Men culture hate in their own hearts and then seek God’s approval lest they have to admit any responsibility. They do it with some passion because it was God himself who warned us against hate in our hearts. Jesus did too.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a tiny woman, never more than ninety pounds. We called her “nanny” because that’s what she called her grandmother. My sister’s children called my mother “gramma,” and my step-children called her “Mrs. Campbell,” so I suppose we broke the chain. That’s okay; it can be picked up again in some future generation.
Her name was Mayrene Brady, and she came from Learned, Mississippi. Learned is an “unincorporated community” in Hinds County, Mississippi. There was never much there but a general store run by a cousin, now one of the best steak houses in Mississippi, although it still looks like a country general store. There were eight Brady children, which wasn’t uncommon for their generation. For my generation, bearing eight children will get you a show on the Discovery Channel.
Nanny was fierce and brilliant but also frightened and timid. I barely remember her when she wasn’t wringing her tiny, wrinkled hands. I used to trace the blue-green veins in her hand with my lumbering pink finger, then pull the loose skin on the back of her hands and let it settle back in place again.
I suppose what made Nanny afraid was cholera, the Spanish Flue, the depression, the Dust Bowl, the communists, the Klan, World War I, World War II, The Korean Conflict (that we never had the courage to call a war), Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, the Six Day War, the Iranian Revolution, Ross Barnett, Medgar Evers, James Meridith, Cliff Finch, Richard Nixon, the bomb, R-rated movies, Home Box Office and more. I was warned not to sit so close to the television, not to chew with my mouth open, not to ride my bike without my hands on the handlebars, don’t swallow gum and don’t go to sleep with gum in my mouth, not to watch those monster movies, not to lift so many weights, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t dare drink that Co-Cola. (She never mentioned that the sugar in Coke might be bad for me, but that carbonation would surely wreck my constitution.)
I think her life filled with fearful things began when she was a teenager and a man raped her little sister. You wouldn’t think such a thing could happen in a sleepy little town like Learned, but it did. My mother explained that my Grandfather was a proud and powerful Scottish-Irish man. He and her uncle “took care of it.” I never knew exactly what “took care of it” meant, nor did she. Knowing my uncle, he was not a man one would ever suspect of any violence. He died when I was very young. He was living with Nanny and Grandaddy Joe in Jackson when the Federal government reminded him of his duty to fight the nazis. They did their best to shoot him out of the sky but failed. I suppose he was capable of more violence than you’d suspect, more than the Nazis suspected, anyway.
Her little sister came to be known as “Babe.” I always thought it incongruent to the point of being funny that anyone would call a little old lady “Babe,” which to my mind meant “baby.” Babe was brilliant and loving. She was often my babysitter, even though she once stuck me with a diaper pin trying to change me and drew blood. She was weeping inconsolably when she confessed it to my mother and father. I obviously didn’t remember this, but my father did. It made him laugh. He forgave her and said I was tougher than any diaper pin. I suppose he was right.
After learning the story about what happened to Babe, I was told that Babe didn’t allow men who were not in the family near her. She allowed my father, Robert Mimms, Buster Bailey, and others, related by marriage or blood, but no others I can remember. She lived a life behind an impenetrable shield built by her family to protect her, hence being called “Babe” well into her nineties. It always seemed to me that this self-imposed, perpetual care of Babe was their way of making up for not protecting her when she was small.
Sitting in Babe’s lap while she read to me, I had no dream in my head that anything had ever hurt her. I suspect, me knowing she had been hurt, would have hurt her again. Even when she became very old and very frail, she never knew that I knew. Her sisters told me. I suppose they thought I was old enough that it was my turn to protect her.
Nanny was very concerned about the quality of my social life, which didn’t exist. She held my cousin Leigh up as an example. Leigh won everything in High School. I explained that Leigh was pretty and popular while I watched monster movies and wrote in the dark. “I wish you wouldn’t watch those monnsur movies!” She would warn me.
This business about the “tortured inner life” of an artist is pretty real, but I don’t talk about it very often because it’s pointless, it sounds like I’m bitching, and you can’t really help anyway. The world doesn’t balance. The artist, particularly writers, spend their lives trying to make it balance in their head, which is impossible, so they’re miserable. Sometimes they drink too much and other things. I did, too, but I quit before it consumed me. I would again, but George Patton says my liver won’t take it, and he’s a lot smarter than me.
I spent too much time last week arguing with a man on Twitter who believed the United Methodist Church, my church, was doomed and abandoned by God because we opened our hearts and opened our doors to people he despised. He wouldn’t say he despised them. He would say he loved them, but he despised how they lived. I told him that I didn’t accept his argument. “Habitual adulterers,” he labeled them. I explained how I knew men who loved each other and only each other for more than forty years. I knew ministers who had trouble loving the same woman for five, including Jimmy Swaggart, who lived in Lousiana where he maintained an enormous church, but cried on television when he was caught having an affair with a prostitute who posed naked for Penthouse magazine exposing the true folly of Swaggart’s misadventure. His wife was lovely, but this woman was among the ugliest, hairiest people I’ve ever seen. She could have been a bigfoot. Swaggart was an adulterer with bigfoot.
When I was a child, my United Methodist Church church was split into pieces through an argument about who we would open our doors to. Nothing more than that. We broke up because some people didn’t want to bar the door.
Being Mississippi, the idea that black men and white men might eat the lord’s bread and share the lord’s cup together was untenable and unassailably ugly to some people. When the issue came to battleheads and a decision was made, some of the church’s most loyal members chose to leave. Although we discussed it considerably when I got older, neither my mother nor my father told me this story first. It was Nanny. She told me to make the point that I should always stand up for what’s right, even if it’s painful.
“Boyd, you’re obsessed with this gay stuff. It’s annoying.”
I suppose it is annoying. It’s not even that interesting to me. There are people I know—people I love, who live like this. I have no idea how this happens. I don’t understand why they are different from me, but I love them and want them to be happy—more than that, I want them to be safe. I don’t want them to be hurt for doing something that’s not all that different from what I do, although it is with people I probably wouldn’t ever do it with. To me, that is not enough of a difference to ever hate anybody.
There’s a song in Cabaret about a man in love with a gorilla. “If you could see her through my eyes. She's clever, she's smart, she reads music. She doesn't smoke or drink gin (like I do.) If you could see her through my eyes—she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” I don’t know anybody who loved a gorilla before, but I knew a woman who became famous when a gorilla loved her, and I’ve deeply loved a Jewish girl before, so I get the point.
When you’re the biggest kid in school, you either become a bully or a protector. I tried the bully thing, but it didn’t suit me. My nanny taught me to be a protector, to look for those who were smaller and weaker, and to make some use of those stupid muscles she wished I didn’t have in the first place.
I shouldn’t argue with men on Twitter, not when their mind is made up. You could accuse me of taunting them. When you’re my size, you develop a certain attitude. “You can hit me if you want, but you’re not going to hurt me.” That’s my attitude on the internet. I wasn’t going to change his mind, but I was going to get him to say he hated people when he was ordered by God to love.
On Twitter, there were any number of people who had been United Methodists but were no longer United Methodists because some of us wanted to open our doors and open our hearts to people they hated, even though they weren’t willing to say they hated them. “I love the sinner but hate the sin.” They would say.
“Are you sure it’s a sin? I can’t see where Jesus or God ever said it was a sin.” And then, they would list off all the people in the bible who weren’t Jesus, God, or Moses, who condemned homosexuality. However, I’ve gotten pretty good at arguing that what they’re describing isn’t what we know in the modern world as homosexuality. I’m also pretty good at arguing that Paul was a great man, a very devout man, a man with experiences I can’t imagine, but he was a man, just like I am a man. He’s not God. He’s not a prophet, and I’ll make a point nobody ever seems to want to make. He never met Jesus. That’s another way he’s just like me.
The United Methodist Church has taken considerable losses for opening its doors, both now and when I was a child. When I was a child, people predicted the end of the United Methodist Church and my particular church at the corner of Congress and Yazoo streets, but when I became a man, the United Methodist Church was stronger than ever, and you couldn’t find a seat at Galloway when Ross Olivier was preaching. We’re taking some hits to the broadside right now, and it sure hurts, but the Church is a living thing. It will heal. It will grow.
What would my Nanny want me to say to this man on Twitter who hated Methodists when he had been a Methodist because Methodists now refused to condemn the people he wanted to be condemned? I thought—and then I typed.
“I warn you. Do not blame God for the hate in your own heart.”