Mississippi Burning

Stephen King says he never has trouble sleeping. He knows the things he writes about are made up because he makes them up. Most of what I write about isn’t made up. Sometimes, I don’t sleep at all.

Not long ago, a friend asked if I wanted to meet her at Fairview for a drink. She’s from out of town and not really invested in the lore of Jackson, Mississippi. I told her that I’d love to, but as beautiful as Fairview is, and as much as I enjoy going there, that’s where the Ghosts of Mississippi go to dance. Since she’s the kind of person who’s very patient with my stories, I told her about Billy Simmons, the Citizen’s Council, The Sovereignty Commission, the Kappa Alpha Order, and the whole lot of it.

When Chris Gerolmo wrote “Mississippi Burning,” he was criticized by people involved in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the families of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney for fictionalizing important parts of the story. No one criticized the title. If you’re from here, you feel the burning. Some people are better at ignoring it than others; some will lie to your face and say it doesn’t exist or it’s a distant, faded memory until they step on the rake themselves and can’t deny it any longer.

For an upper-middle-class white guy with a liberal arts education and a generally gentle disposition, you’d never guess my entire life was punctuated by murders, assassinations, and suicides, but it was.

I was born in the week between the assassination of Medgar Evers and the attempted assassination of Rev. Ed King. I was born in a hospital that refused admittance to both King and Evers. King was a white man, but a white man who was judged a traitor by many.

By the time I was eight, my close circle included three suicides and two murders. That year, my uncle’s only child had a schizophrenic break, killed her husband, then killed herself. Soon after that, schizophrenia became part of my life in a way I never thought possible. It took away the brother I knew and replaced him with someone who never quite made it back into reality.

The parents of the children in my class were murdered; one took his life before cancer would. Visiting my very first girlfriend at her home on Thanksgiving, her father put a pistol to his temple and fired. I had to both break the door down to discover the body and keep her out of the room at the same time.

Jackson, my home, has become known as the murder capital of America. Generally seen as a problem, just among the black citizens, you’d be surprised how many people have no sympathy for it. “They caused their own problem.” I’ve heard people say.

The way I see it, if you spend generations teaching people that their lives don’t mean much, and then you spend more generations using violence to keep them oppressed, nobody should be surprised if they start thinking the lives of their neighbors are cheap, and violence is the only answer.

Having participated in the first ten St. Patrick’s Day Parades in Jackson, I stopped going when my father died. Not very long after that, I stopped going to anything. You’d think these unnecessary deaths wouldn’t reach me in my self-imposed hermitage, but they did. My sister called to say my cousin Jim had taken his life. I said I’d had conversations with him where we both confessed to a lifelong depression. That he ended it that way was painful for me, but not a surprise.

Facing my own mortality, I ended up in rehab for congestive heart failure, which led to several other health concerns. As my body healed and regained my strength, I started to think that I needed to return to the world and that I still had things to contribute, maybe more than ever.

One of my first experimental forays back into the world was a return trip to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Most of us who were in the first parade were in our sixties and seventies, but the parade was still going strong.

Although I didn’t hear it when it happened, on the way back home to rehab, I learned that there had been a shooting. Soon, I learned it wasn’t just a random act of violence to strangers that I’d become accustomed to in Jackson; one of the victims was the child of a woman I knew in college. One of the women I had sworn to protect when I was much younger.

Investigating further, I found information on the male victim of the shooting. He was, it seemed, universally loved by everyone who knew him. On his Facebook page, I saw photographs of him with the woman who was my wound care nurse in rehab. My heart failure sometimes means I have lymphedema wounds on my leg. That night, when she came to check my wounds and dress them, I told her that I was aware it was her friend who had died.

My nurse was in her mid-twenties. A tiny thing, I doubt if she’s ever been much over a hundred pounds. I could tell she had a shy nature. I’m sure it was a shock to have a patient address such a painful part of her personal life. She began to cry.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “There are a number of people who won’t rest until justice is served in this case. It’s been a long time since I was involved in anything like this, but I personally won’t rest unless justice is served here.”

She didn’t show any signs of feeling better, and I’m sure she was still shocked that I even knew all this. I wanted her to know that a community of people was taking this seriously and wanted the same things she wanted.

A brilliant young creature like that, all she wanted was to spend her life making people feel better. I wish I could offer her more comfort than just “Mississippi Burning,” but that option wasn’t available.

I’ve loved so many people who left Mississippi forever. I can’t ever blame them. I can’t ever ask them to come back. I know what it’s like here. All I can say is, “I love you,” and “You’re always welcome back.”