Dead Baby at the Country Club

I don’t hold these people in disdain, but I don’t hold them in regard, either. They are valued citizens and characters in a story. That’s about the best I can do. I know that’s rude.

At the turn of the century (the last century) Mississippi didn’t have so much to offer with regards to golf. My grandfather and his friends enjoyed the game so they began acting like Johnny Appleseed and spreading the gospel of golf around Mississippi, starting with Millsaps.

There came a time when it was decided that Jackson was coming up in the world and deserved a country club. They chose a West Jackson location because that’s where the Mayor had a house, and that’s where the city seemed to be growing. My grandfather and his friends sat down with architects and designed a club based on the ones in Tennessee, and then they brought in a man to teach them how to maintain the greens since that seemed to be the difficult part.

You’ve probably heard that Mississippi was the last state in the nation to allow the legal sale of alcohol and that the old Country Club of Jackson played a part in getting a bill passed to allow this. Those stories are all true. Many of my stories involve people in those stories, but twenty years later. I always thought it was interesting that the State of Mississippi collected tax on the sale of alcohol, even though it was illegal. Imagine if they had done that with marijuana or cocaine.

My grandfather enjoyed being outdoors with his friends and didn’t really care if he was that good at golf or not. My father soon discovered that, if he didn’t play nearly every day, he wouldn’t ever be that good. Once he figured that out, he put up his sticks and never picked them up again. He maintained his membership and served on the board of the Country Club forever, but it was purely out of a belief that Jackson needed a country club to be taken seriously by business interests. He was probably right about that.

When the city started growing to the North, instead of the West, the old Country Club was abandoned and a new one built, just on the outskirts of town. There wasn’t any water service where they built, so they erected a water tower and painted it to look like a golf ball. It held water pumped out of the ground and provided more than enough pressure for the new Country Club and the surrounding neighborhood, at first, at least.

The West Jackson Country Club became available to rent to anybody who could afford it, including the Greek system at Millsaps, which had been blackballed by all the local hotels. I was very taken by a Delta girl who could drink me under the table. Coming home from a formal dance at the West Jackson Country Club, she informed me that she had forgotten to wear any of her foundation garments. In shock, I drove around downtown for forty-five minutes before taking her home to test if what I thought she was saying was actually what she meant to imply.

At both Country Clubs, gambling, drinking, cheating on your wife, and finding activities for your minor children seemed to be the main purpose. I knew a woman who lived in a double-wide trailer in Florence because her father was in and out of prison. One night, her father won a house in Eastover in a card game at the Country Club, even though he wasn’t a member. She cried because she wanted to live there and be legitimate and have a real house, but he wanted to sell it so he could pay off what he owed his lawyers.

I think she was aware of how much trouble being associated with her was. One day, she said, “Sometimes, you look at me, and I think you hate me.”

“I don’t hate anybody,” I said.

I would have appreciated being set free of my gentlemanly obligation to her, but every time I brought it up, she wept and threw her arms around me. I was in it till the end, whether I wanted to be or not.

Most gambling in Jackson was conducted through a Greek restauranteur with ties to the Dixie Mafia in New Orleans, or at least that was the rumor. I always laughed because you could monitor all the doors to his restaurant from the windows of the FBI offices, but nobody cared. I assumed when the agents wanted to place a bet, they did it with him like everybody else.

He was a regular, almost every day, golfer. So was Harper Davis, the head football coach at Millsaps. Davis wasn’t much for gambling, but he held winning in high regard, so if you wanted to play with him, you better have practiced.

The Country Club functioned because black men wearing bowties made it function. I knew people who called them “mo’ tea niggers” because if you ate there, they asked if you wanted “more tea.” I did my best to call them by name instead. My grandfather did, too.

My grandfather played Gin Rummy nearly every afternoon at the country club. They played for pennies, which he kept in a leather pouch. Around him, men were playing for house deeds and car titles, but my Grandfather, Orrin Swazee, Carter O’Ferrall, and Toby Trowbridge played for cigars and pennies.

The men in bowties all called my grandfather “Mr. Jim,” and he called them by their names, not “uncle so-and-so,” but simply their names. At that time, in Mississippi, that was considerable progress. When they needed extra money or had a brother or cousin who needed work, they often showed up at the School Book Supply Company with Grandaddy. For men of that generation, there weren’t many educational opportunities for black men in Mississippi and not many occupational opportunities after that. A job of any sort meant opportunity and legitimacy, even if you had to wear a bowtie and serve tea to men who called you nigger. I was never allowed to use that word, which was interesting to me because I knew so many people who didn’t seem equally encumbered.

My grandfather died at the Country Club of Jackson, playing Gin Rummy. We always wondered what sort of hand he had. A young doctor put him on the table and administered CPR. A helicopter landed on the putting green to take him to the hospital, but it was over. A couple of days later, Toby Trowbridge called me to say I should pick up his car and his hat at the Oldsmobile dealership that bore his name. Driving his Delta 88, I noticed it was freshly waxed and smelled of bananas. His hat was cleaned and blocked, too. That’s the sort of man Toby Trobridge was.

In high school, there was a girl I thought the world of. I see her sister on Facebook from time to time, but I haven’t seen or heard from her in forty years. We used to sit in the parking lot of the Jackson Country Club and count the expensive cars. We drank beer, smoked clove cigarettes, and played hands and feet while we counted the people trying to impress us with the cars they bought. I’ve always regretted not being more appreciative of the time I had with her.

A successful young lawyer had a dark blue Alpha Romeo. By the time he was considered for a full partner, and his first child went from bassinette to walking, he traded in the Alpha Romeo for an Oldsmobile. I always appreciated men who understood the value of being understated.

Of the men who we counted as trying to impress people with their cars, six died either by gunshot or noose, all by their own hand, although there were rumors that two were actually murders. The Country Club is often about pretending to be a lot more successful and a lot more happy than you really were. A woman once wrote a book about how her husband spent all their money at the country club. Her son was in my class. I always felt pretty bad for him. Their problems shouldn’t have been made his.

My father gave up on golf as useless and pointless, but we still took advantage of the Sunday Brunch at the Country Club. Sunday Brunch meant we could eat as a clan, and my mother didn’t have to cook, so she was generally for it. As my brother’s mind began to lose its connection with reality, Sunday Brunch would become awkward, but we still made an effort to do it as long as my grandfather was still alive.

Boys in those days wore khaki pants and a blue blazer, usually from the Rogue, but you could also get them at McRaes. I always thought it was funny that everybody my age in the building was wearing the same coat, just in different sizes.

One year, Billy Neville convinced us all that the best of us wore the camelhair version of the same coat. It wasn’t actually camelhair. It was wool but dyed brown. I guess actual camel hair is that color. Neville had remarkable powers in getting young men to believe he knew what they wanted.

I used the money I earned working in the summer to buy a dark chocolate-colored bomber jacket at Metrocenter Mall. It suited me to be a little different, and I got a kick out of its million pockets. My grandmother made it quite clear that this wasn’t acceptable at church or the country club, so that was that.

Lunch Buffett at the Country Club was a table with about twenty salads, always including some variation of tomato aspic, which only my grandmother ate. There were three or four vegetables served from steam trays, a seafood dish, fried chicken, and usually a steamship roast, which is the entire leg of a cow, minus the hoof with some parts that were well done and some parts that were rare, and a horseradish sauce.

I would always nod and wave at my classmates. My father’s business associates rated a bow and were called by their proper names. Uncles, aunts, and cousins were duly recognized. Early on, I recognized that this entire adventure was about a social promenade as much as a meal. I didn’t care for that at all.

The Country Club had a grand covered entrance that led to a glassed-in air conditioning airlock, which was separated from the lobby by large glass doors. In the airlock area, you turned right to use the lavatory and left to take the doors leading to the Golliwog.

The old Country Club had a Golliwog, too. It was a room where they kept infants and toddlers while the adults and older children ate in the dining room. Golliwog is an African term for Tadpole, which the South Africans used to describe black children. That a place where people were so very proud of their whiteness would name their nursery after a racist name for black children seemed so strange to me. Eventually, they figured out the whole thing looked pretty bad and quit using the name, changing it to Teen Wing and Nursery. Just the name “Teen Wing” annoyed me. I refused to hang out there.

One day, I had just turned twenty. My grandfather died the fall before. We gathered the clan at the Country Club for the Lunch Buffett to please my grandmother, but it was as much of a burden as it always was. I was pretty hung over.

Leaving the dining room, we stalled in the lobby while my Grandmother talked to her two sisters. I could see the glassed-in airlock through the doors, but until she was ready to move, I was stuck where I was and she was not ready to move.

A covered passageway led from the nursery (nee gollywog) to the airlock, where toddlers and infants were reunited with the rest of the family to go home. It was a common sight.

I noticed a little boy—maybe three—wearing short pants and a frilly light blue shirt running down the covered pathway towards his father on the other side of the glass door. I could tell his trajectory was wrong. He was headed, not for the door, but the plate glass window, and he wasn’t slowing down.

This was one of those moments when time slowed. My eyes had just caught sight of the boy moments before I heard the BAM! and the sound of glass shattering on a terrazzo marble floor.

From my perspective, I couldn’t see the floor, but I couldn’t see the child either. Everyone in the airlock was frozen.

By this time in my life, even though I was just twenty, there were five times when I came up with a pool of blood and a body as the life left it. Discussing it with my psychologist, I asked how such preposterous odds somehow fell on my head. This wasn’t normal.

He suggested that God knew I helped people, so he put me in a position to do that. While I accepted that as a theory, I still have questions about why God didn’t take into consideration what all this was doing to me.

Leaving my grandmother and her sisters in shock, I meant to bolt over a chair, but instead, I knocked it across the room, which just added to the calamity. Bursting through the door, expecting to find a pool of blood, guillotine shards of glass, and a dead child—instead, I found a shocked father on his knees, examining his baby for any signs of wounds or cuts.

When designing this airlock area of the new Country Club of Jackson, the architects had the foresight to specify the use of safety glass. The plate glass window this energetic toddler smashed into broke into a million pieces that scattered across the terrazzo marble floor on the other side of the door, where the force of the impact threw him.

He was weeping uncontrollably, as was his mother. Black men in bowties surrounded us. After examining his child, the young father announced, “I think he’s just scared.” Indeed, he was scared. So were the rest of us.

They used to have these big architectural stones as part of the landscaping leading into the Country Club of Jackson. I sat on one of them and chain-smoked about six cigarettes. Preparing me for something really grim, my body pumped mass amounts of testosterone and adrenaline into my bloodstream so I could perform in a crisis that never happened.

While taking my grandmother to his car, my cousin asked if I was okay. “It’s just a headache,” I said. I realize that’s a complete non sequitur, but it seemed to satisfy them that I would survive the incident.

That crying baby is in his early forties by now. The last I heard, he left Mississippi, never to return, and his father retired to North Carolina. That’s a thing that happens here. We spend all this time and energy and love and money making our children as strong as we can, and then, when they get old enough, there aren’t enough opportunities for them in Mississippi, so they leave, and we never see them again.

Shad White believes you should save your money and send your child to trade school instead. Mississippi will always need carpenters and plumbers. I believe Shad White is a funny-looking nazi with big ears and absolutely no tangible answers for Mississippi. Making our children less smart so they can get a job is a terrible idea.

I tried a few times to turn this incident into a story. Anne Rice made vampire novels very popular, so I dreamed up a vampire story for it. That didn’t work, so I changed a few details and tried making it a story about angels. I decided that nobody on the goddamn planet actually wanted me to be a writer, so I quit screwing around and got back to my market research.

It’s hard for me to appreciate the glitter and ribbon functions of the Junior League at the country club because I know all the stories about the people who died there, the people who lost their homes, their cars, their wives, and more there.

When my father died, another member of the Capitol Street Gang started inviting me to lunches. He was having trouble pleasing his family's ambitions, so he sold his third-generation business so they’d have the cash instead. We spoke often about what Jackson was and what it had become. We talked about the problems of a family business and the challenges of young people finding what they were.

His son, who carried a name similar to his, used to spend most nights at the Country Club, singing, playing piano, and pleasing everyone, including the men in bowties. One night, on the way home with his wife, that son had an accident with another car, costing the lives of the promising young couple in it. There was a big trial. After a lot of painful press, his wife went to prison, and he took his own life. His father died just a few years before. I was grateful he didn’t live to see what happened to his son.

A lot of people feel like they’ve really made it when they get invited to join the Country Club of Jackson. I always felt a little sorry for them. There are no guarantees once you’ve joined. Sometimes, the stories end pretty badly

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