Getting Drunk in Jackson

I knew a gay waiter who used to brag that he knew what wine Tom Hederman had with dinner because he waited on him. I told him that I hate to ever “one-up” somebody, but Tom was my uncle, and there were times when I had to drive him home.

My grandmother was named Evelyn Flowers. Her father and her brother owned furniture stores, first in Birmingham and then in Jackson. The lives of the Flowers’ Sisters read like a Southern Gothic version of “Little Women.” They all went to Millsaps. Two were Phi Mu’s, and the youngest was in the first class of Chi Omega’s—two married Millsaps men with a fire in the belly. One became a businessman; another became a physician. The third married a young man named Tom, who became a legend in Mississippi journalism circles.

Tom’s son, Tommy, died when he was very young. It fell on Dick Wilson and me to sometimes play surrogate, although sometimes you couldn’t tell if he hated us for it or if he loved us for it. Knowing that other men’s sons survived when yours didn’t can’t be easy to live with.

Mississippi was the last state to lift prohibition laws and become “wet” in 1966. You may have heard stories about how it happened. They are all true. Bootleggers in Louisiana and Memphis had a financial interest in Mississippi remaining dry, so that had an influence. Baptists, like my Uncle Tom, were against alcohol, at least on paper, and he ran the paper, so that was that. They were also against dancing, and he was a pretty good dancer.

All of this is to say that while you couldn’t buy a legal drink in Mississippi you could certainly get drunk. I smiled when I saw the latest proposed map from the Southern Pearl River Reservoir Flood Control map. On it, what used to be called the “Gold Coast” and the Crystal Lake Club are mostly underwater, but after sixty years, they will be recreational areas again.

Before 1966, if you wanted to drink in Jackson, you could get “cough medicine” at the drug store, or you could drive to the westernmost part of town and drink at the Country Club, or you could drive to the easternmost part of town and drink at the Crystal Lake club, which was an oxbow lake of the Pearl River with a clubhouse on it. Admittance was more or less based on whether or not you ever went to Central High School.

If society types annoyed you, as they often annoy me, you could go across the river to the Gold Coast, which Rankin County bootleggers and moonshiners ran. When Mississippi became wet in 1966, the issue was then put to the counties. Rankin County, where most of the booze was made or sold, was one of the last ones to go wet. Once again, it was the Baptist ministers in Rankin County leading the charge to keep people from drinking. Baptists are actually pretty good drinkers; they just don’t like to talk about it.

My grandmother’s other sister, Margaret, married a really remarkable young man from Millsaps. He went to Louisiana to become a doctor before moving back to Jackson. Before the 1950s, when UMMC was built, you had to leave Mississippi to become a doctor. The US Military, particularly the Navy, accommodated many young men and women doing just that.

My uncle Levi didn’t much care for the starched-shirt crowd, so he drank at the Gold Coast. One night, a fella started a fight with Uncle Levi that ended with Levi getting a pistol and shooting him. The guy didn’t die, but Levi had a lifetime of legal troubles coming from the incident.

How he redeemed himself is actually a pretty fascinating story. He died when I was still really young. I wish I had the foresight to record interviews with him and get his permission to write his biography. To pay his debt to society for shooting but not killing this peckerwood, Levi took his wife and young family out west, where he brokered a deal where he kept his freedom by brokering a deal providing medical care for the Indigenous people living on reservations there.

My Grandmother’s mother, whom we called “Mimmy,” always blamed what happened on “bathtub gin.” Bathtub gin isn’t actually gin; there are no juniper berries involved. In this instance, Bathtub gin is moonshine vodka made from Mississippi corn by some wiley character out in Rankin County. Moonshine has the reputation for causing blindness if made improperly, but I’ve had plenty of moonshine made in Rankin County, and I never heard of anybody going blind.

Mimmy may have been right, though; whether you call it Bathtub Gin or Moonshine, you can get fucked up beyond reason drinking it, and a thing like that can impact a man’s rational thinking.

Driving around Jackson, there are so many reasonable and polite places to get drunk. You can even sneak in the back of Brent’s Drugstore to purchase a snort, just like you could in the good old days. I’ve been drunk in most of the places where you can get drunk in Jackson. Some aren’t even open anymore. They’re doing something to the building that used to be the Recovery Room. I don’t know what’s in store, but there’s lots going on.

I used to watch reporters chase legislators at George Street and the Patio Club. At CS’s, they usually just agreed to drink with each other, although, unlike the other spots, more moderate candidates wouldn’t mix with more conservative ones. Despite what you’ve heard, there have never been more than just a few of what I would call “liberal” candidates in Mississippi, although I keep seeing Shad White and Chris McDaniel keep calling guys in their own party woke liberals. One day, somebody in their own party is gonna take a poke at one or both of those guys. There will likely be alcohol involved.

I remember when Tim Ford was leading an effort to oust Buddy Newman. I had reasons of my own to favor Ford. Newman was arguably the most powerful man in Mississippi, a position he held for many years. I would say he misused it. He was strongly pro-segregation, and he used what I considered improper tactics to try and kill Winter’s education bill and did kill the kindergarten bill. I was all of 19 when that happened. Being born into a political family means that you’re never really not aware of these things.

I was just out of college when I was sitting with Cotton at George Street. I was sitting, and Cotton was working. Tim Ford and three other guys were sitting at a table. I was aware of Ford’s plan to launch an assault on the king. So was most of Mississippi. I told Cotton to put Ford’s table on my bill but not to tell them who did it. These guys are used to not paying for their own drinks. I doubt if he gave it a second thought. Some of these guys could drink quite a lot. So could I. One of them might have ordered a steak because my tab was a good bit more than $250. I explained to my dad why my expense report was so high. A few months later, Ford was speaker, and Newman went home for good.

Newman moved the seat of political drinking from George Street to Tico’s. His photograph still hangs in their bar. There’s a lot of pretty good drinking at Tico’s.

It’s really hard to separate all the different pieces of Mississippi. We’re a big gumbo that’s been cooking a while. The duck mixes with the sausage, which mixes with the peppers, the onions, and the okra. Then you cook it long enough to get it to meld just right.

I can’t drink like I used to. My liver has some damage from all the years I took drugs to become bigger and stronger. I’d cut way back long before that, though. I began to see that my drinking was going to eventually make me choose between it and life. I won’t give you any names, but I know quite a few guys who drank themselves to death.

I hope they finish this one lake project in my lifetime. I’d love to see what they do with Crystal lake and the Gold Coast. A lot of the people I used to drink with aren’t around anymore. They died too young and I lived too long.