Molesting Cephalopods

The Presbyterian church in Fondren had a piper playing in their courtyard. I sat outside for a while, amusing myself with the restaurant-goers and dog walkers turning their heads around like bird dogs, trying to figure out what that sound was.

Fondren has a very satisfying mix of races and cultures on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Considering where Mississippi came from, that’s a clear sign we’re improving. They even let Scottish people cavort openly in the daylight. That’s a trusting sort right there. A bagpipe is technically a type of flute, but in action, it looks like a man in a dress molesting an octopus. It sounds like it, too.

Scottish people aren’t naturally Christians. We were the very last people in Europe to become Romanized or Christianized. My ancestors painted themselves blue and swung swords taller than your mother to prevent becoming something they weren’t. While the rest of the world was celebrating a metaphoric human sacrifice at the Lord’s Table, my people were having actual human sacrifices to keep the bastards out.

When they found the Ludlow man in Cheshire, an hour's drive from Hadrian’s wall, they at first thought it was a 20th-century murder victim, but archeologists soon discovered it was something very different. What they found in those bogs in North England, Scotland, and Denmark made historians re-write their histories with regard to the Roman Conquest of Britain.

When they first started sending reports of Millsaps archeology students working in the Yukitan, I laughed to myself, “Ye might wanna stay out of Scotland, laddie. Ye may not like what you’d find.” My people lived by fang and claw. Archeologists tell us that we sacrificed generations of people to keep out the Southern invaders, bribing our ancient gods to protect us from this strange Judean God.

In my family, the Campbells and the Boyds would have been Presbyterian, but in Attala County, Mississippi, in the nineteenth century, you took what you could get, and the Baptists were prejudicial against whiskey. I can see calling whiskey a sin, but saying it’s evil is just wrong.

The teachings of John Wesley suited my people. He calmed our more savage nature. If you know anything about Campbells in Scotland, you know they don’t have the greatest reputation. There are people who won’t be alone in a room with you if your name is Campbell, and they’ll never let you stand behind them. We kind of earned that reputation. As the guests of the McDonalds in Glencoe, the Campbells, in just a few days, managed to kill the chief, thirty-three men, two women, and two children. Those that weren’t stabbed were garroted. If you’ve seen the scene in The Godfather where Luca Brasi was garroted, think of that thirty-three times.

America is the land of opportunity and fresh starts. Sometimes, it takes a while for the fresh starts to actually begin—just ask the people who came over in slave ships. It took longer than was Christian, but eventually, it began to happen. John Newton was an English slaver who was converted in a storm sailing between Ireland and Scotland. Determined to be a minister, he appealed to the Presbyterian church before being ordained as an Anglican minister. He’s most famous for writing the song Amazing Grace, which is what I heard the piper piping. On the bagpipes, it sounds like your ancestors calling you.

Mississippi is a strange place, but it’s strangely beautiful too. After a day in the sun at Millsaps homecoming, I was too tired to put on a tie and go to church, so I went to the church of the open sky and heard a man in a dress molesting a cephalopod, producing the ancient sound of my people becoming Christians.