I Can't Dance

About once a week, I’ll call Wilson Stribling “Roger.” That’s how much his dad’s death, fifty-something years ago, impacted me.

One day, Madora Mcintyre (the lesser) said I was the last boy in the fifth grade who hadn’t danced with anyone yet, and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d done it. So, I done it.

She had been taking dance from Jo Best, whose husband played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on television. Her daughters were generally considered in the top five prettiest at St. Andrews Episcopal Day School, but somewhere in the low two-hundreds with regard to scholarship. One of them asked how many innings there were to a tennis match. The other became a Solid Gold Dancer. You have to be a certain age to know what that was, but it was a pretty big deal, even though she never spoke in any episode.

I say Madora was the lesser because her mom, who was also named Madora, was my third-grade teacher, who discovered there was something odd about how I tried to learn, and that led to a whole set of other adventures. Madora (the lesser) was also considered one of the top five prettiest girls at St. Andrews Episcopal Day School, but in the top ten academically. Through the years, I watched my friends, one by one, fall in love with her and be denied. It’s not her fault. I don’t know if she ever even knew.

There were girls that I liked, but that was a tightly guarded secret. One was black, which came with problems of its own. She ended up switching to a school where she wasn’t the only black girl in her class. There was a girl everyone thought I was sweet on, but I wasn’t. What happened there was that she lived a block from our house, and when her mom died, my mom pulled me aside to say I should watch out for her. So, I did—For twenty years.

They generally had me sit in the back of the class because I was a known disruptor. For an anti-social kid, I could make a lot of noise. From my spot by the back windows, I could watch over my friends and the girl I’d been given special charge of. I suppose that made people think I had feelings for her that I didn’t. She was pretty, but she was blonde, and that just wouldn’t do.

My mother charged me to watch out for another girl in our class. One of my dad’s best and oldest friends was a man by the name of Ben Puckett. He was in a plane crash where he barely survived, but his business partner didn’t. The business partner had a daughter in my class. From where I sat in the back of the math class, I could check at any moment to see if she was still breathing and not in any pain. I felt like there probably was a lot of pain you couldn’t see, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.

I was acutely aware of the fact that her dad died in the exact same model of airplane my dad flew in every week. Our pilot became very close to our family. If my parents ever died, he would have become my Alfred. When my sister got married and legitimately invited something like fourteen hundred people to the wedding, Tony and his co-pilot were giving their time to fly her and Jay to New Orleans so they could take some sort of honeymoon cruise. The weather was too bad to fly, so he and the Co-Pilot drove the happy couple to New Orleans. That’s something Alfred would do.

Roger Stribling had a son who was several grades under us at St. Andrews Episcopal Day School. He had shocking white hair and crystal blue eyes and rarely ever said a word. I watched out for him, too. Nobody should lose their dad when they’re that little. He’s on television now. Somewhere along the way, he learned to talk pretty good. He has slightly more hair than I do now, it’s more silver than shocking white like it was, but give him time.

Over to the high school, a drama was unfolding that I wouldn’t know anything about for another twenty years. Our football coach seemed impossibly old to me, but he was actually something like twenty-seven. He figured he wasn’t Methodist enough, so he married Bishop Clay Lee’s daughter. That fixed it.

St. Andrews Episcopal Day School wasn’t part of the often-discussed segregation academy phenomenon that swept Mississippi in the 1960s and early 1970s. Whenever I write about what happened with private schools in Mississippi, someone always brings up the fact that I went to a private school too, and I did, but that’s a whole other story. Early on, St. Andrews integrated. Since there was still massive economic racism in Mississippi, it was hard to find black families that could afford St. Andrews, but they always seemed to find a few. I think they would have given out scholarships, but there just wasn’t money for that. It was an expensive private school, but it’s still Mississippi, and we’re poor here.

While the Mississippi Private School Association didn’t really care too much about education, they did care about keeping the negras out, and they cared about football. They were putting tremendous pressure on young Andy Mullins, who was our athletic director, to join their organization so we could play football against Prep and McLeur and all the this-and-that academies. They were willing to forgive us the occasional negra players. A black kid who went to St. Andrews wasn’t going to be much of a threat on the football field. What mattered was that they had a schedule to fill out.

There was also something about St. Andrews. Even in those early days, they had a reputation for academics. They also had the favor of one of Jackson’s most prominent law firms. KA Knight Commander Reynolds Cheney was on their board, and his wife’s family home became the first schoolhouse. Most members of the Mississippi Private School Association had only been in existence for five years. Getting St. Andrews would lend them an air of respectability they hadn’t earned yet. They were also pretty sure they could beat the snot out of us in football.

Andy Mullins had another plan. Fuck those guys. That was his plan. That’s a lot coming from a guy who wasn’t thirty yet. Before long, St. Andrews Episcopal Day School would lose Andy Mullins to Governor William Winter, where he played a significant part in what I call “Mississippi’s Camelot.”

Mullins had the idea that we could form a league with the smaller public schools and the parochial schools surrounding Jackson and fill out a football schedule that way. Most of those schools were ones I had never heard of. One day, Neil Brown asked “what the hell is a Pisgah?” and Mike Sheppard said “Some kinna bullshit indian name.”

Mississippi has a lot of towns with bullshit indian names. If you struggle to pronounce it, then it’s probably Indian, except for Kosciusko, which is Polish. That’s a whole other story. Sometimes we beat Pisgah, sometimes they beat us. We played football as best we could for a bunch of bookish, over-privileged white kids, but we never had to go out into the world knowing we were part of a segregated sports program, or anything else, thanks to Andy Mullins.

They’re talking about tearing the old school down. They’re not talking about it, they’re doing it. Architecturally remarkable for its time, and highly unusual for a private school in that they actually took time to plan it and raise money for it, the old school just isn’t making it anymore. The systems are failing, and it’s not meeting the needs it did an entire century ago. They had a party to celebrate the new structure so they invited a bunch of us old weirdos out to the school to say goodbye.

Someone asked if I wanted to go. Hell no. I don’t like goodbyes. I avoid them when I can. That place holds about a hundred ghosts for me. Tearing it down won’t change that.

Mississippi is a funny place. I still can’t dance, but I’ll do it without anyone threatening me. Most of us got squared away somewhere with kids and grandkids, even a few great grandkids, but I’m not naming names. Some of us didn’t make it out of high school. Some didn’t make it so long after. We’re falling like bowling pins now. That’s not right.

I can’t dance, but I did dance. A lot of us did. A lifetime ago, or was it?