Small Town Blues

Sometimes, Mississippi, its population, and its history are just one small town. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody is kin.

I read in Bitter Southerner that Kiese Laymon was having some pretty intense life issues and living quite a ways away from Mississippi. Seven years older than him, I knew Kiese when he was a student at Millsaps. I returned to spend just one year working with Lance Goss before moving to Los Angeles forever. I had educational opportunities, job opportunities, and friends there, but after I jumped off a ladder and Lance had a heart attack, my one year became six, and I never moved to California.

My impression of Kiese then and now was that he was a pretty decent, normal kid who really liked to write down what he saw and had a gift for it. There were people, those who claimed to be on his side and those who claimed to hate him, who used what he wrote to push their own agenda, and that always landed him in the middle of a tempest he didn’t seem to have that much interest in.

There was one person in particular who always seemed to be at the root of whatever conflict he was having. I even pointed it out to him. When I was his age, I knew all about getting in trouble because it amused somebody I thought I felt strongly about.

Finally, all these conflicts with Kiese came to a head. That’s when George Harmon brought in Bill Goodman to sort it out, and Bill Goodman brought in Judge Ruben Anderson. Anderson had been appointed by Bill Allain, who I wrote about earlier. Seeing who was involved in the remediation of this issue, most folks felt like George might have worked it out, so long as he kept his mouth shut, which he did.

I pointed out to both Dr. Harmon and Bill Goodman that I felt like they set this up so that one of the white boys would be the first to violate their probation and get expelled, and their sacrifice would satisfy everybody. They neither confirmed nor denied my suspicions.

Not too far away from being an active member of Kappa Alpha, and having built them a house not long before, I went to a chapter meeting and spelled out to them, including one who would become governor, that the fix was in and a lot of people were working against them and if they screwed up and got expelled, it would be their own fault.

A lot of people felt like I did. A lot of people felt that some well-heeled KA getting expelled would be good for the community, but it didn’t happen that way.

When I mentioned earlier that there was always one person at the center of Kiese getting in trouble, they asked him to go to the library and get them a book from the campus library, knowing that (like a lot of students) he no longer had lending privileges because he owed late fees, and knowing that he was on pretty severe probation, and knowing there was a great big security camera on the egress point of the library, and knowing that they still had active lending privileges at the library and it was every bit as inconvenient for them to get the book that it was for him, but he did it anyway. Men are like that.

Kiese was expelled for “stealing” a library book, which was all caught on video. He professed that he had every intention of returning the book, which he probably did, but the video of him tossing the book off the third-floor railing so he could retrieve it from the basement without setting off the department-store-like book theft alarm, he looked pretty guilty, and pretty funny, if I’m honest. So much stealth and planning just because a girl asked him to get her a book.

I don’t know the details, but Chokwe Lumumba represented Kiese. He tried to get bigger names in the civil rights community to pick up the case, but it never really came to fruition. Lumumba was from Detroit, where, in 1969, he joined the Republic of New Afrika, a communist organization that sought to redistribute the wealth and property of the Deep South to become an independent black state with the slogan “Free The Land.”

In 1971, Lumumba was involved in an armed conflict between the Jackson Police and the Republic of New Afrika. Two members of the Millsaps Security team had been members of the Jackson Police when this happened, including the Head of Security. They were very uncomfortable with him walking around campus, saying he had a reputation for always being armed.

Ultimately, the conflict over Kiese never became the big deal people thought it should be. I noticed, and even wrote, that nobody seemed to ask him what he thought, but since expelled students aren’t allowed back on campus, it never happened.

I told Dr. Harmon that I would join the staff of the Purple and White, the school paper where all this conflict began, with the promise to keep things calm. He said that’d be fine, but the P&W had spent twice their budget and wouldn’t be printing any more papers for at least a year. He was telling the truth. Printing color editions and paying an ever-expanding staff, the school paper was deep, deep in the red.

The next year, a young ROTC student became the Purple and White editor. I was still acting as Harmon’s inside man, which everybody knew. Being super obvious about it was part of my plan to keep things quiet for a while.

The white boys, including the Governor, graduated quietly. Kiese went on to another school. Lumumba ran for mayor after getting disbarred for six months and won, but he didn’t live very long. We had a number of conversations through the years, including ones where I asked if he was still a separatist and still a communist. His views had mellowed since the early days, but he was still deeply interested in the extraordinarily high rates of black incarceration in Mississippi.

Kiese’s book “Heavy” caused a sensation. Tate Reeves became governor. George Harmon, then Bill Goodman, died. I have no idea what became of the woman at the beginning of the story. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

Kiese’s too young to be having the kind of health problems he’s having. Going in for a consult on a double hip replacement and finding out you have cancer is not a very Christian way to end the day. I hope this ends well for him. There should be another five or six books in him. As for the people he fought with, I never much kept up with what happened to them. I never much cared.