The Edges of the Universe

The universe changes, not at its core, but at its edges. The edges, where fire meets ice, stone meets water, darkness meets light, flesh meets blood, and love meets hate. That’s where the universe changes.

Most people don’t like to live like that. They want to do their job, feed their dog, watch their shows, and NOT be bothered. It might be nice if the universe changed, “but I got a mortgage, man. My child needs braces. I can’t get involved.” I can’t judge them. Sometimes, feeding your dog and taking care of your kid’s teeth is about all the good you can do in the world. The world is just like that.

No matter what anybody tells you, the best way to serve a steak is medium rare, especially if it’s a good piece of meat. Medium rare gives you a nice, umami-laced crust, meeting a brown zone where the meat is more well than rare and then a rich, pink center where you can taste everything the cow experienced. It’s the edges that make it so great. Cooking a steak one solid temperature through and through should come with some sort of public punishment.

I’m uncomfortable living in the center. I’m drawn to the edges like a lonely sailor hearing the voice of the siren or a lonely shepherd drawn to the deep lakes by a kelpie’s tricks. The edge often means destruction, but it also means life, change, beauty, joy, redemption, and liberation. You might die, but you might live. You pays your nickle—you takes your chances.

This has always caused some issues for the people that love me. Particularly because I’m so big and so loud, if I’m at the edges, mixing it up, people are likely to notice, and they’re often likely to remember. It also means that, once again, I might destroy myself.

Daedelus made wings so the immortal could fly near the sun. His son, Icarus, wasn’t immortal, though. He wasn’t satisfied living in the center of the universe. He wanted to experience the edges, but he didn’t account for his wings being made with beeswax. The sun melted the wax. The feathers fell out, and Icarus fell back to the center of the earth and his destruction.

When I was a child, the center of Mississippi wasn’t such a great place. Injustice became the structure of our society, and most men fought to keep it that way because that was the center, and life in the center was safer than life at the edges.

I knew some guys. They were older than me. They were my dad’s age, but they were Methodists in the middle of Mississippi and closely associated with Millsaps, so they became part of my universe because that was the center of where I lived.

Challenging life in the center and moving to live on the edges was a dangerous thing to do in Mississippi in the sixties. Guys were dying over this. Some were very close to where I lived. Even though I was just a toddler, most of the grownups I knew wanted very much for things to change, although they almost never agreed on how. Most wanted something very measured and reasonable and safe; some wanted something RIGHT NOW. They moved from the center to the edges.

T.W. Lewis is such a quiet, measured guy. You would never expect him to be a revolutionary or a radical. Some people suspected him of exactly that. He became the subject of investigation by the State Sovereignty Commission. A group created by the Mississippi legislature to keep tabs on all these race-mixers and integrationists in our midst, either outside agitators or locally grown.

T.W. wasn’t the kind of guy to let you know that a branch of the Mississippi state government was trying to bully him into changing his position. He wasn’t the kind of guy to let you know he sometimes got anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night threatening to do violence to him or his family because of the things he believed.

He wasn’t the kind of guy to let you know these things, but they were all true. There came a time when some Millsaps students wanted to protest an incident of police brutality by forming a protest march around the Governor’s Mansion and the State Capitol. The State Sovereignty Commission sent agents to photograph and identify them and photograph the license plate of any out-of-county cars parked nearby. This was all done openly as a measure to intimidate these students and chase them away from the edge, back to the center. It didn’t work.

Because some of these students were in T.W.’s classes, he got anonymous threats. My dad got anonymous threats about the board letting people like T.W. “do what they want.” Usually, Daddy just hung up on these people, but in relating the story to me, he said that he asked one of them, “You understand this is our New Testament teacher, don’t you?” To my dad, that settled the argument. To the angry peckerwood on the phone, I’m sure it made no sense at all.

like Dr. Lewis, Ed King was a minister in what would evolve into the United Methodist Church. Lewis followed an academic path, where King became more of a chaplain and minister. Where Lewis was subtle and modest about his radical willingness to live on the edge, King was quite loud about it.

Young and strong, King wanted to be there when the fire hit the ice, and often was. If you look at the photographs from the near riots at the Woolworth sit-in, you can see King in his clerical collar in some of the historic photographs of the event. He’s clearly in some danger as he ministers to the protestors. Methodist ministers don’t often wear ecumenical collars. King was making a point—unfortunately, a point lost on the mob that day.

Whereas Lewis wasn’t the kind of guy who would tell you the State Sovereignty Commission was investigating him, King was more likely to say, “Investigate me!” as loudly as he could. If he weren’t a minister, he might follow that with some words most often associated with Samuel L. Jackson.

Living on the edge so you can change the universe comes at a cost. Men protecting the center of Mississippi first threatened Ed King, and then they worked to destroy his career. When that didn’t work, they tried to kill him. It failed. Doctors who could help hide the scars from the assassination attempt were told not to treat him, so Ed King wore a reminder of his moment on the edge on his face for the rest of his life—a warning, not to him, but to the rest of us.

I remember when James Bowley came to Millsaps. He was pretty young. I was a good bit younger, too. Like a lot of guys his age, he was the first generation of students who studied under what most people considered the radicals who lived on the edge and changed the academy and its place in the world in the sixties and seventies.

When he showed up, I said to Lance,

“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

Lance laughed. He knew what I meant. By the nineties, the academy had gotten accustomed to young professors with stars in their eyes hoping to change the universe. They immediately get bogged down by committee meetings, conferences, peer reviews, and reports that they soon find their way to the center of the pile just to survive.

Lance recognized it because it happened to him. In the sixties, he was ready to hare-lip the Navy with his production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I’ve always enjoyed going over the “letters to the editor” both in the Millsaps School paper and the Clarion Ledger condemning Lance for bringing that sort of “near pornography” to Mississippi. The pornography, I suppose, came from the fact that Kat performs much of the play in a silk slip, and Brick’s dead friend had homosexual feelings for him. In the sixties, your grandma would make you leave the table for discussing these things.

Dr. Bowley didn’t move to the center, though. He liked life at the edge. His students liked being there with him. Young people love living at the edge. It’s thrilling, and they don’t yet have a mortgage and kids’ braces to pay for.

For a number of reasons, I was convinced that the Christian Center at Millsaps had to be torn down. Built quickly, using federal money, it had pretty legendary foundation problems. One night, when Brent was out of town, I was called to campus because the walls were visibly moving.

George Harmon had plans to tear it down and build something remarkable on the other side of the parking lot. He invited me over to talk with the architect and come up with thumbnail ideas for the project. George also wanted to retire, and he had some really big, really expensive projects he wanted to get done first. The new performing arts center, he figured, would be left for whoever came next.

I was a bit shocked when the school announced that they would rebuild the Christian Center rather than tear it down. I emailed some friends, saying, “This should be interesting.” The plans turned out to be really solid. While the auditorium space could be saved, the theater itself couldn’t. Considering that a broken water main under it had washed away almost all the soil, I wasn’t surprised. That’s why the walls were moving.

The news reported that Dr. Bowley was in trouble for allowing his students to paint graffiti on what had been the reception space in the Christian Center as the semester ended, knowing that the room would be ripped out and replaced by the new English Department in a few months.

My first response was, “This is dumb. Why is it even on the news?” Living on the edge means you collect people who are annoyed with you. That was pretty clearly happening with Dr. Bowley.

Not just Millsaps but the entire American Academy has been under threat for the past ten years due to changing economies, rising costs, and shrinking college-age populations. Pressure like that moves people to the center where it’s safe. Guys living on the edge where the good stuff happens become a lot more noticeable, and that was happening to Dr. Bowley.

I don’t pretend to know what happened with Dr. Bowley and his Abortion and Religion class and the email about Donald Trump. I’ve been around enough professors from Millsaps and elsewhere to know that comments like “f--- Donald Trump” are not at all rare. Whatever happened there didn’t seem to originate with his students, although it did seem to involve a student. I don’t pretend to know what happened there; it could be a million things we don’t have any right to know about. What goes on between students and faculty and the administration and the board and the alumni is more complicated than you can imagine, and most of it is what I consider “protected information” because this is people’s lives involved, and you don’t need to know everything.

I can tell you that I wasn’t surprised. I’d been thinking for a few years that somebody was coming for his neck. I’ve been around long enough to know the signs. This happened to one of my closest friends, and despite all my history at Millsaps and all my connections, it took ten years for me to piece together what really happened.

For many years, Millsaps had the same general council as the state of Mississippi. Bill Goodman is one of the strongest, smartest lawyers in the history of Mississippi. We got him because he was a graduate, and his family had been deeply involved in Millsaps for two generations. What a lot of people, even other board members, never knew was that Bill would often bill Millsaps for just a small fraction of the hours he spent representing her, often not at all. He could be a pretty scary guy, and sometimes he was a challenge to get along with, but Bill Goodman was sterling through and through. Just ask Joe Lee Gibson.

What Bill taught me was that, no matter what happened, no matter how strongly I felt, it was of paramount importance that I let people do their jobs when there are conflicts at Millsaps because there are often factors I don’t know about and often factors I can’t know about.

I can’t tell you how many times my experience proved precisely that to be true. Once upon a time, I was called into a secret meeting with Chokwe Lumumba (the father, not the son.) He thought that what he saw as my more liberal leanings might make me easier to deal with than George Harmon or Bill Goodman. A lot of people think I’m liberal. I’m not. I take each issue on its own merits. Because I like life on the edges, that sometimes makes me look liberal, but it’s an illusion. Change happens at the edges, and change is often interpreted as liberal. I’m not on a team.

My position with Lumumba was that I had a lot of respect for him as a lawyer, even though we had very different political views. My loyalty, where Millsaps is concerned, is to the students first, the institution second, and the administration third, even though I considered people in the administration personal friends.

Because my loyalty is to the students first, I couldn’t tell Lumumba everything I knew, everything Bill Goodman knew, or everything George Harmon knew. Even though I was deeply concerned about the case he wanted to talk about, the best and only way I could think of to serve not just a particular student but all the students was to let people do their jobs, and that meant him working things out with Bill Goodman, no matter how much of a challenge that might be, without trying to work a go-around with somebody like me.

When I first heard about what was going on with James Bowley, it was from a student. You’d be surprised how often it happens that way. I hate to say it, but I’d been expecting something like that with him. Once it becomes clear that somebody is gunning for you in an academic setting, they’ll most likely have their way, even if it’s not at all clear who is doing what. While there are always rumors about who’s behind it all, they’re often wrong. I can remember a time when there was some stuff going on with the performing arts department, and all the students swore up and down that this one music professor was behind it, but they were completely wrong. The real villain of the piece wasn’t even in the performing arts dept.

When I was told about Dr. Bowley, I sent an email to the new president saying “Head’s up. This is what the students are saying. Try to get on top of this as soon as you can, and hopefully get some sort of statement out before the press gets hold of it.”

I didn’t put my foot down and make some sort of argument in favor of Dr. Bowley because that’s not my place. I’m not in the faculty. I don’t know all the details. I know there’s an upset student involved, but I haven’t met them and don’t know their side of the story. I trust the board, and they picked Frank, and I know how complicated these things can get, so I’m just gonna have to trust them to do their job—mainly because I don’t have any choice. There’s a million factors involved here that I don’t have access to, that they do.

I did feel like saying something first before the press came out with their take on the situation would put the school in a better position than responding to whatever the press came out with. Clearly, the administration (and I’m assuming our lawyers) didn’t think so. I was a bit shocked that it took the local press as long as it did for them to pick up the story. As best as I can figure out, they’re all short-funded and short-staffed these days. Aren’t we all?

I’ve made it quite clear that I have no issue with Dr. Bowley offering a class on Religion and Abortion. For a seminar topic, that sounds pretty logical to me. I also have no issue with him calling Donald Trump a racist. Most of the people I know call Donald Trump a racist, including a fair number of Republicans. Sometimes, a guy can be so racist that they don’t even know they’re racist. That happens more often than you’d expect.

Not knowing any more details than that, I don’t feel like I can take a position of “reinstate him” or “keep him banned.” I have to trust that people will do their job. From what I understand, the Faculty Senate has voted in favor of Dr. Bowley, which is them doing their job. Because I respect them, I respect their findings, but there again, I’m not in a position to demand anything. I know, in my heart, and a lot of other people do too, that there are grapes on the vine here that we either can’t see or haven’t seen yet. That, too, is part of the process. As frustrating as it is.

Sometimes, living on the edge, you get hit by a really powerful blast from the center. It happens when the center feels like there’s change coming, and it makes them afraid. As much as I like Dr. Bowley, I’m not at all surprised this happened to him. I hate that it happened at Millsaps, but Millsaps encourages people to go to the edges, even though they know their wings are made of beeswax.

The other thing Bill Goodman taught me was that there comes a point where nobody wins but the lawyers. Time and time again, that bit of advice has proven to be quite true. I don’t know how close we are to that with the James Bowley situation, but I feel like it’s close. When this is all over, I don’t think you’ll be able to say that he won, or the school won, or the students won, or the board won, but the lawyers will have made a lot of money.

If I were James, I’d be thinking a lot about the sort of life Ed King led after the assassination attempt. The center reached out and blasted him pretty hard, but they didn’t end him, and they didn’t end his work. Sometimes, when you live on the edge, you gotta take getting hit and find ways to continue going afterward.

I hate that the students had to see this. While it’s a pretty important lesson, it’s not a pleasant thing to go through. If it makes them feel better to stand on their desk and say, “O Captain! My Captain!” then maybe they should.

Ed King Woolworth Sit-in

Millsaps Students Photographed by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

Oh Captain, my Captain