Hugh's Blog

Firehouse Soup

While I went to college, I worked a few years as a firefighter for the City of Memphis. I learned many things there, but the biggest impact it had on me long-term was how it taught me to think about food.

The deal was that you worked every other day for three days, and then you were off for four days. So, for example, you may work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then you would be off until the following Wednesday, when the cycle started all over again. And each shift was 24 hours long and began at 7 AM. Depending on what fire-fighting equipment was housed at your station, you could have anywhere from four to 12 people on each shift, and you always worked with the same people.

It was like a second family you lived with 1/3rd of your life. We had laundry and showers and we cut the grass and, of course, ate together. And while there was a kitchen and equipment such as pans and knives provided, the actual food was not, and was up to you. Some people brought their own food, but you didn’t if you wanted to be trusted by the others on your shift. To be trusted, you needed to belong to the syndicate.

I worked at several different houses during the years I was on the job, and the syndicate always worked the same way. There was one member of the shift who kept track of a pool of money, and that was used to buy groceries for your shift. Each shift had its own refrigerator and cupboard, which were kept locked. At each meal, you were either “in” or “out” for the meal, meaning you intended to eat the food bought from the pool of money, and you were “charged” your pro-rata share of the groceries that went into that meal. And on payday, you settled up your bill, which replenished the pool of money, and it started all over again.

So, every day you worked, you had to figure out who was cooking three meals for your shift. Some shifts had 1 person who just loved cooking, and they took it on as their responsibility, but most times we would ask who wanted to cook each meal, with the others doing cleanup. Breakfast was usually fixed – eggs, bacon, biscuits were common, most often with gravy – and lunch was often caught as catch can, but the big show was supper.

A cool thing about this system is that you had a diversity of cooks, with each bringing their favorites to the table. Tom was in his 20s and could run the grill, but not much else. Curtis loved to make spaghetti. Stan made round steak and gravy, with mashed potatoes and English peas so good that my mouth waters just thinking about it.

And John always made soup.

John was nearing retirement after nearly 30 years on the job. He had been divorced for nearly 20 of those years and most of his off-work meals were either sandwiches or dinner fare. But his one claim to culinary fame was his soup.

I probably ate it two dozen times and watched him make it half of those times, and it was never done exactly the same way twice. It was more of a technique rather than a recipe, but what it always was, was good.

As an example, I will share how I made it last week, but everything in this recipe is up for negotiation.

Dice a small onion into small pieces, and dice two cloves of garlic while you are at it. In a large pot, crumble a pound of ground beef, add your diced onions, and sprinkle some salt on top of it all, and then, over medium heat, begin to brown the ground beef. Stir it all around until the meat is no longer pink and the onions are translucent, then add the garlic and let it sweat a bit, but don’t, for the love of God, let it burn or you just ruined the whole thing. The garlic will be flavorful and ready in about a minute.

Pour in three and a half cups of beef broth (or water plus an appropriate amount of beef paste) and a 12-ounce can of V8 juice. Using a spoon or something, scrape the bottom of the pan to make sure all the bits are off the bottom of the pan and it’s all mixed well.

To this, add a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes (Rotel is another option here, but it obviously changes the flavor), a couple of tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (easy for you to say), and 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning. We only had a few spice jars at the fire station, but Italian seasoning went into everything. Let it come to a boil.

While you are waiting on that, peel and dice 2 potatoes of whatever kind you have around – I had Yukon Golds. Add it to the pot, along with a pound of frozen mixed vegetables. (I know that sounds vague, but that’s what they are always called at the grocery. It’s generally green beans, carrots, and English peas.) Let it boil, then bring it down to a simmer for 15 minutes.

NOW. You can let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a perfectly acceptable soup to serve with your dinner. Or, you can do what I did and add a cup and a half of elbow macaroni and another half cup of beef broth and THEN let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a hearty, filling soup you can eat for diner all by itself.

Beef or shredded chicken. V8 or Tomato sauce. Beef broth or chicken. Macaroni or spaghetti or even instant grits (trust me on this). Tomatoes or Rotel. White potatoes or sweet potatoes (What? Yes.)

It’s all up in the air. Mix and match. Live a little.

You deserve it.

I Know.

Hi there.

Can we talk? I just wanted to check in.

For some of you reading this right now, I know the stories about your decision to terminate your pregnancy.

I know, because I was the person you called when you were assaulted, and I waited in the ER while they did the rape kit.

I know, because I was the person you talked it over with when you saw no way forward, and the dad no longer returned your calls.

I know, because you trusted me enough to tell me about the shady guy who date-raped you.

I know, because I drove you to the clinic, then sat in the clinic waiting room, then walked with you through the mob of protestors afterward, and then drove you back to your house because no one else would.

I know, because when you had nightmares about the so-called Christians who called you a slut and a murderer, you wanted to scream and yell at a preacher and I was willing to let it be me.

And I know because you wrote me long emails after hearing me speak somewhere, and you wanted someone, somewhere, to know why you did it.

I know all those stories and more.

There are others of you, reading this right now, whose stories I do not know. But I know you are out there because almost 1 in four women in the US has had an abortion by age 45. And I know that the recent uptick in anti-abortion conversation on social media must be triggering.

I know that the people who are calling people who chose to end their pregnancy “sluts”, “murderers”, and “whores” don’t realize that they are actually talking about people they know. That they are talking about people like you. Because they don’t know your story.

I don’t blame you for not telling them, by the way. They obviously aren’t safe people to share it with. It’s always you who gets to decide who you share that with.

But even though they don’t know your story, and you know they didn’t mean you, specifically, when they said those things, I know how much it hurts to hear those things from people you love. I know it brings up all the old wounds and makes you ask all the old questions.

Whether I know your story or not, please know this: You are loved by God, without condition, and without exception. The mere fact of your existence makes you valuable, and there is nothing you could do to separate you from the love of God.

Not a single goddamned thing.

There is much in this world I am unsure of, but I am certain of that.

I know how hard that decision was, and I know how brave you were for making it. So if all of the recent news has drug stuff up and you want someone to talk it over with, someone to yell at, someone to just listen and hold space for you, if you don’t have anyone else, I am willing to hold your story.

I will listen. I will not judge you. And I will never tell a soul.

But mostly, I just wanted you to know that God does not judge you, and neither do I.

Your friend,

Hugh

The Bad News

It was perhaps six years ago that I found myself at the hospital. It was, to be fair, a nice hospital, as hospitals go. I didn’t have clergy credentials at this one – my people almost always ended up at the much less nice county hospital. But still, here I was – well, me and my buddy Shelden. He was good as gold, Sheldon was, but his missing teeth and unkempt afro garnered some stares from folks in the lobby.

Shelden had come to me earlier that day and told me that his brother was in the hospital with lung cancer. And then he asked if I would go with him to see his brother.

I said that of course I would, but that I didn’t even know he had a brother. Sheldon said something about his own brother had acted like he didn’t have a brother. I didn’t push it. When you don’t have a home, sometimes family dynamics get complicated.

The first clue that something was wrong was at the front desk when Shelden asked for his brother’s room number. The receptionist looked at the computer and then picked up the phone. A cryptic exchange happened, then she hung up and said, “You need to go to the nurse’s station on the fourth floor, they will tell you where to go.”

So we go off in search of the elevator. We get lost and wind up on the wrong elevator, and at the wrong nurse’s station. We ask for his brother’s room.

The nurse looks up the name, makes a bit of a face, and then picks up the phone. And that was when I knew this is not going to end well.

She sends us to the other end of the fourth floor, to the correct nurse’s station. Shelden starts that way, while I linger.

“He has passed, hasn’t he?” I ask the nurse.

She looks at me with sadness and nods, probably violating eight different privacy laws.

I take a huge breath and then hustle down the hallway to catch up with Shelden, who is shuffling along, head down. There are no rules in such a situation, other than to take care of your people. Actually, that is really just a good rule any time. Figuring that it’s better for him to hear this from me than a nurse, I stop him in the hallway and, for probably the 10th time in my life, I told someone who mattered to me that someone who mattered to them is dead.

The hospital staff had been watching us, and when Shelden broke down in the hallway, they were right there with a chair and a wet rag. They assured him his brother had gone easily in his sleep that morning. One, in such a scene that only happens in the South, told him his brother was “with the Lord now.”

Fifteen minutes or so pass, and we’re handed more wet rags and ginger ale and boxes of tissues and Shelden gets hugs from a few nurses. Then he looks at me and says, “Can we get out of this hallway?”

We go to the chapel to sit for a while. That’s the nice thing about hospital chapels – they are almost always empty.

Again – no rules. We sit. He cries, and at his request, I read “some stuff from the Bible.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:37-39

He asked me what I thought that meant. I told him that it meant that there wasn’t a damn thing that could keep God from loving us. He nods.

We sit and time passes. A few more tears. Then he is ready to go. It’s almost dark as we walk to the car. I ask him where I should take him. He asks to be dropped downtown, where he can hang out until he finds out if he has a bed for the night at the shelter.

We stop at the big park downtown – the one that had the statue of an acorn in it – and we get out, the wind whipping at our cheeks. It’s not bitter cold yet, but it’s down in the fall and the wind makes it a little uncomfortable. I hugged him and told him I loved him, and that I want him to come by my office tomorrow and we will see what needs to be done about the arrangements.

And then he headed toward the bus station, hands in pockets, head hung low, and I got back in my car and drove home to get ready to meet friends for dinner.

The Half-Acre Habitat

I know how to get six-pack abs. I have had them – for about 2 weeks. But since I like to eat, that is hard for me to sustain over time. But in terms of what is sustainable over time, things like being flexible, having good cardiovascular health, and good blood pressure and glucose readings are far more sustainable markers of health.

When you see people who have defined abs, cut muscle striations, and low body fat, what you see are people who went to extreme lengths to look that way. That’s fine if that’s your goal. I don’t want to harsh anyone’s thing. But it’s not mine. I have better things to do with my time than to calculate protein grams and intermittently fast and figure out if this is the day I spend 3 hours in the gym or the day I spend 2 hours in the gym.

For most people, such a life is attainable – but not sustainable. I want both. And not just in my health goals, but in my whole life.

That’s also my approach to my yard. I do not have a manicured lawn. I do not have a raked lawn. I don’t even have a lawn – I have a yard. It’s mostly green. Its primary use is as a habitat for the creatures who live here – including us.

So I have vegetables and greens we like to eat. I have flowers for the bees and butterflies. I have plants that grow food for the chickens, which then provide us with eggs. There are plants here that exist for no other reason than bugs like to eat them, and the birds like to eat the bugs, and I like birds.

I haven’t really talked about my yard here much. When we lived in NC, I had a raucous, out-of-control cottage garden on a fifth of an acre that was in bloom 10 months out of the year.

We moved here and bought a house on a half-acre lot, which makes gardening harder, not easier. Then there were two years of foster parenting, two years of the pandemic, a bunch of people I love died, and a long year of pretty deep depression (all of which overlapped at various points), and so, we are 3.5 years in our new home and it’s nowhere near where I had planned for it to be at this point.

In the old house, we lived there for a bit over five years, and at the end of our time there, the one thing I wish I had done was document it more. What flowers are these? When did I plant the peach trees? What was I thinking when I planted those? How long did that mulch last? Are these plum blossoms early this year, compared to last year?

Since this blog is, at its core, about how to live a good life, and I need plants for me to have a good life, I plan to do a walk around the property each Saturday and take photos of what’s in bloom, as well as things that catch my eye. I might tell you about a thing I’m working on, or I might just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Anyway – welcome to my little half-acre habitat.

A Closet Full of Grief

In the Looney Tunes cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, there was a recurring gag where there was too much stuff in the closet. Someone would open the closet and more things than should fit in a closet that size would fall out, burying the person who opened it.

Grief is like that, sometimes.

It’s overwhelming in the beginning. You give some of it away and learn to live with some of it and the rest you don’t actually deal with right now, but instead, in order to function, you put it in the closet and it won’t really fit so you stuff and punch and contort and finally, you get the door closed so you can keep going with your life because we live in a capitalist society and your mortgage doesn’t go away just because people you love died.

So it’s all stuffed in that closet. And because you stuffed it in there – I mean, it may have taken a few weeks or even months to get it in there, but it was in there, and you had to lean against the door to get it shut – but because it’s stuffed in there, it was hell to get it all to fit. But you did.

And life goes on and most days everything is fine and sometimes you are whistful and sometimes you miss them and sometimes you walk by the closet and see the door and remember what’s in there, but you know it’s going to be a mess if you open that door, so you keep on moving.

But the problem is that we don’t live in a vacuum. Other people are moving around in our life as well, and one day, with no ill intent at all, somebody or something is gonna open that door and it will all fall out, but instead of burying them, it buries you. And when that happens, you have no choice but to sit in the midst of it and pick it all up again, handling each piece, looking at it this way and that, as you put it all back in the closet.

This is why this afternoon I was driving down the Interstate, tears streaming down my face. An old song came on the radio about a child’s love for his father and, without warning, ripped that door off its hinges.

The Accent

The High School from where I graduated – one of 75 or so people so honored in 1990 – was literally in the middle of a cow pasture. Like, literally. The land for the school – 10 acres or so – was purchased from the farmer at some point in the distant past, and they built a school there. At lunch, you would see cows hanging their heads over the barbed wire fence, hoping you would give them your apple. Cows love apples, and since these were Red Delicious apples, we did not. We figured somebody ought to eat them.

In any event, this isn’t a story about the apples. Rather, I tell you about where my school was located to let you know that I am the educational product of rural, southern America. And the South is not monolithic. North Carolina is the South, and Central Mississippi is the South, and neither of them is like the other, and neither of them is like Virginia or Central Georgia.

But all of those places have produced educated people. People with an accent like the one I have.

Well, not exactly like the one I have. The Central Mississippi accent that I hear all the time here is not quite like the Northern Mississippi accent I heard in the hills growing up, and neither of them sounds quite like a Charleston, SC accent, and nobody sounds like New Orleans.

There was a teacher in my high school who prided himself on his academic rigor. For a while, he taught our AP English class, and when that happened, Holy Hell but he declared himself the arbiter of the English language – not only grammar, which could be argued was in his bucket, but also diction.

He routinely made fun of our accents. Humiliation was his primary pedagogical technique. There were students who liked him – but they were generally the popular students. He seized on social insecurities and would call you out publicly for an error with glee. He routinely called me Hugh Hollowhead in class because I once froze when he asked me a question because I had been daydreaming. This gave the bullies in my world a new, previously unthought-of nickname to call me.

But I can forgive him that. What I haven’t managed to forgive him for was making me ashamed of my accent. He had me stand up and say “Nice White Rice” to the class, and then he mocked my pronunciation.

”They aren’t all the same sound, Hollowhead!”

Everybody laughed. Well, everybody but me.

I could have killed him right there. There was not an ounce of Christian compassion in my body for him at that moment. None.

But he was an advisor for the Beta Club. Taught the AP English class. Had a Master’s Degree. And all I had was the ghosts of working-class people who had lived in one place for 170 years. Everybody I loved talked just like I did. The people who taught me about Jesus, who baptized me, who raised me, who taught me to fish and how to make a cane whistle and how to drive a tractor all talked just like I did.

And for the record, I would later learn that, when William Faulkner gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, he talked like I did, too. If you listen to the recording, the rhythms of North Mississippi pervade that speech.

But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that this community that had always been safe for me now felt less so.

He wasn’t the last person to make fun of my accent. In college, it would happen. Eventually, I got something of a complex about it and began reading Time magazine into a tape recorder, over and over, trying to smooth out my diction. As Don Williams sang in Good Old Boys Like Me:

But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news

In the business world, this was rewarded. When I began preaching, this also was rewarded. People do make judgments about us, based on the diction we use.

Imagine you are telling a joke, where one of the characters is stupid. What does he sound like?

That’s right. You made him sound Southern.

They won. I no longer have my accent. It’s gone. I mean, I have an accent, but it’s not the one I grew up with. It’s not mine. It’s studied, and while there is some Mississippi Hills in there, and a mixture of formal and informal usage, there is also some Piedmont North Carolina and some Tidewater Virginia and a little bit of whatever the people on the news sounded like when I was learning how to talk the way they wanted me to.

When I’m very tired, or if I’ve been drinking, or talking to someone from home, it comes back – but I don’t know how to make it happen. It’s just gone, another casualty of the insistence on our being homogenized and any difference stamped out. In the end, I guess we will be assimilated. But the first thing they took from me was my accent.

The Bird Project

Mr. Doc died when I was 10, and it was way before that. I was probably six or so when I first learned about birdwatching.

Mr. Doc was my elderly neighbor, the retired farmer who, along with his wife Monty, acted as my surrogate grandparents when I was growing up, and who often kept me after school. She was, without question, the best cook in the world – or at least, in my world, but he was the lord of all other domains.

When the clock on the table in the living room hit three, he and I would go outside to sit in the shade on the north side of the house, where it was far cooler than it was in their un-airconditioned small farmhouse. He wore a battered straw hat when we would go outside, to keep the sun out of his watery eyes, and he and I would sit in metal yard chairs that were old then, and the cool kids would powder coat and sell them on eBay as “retro” now.

The fencerow on that side of the house – the one that separated their lot from the 3 acre field that was always strawberries in the spring and then black eyed peas in the late summer – had a hedge made of wild plums, from which Monty made jelly each summer, and overhead, a power line that ran along it to the yard light that illuminated their backyard. And nearly every day of my life, on that power line, sat mockingbirds.

We would sit out there in the shade of the late afternoon, him and I, and watch the mockingbirds and listen to their songs. Sometimes the blackbirds or the blue jays would come and try to chase them off, but the mockingbirds would not have it – no sir.

When I told my Aunt Louise about the mockingbirds, she told me there were people called birdwatchers, who went to faraway places to look at birds through binoculars and write it down in their notebooks. Wasn’t I lucky, she said, that I didn’t have to go anywhere at all but the north side of Mr. Doc’s house.

We didn’t have any binoculars, but she did have an old pair of opera glasses she let me borrow, and I would take them to Doc and Monty’s and sit in that yard chair and look at the different birds, giving them names and making up stories about them. Mr. Doc would show me how to bust up dried corn on a flat rock with a claw hammer, and then I would make piles of it on the ground, far enough away for the birds to feel safe from me, and they would fly down, skittish and fearful, and eat.

We were rich as lords.

I haven’t done any birdwatching in at least 40 years. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love birds, and I plant my yard heavily in their favor. Sometimes we will sit on the yard swing and watch the cardinals in the magnolia tree, and the deck I built in 2020 is always a haven for grackles and cedar waxwings, and we get hummingbirds in the salvia I planted just for them. But I don’t go looking for them. They are something like happy accidents I sorta planned for.

But last week I came across a German woman who lives in Michigan and who takes pictures of the birds that show up at her birdfeeder. It’s pretty stunning. And faster than you can say hyperfocus, I have spent literally every spare hour researching how to do this.

I mean, it ties in with a lot of my existing projects, like building a yard that supports wildlife, and I figure I can share the pictures on my sadly neglected Instagram account, which I think a subset of you would also appreciate, and then maybe periodically give updates on the project itself, which gives me things to talk about on my blog, and plus, I know the names of like six different kinds of birds. It would be a chance to learn new things.

I like learning new things.

So, stand by for bird updates. This is how ADHD works, y’all. Despite the fact that 7 days ago I had zero interest in birds in any specific way, I spent the afternoon today researching feeding setups and action cameras. I don’t make the rules – it’s just how my brain works. You can fight it, but 49 years of owning this brain have taught me to hang on and see where it shakes out.

Debits and Credits

When I was in my 20s and hated my job, I would sometimes hide in the casinos outside of Memphis in Tunica, MS. They were all still pretty new then, and it seemed fancy and exotic, and there were good shows at night and they were liberal with the comps.

As an aside, if you ever want to hide, or develop a drinking problem, casinos make excellent places to do it – you can get $30 of chips and bet sixes and eights on the pass line at the $5 craps table for hours and hours. They also bring you free drinks. If you wear a suit to work (as, say, an investment advisor), you can also wear it to the casino without changing. It may be different if you are a plumber, although the things you could get away with at a casino in Tunica Mississippi in the late 1990s would fill a book.

There was a man I knew at the casinos – we all just called him Mr. Daniel. He was a retired farmer, and he lived near the casinos, and he dressed like a retired farmer: khaki slacks, tan boots, a plaid shirt, and a baseball cap. He called the cocktail servers, all of whom were young and shapely and female-bodied, things like honey and darlin’.

Every day, he came to the casino and played craps. He arrived at 9:00 every morning, like clockwork. Like it was his job. He stood in the same place each time, and always ordered the same thing to drink- Diet Coke with a lime wedge. Every third drink, he tipped the server a $5 chip.

Mr. Daniel would show up every day and would always throw three $100 bills on the green felt, and say “Change Only” and take the $300 in $5 chips, and then he would play very safe bets, and when he had doubled his money he would quit for the day. Sometimes he was done by 10:30, and most days he was done by 2 PM, but still other days he was still there at 5 PM when he would quit for the day. If he ever got down by $100, and sometimes it happened, he would quit for the day. And either way, tomorrow morning he would be back at 9 AM with $300 and do it again.

If you figured he made an average of $150 a day, accounting for losses and weekends off and so on, he cleared more than 40K a year. Not bad for retirement money in the late 1990s.

I liked Mr. Daniel. He would talk to you if you asked him questions, and we sometimes would eat in the casino’s steakhouse if he was done for the day. The casino was just fun for him. He won more than he lost, but he was wealthy, and this was just a distraction from the sameness and boredom retirement was for him. As someone who was supposed to be trying to sell rich people things, I asked Mr. Daniel lots of questions.

A thing he told me was that most of life was just money management. Most of life, Mr. Daniel said, was just money management. Deposits and withdrawals, credits and debits.

I never got rich gambling. And no, I never got Mr. Daniel as a client, although I tried, hard. But the metaphor of debits and credits has served me well, especially when it comes to relationships.

We make deposits and withdrawals into our relationships with other people. I smile when you walk in? Deposit. I share something you wrote on Facebook? Deposit. I help you move? Big deposit.

We have a disagreement? Withdrawal. I ate all the chips and didn’t tell you? Withdrawal. I don’t show up for our lunch date? Withdrawal.

We all do this. We all have debits and credits with each other, and while we don’t keep score, per se, we all know the person who only makes withdrawals. We avoid those people. We get tired of them quickly.

The truth is, some people only withdraw. The guy who only calls you when he needs your help. The person who only critiques your work, but never affirms it. The guy who “just wants to play devil’s advocate.”

Those people are not automatically bad people. There are probably lots of accounts they routinely make deposits into. But that account they make deposits into isn’t your account. In your account, they are overdrawn.

The Flag

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I can’t write about Oxford, or even Mississippi, without talking about the flag. You know. That one.

Back in the winter, I found myself in the mountains of North Carolina, and near Morganton, on the edge of Interstate 40, I saw a giant 20×30 Confederate battle flag flapping furiously in the wind. As one who grew up in the Southland, a straight cisgender child of the white working poor, that flag has held many images and emotions for me over the years.

My earliest memories are of it being in the state of Mississippi flag – the flag that hung in my school classroom, the flag that hung at the city hall that also housed the library in my small town, the flag that meant home.

It was the large emblem on top of The General Lee, the car that was the real star in the Dukes of Hazard, my favorite show as a child. As a poor white child with an accent, seeing other poor white people with accents who routinely outsmarted the Powers that tried to hold us down was life-giving to me. I did not notice how white their world was on that show, and how little that lined up with my life in a county that was mostly Black.

That flag was most often used as a visible placeholder for The South – almost like it was our logo – and we were proud of it, the way Red Sox fans are proud of that pair of socks on their merch.

I was taught both implicitly and explicitly that the US had two teams, and our team was Southern, and this was our logo, our symbol. I think that is what the “Heritage, Not Hate” people are getting at. It was an easy visual placeholder for all the feelings that go into being Southern – or at least a certain kind of Southern, from a certain race, from a certain socio-economic class.

I grew up 50 miles from the University of Mississippi, where most of the educated people in my life had matriculated. They all loved Ole Miss football, and had the battle flag – the Rebel flag, we called it – on all their flag poles, their team merch, their ball caps, and their license plates because the battle flag WAS the team logo, their mascot at the time was a literal Confederate Colonel and they were (and are) the Ole Miss Rebels.

Pride of team and pride of region got conflated for me and people like me. Most of the respectable people – our bankers, ministers, lawyers – all were Ole Miss people, and they all waved the battle flag, hung it outside their offices, put it on the business cards, even. It was hard to not see it as a sign of respectability and something to aspire to be a part of.

As a Marine, I had a poster of the battle flag taped inside my wall locker in the barracks, a reminder of home when I was far away from home, in a land where people did not sound like me, or think like me, or eat like me. The feelings I had anchored to that visual cue were as real as the memories that waft back when I smell catfish frying.

The people who look like me and had my childhood – I get where they come from with their “Heritage Not Hate” comments. People like me – white children of the working class, born into families with few advantages, who knew the struggles of a Dollar General Christmas and the humiliations of government commodity cheese – had nothing to be proud of. But we were of this region, this marvelous place, where the flowers bloom year-round and the fish practically jump in your boat and the biscuits rise with hope every morning and the sweet tea is strong enough your back teeth hurt.

If our ancestors had failed to get rich here they had, against desperate odds, survived and left their mark on the future. And this logo, this flag, was our reminder of that fact. We existed. We mattered. We were here, by God, and you would notice us.

As a student, I would get engrossed in the history of the Civil War. I would walk the sacred ground at Shiloh, where nearly 4,000 people died in less than 48 hours. I would visit the quarters of enslaved people in old plantations. I would read slave narratives and learn of the horrors of slavery. I had always been taught that war was over the rights of states to determine their destinies, but I would learn that wars tended to be fought over money when all is said and done and that this one was no different. Those 4000 folks died at Shiloh because of what that flag represented – the right of white people to own, breed, and sell Black people.

And I do believe that for many of us, people like me, race played little conscious part in our displaying of that flag. In the same way that huge numbers of fans of the Atlanta Braves proudly wore a mascot that mocked and appropriated Native cultures with no conscious thought of native cultures, we were blissfully ignorant of the impact our actions carried. We knew the past but were caught up in the present.

As a child in Mississippi, I was surrounded by Black bodies, but I was an adult before I began to develop true relationships of mutuality and love with people who had Black skin and was trusted with their stories. I learned they had very different images attached to the memory of the battle flag – that they saw it the way a Jew viewed a swastika, say, and not the symbol of regional pride it was for someone like me.

That flag belongs in a history book – the same way we put other failed ideas and images in the history books so we remember to not do them again. The same way people tour memorials at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, to remind us of the horrors we are capable of.

I felt all of that and much more that morning as I drove west on Interstate 40. I thought how sad it was that a person could erect a symbol they knew would distress their neighbors. I thought about how shallow their lives must be that the only outward symbol of the regional pride they felt was one they knew would cause at best anger and at worst fear.

And, I must say, I felt tremendous pride that I got to play a small part in getting that emblem removed from Mississippi’s state flag through the organizing work I do in faith communities here. If I live to be a thousand, the day they took it down from the Capitol here in Jackson for the last time will always be one of my proudest days.

Whatever complicated stories exist in the backstory of people like me, these days the battle flag symbolizes not a region or a sports team but white supremacy and domestic terrorism. It is a symbol of terror, and it belongs in a museum, where it can be explained in its context, alongside other failed ideas we have tried and found wanting.

Chips and Cheese

In high school, I worked at a grocery store after school. I worked from 4 to closing (which was 8 PM) during the week, and usually a good eight hours on Saturday, and would sometimes work on Sundays from 1 when we opened after the church was out, until 6 when we closed. Sunday was the worst because on Sundays you had to both open AND close.

It was a small town and a small grocery store. It was roughly the size of a Rite Aid or small Walgreens. I didn’t work every night, but most of them. I generally pulled 25 hours a week or more – probably more than was wise for a kid my age, but I loved it.

But the best part was after I got home. By the time we closed the store, it might be 9 before I got home during the week. Supper would be long over, and my brothers in bed, but Mom would leave dinner out for me, and I would fix myself a plate and heat it up in the microwave. Often she would then put everything away and go lay down and read, and Dad would sit up to watch the news before bed.

This particular night, I had gotten in later than normal and was starving. Mom had fixed Taco Salad for supper, which was what she called it when she would spread crumbled tortilla chips on a plate, then cover the plate with iceberg lettuce and tomatoes and shredded cheese, which was then topped with “taco meat”, which is what we called ground beef with an Old El Paso seasoning packet added, and jarred salsa and sour cream. It was very filling and good and seemed exotic in Marshall County, Mississippi in 1986.

All the ingredients were left out on the counter, waiting on me to put them together. Mom was already in bed, reading, and Dad was watching the end of a show, in anticipation of the news. I piled all the assorted goodness on my plate and, as I often did on those nights, sat in the living room with Dad and ate while we watched TV together.

When the show ended, I got up to put the food away. Dad followed me into the kitchen.

“Wait a minute”, he said. “I need a snack.”

He took down a large supper plate – one of the white Corelle plates with the blue flowers they had gotten as newlyweds – and spread chips over it in a single layer, edges just barely touching. Then he picked up the block of good sharp hoop cheese we always seemed to have in our refrigerator and, holding the box grater in his left hand, grated cheese over the tops of the chips in a dense layer, coving the chips until only the undulations of the chips under the cheese betrayed their existence.

He took this mounded plate of yellow marvelousness and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds, during which time the cheese melted and spread over the chips, flowing into the cracks and bubbling on top. He took it out, pulled a chip from the edge of the plate, watched the melted cheese string stretch an improbable length before breaking, then picked it high in the air and, head tilted back, put the whole thing in his mouth, cheese string first, the way some people eat spaghetti.

Then he shut the microwave door and went into the living room to watch the news. I had watched all this with curiosity, just waiting to see where this was going. Suddenly, the spell broke.

“Wait, “ I said. “I want some!”

“Well, make you some of your own. What do you want me to do, write the recipe down for you?”

So I made some, exactly the same way, and just as I walked into the living room, the news came on the TV. We sat together on the couch, in silence, with nothing heard above the sound of the TV but the crunching of chips and occasional sighs of satisfaction.