Freddy Krueger, Civil Rights, And Fried Pork In Mississippi

Much to the chagrin of my mother, I dedicated a significant portion of my childhood to watching every horror movie that could be rented on VHS at Berry’s Video in Pulaski, Tennessee. Being an only child, movies quickly became my friends, and being a ten year old boy, scary movies became my weird friend that my parents weren’t so sure they liked me hanging around. Nevertheless, more often than not they relented (never underestimate the power of the only child), so most Friday and Saturday nights were spent eating Domino’s pizza and plowing through as many movies as the video store would allow me to rent.

Having watched virtually every film in the Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Hellraiser, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Phantasm, Child’s Play, Evil Dead, The Howling, Poltergeist, Sleepaway Camp, Stephen King, and Candyman series, I am extremely well versed in the plot lines, characters, and tropes used to scare us into sleeping with the lights on. Because of my overexposure to horror films in my childhood, I seldom watch them as an adult, not because I don’t still enjoy a good “scare”, but because I know what is going to happen before it happens, which means they don’t scare me anymore.

Lately I’ve found myself mulling over these old horror movies and their themes, and mainly how they have real world application. Like nursery rhymes and fables, horror movies are often contemporary delivery systems for cautionary morality tales. Don’t trust strangers. Don’t stay up late. Don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you. Don’t be promiscuous. Don’t use drugs or alcohol. Regardless of genre or era, if a character in a scary movie breaks any of these rules they will not live to regret it.

In recent years the more cerebral horror films have turned the focus from warning randy teenagers about bad behaviors to bringing to light the real monsters that walk among us. Greed, jealousy, manipulation, exploitation, hatred, racism. Great filmmakers succeed in anthropomorphizing these abstract concepts of evil into something tangible and terrifying for all audiences — I’m looking at you “Cabin Fever” and “Get Out.” Not everyone is attacked by hatred or racism in real life, but if you can embody it as a monster in a movie you can make everyone experience that sense of fear and dread vicariously, hopefully creating both sympathy for those who do, and a desire to fight the real monsters in the process.

One thing you can always count on in a horror movie is that the bad guy/monster is never dead when you think he is dead. The monster may have been shot, burned, stabbed, chainsawed, blown up, or worse, but he’s not dead yet. Just as soon as the survivors let down their guards, the monster will rise up again and claim another victim before he is defeated once and for all, or at least until the sequel is released and the process starts all over again. These were the thoughts that filled my mind this past June as I was making the hour long drive from Oxford, Mississippi to Tupelo on State Road 6.

Father’s Day weekend my youngest son was graduating college in Memphis and we were celebrating in Oxford over a Big Bad Breakfast. I’ve always had an affinity for Oxford, though I’ve seldom spent time there. To me it is one of those quintessential southern cities, like Birmingham, Memphis, Athens, Savannah and Nashville, that everyone should really explore at least once. To the untrained eye there is little to no difference between the landscapes of rural southern states, but to those who are natives there are subtleties to be discerned. Those of us who grew up traveling these roads for ballgames, vacations, and trips to visit our kin can pinpoint our location as surely as an interstate sign or mile marker, using only the rolling hills of middle Tennessee, the flat farmland of the Mississippi Delta, or the red clay of Alabama as identifiers. The most observant among us can differentiate between northern and southern parts of the states. A location in Georgia is known by the presence of bluffs or pecan farms. In Alabama it’s the difference between cotton fields and orchards, and in Mississippi it’s kudzu or Spanish moss. For those of us in whom this geography is as natural as water is to a fish, these changes shine like neon, while to the outsider they can be practically undetectable. But this isn’t just true for the landscape, the same could be said for the mindset of the South. 

       Chances are when you see a southern character, or the South in general, portrayed in pop culture there are overt references to racism, inbreeding, ignorance, poverty, and fundamentalist religion. God as my witness, you will find these things in the South, but I’ve traveled far and wide enough to know you are just as likely to find them in Boston or Michigan as Alabama. Stereotypes are tricky things. They are exaggerations, caricatures, but they also hold a grain of truth. If you come to Mississippi expecting to see a cotton field butting up against a mostly dirt yard with a mobile home on it, a barking dog chained up in it, and a pickup truck flying a confederate flag parked out front, you will see all of that, many times over. And if you head east through Alabama and Georgia and then cut up north through Tennessee you will see so many you lose count, and you may also lose perspective. 

Although I’ve traveled extensively in my forty-two years, the South has always been my home, and there aren’t many highways in the southern states that I’ve yet to drive. I sincerely believe that if you blindfolded me and dropped me at a random spot in the South I could tell you what state I was in just by looking at the landscape, and most likely what part of the state. But it’s not just the change in geography that I detect, it’s the change that is taking place in the South collectively. 

      Traveling these roads I listen to a lot of music and I’ve found that the musician is often more of a prophet than the preacher. Musicians talk a lot about change. Bob Dylan said “the times they are a changing.” Sam Cooke said “I know a change gone come.” Eddie Vedder once observed, “everything has changed, absolutely nothing’s changed.” You sing along with these folks long enough and you start to see what they were seeing. 

But it’s not just our poets and performers who make these observations, the guys eating lunch at the local meat and three do too. Some of them believe things used to be great but something changed, others believe things used to be worse but things are changing for the better, and some realize everything has changed and yet nothing seems any different. I don’t know exactly where I fall on this spectrum. It likely depends on the day. But on this day in June, pulling out of Rowan Oak and heading East on Highway 6, with pounds of pork in my belly, Elizabeth Cook’s Apron Strings playlist filling my ears, and the words of William Faulkner filling my mind, I was seeing change.

Our party of three was sitting at a back corner table, at “the brainchild of James Beard award winning chef John Currence” restaurant known as Big Bad Breakfast, as I began noticing things I haven’t always seen in Mississippi. What caught my eye first was the biracial couple sitting at the breakfast counter together. Although I’m completely comfortable with biracial relationships, admittedly I was a little surprised by the “normalcy” of it in Oxford. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe I was just yielding to a pessimistic stereotype about Mississippi, but I can’t overlook the fact that we are only one generation removed from black and white people not being able to eat at the same lunch counter, much less do so as an obviously romantically involved couple. It was in my parents lifetime that Emmitt Till was mutilated and brutally murdered, seventy miles south of where I was sitting, just for whistling at a white woman, and his murderers were acquitted. My parents were school age when the “Battle Of Oxford” occurred. Less than a mile from where I was sitting Governor Ross Barnett had tried to reignite the Civil War in 1962 because James Meredith, a black, military veteran, enrolled in the University of Mississippi. So excuse me if I was a little surprised by the level of tolerance.

Perhaps even more shocking was the presence of an openly gay couple sitting at the table right beside ours. Completing the tolerance hat trick was the Muslim woman wearing a niqaab (head and face covering that has only an opening for the eyes) sitting to my right. Mississippi, Oxford, the South as a whole has changed more than Honey Boo Boo’s Mamma June, and like Mamma June, there’s still some work to be done.

On the way from tiny Looxahoma, Mississippi to Oxford that morning I’d passed more “Make America Great Again” signs and stickers than I could count. Sitting in this little restaurant I was reminded that what makes America great is our love and respect for everyone, not just those who are like us. Recent generations have demanded that our nation live up to the lofty standard it set when it declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” There may be plenty of Americans who hate what I saw in that restaurant that morning, but don’t fool yourself, that hateful attitude is un-American.

If the past few years have shown us anything they have shown us that the ghosts of Mississippi still haunt this land. Like Jason, or Michael Myers, or Freddy Kruger from the horror movies of my youth, just when you think the monsters of hate and bigotry are dead, they come back again and claim more victims when you let down your guard. Freddie Gray. Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Walter Scott. Eric Harris. Tamir Rice. Trayvon Martin. Heather Heyer. 

I cannot deny that times have changed drastically, and yet, Trump rallies and Charlottesville, Virginia remind me, “everything has changed, absolutely nothing’s changed.” Colonel Reb, the archetype of the old South plantation owner, no longer walks the sidelines at Ole Miss football games, and yet the Confederate Flag still adorns the Mississippi state flag. Emmitt Till’s murder is near universally considered an abomination, and yet the sign memorializing the location of his body is continually vandalized, stolen, and riddled with bullets. The idea that a black man could be killed  for whistling at a white woman, and the murderers get away with, is hard to image today, and yet, I regularly see reports of black men being killed for things as trivial  and harmless as selling cigarettes, walking home from the store, selling CD’s, or holding a cellphone, and most of the time their killers go unpunished. 

Like a wounded animal in the throes of death, bigotry, racism, and hate can be ferociously dangerous when desperate for survival. When backed into a corner they will bare tooth and fang. It will fight to “make America great again” while demanding “I want my country back.” 

Perhaps I was just intoxicated by the mixture of the sacred ground that is Rowan Oak, the Southern charm of Oxford and the smell of sausage and bacon, but for a brief moment, one morning in June, I saw the South as it could be. As it should be. As it is becoming. The South is going to rise again, and this time it will rise above its past, and it will rise above those in the present who are clinging to that past.

There IS Crying In Baseball

(Note: I wrote this nearly three years ago after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, but for some reason I never published it, so I decided to put it up tonight. Keep reading to the end where I have included an addendum that was written by my oldest son that night).

     Tom Hanks is one of America’s most beloved actors. Forrest Gump, Sully, Captain Phillips, Jim Lovell of the Apollo 13 mission, Walt Disney, Woody, he’s played some of the most iconic roles and endearing characters. Those endearing characters have given us some memorable quotes. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” “Houston, we have a problem.” “Wilson!” Despite these iconic roles, strangely his most famous quote may have come from his least lovable character, alcoholic, bitter, ex Cubs slugger, now baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, as the manager of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League team the Rockford Peaches. During a game one of the girls on the team gets very upset and starts to cry, to which Dugan replies, “There’s no crying in baseball.” The line is hilarious, quotable, but not entirely true. Let me explain.

Baseball and I have a very long and complicated relationship. I was introduced to baseball by my dad through the Napa Auto Parts tee ball team I played for when I was five years old. I laugh every time I look at the picture of the snaggletoothed kid wearing the mesh snapback trucker hat with the unevenly bent bill, awkwardly holding out the oversized glove like it was some exotic and terrifying animal. Within a few weeks I was in love. Saturdays couldn’t come around fast enough for me. The smell of the fresh cut grass, the smell of hot dogs and popcorn cooking, the stark contrast between the bright white chalk lines and the powdery smooth dirt. The creaking sound the leather glove made when you flexed and squeezed it. The jerseys with a number on the back and your last name at the top. Your friends and family members in the bleachers cheering you on and calling out your name or saying things like “Look alive,” “heads up,” “keep your head on a swivel.” Of course the fans weren’t the only ones making noise. We players loved to “chatter.” “Hey batter, batter, batter” or the bizarre “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh swing!” I loved it all, but the part I loved the most was my dad. He loved baseball too, so much that he coached me practically every year I played. Baseball was “our thing.” There are few things in life as pure and beautiful as the love a little boy has for baseball. After his mamma, it is his first love.

     To this very moment I can still feel how much I loved getting dressed in my uniform for a game. Back then the uniforms were these terrible polyester things that came in small, medium or large and were passed down from year to year to the next team. It was a thrill to go up to the square in my hometown and shop for cleats at Sports World. Jerry Hibdon would always be working in the back of the store, building trophies or printing logos and numbers on jerseys. I would make a right turn and go past the George Brett and Dale Murphy posters on my way to the shoe section. The cool cleats were the colored ones that had the long tongue that hung down over the laces.

     For the better part of the next decade the one thing I cared about the most was baseball. I played baseball, not just in Little League, but in backyard games in our Green Acres neighborhood, and on Nintendo. I watched baseball, on television and in person on the rare occasion that I got to go to Atlanta Fulton County Coliseum to watch the Braves play. Though I liked girls, they just couldn’t compare to baseball. Baseball wasn’t confusing like girls. It was simple and predictable and consistent. People today complain about the slow pace of baseball games and want time limits and play clocks speeding up the time between pitches, but I always thought the slow pace was intentional. When you are doing something that you love so much, why in the world would you want to speed it up and make it go faster. For me, Ernie Banks famous quote, “Let’s play two” was practically Gospel truth. When I wasn’t playing or watching baseball I was organizing or trading baseball cards. Baseball wasn’t a part of my life, it was my life. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who first wrote, “Into each life some rain must fall” and for me that meant sometimes there was crying in baseball.

     The first time I remember crying because of baseball was when I was in Little League and we lost the championship game. I was twelve years old at the time and had been playing baseball for seven years. During those seven years we had lost games, though not very many, but we had never lost a championship. I was twelve years old and we were National League champions, but we lost the overall league championship to the American League winners and I was devastated and I cried. Most people would find that completely understandable, but I also cried at other times. I actually grew up an Atlanta Braves fan, but in August of 1990 they traded my hero, Dale Murphy, to the Philadelphia Phillies, and I cried tears of anger, and swore off the Braves forever. My loyalty would now lie with my idol, and fellow second baseball Ryne Sandberg of the Chicago Cubs. Just a few years shy of being married and after I was old enough to drive a car, I remember crying because a game got rained out. I realize you may be thinking that is a bit extreme, and admittedly, perhaps it was, but I loved playing so much that once I completed my pre game dressing rituals and had on my “game face”, having the game canceled due to weather was emotionally devastating. My tears were a mixture of anger and sadness. The last time I recall crying over baseball was the day I played my last game in high school. Thirteen years of my life was coming to an end. From the time that snaggle toothed little boy in the blue jeans and Napa t-shirt put on a glove, baseball was his one true love. Girls had come and gone and broken my heart, but baseball had never let me down. Life can be scary and unpredictable when you are growing up, but baseball was something I understood almost instinctively. But now it was gone for good. Although I had a few scholarship offers to some small colleges, I passed on them and realized I’d never play baseball competitively again. Add to that fact the realization that my best friends and teammates and I would be going our separate ways with graduation just a few weeks away. I would be in Alabama, Jode would be in Louisiana, and Brad would be at Paris Island. It was all just too much for me to bear, and I cried. Standing at home plate at the Loretto High School field, having just been defeated in the District playoffs, I took one last look. Like a rain cloud, pregnant will so much moisture that you could smell it, taste it in the air, the clouds of my emotions burst forth. On that day, there most certainly was a lot of crying in baseball.

Just a few weeks later I finally got to sit in the bleachers at Wrigley Field in Chicago to watch my beloved Cubs. This trip was part of a graduation gift and it was a dream come true. I stood on Waveland Avenue, I got to see Harry Carey. I was with my parents and the girl who would be my wife just six months later. Little did I know it was the pinnacle of my baseball life, and that less than two months later baseball would break my heart like no girl ever had. I was at work at my Uncle Fuzzy’s lumber yard, Old Mill Salvage, on a Saturday in August when I saw the news that Major League Baseball was going on strike. The strike was bad enough, but when it continued into October and resulted in the World Series being canceled for the first time in 90 years, I was crushed. I couldn’t understand how men who were privileged to play the greatest sport ever invented, and get paid millions of dollars to do it, could betray the integrity of the game over more money. Twelve year old me wouldn’t have been able to believe it, but on that day, I didn’t cry for baseball, I walked away from it and didn’t watch another game. But like any great love affair, you break up, but something always brings you back. For me that something was the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. 

     In 1998 one of the great baseball records seemed destined to fall, the only question was who would break Roger Maris’s 61 home runs in a season first, McGwire or Sosa? In a moment that seemed to be scripted by Hollywood, McGwire’s Cardinals faced off against Sosa and my Cubs in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, with the power hitter sitting on 60 home runs. In the next two games he would hit 61 and 62 and Sammy Sosa would charge in from the outfield to hug McGwire in celebration. Brandon and baseball were back together again. They say love is blind, and I certainly was. Within the next few seasons something even more shameful than the strike would plague the sport I loved. Barry Bonds would electrify fans with an astounding 70 home runs in a season, but then Sosa was found using a corked bat and by this point the rumors were swirling that he, McGwire, Bonds, and essentially every other “great” player from my childhood was using steroids to achieve their unprecedented success. The one thing worse that quitting is cheating. And to borrow a phrase from George Jones, “This time, he’s over her for good. He stopped loving her today.” Other than my children, that was the last time I watched baseball, until tonight.

     For many years sports were too important to me. Now they are just fun hobbies to enjoy, but I don't live and die by them anymore and I'm not obnoxious about them. I always remind myself it's just a game, but every once in a while you get reminded, it is a little more than just a game. It's learning how to lose and how to win. It's never giving up hope and giving it your all until the very end. It's about teamwork. It's about crushing lows and exhilarating highs. It's about traditions. But for me, most of all, it's about friends and family, making memories, just being together and being reminded you are on my team. 

     Tonight I sat here thinking about a 12 year old second baseman with his Ryne Sandberg poster over his bed. A 16 year old new driver with an airbrushed Ryno tag on the front of his Blazer. A 17 year old senior wearing the Cubs hat in his senior pics. An 18 year old newly graduated “adult” with his soon to be wife in the bleachers at Wrigley. And tonight, a 40 year old father of two sat next to his firstborn son and witnessed what none of those others guys ever thought he would see. My Cubs won the World Series! Tonight there most certainly was crying in baseball.

Addendum: I'm not a Cubs fan and I won't pretend that I am. I've been a die hard Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember. With that being said, this World Series was the first time in my life that I witnessed my dad willingly watch a pro baseball game. Growing up loving baseball and coming from a family of men who loved baseball, I never understood how my dad could have fallen out of love with a sport he had once practically dedicated his life to. He always told me that he lost the love for baseball because of the 1994 strike. To 9 year old me who sat watching the 2004 World Series in a hotel in Mississippi as the Red Sox won their first championship of my life, it still didn't make sense. I didn't understand how the actions of anyone, not even the players, could ever influence your opinion of the game. In my eyes, baseball was pure. Baseball was fun. Baseball was methodical and strategical. I never understood how anyone could "fall out of love" with the sport. 

Tonight, however, I sat beside my dad as he stayed up until 1 AM to watch his Cubs win their first World Series in 108 years. I watched him cheer, clap and shout with excitement over base hits and strikeouts. I watched him overcome with joy for a sport he had once loved, for the first time in my life. 

I didn't root for the Cubs because I'm a fan. I didn't root for the Cubs because I wanted them to win. I rooted for the Cubs because I knew a championship in Chicago would restore the faith and love of baseball into the eyes of the man who taught me how to play. I rooted for the Cubs for my dad, because he spent countless hours rooting for me, teaching me how to bat, showing me how to field ground balls, and teaching me how to love a sport that had once meant everything to him. I'm glad your Cubs got a win, dad. You and Chicago deserved it.

The Music That Is Moving Me This Year

Early in life I discovered that sometimes I lacked the vocabulary to express the complex emotions I was experiencing. Announcing that I was happy, sad, angry, afraid somehow failed to exorcise the feelings from my heart. As I’ve mentioned before, around fourth grade Fordie Franklin put a tool in my hand in the form of a pencil and instructed me to write whatever I felt. Over thirty years later I still am, but admittedly, sometimes I still lack the adequate language to explain what I’m feeling. Thankfully there is music. Music has been a frequent topic of my musings, but I haven’t written about it in far too long. That ends tonight. Below is a list of music that has moved me and meant even more to me this year. Hopefully, if you find yourself in a mood to go on a journey to explore and discover some new music, you will give some of these a chance. Not all of them are new, or even new to me this year, but all of them have spoken to me when I needed them, or for me when I needed to get out what I was feeling. Grant Peeples, one of the artists on this list, said it best when he wrote, “The reason that most songs ultimately fail is that they are written from the perspective of the writer rather than the listener.” At various times this year these songs were definitely speaking for this listener.

“The World Is On Fire” by American Aquarium, if you are a fan of Drive-By-Truckers you need to check out this band.

“Ramon Casiano” by Drive-By-Truckers, speaking of DBT, the line “someone killed Ramon Casiano and Ramon still ain’t dead enough” just cut me to my core. Not to mention the brilliant diagnosis that is, “He had the makings of a leader, of a certain kind of men, who need to feel the world’s against him, out to get‘em if it can. Men whose trigger pull their fingers, of men who’d rather fight than win, united in a revolution, like in mind and like in skin.”

“Heroine Addict Sister” by Elizabeth Cook, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this song without crying.

“Wild Blue Wind” by Erin Rae, sometimes this one is too real to enjoy, but it sure can lance a wounded heart so that the pain can escape.

“This Could Be A Long Night” by Grant Peeples, I can’t say it better than John Conquest did, “Peeples is unusually honest, unusually literate. He’s the only songwriter I have ever thought to call ‘ruthless.’”

“Romeo & Juliet” by Hobo Johnson, unfortunately I know way too many young people who have a similar narrative. Don’t blame the broken, blame those who broke them, or better yet, help pick up the pieces.

“Ice Age” by How To Destroy Angels, this song is several years old but it is truly haunting. Trent Reznor like you’ve never heard him before.

The entire “KOD” album by J. Cole. My students in the prison know I quote J. Cole like he was a prophet. This album is like a hip hop version of Ecclesiastes.

“Anxiety” by Jason Isbell, everything Jason Isbell does is poetry.

“One Day” by Matisyahu, I was probably the last person in the world to hear this song, but once I did listen it just made me smile, and it still does every time I play it.

“Sunday Morning (Thinkin ‘Bout You)” by Royce Lovett, this is one of those songs that finds you rather than you seeking it. And it couldn’t have found me at a more needed time. Jade connected with him through Twitter and he guest listed us for his upcoming show in Gainesville. I can’t wait.

“WalMart” by Tank And The Bangas, You’ve never heard anything like Tank and the Bangas, and even though I am a man, I can’t help but imagine this is a song every woman wishes every man would listen to.

“The Fruitful Darkness” and “Free” by Trevor Hall, these two songs perfectly bookend this whole playlist. Trevor always knows how you are feeling.

“More Than Enough” by Tubby Love, it’s a simple song, but the message bears repeating regularly.

“No Good Time” by Trombone Shorty, he is much, much more than just a trombone player, he can write great lyrics too, and this song just tells the truth.

I hope you’ve got Spotify, because I doubt you will ever hear many of these songs on the radio