In The Garden with Ted, Brent and Sam
At the end of his novella, Voltaire leaves his heroes, Candide, Pangloss, Martin, Cunégonde, Paquette, Cacambo, and the old woman, working away in their garden, realizing that this, after all, is the best of all possible worlds. I know this because I attended a politically moderate but academically progressive (and even aggressive) high school. I’ve always maintained that fifteen was too young to be assigned a book like that, but you know, it’s been more than fifty years, and I remember it and refer to it fairly often, so maybe they knew something I didn’t.
Today, I did something I’ve done a thousand times before but haven’t done in quite a while. I met Sam, Brent, and Ted Ammon to clean and organize the scene shop at the theater. I hadn’t ever worked with Ted in the same space at the same time before, but I’d heard from a reliable source that he was an excellent carpenter. He was. He asked if I remembered him. I told him that after knowing him for thirty years, I’m pretty sure I did, although neither of us looked the same. Watching him and Brent lean their White heads into Dewalt power drills made me think of Professor Pangloss and Candide.
I made a joke about Brent recycling staples. Sam laughed but tried not to. Theaters never have the money to do what they want to do. Brent’s solution was to pinch pennies until Lincoln started accusing him of sexual harassment. Anybody who ever worked with him has stories about recycling screws, double-headed nails and hinges. It pays off, though; he produced stages that looked like they cost three times what they did.
When we were surveying a space for prop furniture storage, I asked Brent if he felt like Rip Van Winkle. When Millsaps put the theater major in abeyance, Brent and I put Millsaps in abeyance. Much like Kappa Alpha, The Jackson Zoo, The City of Jackson, The Mississippi Democratic Party, and my marriage, I felt like I’d put considerably more into Millsaps than I owed them, and if I needed to step away for a while, nobody could judge me. Brent did too.
“A while” turned into a little more than thirteen years. I asked Brent if, like me, he felt like Rip Van Winkle, who woke up one day to find that everyone he knew was gone, and nobody knew where his stuff was. Hence our visit to Millsaps today—we’re trying to get our shit back where it belongs.
My perspective on Millsaps is threefold. I was a student—boy, was I ever a student. I involved myself in every possible activity that didn’t involve turning essays in on time. When I was born, the trustees of Millsaps asked my father to join their company. For most of Millsaps's history, the Board of Trustees had a rule that the chairman had to be a Methodist minister. My Uncle Boyd served as Treasurer, which was the highest position a layperson could attain. When I was four, the Board of Trustees asked Daddy to be the first ever layman Chairman of the Board, a position he held until the day he died.
Someone once told me that students are transitory. The Millsaps Community is made up of Alumni, Administration, and Faculty. At the time, I took offense at the idea. Students were our raison d'être, I argued. I eventually learned that they were right and I was wrong. Of people I don’t share genetics with, the most constant people in my life have been the faculty and administration of Millsaps.
There are stories about Millsaps I can tell you in person but never write down. One thing I’ve learned is that everyone has their own perspective. I love Sam. He came back to Mississippi and Millsaps despite the fact that we’re in a stretch of history where Mississippi is being unkind to people who believe the things he and I do. He did it because he loves Mississippi and he loves Millsaps, but if you made him choose between his art and his school, Millsaps would lose every time. Lance was that way, too, and boy was Brent.
There were times when Ed King and TW Lewis would play a sort of good cop/bad cop routine on matters of race in Mississippi. Both of them operated from a position that they were trying to express Christian love and Christian Justice, but it made some people very mad—really, very, very mad. They were serving not Millsaps or Tougaloo but their field of study.
I can’t tell you how many times somebody or another would call my dad or George Harmon and DEMAND that they do something about those damn liberal professors at Millsaps. They all believed that they were important enough that Daddy or George simply had to do what they said. There were times when both Daddy and Dr Harmon would ask somebody to cool it for a while because they were trying to get a bunch of money out of somebody, but I can only think of a very few times when they straight out told somebody to stop. George would regularly argue people down like a drill sergeant, using drill sergeant language, but attracting the best talent in faculty members meant accepting that they serve another master and he understood that.
When I started becoming a man, my father would carry me around like a mascot. Part of it, I think, was his attempt to make up for never having time to be there when I was little, but part of it was a pretty clear attempt to get me to quit screwing around and become what he was. In the months before he died, he started to accept that I wasn’t going to survive if I didn’t start trying to find my own way in life, apart from whatever he thought he saw in me. I don’t know how much peace I’d have with his death if we hadn’t had those conversations.
Until that point, I acted as something of a valet or butler in my father’s life. It was the happiest times I ever had with him. Early one Saturday morning, I was having breakfast with my dad at LeFleur’s restaurant when Sonny Montgomery came in.
“Can I talk to you for a minute, Jim?” He said. I stood to say I needed to get something from my car in an attempt to give Daddy and Senator Montgomery privacy to discuss whatever they had to discuss. “Keep your seat, Jim.” The senator said. You’d be surprised how many people think I’m James Boyd Campbell, Jr. That’s my brother, though. Even George Harmon would make that mistake sometimes. My first name is Alexander, not James. When they renovated the Student Union, the sign read the James Boyd Campbell Student Union. My mother and I laughed. George was mortified and had it immediately corrected. I told him I didn’t mind if it stayed James.
“Jim, if you would, tell Mr. X that I have talked to you, and I’ve talked to Louis Wilson, and that’s the entire extent of how much I care to be involved in this issue.”
I had a lump in my throat. Even though I had no idea what he was talking about, Sonny Montgomery's conversation with my dad about Mr. X and Commandant Louis Wilson was several levels above my pay grade. After that, we had a nice breakfast and talked about football.
Mr. X considered himself a Republican kingmaker, even though none of the Republican Kings I’d met agreed with him. He wasn’t a Millsaps person, so an hour later, while Daddy and I were opening the mail at Misssco, I asked why he was involved. Daddy said that Mr. X had opinions about what some of the Millsaps professors were up to. I was aware of the situation but hadn’t considered it that important. Mr. X called Daddy and George Harmon to try to get his way but wasn’t satisfied, so he escalated with General Wilson and Sonny Montgomery. Reading between the lines, Senator Montgomery put an end to the issue. Mr. X wouldn’t get his way.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I need Millsaps far more than it needs me. Like comeback dressing, hot tamales, magnolias, and honeysuckle vines, it’s part of my DNA. Lately, the sound of show tunes, hammers, and power drills has returned to the scene shop at Millsaps. Returning from their adventures, Pangloss and Candide meet a Turkish philosopher who tells them that life’s louable dessein is to devote oneself to simple work and avoid external affairs. So here we are, together again, in the garden.
