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.
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