Dateline: Biloxi, Mississippi
Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of
tremendous strength. Our songs are full of love and life— and the ups and downs
of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with
nature and wonderment. Our struggles are real and rugged. They beckon our
memory to the highest callings of the spirit, to help us rejoice and to
overcome.”
Deborah L. Parker
Biloxi is a sea port city with
a colorful past steeped in the now long ago antebellum glory days of the Old
South. Unfortunately, to a first time visitor, the city’s present is a mere one
step ahead of urban decay. In Biloxi’s case, big city eastern seaboard problems
have found their way onto the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Stately southern mansions
still dot several well preserved and protected inland sub divisions, majestic
Magnolia trees bordering wide boulevards. But the tourist industry has all but
dried up and left town, a concession to the rapid development of what the
locales refer to as “the Redneck Rivera,” the Gulf Shores, AL area, about 60
miles up the coast.
The Jimmy Buffet parrot head
types spend little time in modern day Biloxi, it being no Margaritaville. It is
instead as blue collar as a beach front community can get, still a sailor’s
town, ripe with a full supply of all the shady enmities that sailors enjoy.
The evening shift on this
particular winter week day, Marvelous informed me, had been slow. He was on the
4 pm to midnight shift. He preferred the midnight to 8 am schedule. It paid a
dollar an hour more. “Not as busy, either,” he told me, “but there are still a
few more problems on the grave yard shift.” Such as, I asked? “No custodian on
duty after midnight, so I got to clean up the puke in the lobby myself.”
I guessed his age to have been
between 65 to 70 years. But he also appeared to have lived a hard life, the
sort that can make a man appear older than he really is. Manners did not allow
for me to inquire, but even if my estimate is off by a decade either way, he
would still have been of the last of a generation of blacks to have lived in
the south under the Jim Crow laws of segregation. I asked about coming of age
in Mississippi under such discriminatory laws, when separate but equal was the
law of the land, strictly keeping the races separate.
“You assuming a lot, my
friend, what makes you think I grew up in the south?” The accent, maybe, I
responded? “I went to an all-black school,” he answered with a head nod to my
inquiry about growing up in the Mississippi of segregationist laws. “Terrible
schools. Teachers, most of them, couldn’t even read themselves. Back then all
of our teachers were black and most were poorly educated because the college’s
blacks could go to in those days were not good colleges. The books, the few we
had, were the ones sent down from the white schools when they were done with
them. Most didn’t have the covers even left on them but I guess they were good
enough for us nigger kids. But tell you what, we behaved or they would beat our
little black asses until we couldn’t sit down. My, oh my how those teachers
could swing that paddle. Today, the schools are still segregated, but not by
law, but instead by choice. The white kids all go to the private academies, but
we do have lots of well-educated white teachers in the local public schools.
They teach my grand babies.”
“We couldn’t even go to school
in Biloxi, not for high school, anyway,” Marvelous remembered. “They sent us up
to Gulf Port to what was known as the 33rd Avenue High School. It is where all
the ‘colored’ children, as they referred to us in polite society back then,
went. It was the law up until the early 70’s. School building still there, but
when Katrina blew through, it darn near took it down. Not much left. It is
named after the address of the street it sits on. Think about that? You ever
hear of a school named for its address? Guess the white people in charge back
then figured there was not one nigger from the area, going back 100 years, that
was worth naming the school after,” he said with a laugh. “And no
self-respecting white back then wanted their name on the front door of the town’s
nigger school.”
Marvelous asked me what I did
for a living. I told him I was now a professional vagabond pretending to be
retired, but I had previously spent 30+ years in public education. “You was a
teacher,” he said, in a tone that told me I was now sitting dead in his sights,
I just wasn’t yet sure why. It would not take long for me to understand. “Yes,”
I confirmed, “15 years in a class room and 15 years as a building
administrator.” What did you teach, he asked? “American History,” I told him.
“Well, let me tell you about
history, Mr. History teacher, our true history, not that stuff they want kids
to learn in schools, but the truth, how it really was,” Marvelous responded
with a condescending tone in his voice. “See, I like history, it’s kind of a
hobby of mine. I love to read. Pretty
much self-taught. I quit school in 8th grade when I turned 16. But I always
knew if I was to make anything in this life I had to know how to read. Black
kids today just don’t understand how important education is. So many good people
a long time ago sacrificed so much, just so black kids today can sit in a class
room. Some even gave their lives and these dumb punks today throw it away.
Throw way the opportunity we were denied for so long, the right to an
education. It makes me just sick to see the waste. And you know the real shame;
it’s the black community allowing it to happen, a self-inflicted wound.”
It was time, Marvelous told
me, for a quiz and he was now the one at the head of the class. “Now tell me
what you know about Woodrow Wilson,” Marvelous asked, leaning across the front
lobby desk, the gleam in his eyes now matching the shine on his gold front
tooth, oblivious to the two young ladies of the evening who had just entered
the lobby. Attired in four inch heels and two inch skirts; they loudly argued
about who did or did not hold seniority on the street corner outside the front
door.
Later, when the bickering
between the two began anew, interrupting our conversation, Marvelous quickly
and decisively ran both out of the lobby. “Dumb ass crack whores are the only
whores that are left to work on the street anymore. The hookers with any class
at all, now days, they all use Craig’s List,” Marvelous said.
Woodrow Wilson, I responded,
drawing out the pronunciation in a way that showed I was calling up from my
well educated history teaching brain a plethora of information that would prove
overwhelming by sheer volume for this night shift desk clerk wannabe historian.
Woodrow Wilson: “President of
the United States, highly educated, served as President of Princeton
University, created the League of Nations after WWI, considered the most
educated president ever,” and I added, after a long pause to draw out the drama
of the knockout punch of knowledge I was about to unload, “probably had a
nervous breakdown the last three months of his final term. Most historians
agree now that his wife really ran the nation during that time, with Wilson
sequestered in the White House 24 hours a day in his bedroom. Sequestered, that
means hid out,” I clarified for my new friend.
“You left out the most
important part,” Marvelous said, ignoring my condescending addendum to the end
of my lecture. “Wilson was the biggest racist in the history of the American
Presidency. Even worse than some before the (civil war) who had owned slaves.”
Taken aback slightly by this tidbit of trivia, I recovered quickly. “I do know
that was rumored, the racism,” was my retort. “Rumored,” Marvelous answered.
“Rumored; your white ass. It is a fact, but I bet you never taught it to those
kids in your class, now did you?”
Marvelous was now in full
control of this conversation. “All this Princeton stuff, the League of Nations
and its 14 Points (damn, I thought, I forgot to mention the 14 Points), all
bull shit. Wilson came from the South. He came to the presidency in 1912 with
considerable help from the black vote. Back in that time, blacks were very much
aligned with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt had
been the progressive leader of the Party and had served seven years in the
White House, but the Democrats made a big push to win over the black vote in
1912 and it worked, get Taft out. When TR couldn’t get the nomination away from
Taft and (he) formed a third party, the Bull Moose Party. That is what we need
today, a man of action, like Teddy, but that is another story, so back to
Wilson. They (black voters) got Wilson elected. And you know what the first
thing he did when he got to Washington to pay back blacks for their loyalty?
Wilson segregated everything, both in the city and in the government agencies
buildings. Made it the law. Blacks and whites now had to work in separate
buildings, if they worked for the government. If circumstances made it so it
was not possible to separate whites from blacks by buildings, then Wilson
ordered that curtains be hung between white and black workers, to discourage
association. Bet you never taught that to your students, now did you, Mr.
History teacher?”
Later when I researched
Wilson’s race segregating history, I found that Marvelous was extremely
accurate in his rendition of a very sad chapter in our nation’s past, one, as
Marvelous had predicted, I had never taught to my students.
“Now listen to this, it should
be a very important part of our history and should be taught to every school
kid in America, but it’s not.” Marvelous was rolling now. “The worst domestic
riots in the history of this nation were racial riots and came in the later
years of Wilson’s (tenure) and the year’s immediately after his terms in office.
He set the tone for the 1920’s, the worst decade in our history for
intimidation and the denial of civil rights to black citizens in the South.”
“I will give you an
interesting fact, the first example of air bombing of civilians, anywhere in
the recorded history of the world happened right here in this country, came
during the race riots in Tulsa, OK in 1921. Our military bombed black
neighborhoods in Tulsa. They, our military, understand, dropped dynamite on the
black neighborhoods of Tulsa and killed at least 70 innocently random people.
We are not talking now about Syria or Iran, mind you, we are talking about
Oklahoma, OKLAHOMA, and nobody remembers. Did you ever teach that to your
students?”
Back on my heels now,
Marvelous smelled blood in the water and moved in for the intellectual kill.
“Tell me about the Reconstruction Era, the year’s right after the Civil War,”
he asked? I once again gave him the standard text book rendition: The defeated
southern states were treated as a conquered nation by the northern victors.
Blacks in the southern states were put into positions of governmental authority
by northern forces. Although noble in intent, the complexity of governing a
nation by a group of just freed and uneducated slaves proved to be too much and
was a dismal failure. Eventually, the north out of frustration, withdrew its troops
and thus the enforcement of the reconstruction mandates it had put in place.
With no agency of power to enforce the laws of equality, whites took back all
local and state power in the southern states and a Jim Crow segregated society
became deeply entrenched for the next 100 years.
Once again, Marvelous was
neither impressed nor in agreement with my assessment. “Bullshit, more bullshit,” was his evaluation of my knowledge of Reconstruction. “You know less
about Reconstruction than you do about Wilson, and that my friend is limited,”
he said.
“Did you know that
Reconstruction in Mississippi worked just fine,” he stated, “as long as the
federal troops were there to enforce the law that all men are equal? Once they
(the Feds) pulled out, then fear took over and terror was used to take back all
the gains of Reconstruction. The Klan rose to power and the darkest chapter in
the history of this country, even worse that slavery itself, came about. Jim
Crow and segregation was released upon my people, my ancestors, and eventually
upon me.”
He was not yet through; he had
one more good and strong volley of academia ammunition to fire across the bow
of my sinking ship. “Here is a fact you will not find in the history books,”
Marvelous announced. “Did you know that the first public school mandatory laws
for school attendance in Mississippi; and the first laws that obligated the
state to support compulsory education for white children (were) passed in 1870
by an almost all black state legislature?”
“How ironic that it was black
politicians who made the laws that for the first time allowed white kids in
Mississippi the right to go and get a free public school education. Right here
in good old boy Jim Crow Magnolia state Mississippi. Did you ever teach your
students that fact when you talked to them about how Reconstruction failed
because blacks were not ready to lead,” he asked, with no attempt to try and
hide the triumph in the tone of his voice? I remained silent, defenseless to
the onslaught. Marvelous answered for me, “No.”
“And you know why you didn’t,”
he prodded, rhetorically? “Because, Mr. History teacher, no one ever taught
you.”
They have now.
