Welcome to Millsaps
the innocence of youth
Sometimes, I can’t tell everything I know about a story. Even with stories that happened a long time ago, people deserve some privacy regarding their part in a story.
As a freshman in college, I resolved to reinvent myself as the responsible businessman people expected of me and become the leader everyone said I could be. In my family, “leadership” has nothing to do with charisma. It means constant and relentless service to others, regardless of the personal cost. Leadership isn’t about what you receive; it’s about what you give. When I see my sister’s life, it’s clear she absorbed the lesson pretty well.
Even though I had mentioned California, the most common suggestion in my family was either Millsaps or Ole Miss for my college career. I chose Millsaps because I could attend class and work full-time with my father. Working with my father turned out to be about the only way I ever had to know him since his job took him away from us most of the time.
When I had meals at school, Ruby, the woman in the lunch line, called me “preacher” because I wore a tie, and none of the other boys did. Paul Hardin was very pleased with me for wearing a cravat even though it hadn’t been required since the fifties.
The part I sometimes leave out of these stories because I wrongly assume people already know it is that, at this point, my father had been Chairman of the Board at Millsaps for almost fifteen years, having been the youngest person ever appointed to that position and the first lay person ever holding that position. My uncle, (and my namesake) held the position of treasurer for almost forty years. Treasurer was the highest position a layperson could take at Millsaps. When he died, they named the recently completed student union after him. I joined Millsaps, knowing there would be constant questions about why my name was on the building where we ate lunch.
There came a time, fairly early on, when a woman said her rights had been violated by members of one of the campus fraternities. Then she said they hadn’t. Then she said they had, but not all of them were a violation. At that point, the Jackson District Attorney threw up his hands and said he couldn’t do anything with the case because she changed her story too much.
People always accused my father of using his political position to pressure the DA into dropping the charges because it made the school look bad. I was pretty close to the situation, and I can tell you that’s not what happened. Dad’s position, and Bill Goodman’s position, was that the real threat here was the potential for civil suits, and if the school just backed up whatever case the DA made, it would put them in a better position to fend off civil suits. They believed the school was in a better-protected position if at least one of the boys were charged. All of this is pretty serious. I was just nineteen.
The Dean of Students was just about as Yankee as they come, but he was a gentle and wise creature. Jeff Good is a lot like his father, Stuart, but Jeff has this sort of chaotic energy, where his dad was one of the most constant and even people I ever knew. Even though I had just shown up on campus, I began having weekly, sometimes daily, meetings with Dean Good to try and work with him on a way out of this and maybe somehow act as an instrument for his office.
George Harmon, the college president, had never been a fan of Greek organizations. His plan was to kick the named fraternity off campus forever, make it illegal for boys to live in the other fraternity houses, and make it very illegal for boys to drink in the fraternity houses. He was pretty well aware of what rules like that would have on Greek life at Millsaps, and he didn’t care. My father’s position tended to be, “This is George’s decision, and he’s right; fraternities are a pain in the ass.” My father and I had several conversations about how the Greek system in the American Academy could vanish overnight. There was, and still is, a fair amount of pressure to make just that happen.
Without the involvement of the District Attorney, the focus became twofold: making the women on campus believe their rights were protected, which was huge, and protecting the school from civil suits, either from the accused boys, their families, the woman herself, or anyone else.
When I told my father that I had gone out with the woman involved, he told me to immediately call Bill Goodman and say what happened, giving all the details. On my mother’s grave, I was an absolute gentleman with this person. Eating Gibbs pizza with her, I discovered that, other than video games and beer, I had absolutely nothing in common with this woman. There are very, very few instances in my life where I shared lips with a woman who I couldn’t share my mind with. It was a one-night thing, and I never called again.
It was decided that one of the fraternities would be put on a one-year total probation for alcohol violations, among other things. A boy whose father was one of my father’s best friends met me in the bowl. That was the last year when you could drive through campus. In my Ford LTD, we made several circles around campus as he tried to intimidate me into getting my dad to intervene and remove the one-year probation since the DA wasn’t pressing charges. He believed that since I had regular conversations with my Dad, Rowan Taylor, and Jack Reed, I could do this, and I was obligated to do it since I was also in a fraternity. That he was trying to push me into doing this was making me pretty mad, but I wasn’t going to let on.
Things did eventually calm down. Even though she left Millsaps, I tried to leave things open with the woman in case she ever wanted to talk about it. Her father let it be known he’d kick my ass if I ever showed up in his town. I don’t think he believed I had been a gentleman with her. One of the boys in the case returned to finish his degree but didn’t engage socially on campus very much.
My relationship with Stuart Good remained very close after that. I recognized that he was a man of goodwill and good sense, and I think he recognized that I wasn’t gonna try to impress him with my social and familial connections. He had a tremendously positive impact on the lives of many, many young people.
I thought for a time that I could tell this story as fiction. I thought there were interesting things that happened in the community as it struggled to understand how to respond to what was happening. I still think that, but it became pretty clear that I couldn’t make the story fictional enough that anybody who remembered what happened wouldn’t see through what I was doing.
People talk about the innocence of youth. I never had that option. When I was sixteen, I lost my virginity. Four weeks later, I held her father’s body while his life’s blood shot from a self-inflicted hole in his head. I felt his soul leave his body.
At nineteen, my introduction to college was the biggest conflict we’d have for twenty years, one that ended with nearly everyone hurt. I’ll never really know if we did the right thing. The plan was to just go with whatever the District Attorney did. When he backed out, the whole thing became a very complicated legal and moral quagmire. George Harmon was too angry to be much comfort to anybody so that all fell on Stewart Good.
I’ve left out a lot of details because I believe people have a right to their own story. I’ve also tried not to give any indication of what I thought really happened during the incident because what I think doesn’t really matter, and I don’t have any way of actually knowing.
I feel like, as bad as it was, the school handled things pretty well. It was one of those situations where nobody would ever feel like their particular concerns were met. Sometimes you just have to accept that you can’t give everybody the closure they need.
Every so often, I’ll check social media to see what happened to the people involved. They seem to have had good lives. I think that’s all you can expect.
Most people thought I was a drunken idiot who didn’t study and broke up all the fights at CS’s. A lot of that is true. A lot of that is what I wanted people to see. Those four years between high school and real life can be filled with an unbelievable amount of drama and suffering. A lot of it happens without any lights being shown on it.
I don’t think I miss not having had any innocence. I don’t know what I would have done with it if I had it. I’m grateful for the men who helped me, and I’m grateful for the people who friended me, and I’m grateful for Ruby’s poppy-seed buns on hamburger night.
