Redemption Stories
A couple of times a month, I’ll get a message from somebody saying, “I can’t believe you wrote so lovingly of that person. Don’t you know how horrible they were?” And then they’ll tell me why the person in question was horrible and evil and why I shouldn’t have a good opinion of them.
Truth be told, I collect stories, particularly stories about people. You should ask me what stories I know about you sometime. The more drama there is in the story, the more I like it and the more I collect it.
I try not to judge the people in my stories, at least not while I’m telling the story. I tend to see my task as something other than judging, not that I would ever be good at that.
I’ve written one entire book and two-thirds of another but put them away forever because I felt I wasn’t the person who should tell that story. As a writer, I consider myself a raconteur. While that’s a valuable and important role, it produces a result quite different than a journalist or a historian. A raconteur doesn’t bear the burden of objectivity that a journalist or historian does, making it very different.
One book told the story of Mississippi's history from Brown v. Board of Education through the white-flight end of Jackson, including the rise of the private school system, the conversion of Dixiecrats to Republicans, and the search of moderates for a new home.
If that sounds like it’s pretty heavy, it was. I’d been researching it for something like twenty years, so I felt like I had a fairly accurate view of the story, but what kept me from seeking to publish it was the simple fact that I wasn’t comfortable telling stories about people that might have the effect of changing their reputation. Even though most of these people are no longer among the living, their children, grandchildren, and, in some cases, great-grandchildren are, and I just felt that, as a person in this society, I didn’t need to be the one who delivered that message.
The other book was a fictionalized account of something that happened when I was nineteen. A woman I knew accused some boys of rape but then recanted. I felt like several aspects of that story illuminated interesting things about life in the twentieth century. I was worried that none of the people involved would want to be reminded of it, so I fictionalized it.
I shared some of the early chapters with friends and family. They found it interesting, so I started sharing some of the other chapters with a person I’d known for quite a while who was around when all this happened. I was hoping she could tell me if I was being fair to the characters in the story, but also if she could identify the actual people from their fictionalized version. She immediately could.
For forty years, I’ve believed that Stuart Good used his position as Dean of Students to help guide many young people through an extraordinarily difficult situation to an outcome that kept anybody from ruining their lives. That’s what made me interested in the story to begin with. Bringing it all back up where people who put it in their past long ago didn’t seem like something I should do, so I put the book away.
Most writers have projects they never finish or do finish but put away for one reason or another. I can produce three thousand words daily, so it’s no great loss. What’s important to me is that I feel good about the stories I tell, not to maximize the result of my efforts.
I love a redemption story. Sometimes, I think they are the most important stories. My brother always tried to figure out a way to craft his own redemption arc, but his illness always kept him from maintaining the sort of relationship with reality that it would have required.
I’ll tell you three short versions of some of my favorite Mississippi Redemption Stories.
George Malvaney was an heir to one of Jackson’s most storied families, but as a restless young man, he fell in with pirates. Not the happy, weed-smoking pirates of Jimmy Buffett’s stories, but guns and bombs pirates who were also members of the Klu Klux Klan who had an idea to take over a small Caribbean country.
When the story broke, many of my classmates thought it was funny. Having experienced this sort of thing in my own family, I knew it wasn’t. Their plot was exposed, George was sentenced to prison, and I lost track of him for a while. In prison, he found a way to reevaluate himself and the people around him. His views on race, which were part of what got him in trouble, changed dramatically.
I heard George found Jesus. I heard he changed, but our paths didn’t cross again for quite a while. One day, the British Persian Oil Company spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Mississippi Gulf. Suddenly, George appears again as Haley Barbour’s point man and lead conservationist in the effort to clean up the coast. George found a way to make the sea a part of his story after all, I thought.
Before I found him again when I rejoined Facebook a few years ago, the last thing I heard from George was an article he wrote for the Clarion Ledger. The article discussed Bill Minor's death and recounted the time he and Bill attended the funeral of the famous Klansman, L. E. Matthews. All I could think of was, “he’s really seen some shit, ain’t he?”
Richard “Dickie” Scruggs was once arguably the most successful lawyer in the history of the United States. I used to know guys who were buying planes and yachts from the money they made working in even minor capacities with Scruggs. One of them even died when he fell off a yacht he bought with asbestos money made working with Scruggs.
Dickie was friends with Bobby DeLaughter. No matter what happened, I’ll always consider DeLaughter a Mississippi Hero. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Ghosts of Mississippi,” that’s his story.
After making more money than Solomon in the asbestos business, Scruggs doubled it and more with the Tobacco litigation he entered into with Mike Moore. Hubris can bring low even the greatest men. One day, Dickie and several of his associates were charged with bribing Judge DeLaughter in what appeared to be fairly minor cases compared to the billions Scruggs usually dealt in.
Some men lost their licenses, some went to jail, and the most successful lawyer in American history was suddenly a convict. Like Malvaney, Scruggs found time to reevaluate himself, his life, and his choices in prison.
With their sentences served, DeLaughter went to New Orleans to start his life over, but Scruggs stayed in Mississippi. Still possessed of a great deal of money and one of the best minds in Mississippi, Scruggs decided to stay and try to do some good. In prison, Scruggs found a new calling as an educator. At liberty again, he returned to his Oxford home and began a new life dedicated to education in Mississippi.
I follow Dickie on Twitter. He can’t say anything without some anonymous incel screaming, “Yeah! Didn’t you go to prison?” at him. None of that changes the fact that when Dickie says something, it’s usually something you should hear, so he pushes through any resistance he finds online and continues with his new path in life.
Ross Olivier was a young accountant and banker in South Africa during the height of the African Apartheid. Surrounded by money and success, Ross thought he was king of the world, but then he was convicted of financial crimes and embezzlement.
Prison in Mississippi is pretty bad. In South Africa, it’s worse. He found the life he knew stripped away in prison and wondered what he would be now. Suddenly surrounded by hardened criminals and black reformers, Olivier found himself face-to-face with a small man with a disarming smile named Nelson Mandela.
Meeting Mandela, Ross found himself reevaluating and reordering his life; in it, he dedicated himself to God. In prison, Ross Olivier pursued the necessary credentials to become a Methodist Minister.
Finding a kinship between Mississippi’s story and South Africa, Olivier asked the Bishop of Mississippi to find him an appointment somewhere here. He was assigned as the head pastor at Galloway United Methodist Church.
People in Jackson soon recognized that Ross was unique, different, and remarkably authentic. When he spoke, people from all over Mississippi drove to Jackson to hear him. Returning to Africa at the end of his appointment in Jackson, Ross became ill and died far too young. His time in Mississippi was one of the most remarkable parts of his already remarkable life and ministry.
Nobody’s life is ever a matter of “this person is good” or “this person is evil.” We all have a redemption arc to live out. I’ve loved many imperfect people. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made.
Sometimes, I like to tell the story of my experience with Billy Simmons. Simmons was the editor of the official Mississippi Citizen’s Council newspaper. In it, and some of his radio broadcasts, Simmons wrote and said some of the most racist, objectively evil things I’ve ever been exposed to.
In later life, Simmons turned Fairview, a home in Belhaven, into an Inn. He was always accused of hiding away whatever money was left in the Citizen’s Council when it broke up. I never cared if he did or if he didn’t; I was just glad they were gone, regardless of what happened to the money. I had friends who kept wanting me to do things with Simmons, work with him, meet with him, and so on. I was never comfortable with it. I wasn’t worried about my reputation or anything, but having read some of the things he wrote, I just wasn’t comfortable around him.
That’s where the story takes a strange turn. I really enjoyed being around Billy Simmons. We never talked about race or the Civil War or anything like that. We talked about English history, stoic philosophers, and Shakespeare. He was, objectively, a brilliant guy, no matter how he used it or misused it.
I tell stories. I don’t judge—even when parts of the story frighten me, I’m not made to judge anyone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown away or boxed a story I wrote forever because I worried that a reader might see it as Boyd judging anyone.
So, yeah, I usually do know that the people in my stories did something horrible. I’ve done horrible things too, but the horrible bits aren’t ever the whole story—at least not the stories I tell.
