He Ate An Entire Fried Chicken

Ernie “The Big Cat” Ladd was six feet nine inches tall and weighed three hundred pounds. A standout at Grambling University, he went on to play for the Chargers, the Cheifs, and the Oilers. One night, I saw Ernie Ladd eat an entire fried chicken at Jobie Martin's Restaurant and Lounge. I had to pay twenty-five dollars for the chicken he ate and the beers we both drank, but as many times as I’ve told this story, I got my money’s worth.

The Big Cat wrestled for Mid-South wrestling out of Memphis. Some of us boys at a private high school idolized him and were always sure to see him wrestle when he was in town. I lived one block from Eastover Drive and one block from the guy who created the Eastover part of town because he’d seen it in Dallas. That four over-privileged white teenage boys might take a rough end of Lousiana giant, a veteran of the NFL, and the Mid-South pro wrestling circuit out for supper after a wrestling match is a very Mississippi kind of story.

I mention this because I recounted the story with my Uber driver on the way home from a funeral at church yesterday. Sometimes, I get drivers from Madison County who know nothing or guys from another country who think we’re all weird, but when I get a Jackson fella, we have something to talk about. This guy knew the difference between Bobby Rush and BB King, and he knew the difference between Soul Train by Don Cornelius, and Black Gold by Lee King. If you do it right, Mississippi can be a place of blended cultures. I like it that way. Some people avoid it, but that’s their loss.

Because the summer was so hot, I’ve been going to church via television for a while. On television, you hear the preacher only by electronics, so you can’t really tell how the sometimes finicky acoustics at the century-plus-old Galloway United Methodist Church will treat them. Sometimes they help you out, but sometimes they don’t.

At the funeral, I learned that our ancient oak and walnut walls embraced the voice of Raigan, our new minister. There was a time when women couldn’t take the pulpit in Methodist Churches. There’s a bit about it in Paul’s letter to Timothy. My take on Paul is that he’s an evangelist, not a prophet, so what he says is an important opinion, but it’s still just his opinion. I read him with the same sort of weight that I give to CS Lewis and TW Lewis. Discovering what God wants of you often requires consulting many voices.

I noticed at the last Mississippi United Methodist conference that the loudest, most important, most common, and most available voices in the United Methodist Church today are all somebody’s mother. It would take a lot to convince me that we’re straying from God’s plan by letting a feminine hand shepherd us.

This weekend, we learned there is renewed violence between Muslims and Jews in the land an afternoon’s drive from Jerusalem. Somehow, they’ve figured out how to turn message pagers into bombs using radio signals. It takes unnatural hatred to figure out how to do that. Hatred among people who, on the face of it, worship the same God and most of the same Prophets, but in different ways.

Even though I’d known Mimi Adams since I was a child, I learned things about her at her funeral. For much of her life, Mimi was a member of three different faith communities: one Methodist, One Episcopalian, and one Lutheran. I’ve seen families torn apart over decisions of which faith to practice, but Mimi decided she could blend them all inside her. She added her lifelong devotion to civil rights causes to the mix. I think the only thing that limited her to three was the fact that there are only so many hours on any given Sunday.

My faith has always been fairly divided between Episcopal and Methodist practices. Although Reverand W. J. Cunningham baptized me, I’ve always considered Bishop Clay Lee and Father David Elliot my personal ministers. They’re who I think of when I think about where my faith began, where it is now, and where it will go in the future.

When I was in rehab in a Catholic facility, I would sometimes see Father Elliot come to deliver the last rites for someone who was very dear to me. David had to come out several times for this because my friend simply declined to die. Whenever I saw David coming up the walk with his last rites kit, I thought, ‘Here we are again.” Christianity is a journey that ends there, but there’s so much between that moment and this.

People suffer when they refuse to blend their cultures. Life is so much richer the more tables you sample from, and eating from one table should never mean that you hate another.

Mimi was one of the people who noticed when I fell off the face of the earth, and she’s one of the first faces I sought out when I came back. She sampled life from many, many tables. I don’t know that she could ever eat an entire fried chicken, but if we were to take any of the adults with us on those teenage adventures, she would have been a good choice, and I know the Big Cat would have been pleased to meet her.