Redemption and Freedom
A Tale of Mississippi Camelot
I have a friend most of us still call “Mission” because he once, drunkenly, said he was a “man on a mission.” It was of love. I was a “man with something to prove.” It was not of love.
“Screw YOU! I’m The Second Boyd Campbell! Fight me! FIGHT ME NOW!”
The “second” bit is probably what did it. Nothing puts a boy in peril more than a father everybody in Mississippi calls “great.” In my case, it was father, grandfather, two great-grandfathers, three uncles, three great uncles, and if that wasn’t enough, my mother decided to feed all the homeless in Mississippi.
Despite not being able to read and struggling to make friends, simple hubris made me think God himself made me stronger than the world, and I could save every fallen bird. The world responded by breaking me into a million, million pieces, and then breaking those pieces into pieces. Atomized, redemption was something I’d have to earn.
On Christmas Day, I have a text conversation with my sister about her precious youngest child. “She has no reason to trust me. I’ve never been anything to her but, ‘the man who wasn’t there.’ It may take a lifetime to earn her trust and faith, but I will.”
People think of Mississippi as banjos and mouth organs. When you live here, it’s a hundred-man brass section, kettle drums, and a live cannon. Here, we’ll kill a man to deny we lost a war we shouldn’t have fought a hundred years ago. God himself will say that’s true.
Ross Barnett said, “I love Mississippi!” causing a riot in Oxford. Instead of trying to save lives, he went on the radio and said, “We will never surrender!”
Recovering emotionally and physically from the stillbirth of twins, my parents hadn’t been intimate in almost two years. A week after acid and fire were thrown on reporters in Oxford, in a moonlit bungalow, at the Broadwater Beach Motel, I was created in my mother’s belly. Love, for lack of a better word, found a way.
The kettle drums and brass of Mississippi weren’t done with me yet. There was a small tear in the sack surrounding me inside my mother. Sometimes, she would find blood in her underwear. The doctor ordered her to bed, or we could both die. A man in Jackson fought for freedom. A fertilizer salesman in the Delta began plotting his death.
Should I be born alive, I’d be the progeny of one of Mississippi’s first families. Medgar Evers was a black man, fighting for the dignity and freedom of people like himself. I would have liked to have met him. I used to love talking to his brother. Mississippi had other ideas.
Four days before I was born, less than four miles away, a fertilizer salesman from the Delta shot Medgar Evers dead in his driveway, where his children could see him. Mississippi wasn’t done with me yet. Bobby DeLaughter was nine years old, forty-five minutes away in Vicksburg.
Less than a week later, the same kind of men tried to kill Ed King, whose persistence in trying to integrate Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church meant that our much beloved pastor would step down from his pulpit rather than minister to people who would lock the doors of the church.
Days later, Eudora Welty buys a box of typing paper from my father on Capitol Street, and begins typing:
“I says to my wife, “You can reach and turn it off. You don’t have to set and look at a black nigger face no longer than you want to, or listen to what you don’t want to hear. It’s still a free country.”
I reckon that’s how I give myself the idea.
I says, I could find right exactly where in Thermopylae that nigger’s living that’s asking for equal time. And without a bit of trouble to me.”
I feel a chill, directly quoting Welty. When I met her, she was a little old lady at church. One day, my grandmother says, “She writes, you know.”
Welty does sly, subtle things that are huge. If you know what renaming Jackson “Thermopylae” suggests, just that, just that itself is huge. Thermopylae is where just a very few Greeks held off the invading horde. Was she speaking of herself and her posse of rebellious women and gay men, or was she speaking of the Klan?
You can trace the route to the Medgar Evers Museum using the words in Welty’s story. She never wrote another story like it. It was furious, murderous, tragic, beautiful. She didn’t know she was describing Byron De La Beckwith. In 1990, Jerry Mitchell interviewed De La Beckwith. Welty was frighteningly accurate. Miss Eudora had ten more years in her. I’ve never heard her comment on Mitchell’s interviews or the 1994 trial.
Last week, I wrote Bobby Delaughter: “Hey Bobby. We haven’t spoken in decades. You may not even remember me. You’ve always been one of my heroes. With your permission, I’d like to write about it.”
For what seemed like an hour, I watched the little “waiting” icon on Facebook Messenger, meaning he was typing. Bobby agreed, but he told me what he’d like for me to focus on. I think we were already of one mind.
On February 5, 1994, Byron De La Beckwith, in his third trial, was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers thirty-one years before. Two weeks later, Bobby turned forty years old.
If you live here, you’ve seen “Ghosts of Mississippi.” You know what Bobby did, and how he did it. At that moment, while I was deeply impressed with Bobby, I was more impressed with Mississippi. In 1994, you could almost see Mississippi Camelot dying, but hey boss, did you ever see a more splendiferous crash? Mississippi won.
In Mississippi, lawyers were always doing something to piss people off. Brown v Board of Education was lawyers, so was Alexander v Holmes. My father used to say that Alexander v Holmes was absolutely the right decision, but Nixon’s Justice Dept. screwed up the implementation. I agree. Ayers vs an entire list of Mississippi Governors went on for four decades. Daddy used to kid Bill Goodman. “Y’all ever gonna settle the damn thing?” Eventually, they did.
As a smoker, I was pretty pissed off at Dickie Scruggs when he sued the tobacco industry. I also assumed he’d be demolished. He made waves in asbestos legislation, but this was Goliath. And then the son of a bitch won.
Let me make a personal note here. Although this case annoyed me, smoking nearly killed me. It did kill my father and my brother. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, but Scruggs was fighting for us.
The bible and the entire classical world tell stories about great men who fell because of hubris. Some, like Icarus, are destroyed completely because they believed they were greater than they were. Others, like Samson and Hercules, had their greatness stripped away, and they had to earn their redemption.
Bobby, and Dickie, and some other guys, did a very stupid thing. Dickie offered and Ed Peters received a bribe, taking Bobbie with them. When I look at how little money was involved, I shake my head in disbelief. Scruggs spent more than this on a good dinner party, but Hubris destroyed his famous career, taking Bobby with him. That’s not to say Bobby was innocent. A grown man, he made grown man decisions.
It was one of the purest examples of hubris I know of, and for it, before the world and all of Mississippi, as great as they were, they were laid low. In 2009, his estate destroyed, Bobby went to prison. In 2011, Bobby was a free but changed man. Humbled, he found redemption in a book.
I’ve seen this before. Ross Olivier also committed stupid money crimes. In prison, he met Nelson Mandela. Mandela introduced him into the book that became the basis of Olivier’s redeemed life. The same book Bobby DaLaughter used, twenty years later.
Through mutual friends, I kept up with Bobby. 2011 was not at all a good year for me. I wrote a letter to Bobby, but didn’t send it. I had my eyes on the door to my cave. Soon, I would roll a stone in front of it. Because of that, I became “The Man Who Wasn’t There” for baby Collins Cooke.
The thing that Bobby wanted me to say, the thing I wanted to say, is that he was washed in the blood of the lamb. He found redemption through his faith, and that’s how he lives now. Wounded, but redeemed. It’s something we have in common.
Bobby and I were never “friends.” I didn’t have many friends. I was born an antisocial child, and I remained so. It’s how I lived in the cave. Seeing him on Facebook, I thought, “Would he know me? Would he accept my friend request?”
People complain about Facebook, and honestly, it is actually nuts. It’s been good to me, though. Through Facebook, I met The Little Bird, which opened an entire chapter of my life that I desperately needed redemption for, and I became “internet buddies” with my hero, Bobby Delaughter.
Live where you can
Be happy as you can
Happier than God has made your father
Live where you can
Be happy as you can
For he may not be here tomorrow
You have a vision of Mississippi that exists only through rose colored glasses. Maybe because you appear (I never heard of you or your family until I started reading your posts) to have been born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Much of what you post as fact I find “uninformed”. I’d love to sit down over an Inez burger with you to have you explain your thoughts.