Gargantua

Dick Wilson called one day. He wanted to have lunch. He was concerned that I wasn’t living up to my potential. I wasn’t. My first thought was, “Baby, we in the same boat, aint we?” I knew full well that being the child of Baxter Wilson wasn’t too different from being the child of Jim Campbell. Not here, not in Mississippi.

Dick liked to have lunch in two different sort of places. Places where ladies ate, and places like Morrisons, where you could get an extra serving of whatever you liked for a buck, and some troubled meemaw in a hairnet would serve it to you without looking up. One place was for show, and the other was for food.

He wanted to have lunch at “Le Palette” in the Mississippi Museum of Art. A lunch establishment not only frequented by ladies, but they also served the food. We pretended to prefer cucumber sandwiches to country-fried steak and gravy.

There was a crushing weight to become Jim Campbell. Ironically, most of it didn’t come from him, even though he was convinced I would be happier that way than trying to be a writer. There was a wedge between my mother and myself over the issue of how to deal with the mentally ill. I figured that, once somebody tried to kill me with a hammer, I was entitled to my opinion. She didn’t agree.

I had been told that Dick was Mississippi’s finest when it came to certian types of contract law. I was told this by Bill Goodman, unarguably Mississippi’s most prominent Jurist until Dickie Scruggs made a billion dollars suing big tobacco. Dick and Bill were both KAs. I was surrounded by KA. It was inescapable. My banker was a KA. My orthopedist was a KA. My ophthalmologist was a KA and my cousin. People asked why I became a KA. I was surrounded.

I knew that, despite being generally acknowledged as one of Mississippi’s finest contract lawyers, Dick hung his shingle out alone in Highland Village. He had the reputation of being difficult to work with. One summer, Dick and Doug Stone decided to re-write all the KA bylaws so we would be in compliance with shifts in Civil Rights laws and changing times. Doug’s job was mainly to say “That’s very good, Dick.” and it was.

Early on, Dick struck on the same solution I found. If you eat enough of the food here, and drink enough, and surround yourself with beautiful things, this third-generation Mississippi conundrum wasn’t so bad.

I taught myself the libretto to most of the famous operas. I began collecting watercolors and oils. My rules were that they had to be from prominent painters, and I had to know them personally. One of my favorites was by Edwina Goodman, Bill’s wife, William’s grandmother. My most favorite were three Jackie Meena paintings. Two watercolors and one Chinese ink. She liked to experiment.

When I was younger, Katherine Speed let me watch her sculpt a ballerina out of clay. It was for a museum somewhere. I knew her as the late Mayor Speed’s wife and Stuart’s grandmother. The maid brought me co-cola and peanut butter crackers. I watched as her slender, but powerful fingers moved the clay where it needed to go, adding and taking away bits.

Most of the time, when I had lunch with Dick, which was a lot, we talked about his dad and my cousin Tommy. Tommy had been his best friend. Tommy tried to drive home to see his momma in a snowstorm. He never arrived.

Had Tommy lived, the Clarion Ledger would have never been sold to not-Mississippians. Marshall Ramsay would have still worked there, but he wouldn’t have recieved so much shit, except from Tommy. Dick used to visit my Aunt Bernice. They had coffee at her home in Belhaven and talked about Tommy like he never died. In the dining room and in the parlor, my Uncle Tom had hidden a switch in the floor so Burnice could magically summon the maid by pressing it with her foot. Tom was a gadget guy. I loved him for that.

There was a tremendous weight that came with being the third generation of the Mississippi Capitol Street Gang. I watched the weight of being in the second generation crush and eventually kill my father. Although he didn’t agree with my escape plan, he helped me put it into action. And then he died before I could pull the trigger. Nobody in the world knew that, not even the girl from Memphis I slept with on weekends, but he did.

I informally keep up with other members of the third-generation Capitol Street Gang. Sometimes they read my stuff, the ones that are still here, I mean. One mentioned that he thought I knew his dad better than he did. I don’t think that’s true. If it seemed like it, it’s because I could be counted on to get bags of ice and carry cartons of whiskey. That the Capitol Street Gang required somebody to carry cartons of whiskey should tell you something. The second generation considered that getting the gargantuan son of one of their second generation members to get ice and tote supplies marked them superior to their dads, who used bow-tied negras to do the same thing. In Mississippi, progress is measured in small increments.

Tommy died in the snow. Another member of the third-generation club hung himself when the world started calling him a murderer. He didn’t mean to. He was drinking. The Capitol Street Gang doesn’t exist anymore. It dissipated into the night sky like sparks from a bonfire.

In my family, I couldn’t count on many allies. One brother found escape by losing his mind. One brother found escape by doing the opposite of what my grandfather told him. The only real ally I had was Robert Wingate’s wife, Libba, who asked about my art and what I was reading. Both grandmothers thought all those muscles made me ugly. “I’m already ugly,” I told them.

My cousin Robert was relentless. I had a duty, he said. I was the smartest one, he said. That’s quite a lot since we have a cousin who won the Founders Day Medal at Millsaps. I think the pressure on him to be Robert Campbell and Boyd Campbell trickled down to pressure on me to be Jim Campbell and Boyd Campbell. That Boyd Campbell guy had quite a lot to answer for. I never met him.

Among my peers’ parents, I had three allies. Carl Andre, Betty Wright, and Tim Jones. Mr. Andre talked to me about beauty and art and justice, with dancing ice cubes beating a baseline to his philosophy. Tim Jones talked to me pretty openly about girls. He knew that I considered his daughter untouchable because three of my friends were in love with her. That made everybody else fair game. Like everybody else, he believed I should drop everything and invest everything I had in Paige. He was probably right, but holding her hands and looking in her enormous black eyes, I couldn’t do it.

Betty Wright had a police scanner and smoked the same cigarettes I smoked. Charles was often not there when I went to pick him up. Older sisters networked around their house with hair and makeup in various stages of construction while Betty and I listened to the police scanner and discussed things. Now that the older sisters have white hair too, all I see is Betty, an echo in time.

I went to pick up lunch at Corner Market. I was sweaty, and smelly, and grouchy, and hoping to be invisible. I met a woman I’ve known since before many of you were born. She married one of my classmates. I might have broken his arm at Funtime Skateland in the sixth grade. It wasn’t intentional. The kids called me “Gargantua.” Over the years, that would change to “Mongo,” and “Bahhh.”

In code, we discussed the fate of a classmate’s child. I said she was Dick Wilson and General Wilson’s neice, but I think she’s technically a cousin. This child has layers of connectivity that you can only experience in Mississippi.

There’s a tremendous weight that comes from being born here. The weight of oppression. The weight of oppressing. Bad decisions, bad debts, not knowing what you got until it’s gone, fecund soil, dead boys in a river, dead boys in an earthen damn, governors shot by their wives, governors you wish had been shot by their wives, death, birth, loss, letters, songs, food, magnolias, muscadines, hope, hopelessness.

They called me Gargantua. Maybe I was. There are worse things you could be.