesa was no different. Traveling to Ole Miss, Lesa realized she had no more use for me as a swain, but kept me on as a political ally.

Protestants and Republicans had no particular interest in abortion until the same people who convinced Ronald Reagan to open the Republican tent to televangelists also convinced televangelists that they might raise money if they demonized abortion. You can look all this up. It’s not my opinion, it’s a historical fact.

To raise money and further their cause, televangelists arranged bus tours of the United States to protest and block the entrances to abortion facilities. By the end of the nineties, this movement culminated in several abortion clinic bombings.

Jackson had two abortion clinics. The largest was in South Jackson. There were times when I had to attend to women visiting that clinic because, just like in the Faulkner novel, the men who got them that way would not. You don’t get to know those stories. I never took anyone to an abortion clinic because I had gotten them that way, because I was pretty obsessive about using spermicidal condoms. Even before AIDS, I knew being irresponsible could ruin a person’s life.

Jackson usually gets left out of the better concert tours, but we were targeted in the destroy abortion tour. Buses were scheduled to arrive and shut down the South Jackson Clinic. That’s when Lesa called again.

I knew she was a pretty strong first-wave feminist, although she practiced it in very Ole Miss, large-hair ways. I had no idea she was interested in the abortion issue. I didn’t know anybody who was interested in the abortion issue. The clinic operated quietly. Everybody knew about it, but nobody talked about it.

“Hey, can we have a drink?”

I knew she wanted something. I didn’t really mind. We’d spent a beautiful summer looking for the best places to watch the Perseid meteor shower and drink a bottle of wine.

At Scrooges, holding hands as old friends, not lovers, she introduced me to a concept I’d never considered before, “clinic defense.”

She’d arranged a clinic defense team for the South Jackson Clinic for when the kill abortion bus came through Jackson. Her group hired and paid for the use of the heritage room at Millsaps to train recruits and do some basic planning, but a Methodist Minister had opposed it, and would I go with her to the meeting with the minister?

Had the meeting been with George Harmon, I probably wouldn’t have gone. If it were with George, there probably wouldn’t have been a meeting. He would have said yes or no, and that would have been it. For whatever reason, George didn’t get involved, and he left it up to Stuart Good. I’d worked with Stuart on several issues, and I felt like we communicated well and understood each other, even though he was still a Yankee.

So far, nobody had mentioned to me who the Methodist Minister was. Sitting in Stuart’s office, Ed King walked in. Ed King is one of the most famous Methodist Ministers to ever come out of Mississippi. Deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, some men tried to kill him, but failed, leaving Ed with a deeply scarred face.

Associating Ed with progressive issues, I assume he was on our side, and whoever this unnamed minister was who wanted to shut us down was about to get an earful from Reverand Ed King.

“I’m glad to see you, Reverand King. Apparantly, there’s somebody in the conference who doesn’t want Millsaps to give the appearance of aiding abortion rights activists.” I presumed I was making a friendly gesture while we waited for the opposition to arrive.

“That somebody is me.” He said. Oh shit.

I never imagined a time in my life when I’d be on the opposite side of things with Ed King, but here we were. I think Dean Good knew I put my foot in it. We had a long and generally respectful meeting. It was agreed that the clinic defense sessions would go on as planned, with King monitoring it, and if the organizers stuck with what they presented to him, he wouldn’t press the issue with the board or the conference.

I was intimidated, but I had a right to be. If someone like King had an opinion so different from mine, then I probably should reconsider what I was thinking. I came away still devoted to the path I was on, but willing to listen to reasonable opposition.

What was heading our way was not reasonable opposition. Three buses from Pennsylvania were headed to Jackson. They were scheduled to arrive on Saturday at noon. They were determined to shut the clinic down so it couldn’t see any patients.

I had coffee and opened the mail with my father and grandfather at six-thirty that morning. Normally, I would meet my father for breakfast at either Primos or LeFleurs on Saturday, but I didn’t feel like it. By seven, I was at the clinic.

Apparantly, Lesa had done to Dale Danks what she did to me. There were two lines of City of Jackson Police barricades surrounding the South Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, like a phalanx. Soon to be backed by the largest women and men Lesa could find.

A big country girl is nothing to mess with. Two of them I knew well enough to know they were friends of Dorothy. I don’t know if that term applies to women, but you’d be better off not playing pool for money with them.

Playing football, I’ve seen a lot of opposing teams get off buses. There’s a look they try to make with their face to frighten us. Most of these people were men. That it should be a bunch of men traveling around the country to shut down women’s reproductive choices was a point not lost on me.

I wore a tie and an Oxford cloth shirt from the Rogue. I wanted to make a couple of points. I wasn’t a hippie. I wasn’t a kid. I wasn’t effeminate, and I was bigger than most of the people on the other side of the wall Dale Danks built.

The biggest of the Pennsylvanians took up a position on the other side of the fence closest to me.

“If they’d let me, I’d come over this fence and cut your throat to save a baby.” He said.

“I doubt if they’d stop you,” I said. “But, I might.” I can speak bullshit machismo about as well as anybody.

“If you ever come to Philly, your ass is mine.”

“Do you have a card or anything? I mean, how will I find you?”

“Fuck you fatboy.”

That’s about the only conversation I had with him. The rest of the day, he sneered at me and drank Mountain Dew. I was used to the August heat in Mississippi. He was not.

Despite the protest, six patients visited the clinic that day. None of them were scheduled for a procedure, but the protestors didn’t know that. Besides the six legitimate patients, there were five or six fake ones, intentionally trying to confuse the protestors.

Although I made several trips to PA for the National Purchasing Association, working for my dad, I never found the guy who wanted to cut my throat. Lesa moved to Boston to work at a law firm and married somebody in the medical field.

The South Jackson Clinic shut down after a succession of malpractice suits bankrupted the doctors there. It was generally thought that anti-abortion groups staged the lawsuits. As the “New Republicans” took over Mississippi, old Republicans and Democrats lost ground on the abortion issue. It became an issue that Mississippi lawmakers took up to please their Tea Party and MAGA overlords.

With Lesa living in another state, the only people left alive in Mississippi from this story are me and Ed King. I’ve never dared ask him if he remembers it. I feel like we will eventually reach some reasonable position on abortion. It may be a while, though. The people pushing this need issues to help keep them in power. Meanwhile, my throat’s not cut.