The Broken Child Chapter 1 (fourth revision)
a lady chooses her companions
A lady chooses her companions. It is the basis of civilized life. In some places, her companions are chosen for her. They should know better. A gentleman waits for a proper introduction. Let’s start there. It’s as good a place as any.
I had yet to choose where I would go to college or what I would study, but forces were stacking up in one particular direction. I finished high school early by taking courses at the Education Center, which allowed students to study at their own pace. Properly motivated, my own pace was pretty rapid.
I had recently gotten out of a relationship with a perfectly lovely girl. It began in earnest one Thanksgiving when I broke down the door to her father’s bedroom, to find that last of his life’s blood draining from a hole he made in his own head. Being able to take down most any wooden door, I was the logical person for this task.
Oxford, Mississippi, wasn’t the darling, overdeveloped, real estate miracle it is today. It was a dusty, decaying delta town where most folks my age hung out at a retired cotton gin or warehouse or took in a subversive act at a retired movie theater, renamed “The Hoka.” A genuine Hoka is something you smoke hashish from, if that gives you any idea of what’s going on here.
I had seen Donna at a party, but more importantly, she was in a class I arranged to visit. A class on writing. This was sort of a legendary time in the little town of Oxford. Both Barry Hannah and Willie Morris taught at the little day school called Ole Miss. Shelby Foote was known to visit.
Had I visited a writing class at the college everybody knew I would choose, word would have almost immediately gotten back to my father, who was Chairman of the Board, and not at all interested in my writing. Oxford offered me a place of refuge, a chance to discover myself as myself, if only I had the courage to do it.
Donna was in the writing class too.
Seemingly my age, I found out she was from Grenada. My closest contact to Grenada was my cousin Robert Wingate, who was from Greenwood. Robert was an accountant. He knew her father because he did the books for one of his businesses and his campaign. Through Robert, I would backward engineer a proper introduction through some boys we both knew.
Making a second trip to Oxford, I knew I was throwing the dice. I wasn’t batting a thousand with girls. The ones that liked me, I never understood why. The ones that didn’t like me, I never understood why either.
Blonde girls made the best buddies. Gentle and soft, they had the best laughs. They were, however, not my preference. From the earliest days, I liked them dark and mysterious. Black Irish, Mediterranean, more than a few Jewesses, and even a few African Princesses.
“Jewess” is an offensive term, by the way. You shouldn’t use it. If I’m going to write this book, then you’ll have to accept that I use offensive terms sometimes because that was a part of my life. This is a gumbo that’s been cooking for more than fifty years, and there are many, many ingredients. “Jewess” reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor, who wasn’t one but became one, and her presence probably started this mess.
“This is my friend, Boyd, from Jackson.”
“Oh, hi. Hey, we’re gonna go, but are you guys going tomorrow?”
Casey, mighty Casey had struck out. The lottery ticket I worked so hard to purchase had not a single winning number on it.
The next year, Donna moved to a small college famous for its writing program deep in Yankee territory. I would enroll at Millsaps College to study business and absolutely not theater, art, or writing. Donna would win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I would win a seat on the Kappa Alpha Order Court of Honor. One is considerably more prestigious than the other.
Robert Wingate knew Donna’s father in the Delta. In Jackson, everybody in Mississippi knew my father, and my uncle, and my other uncle, and my grandfather. Some of my friends had taken to calling me “Le Dauphin,” a term I found offensive.
“Does this mean I’ll end on the guillotine?”
None of the men called Le Dapuhin ended up on the guillotine. Not yet. It still was not something I was excited about. Being known for what I could do myself didn’t seem to be in the cards.
When I was born, the Clarion Ledger said “Another ABC,” and someone wrote a pretty extensive birth announcement about what my namesake, Alexander Boyd Campbell, and my father, James Boyd Campbell, had done, but nothing at all about what baby Boyd had done, which was mainly poop and laugh. There was no byline to the article.
If I’m going to write this book, you’ll have to accept that I move back and forth in time quite a bit. I’m probably not always going to tell the truth either. I only have permission to tell my own story, so if there comes a spot where I feel like I’m invading someone else’s privacy, I’ll lie and give a false name and false details so they can’t be identified. I figure I owe them that much.
Ray Bradbury said I should write about Robots and Dinosaurs because I loved them so much. I suspect it’s what he told all the starry-eyed young writers who found him. It’s also what he liked to write about.
Eudora Welty said I was lazy because I hadn’t sought to have even a single word published. I learned later that she called any number of young writers lazy. I don’t think writers are lazy. They may be frightened that their vision doesn’t match what comes out of their fingers. Calling them lazy might be a way to get them over the hump. People thought of Eudora Welty as this sweet little old lady with back problems. She was a lioness, and anyone close to her knew that.
I had sought publication before. I asked my Uncle Tom, who ran the Clarion Ledger, if I could write movie reviews. He told me to write one and let him see it. I reviewed “A Piece of the Action” with Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, typed it up, gave it to him, and waited for a reply. I’m still waiting. Although he was my uncle, and generally as loving as men in his generation could be, I think he just had no interest in having adolescent writers on his paper.
This is my fourth attempt to start this book. My goal is not to bore you. I intend on breaking the fourth wall quite a bit because if a writer forgets his audience, he’s in very deep water without a compass.
I never saw Donna Tartt again, and she never saw me. Sometimes, when people leave Mississippi, they stay gone. She eventually landed in Charlottesville, Virginia, almost a year to the day before the “Unite the Right” riot there.
I had written around a thousand to two thousand words a day since 1978, but never showed a word to anyone, not even my spouse or any of my fiancées. While I didn’t know Donna was there, knowing that a woman was killed there changed something within me. I had always considered myself mostly republican, but these definitions were changing faster than I could keep up.
Still recovering from some pretty extensive health issues, I published my first story on Facebook, which I had largely been ignoring. I had a blog before that, but it was mostly opinion pieces, and once a guy named Kingfish contacted me about doing something together with our blogs, I lost interest. That’s another story, I suppose.
You’re supposed to start a story at the beginning. I dislike chronological beginnings. They bore me. Let’s start this story where so many of my stories start, with a tiny creature who has more activity behind her eyes than in front.
