Jackson Mississippi 1962

In 1954, I was three years old. In that year, my parents moved from Louisiana to Jackson Mississippi. Our family of four, soon to be six souls, stayed in Jackson until I was in the sixth grade, 1962. Then we moved back to Louisiana.

All around us at that time the world was changing big time. I was, of course, clueless, being just a kid. Living in a humble, GI-bill enabled suburb, l and my whitey neighborhood playmates were quite insulated from the maelstrom of civil rights-fueled social change that was gathering momentum in Jackson and in the whole state of Mississippi and the South, and later the North.

I was in a Catholic school; it was nice enough, and I had some good friends there. Although the US Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had established a legal path toward school desegregation in 1954, I never saw a black classmate until I was in junior high school in Baton Rouge a few years later.

My first impressions of black folk in Jackson came mostly through our maid, Aleen. She was a very nice lady. Many an afternoon, my sister and I would accompany my mother as she drove Aleen home from her day-job at our home. Aleen's home was what we would politely call the "other side of town," although it wasn't really in town, but seemed to me to be out in the country somewhere nearby. The vivid image in my child's mind was of a dirt road lined by houses that I later learned are called "shotgun shacks."

In 2011, Dreamworks released a movie about what was developing in Jackson at that time. You've probably seen it: The Help. It is an excellent film, based on the novel by Kathryn Stockett and it absolutely confirms all my juvenile impressions and memories of Jackson in the 1950s. But of course, as I said before, being a kid I had no idea of what was really going on behind all that docile southern comfort status quo.

Recently, I have decided to write a fictional historiography about growing up in the South during that time, and about how being a born-n-bred southerner interfaced with what the rest of our country was becoming. This novel, my fourth, is tentatively named King of Soul. (Preview: I am not "the King.") The book being written follows the novel Smoke, which I have just published.
I do a lot of historical research. Learning about history is what propels me as a writer. I turn the research into fiction that, I feel represents a certain time period or zeitgeist. Finally I am doing one now on the actual time and place of my growing up.
My daughter Katie, who nobly attempts to be my editor, tells me that my protagonist's depth suffers in the midst of all my fictionalized history. She is of course correct in this critique. Certainly I will learn the lesson of satisfactory protagonist development in this next project, instead of obsessing with making the history itself the main character.

To begin research I have picked up several books at the Belk library, Appalachian State University, here in Boone NC where I live, where Pat and I have raised our three grown young'uns. This researching will be my modus operandi. Before King of Soul is finished in a few years, I probably will have consulted with a hundred or more sources from that library, as well as our local Watauga County library.

The Kindle, and Wikipedia, and real historians posting online, and so forth are also major components of my publishing projects.

To get into the King of Soul, I am reading, among other things, Michael Vinson Williams' opus of history research, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr, and also A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg.

So, by doing, I am finally getting the back-story of what was really going on while I was growing up in Jackson Mississippi in the 1950s and Baton Rouge Louisiana in the 1960s.

I graduated from high school in 1969. What does that tell ya? Should be a fascinating period to reflect upon.

All of this to say: at the present moment I am here to share with you three of the most interesting historical facts I have learned in preparation to writing the fictional historiography.

1. From Williams' book on Medgar Evers: When Medgar returned to the USA after soldiering to defending our country and Europe in 1946, he had to "go to the back of the bus."! What kind of a welcome was that for a man who had survived D-Day and World War II in Europe? Mr. Evers went on to do very persistent, determined work in voter registrations in Mississippi in the '50s and '60s, and became a great leader in the civil rights movement before he was shot down in the dark of night by a white supremacist in his own front yard in Jackson in 1963. That was just a few months before they got Kennedy.

2. From Greenburg's book on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): Through volunteering in the civil rights movement in the South, empathetic activists from other areas of the country learned how it's done. For instance: after working with the blacks down south, Mario Savio took his SNCC experience back to Berkeley, where he lead the Free Speech Movement that soon initiated protest against the Vietnam war. Also, after working with blacks down south, Tom Hayden returned to Michigan and authored, with his SDS comrades, the Port Huron Statement which was the beginning of Students for a Democratic Society.

3.What I am seeing now about the time period is this: As the civil rights movement gathered steam in the mid-'60s, a rift developed between the moderates (such as Medgar Evers, the NAACP, Dr. King, SCLC, John Lewis, Julian Bond, etc.) and the radicals (such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, SNCC, Panthers, Malcolm X, etc.) This parting of ways is similar to what happened among the anti-Fascists and also among the anti-Communists in Europe of the 1930s, a subject of my new novel, Smoke. The peaceful v. violent disagreement is also, I believe, indicative of protest movements generally, such as the two biggies: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Probably the next revolution, too, whatever becomes of that.

As for me, the kid growing up in the '50s and '60s, well. . . shut my mouth, I'm a child of the South. But I'm a commencin' to write about it. Thank ye for your time.
Glass half-Full

The help in Jackson, 1963

We left Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, and went back to Louisiana. Maybe it was 1962. Mama and daddy moved me, my two sisters and my brother to Shreveport, where daddy would be starting his business. But after about six months or so, they decided we should go back to the place where we had all started out this life, Baton Rouge. I had been born there in 1951, at Our Lady of the Lake hospital. The reason I remember we moved back to Baton Rouge in '63 is that I remember Sister Georgia, the principal of our Catholic junior high school coming in one afternoon to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot, and I remember riding my bicycle home in the rain that day. It was just a few months into my seventh grade, which had been my first school year in Baton Rouge, when Kennedy got shot in Dallas.

Mama and daddy had deep roots in Baton Rouge. For instance, my granpa on mama's side had been assistant Sec. of State under four Louisiana governors, including Huey Long. My other granpa had come out of the piney woods of Mississippi to Baton Rouge to work at the Esso refinery, which was at that time the third largest oil refinery in the world, or so my daddy used to say. My daddy had married up, if you know what I mean, insofar as he found a Baton Rouge society girl, my soon-to-be mama, and convinced her to marry him, even though he was a Scots-Irish redneck from out in the mossy sticks somewhere out in the parish. Mama and her people were from that ole French strain from across the River, they said Parisian, but I think mostly coonass.

When we got to back Louisiana, we were on penny-pinchin' times, with dad trying to get a forestry-supply business started. We didn't have a maid. But we had had one back in Jackson. Her name was Aleen.

But I'm here today to tell you about the city of Jackson, since my childhood memories of the place have been freshly awakened by seeing The Help movie just about an hour ago, this Sunday afternoon, August 14, 2011. I don't usually go to movies in the daytime, but I made an exception this time since I had heard the story took place in Jackson at about the same time that I was growing up there, or about the time that we left there. We moved back to Louisiana just a few months, I suppose, before Medger Evers was shot in Jackson in '63.

We had lived in Jackson for about nine years. Mama and daddy had moved there in 1953, or maybe it was '54. I don't really know which, since I was only about three years old at the time, and mama and daddy, God rest their souls, are no longer on this earth to confirm the date. It don't matter anyway.

Mama, having been raised in Baton Rouge, had to have a maid, you know, when she and daddy were starting a new household in Jackson, even though we lived in a rather small GI-bill house out in the suburbs of Jackson. Our maid's name was Aleen.

Our phone number was EMerson 6-6852. Mama shopped at Jitney Jungle, where she would buy, I guess, all the foodthat she and Aleen would cook for our dinners and suppers, and for barbecues in the backyard, and for goodies that the ladies would snack on while mama was hosting bridge club.

One of my earliest memories was mama putting us kids in the car on a regular basis to take Aleen back to her house at the end of a working day. Aleen's house was so different from our home; it was a shotgun shack on a dusty road out by the lake levee somewhere; it looked a lot like those small houses that Abilene and Minny lived in in that movie, The Help.

Now that I've seen the movie, I understand a lot more about what was going on on the other side of Jackson's tracks, in the area where Aleen and her people lived, when I was a clueless white kid in Jackson in the early 1960s. Thank you, Kathryn Stockett and Tate Taylor, for expanding my horizons. The amazing story you told has been helpful to me.

Glass half-Full