The Broken Child - Chapter Five

The Moral Implications of Time

When I was married, you would have thought my wife and I were the same age. If anything, you’d think I was a few years older. My wife was already walking, talking, and wearing big-girl pants the day I was born. Given the opportunity, she could have carried me around like a baby doll or a puppy. Knowing her, given the opportunity, she probably would have.

When I was born, Jackson, Mississippi, had only a few pediatricians. You could have fit them all in a car and driven them to a baseball game. Hearing their stories, I’m surprised it didn’t happen just so. My pediatrician was a white-haired man who made house calls, especially around suppertime.

When I was born, if you mentioned “Dr. Alexander,” people would assume you meant the woman who ran Mississippi School for the Deaf, The woman who ran the writing Department at Jackson State University, or a gentleman who seemed near retirement for twenty years, who was my doctor. I never minded going to see Dr. Alexander, even though they gave me shots, because he looked like the man on the Kentucky Fried Chicken sign.

My mother adored Dr. Alexander. She always said that she would have left my father and moved to Bora Bora with him if he had ever mentioned it. He never mentioned it. But, making house calls, he sometimes asked, “What you got cookin’ in that pot?”

Under Dr. Alexander’s advice, when my brother caught Chickenpox, she made sure I caught it, too. “It's best to get it over with,” they reasoned. Fortunately, doctors were giving different advice when Covid came along.

From the day we started dating until just last week, I regularly encounter people who were patients of my Father-in-Law when they were children. Although I had not been his patient, my relationship with Cecil Jenkins lasted considerably longer than my relationship with his daughter. Most boys don’t invite their father-in-law to their bachelor party. I made it clear I wasn’t going without Cecil.

My loving spouse used to enjoy challenging me with questions of great scientific and moral implications. “How is it,” she asked, “that God knows our fate if we have free will? If he already knows what we will choose and the implications of it, then is our will really free?”

Certain sects of Presbyterianism in the South made considerable arguments about “pre-determination.” They sometimes made a great production out of judging nearly everyone I knew, including my wife, which is probably why she engaged me in this conversation. My sister was put on a list of people destined for hell when she was a teenager by otherwise well-meaning people in a certain sect of Presbyterianism in the South. She’s been praying about it and hasn’t ended up in Hell yet. There’s still time if she puts her back into it.

Large groups of United Methodists recently decided they no longer wanted to be United, so I can’t really say we’re in much better shape as a denomination than anyone else.

I explained to my wife that the linear expression of time could be just part of the mortal condition. God, who created the universe, might not experience time like we do, or at all. The closest we can come to understanding how God experiences time from our mortal perspective is that everything happens all at once. To him, there is no time. God experiences the choices we make and their consequences at precisely the same moment because there are no moments to him.

We don’t know why God preserves the aspect of Free Will, but he does. We can and must choose from many paths, hoping to find the one that leads to the consequence God intended for us.

This perspective about God and Time also explains some important questions about the creation of the universe in “seven days.” To a being who doesn’t experience time, “seven days” doesn’t have the same meaning it does to us who experience time. Since God was the only one who could share the creation story with us, assuming there might be some confusion between his message and how we interpreted it is not unreasonable.

If we exist eternally in God’s eye before we’re made here on Earth, then there are moral implications in a God who chooses the middle of 1963, in the middle of Mississippi, for me to be born. Being born white and male to a middle-class family probably alleviates some of the negatives here. Still, surely a loving God knew he was sending an unusually sensitive child into a world at the very moment it was catching fire.

My mother was physically very strong. Her first two births went off without a problem. My mother began having children as the people in Mississippi began stoking the fires of change. The year before my brother was born, Emmitt Till was murdered, and photographs of his bloated body appeared in Life Magazine. To frighten off the waves of social change coming, the Mississippi State Legislature created and funded the State Sovereignty Commission just months before Jimmy was Born in 1956.

My brother Joe was born healthy and strong in 1959 with gobs of jet-black hair that was almost immediately replaced by a shockingly white towhead that lasted until school started. He’s still blonde now, but he has help. If I still had enough hair to cut, I’d probably seek help with its color, too.

Still very young, my parents were determined to keep rolling the dice until the dice came up, “Girl!” Since Joe and Jimmy had been such easy births, my mother presumed she could do this as much as she wanted—and she wanted that girl.

Fifteen months after Joe’s birth, Mother was pregnant again. She decided to name the new baby Either Joreine or Evelyn, after her aunts, or Martha after herself. If it were a boy, she would name him John-Allen after his uncles. Double names are common in the South. A few months into the pregnancy, my mother’s obstetrician made the shocking announcement that there were two heartbeats. Joe and Jimmy were expecting twin siblings.

The naming strategy changed. If the twins were girls, they would be Joreine and Evelyn. If they were boys, they would be John and Allen. One of my mother’s best friends was born a twin. She was excited about the opportunity.

By this time, my father was the head of the printing division at Mississippi School Supply Company. Bob Hearin regularly tried to lure him away to work at First National Bank, but my Uncle made it clear he was looking to my father to replace him one day, not realizing how soon that day would come. My mother’s health remained impeccable, and the two tiny heartbeats inside her were growing every day.

One of life's great mysteries is that women can create human life from within their bodies. In “Dune,” Frank Herbert made much of this sort of mystical chasm between men and women. Whatever men have created in the history of the universe, we’ve yet to create a single human life. Mary Shelly had three children who died before their first birthday before having one that lived. Her book about a man who creates life is said to reflect the children who didn’t survive that she bore to Shelly, whose love was inconstant.

After a clear blue day full of nothing but good news, my mother went to bed thinking that her life was the best. In the small hours of the night, she woke because pregnant women visit the bathroom quite a lot. In the little master bathroom in our little house on Northside Drive, in the middle of the night, my mother felt a sharp cramp and delivered the twins into the toilet. Cleaning herself the best she could, she went into the bedroom and told my father that she needed to go to the hospital. The babies were dead, and she was pretty sure they were boys.

I’ve known enough women who miscarried children to know that I’ve probably already written too much about this. My mother hadn’t previously had problems with the postpartum depression that sometimes comes with childbirth, but losing these children sent her into a deep depression. She began sleeping in a separate bed from my father. My grandmother, who normally spent six months in Mississippi with my mother and six months in Georgia with her sister, stayed in Jackson to watch over my brothers while my mother worked on becoming herself again.

In the first weeks of October 1962, my parents drove to Biloxi, Mississippi, for the National School Supply and Equipment Association Convention and stayed at the Broadwater Beach Hotel. There, they reconciled by drinking colorful drinks with paper umbrellas and listening to a Jazz combo in the Garden Room. Under a Biloxi Beach moon, I was conceived.

Two weeks earlier, on Saturday, my mother and father walked from my Grandfather’s home on St. Ann Street to the Ole Miss Vs Kentucky game at Veterans Memorial Stadium. The Rebels were winning. Most Ole Miss people considered Ross Barnett a bumbling idiot. He was. Trying to speak at an Ole Miss Game before, he’d been booed. On Thursday, Barnett had made a secret deal with President Kennedy to admit James Meridith to the Ole Miss Law School. Reportedly, Barnett asked Kennedy to have the marshalls hold him at gunpoint while Meridith was enrolled. Kennedy refused.

During halftime of the Kentucky Game, with the Rebels ahead, the Pride of the South marching band played while my mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, and my uncle (his brother) sat watching. Then Ross Barnett spoke.

“I Love Mississippi!”

“And I Love it’s people!”

Forty thousand fans cheered him on.

That night, Barnett told Bobby Kennedy he was having second thoughts about his deal with the President. While Ole Miss Students drove back to Oxford, they found it occupied by thousands of people determined to block the admittance of James Meridith with their bodies if necessary. Kennedy would send as many as five thousand troops.

Monday morning, my mother made breakfast and drank coffee, listening to the radio describe the two dead and three hundred wounded from what would become known as the “Battle of Oxford.” Feeding her two living children, it would be two more months before she knew a third child was growing inside her.

Five months into her pregnancy, my mother began to find bloody spots in her underwear. Fearing what happened before, she immediately called her obstetrician.

Six months into her pregnancy, the spotting got worse. The obstetrician told my mother not to panic, but he could no longer hear the baby's heartbeat. My mother swore she could feel me moving. Making a second examination, the obstetrician thought maybe he could hear my heartbeat, but he was unsure. He ordered my mother to observe strict bed rest.

My mother spent the last trimester before I was born in bed, with her mother tending her and cooking for my father and brothers. Some days, she excitedly asked people to feel her belly to confirm they could feel me moving; most of the time, they could not. They say that a baby born after a miscarriage is called a rainbow baby. My mother was praying for a rainbow.

On Wednesday, June 12, 1963, the radio carried stories about the assassination of Medgar Evers at his home in Jackson. Concerns about a race riot were palpable, and not alltogether inconcievable, under the circumstances. On Friday, my father packed a suitcase and moved my mother to the hospital. My arrival, alive or not, was imminent.

On Sunday, Father’s Day, my mother had been contracting but not dilating as much as expected. My father sat with Jack Flood, one of his oldest friends, waiting to find out if I would be born dead or alive. At this point, the fetal heartbeat was pretty clear, but nobody knew what condition I’d be in. There were considerable worries about a fetal heart condition.

At suppertime, my mother said she couldn’t eat. The doctor said that at the rate the contractions were coming, it could easily be Monday before I was born. My father and Jack Flood walked to Primos, not quite a block away, to pick up hamburgers for themselves and soup for my mother in case she changed her mind about eating.

When my father returned with a sack full of food, my head and shoulders were already in this world, and the rest soon followed. After cleaning me up, the doctor declared me a strong and healthy boy with no heart condition. In a world afire with strife, I was born a rainbow baby.