Have You Ever Heard of Sweet Potatos?
Once upon a time, I was listed as an expert on Godzilla and King Kong with NPR’s Morning Edition news team. If y’all want to put that on my tombstone, I won’t resist. Just put my tombstone somewhere nobody can find it.
While they consulted me several times, they only broadcast me once to discuss the film “Lake Placid.” We discussed monsters and why we write about them and make movies with them. “Monsters,” I opined, “represent our feelings about ‘the other’, our fears about our capacity for evil, and our fears of feeling isolated and disconnected.”
NPR found out about me because they had contacted Millsaps, hoping to find a professor who knew about monsters. “The only one I can really think of is Boyd, even though he’s not a professor.” In the fledgling days of the internet, a FAQ I wrote about King Kong attracted the attention of the SciFi Channel Web Master, and suddenly I was getting hundreds of thousands of hits. Having breakfast at a convention with Ray and Dianna Harryhausen, he asked to see a copy. I just happened to have one.
The lady from NPR and I talked about Homer, monsters in the Bible, Mary Shelly, and poor old Kong, broken in a pile at the bottom of the Empire State Building. “Whatever happened to Fay Wray?” She asked. “She’s living in New York and working on a play about her mother in Canada.” That I actually knew the answer to that rhetorical question from “Rocky Horror Picture Show” took my interviewer aback. I think she expected Fay to have died sometime in the sixties. It was the nineties, and Fay was in better health than I was.
My father taught me to lose and revive my Southern accent, as needed. It was a trick he learned from his uncle, my namesake. My interviewer, a sort of zaftig woman from New York, said I sounded like Shelby Foote. I was trying to sound like Lance Goss. Zaftig is a Yiddish word used to describe plump but energetic Jewish women. There have been many of them in my life.
Jill Conner Brown wrote a book about her experience with the Sweet Potato Queens, as if they were real. I picked up a copy at Lemuria because it amused me. I was there the day the Sweet Potato Queens came out of the womb.
I was in the first St. Paddy’s Day Parade because Inez Birthfield said, “Why don’t you get up on the back of that truck?” That was all the authority I needed. Years later, I learned she meant for me to get in the back of a pickup truck, but from my position, she was pointing to a beer delivery truck, and although I didn’t know it before, beer delivery trucks had ladders welded to their back that led to their roofs.
That I was wearing a navy chalk striped suit and a Billy Neville tie should have been a hindrance, but wasn’t. I’d spent much of my life figuring out how poor old Kong could climb the Empire State Building, but not that damn wall on the island. Motivation had a lot to do with it. So did dames.
Once on the truck, I was soon joined by Bonehead and my brother. A lot of my stories have that sentence in them.
The Sweet Potato Queens were wearing what struck me as old prom dresses. Either theirs, or ones they got from Goodwill. They weren’t so well disguised that I didn’t know who each of them were. We didn’t realize it, but this was during the peak years for Jackson’s population. Even then, we weren’t so large that every member of the bar scene didn’t know every other member. Some of the Sweet Potato Queens I’d known since they were children—since we were all children.
They were older than me, but not much. They were the older sisters in what was a well-populated small town. Now that it’s been many years, it doesn’t seem like they’re a day older or younger than I am.
Jill’s book sounded like she was making fun of the imaginary Sweet Potato Queens for being debutantes, but knowing who they were, I knew several of them had been debutantes. I’d even been there for their debut.
It pleased me that her little local book was doing well locally. “Jackson needs that.” I thought. One day, the stories about how well her book was doing nationally and internationally hit me. I had no idea how it happened. I had a pretty good idea why “The Firm” blew up after John Grisham had been selling “A Time To Kill” out of the truck of his car, but I had no idea what happened with the Sweet Potato Queen book, and I didn’t care.
Entertaining an old flame at a hundred-dollar dinner downtown, I roared with laughter when she told me. She was a lot more connected to these things than I was. She still is.
The next time I was in the St. Paddy’s Day Parade, I noticed that the Queens had gotten a serious costume boost. Not knowing who built their costumes and wigs, I was pretty sure it had to be a drag queen. Drag is about where you finish, not where you started. All these ladies still holding on to their hot mom aerobics bodies suddenly looked like Divine, and I laughed again.
Kane Ditto ran against Dale Danks. It made me sad. They were friends. Arguments about what started White Flight in Jackson will go on much longer than I will. I have a pretty good idea of what happened, but it doesn’t fit a lot of people’s agenda, and it’s also seventy years too late to prevent it.
You could see Jackson’s first black mayor coming over the horizon like Godzilla coming out of the ocean. I liked Harvey Johnson. I still do. I thought he was pretty well qualified for the job. I still do. I know people who thought he was either an agent of Satan or the man himself. There are a lot of people from Jackson that I look at now and wonder, “Why are you like this?” There actually is no answer.
Fay Wray told me once that she buried three husbands and King Kong. The Sweet Potato Queens are working on that record. Fay developed the fake Mid-Atlantic accent she learned because she was in a play with Cary Grant and had a huge crush on him. It helped her make the transition from silent to sound movies.
Her actual voice was that of the sweet, country, Canadian girl she was. She would slip in and out of it for interviews in her nineties. I think she would have enjoyed coming to Jackson and dressing up like one of the army of queens Jill’s book spawned.
“Well, Denham, the airplanes got him!”
“Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
I’m pretty sure she did. She felt pretty bad about it, too.
Whatever happened to Fay Wray?
That delicate satin draped frame
As it clung to her thigh, how I started to cry
Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same
