Hubris and Fried Pork Skins
The Gods and Jackson's City Council
In 1998, Roy Dixon was charged with Hubris as a federal crime. In 2016, he asked President Obama for a pardon.
Hubris is a Greek word that roughly translates to “the sin of self-love.” By self-love, I don’t mean a spa day, although it can include that. Hubris is the belief that you’re so great that you deserve more than other people. If you know somebody with a gold toilet, they’re most likely filling it with hubris. The Greeks believed that the gods always punished hubris. In the real world, sometimes they do—sometimes they don’t.
Recently, Anna Wolfe with Mississippi Today, an electronic news magazine, published her first article on the City of Jackson bribery scandal. I suspect it’s the first of several. Anna was in my nephew’s high school class. Not yet thirty, to me, she’s a baby, but she’s a baby with a Pulitzer Prize.
She’s a woman who can make grown men shudder, not because of what she does, but because of what she can uncover about what they’ve done. The former governor of Mississippi is suing everybody in sight because of what Anna Wolfe wrote. Let me throw the word “allegedly” in there a few times so he doesn’t sue me. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.
Yesterday, Bret Favre made a tweet thanking God for electing Donald Trump, and over a thousand people lined up to call him an asshole and demand that he pay back the money Anna Wolfe told them he stole. That’s an awful lot of power for just a lady with a typewriter.
Anna is leading the investigation into Jackson's corruption in print media, and Ross Addams with WAPT is leading the electronic media coverage. Ross is younger than me but older than Anna. I tend to think of him as the younger, blacker version of Bert Case. As far as Central Mississippi journalists go, that’s about as high praise as I know how to give. He doesn’t have the funny hair or funny voice that Bert had, but he’s like a snapping turtle when he latches on to a story. He won’t let go till you hear thunder, and sometimes not then.
District Attorney Jody E. Owens and Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba are the biggest fish caught in this corruption scandal. FBI agents pretended to be real estate developers. They offered Owens and Lumumba money and other gifts in return for their official help on a fictitious Hotel development across from the struggling Jackson Convention Center. Allegedly, their bribes were accepted, but from what I’ve read so far, it sure didn’t seem like very much money to ruin your life and go to jail for.
When Owens opened his cigar shop and daiquiri bar on Lamar Street, I was glad to see somebody renovating that building, but I joked that “Jody better not fuck around” because you could see the roof of his building from the FBI offices in the federal building on Capitol. Damn, if that’s not exactly what happened. FBI agents rented offices in the old Petroleum building on Lamar specifically so they could have a closer vantage on Owens. I like Jody a lot. I hope things work out for him, but it sure looks like he’s screwed.
Thanks to Dumas Milner's influence (and money), the Petroleum building and the one next to it once had a four-color checkerboard skin that screamed mid-century modern. Going into the nineties, some developers reskinned the building in black architectural glass, giving it the nickname “The Darth Vader Building.” It’s a great building, but like a lot of properties downtown, it remains underutilized.
Rumors of Lumumba’s corruption have been circulating for a while now. Although I didn’t agree with his father on many things, I respected him. I hope he knew that. There was a time when I interceded on his behalf to keep him from getting ejected from the Millsaps campus, but that’s another story.
The elder Lumumba was a street fighter and a humble man. From the first day I met the son, it seemed he was trying to impress me with how he dressed.
I tell the story that sometimes, when he was mayor, Dale Danks bought suits from the most expensive places in town. He sometimes went to Memphis, where a fella would measure you head to toe and then sell you two immaculate hand-tailored suits made in Hong Kong for a thousand bucks. Five hundred bucks for a hand-tailored suit is a deal.
Danks knew that most people in Jackson weren’t wealthy, far from it. He kept a suit from McRaes in his closet at work. If he ever had to go before a camera, he’d switch from his hand-tailored suit made in Hong Kong to his Haggar Stretch Suit bought at McCraes, knowing that people would judge him by how he dressed and he wanted people to judge him as one of them.
The first time I encountered the younger Lumumba, I told a friend, “I know a thousand-dollar suit when I see one.” At the time, he was a lawyer and not a politician, so having an expensive suit wasn’t a big deal. That would change.
I hate ever to use the phrase “black friend” because it sounds like I’m about to say something racist, but there are times when I turn to black people about their perspective. Living in Mississippi, you kind of need to do that.
I asked my friend about the Mayor’s haircut. It has a sort of shaved-out part of his hairline. It occurred to me that if that’s his real hairline, then he might be some sort of werewolf because his hairline grows into his eyebrows. My friend explained that most of that was painted and glued on. Then he told me how much that kind of “fresh” haircut costs. “Damn,” I thought, “that’s an awful lot for a grown man to pay for a haircut.”
Strange haircuts aren’t rare for politicians. Trent Lott used to have hair that was an architectural wonder. Donald Trump’s hair defies science. Some people won’t agree with this, but when a man spends more than a week’s worth of plate lunches on his hair, something is askew.
One day, when I was working for my father, Roy Dixon showed up with a box full of products made by his new company. Roy’s brother Curtis worked for us. Like Curtis, he had about three jobs. Black guys, born in the late forties and early fifties, often had a way of walking that identified them culturally. They were among the first black men in Mississippi to identify cracks in the closed society and fought as hard as they could to force their way through them into a new life. I thought the world of Roy Dixon.
In the box were fried pork skins in paper bags and candied apples wrapped in wax paper. He was selling them for a buck each, and I bought one of each.
The grumpy woman who sat across from me asked what I was eating.
“Fried pork skins. Want some?”
“Ewww.” She said. This woman weighed three hundred pounds. That she’d turn up her nose at pork skins amused me because she clearly didn’t turn up her nose at much.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “More for me.”
Within just a few years, Dixon would build up a company of almost fifty employees, turning out pork skins in fancy cellophane bags. I remained a customer. I still buy them from time to time, even though Roy ended up having to sell the company.
Dixon was a loyal friend who was always looking to help somebody make a deal in hopes that they would one day return the favor. That would be his undoing. Car Salesman Robert Williams enlisted Dixon’s help in extorting cable television executives out of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his help in influencing the Jackson City Council on contracts. Dixon maintained he wasn’t part of the extortion scheme and was never promised any of the money. He and Williams were both convicted. The probe into city council corruption continued for years, but the worst of it fell on Dixon and Williams. Another man offered to buy out Dixon’s interest in the snack food company so he wouldn’t have to shut it down.
Dixon was an old man when he petitioned Obama for a pardon. Discussing the case with the security guard at the King Edward Hotel, I said that I hoped he got it. Roy’s career was likely over then, but he deserved forgiveness.
Based on what’s been testified to so far, if the Mayor and the DA are guilty, they will have ruined their lives for not very much money. The FBI apparently wants to bring elements of the garbage contract into the case as well. Nobody knows what they have up their sleeve where that’s concerned, but Kenneth Stokes has been saying the garbage contract was “cooked” since it happened.
The Mayor of Jackson and members of the City Council have a lot of power but aren’t paid very much. That’s a situation that’s very vulnerable to corruption. It’s been going on my whole life and probably a lot longer than that.
However I felt about his dad, I don’t care for the Mayor much. My feelings don’t and shouldn’t matter. I do like Jody, and I hope something emerges in this case to help him, but I haven’t heard of anything yet to suggest that might happen.
Roy Dixon died having lost everything he created. The gods judged his hubris. The gods can be a lot harsher on good men than on evil ones. I’m not sure how they justify that, but I don’t suppose they care much about my opinion.
I might get a bag of pork skins tonight. They have a lot of sodium but not that many calories. I don’t suppose there’s any escaping hubris.
