It was Ed All Along

I left out a lot of important details in the Mississippi Camelot story. In my zeal to paint Eudora Welty, Leland Speed, and the faculty at Millsaps as unconventional heroes, I misstated some facts. Joe Reiff has been helping me work out the error of my ways.

I tell people all the time that I’m a storyteller, not a journalist or a historian. Journalists and historians are terribly important writers, but they’re deconstructionists, and I’m a constructionist. Deconstructionism is a philosophy that came out of the post-modern period. It posits that words are just memes (even though memes have not been invented yet), and we hide the actual meaning of a thing in layers and layers of words. In my case, I try to explain that journalists and historians try to take photographs of things, whereas what I do is more like a painting. I build layers of meaning onto ideas because I think that’s important too, but it can be abused, which is why the post-modernists went with deconstructionists.

Joe’s dad taught me the Old Testament. I don’t know what sins he committed in life that he should be punished that way, but I feel sure he came away clean, bathed in the blood of the lamb. Mostly mine.

Joe pointed me to passages in books by Suzanne Marrs and John Salter. Suzanne, I knew because she fell in love with my dad’s best friend, although I’m pretty sure he fell in love first. John Salter I knew because he wrote a book that I was taught in class, but before that, landed my dad in court, not as a plaintiff, but as a witness. The head cheerleader at my school also had to testify because she had been taught from the book. Strange things happen in Mississippi.

According to Joe and Suzanne, both of which referenced John Salter, Ed King was the real moving force behind Miss Eudora speaking to an integrated audience in April of 1963. When Joe told me that, I smiled. Of course, it was Ed King. I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all the things that happened in Mississippi in 1963. It was like the devil himself visited Mississippi.

In 1963, Eudora Welty was mostly concerned about getting her mother, Chestina, into a nursing home and paying for it. Her books of stories were paying the bills, but paying for nursing homes is another matter. Eudora Welty’s books of stories won awards from all over the world but had she written murder mysteries; she would have made more money.

I feel weird discussing the mundane details of Eudora Welty’s life. She had a checking account. She had bills. She had to cut her toenails and floss her teeth. There’s no amount of hero-building I can do to make her not a human being.

In 1963, Eudora Welty’s church, my church, Galloway Memorial Methodist Church, was tearing itself apart at the seams over the issue of race. It did, in fact, tear itself apart. The top two ministers left the church because they wouldn’t integrate, and when the lay board relented and decided to integrate, hundreds of lay people decided to leave Galloway and start their own church.

The Methodist Church seems cursed to forever argue about who gets to bathe in the Light of the Lord’s Countenance. At the moment, we’re having arguments about whether gay people are people. Those taking the negative position have left and started their own Methodist Church. Those taking the positive position have remained with the United Methodist Church. This all sounds so familiar.

Once again, in 1963, in Mississippi, Ed King was right in the middle of this conflict. Agitating, always agitating. King was a gadfly on Mississippi’s brow. The Mississippi Methodist Conference broke ties with King. That didn’t stop him. He wanted terribly radical things. He wanted black kids to eat lunch at a downtown department store, he wanted black kids to sit in church on Congress Street, and he wanted black kids to attend plays and lectures at Millsaps.

Knowing that it was King who approached Bishop Finger about integrating the Mississippi Literary Festival, I’m even more convinced that it was going to happen whether Finger approved or not. Reading through Suzanne’s book and John Salter’s book, I still can’t find where Bishop Finger said, “ok, do this.” The best I can get so far is that he had concerns. I’m sure he did.

On June 9, 1963, Ed King and some students from Tougaloo were turned away from the steps of Galloway Memorial Methodist Church. William B Selah, who had been the head minister at Galloway since the war, resigned his post from the pulpit.

In the very middle of 1963, on the sixteenth day of the six month, I was born. Three days before, Medgar Evers was killed. Two days later, Ed King was nearly killed. On the seventh day, Eudora Welty wrote “Where Is That Voice Coming From.”

It’s almost like Ed King had a death wish in 1963. He did everything he could to get in the face of some pretty terrible people over some pretty simple issues. It nearly cost him his life. Doctors wouldn’t perform plastic surgery on his face, so he wore the events of 1963 from his eye to his chin for the rest of his life.

Of course, it was Ed King. Who else? To her credit, Eudora Welty didn’t say, “Don’t do this.” She wasn’t the prime mover, though. She had an awful lot on her plate in 1963. In 1963, you could feel the hate rising and building in the South. After the attempt on Ed King’s life, things got quieter in Mississippi, but in September, in Birmingham, men who considered themselves heroes set a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls. By the end of November, another man who considered himself a hero killed the president of the United States in Texas.

Five days after Christmas 1963, I was baptized by the new head minister at Galloway.