acknowledgments
Thank you to the Hub City Writers Project, Chapman Cultural Center, Watson-Brown Foundation, for support of the Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts & Letters. For Salvation South, which has published two of the essays in this collection. For the Spartanburg Public Library. For Pharmacy Coffee. For the Montgomery Building providing a reading and exhibition space. For my family’s gracious participation in this project of curiosity and questioning and unlearning and the many more stories still to be included. For my Southern Studies co-fellow Mo Kessler and coffees and brainstorms and talks and doodles and walks. For notes from poet and playwright T.K. Lee. For James Hannaham and that ponderous question on queerness and race. For Judge Griffen. For AK and all the edges, smooth and rough.
Although I prefer “fireflies,” the magic of that word was foreign to my childhood summers in Arkansas. How many times along that gravel road did my cousin and I catch and release, holding a glass jar of bioluminescence if only for a short while? I have vague memories of waking up at odd hours to a different shade of green flash outside the window. I never ventured into those peculiar dark nights to see what new lightning bugs had waited to appear, like copycat tooth fairies, until after we fell asleep.
Both sets of my grandparents lived in the southern part of Pike County, Arkansas. As of the 2020 Census, the entire county has slightly more than 10,000 residents. They lived at least twenty miles from the nearest Walmart. Cell phone service, even today, is like roulette: some days it hits, some days it’s a bust. The best indicator that we had, indeed, gone over the river and through the woods were clear nights when the Milky Way galaxy stretched across the sky like a impressionist brush stroke.
I could have spent hours watching, wondering, wishing, if I hadn’t been so afraid of the dark, tall tales, and coyote cries that amplified a childhood imagination into hyperdrive.
It’s rural.
The county has one weekly newspaper that covers several communities. This is not unusual. More than 1500 counties in the United States, roughly half the landscape, have only one local news source. More than 200 counties have none. According to the Local News Initiative, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers from 2005 to 2023. Yet, people crave information. In a preliminary survey as part of this project, only one person out of more than fifty indicated that they don’t read the news.
Limited access to information isn’t a commentary on rural life. Local news keeps communities informed on local issues: who else will report on city decisions like raising property taxes or school district budget cuts? Local news also thwarts community polarization and can build the sense of a unifying purpose.1
Quite simply, without local news, we don’t get to know each other very well.
But is access enough?
Does a town crier really bridge the gaps between neighbors? What if that town crier limits their perspective? How does a community benefit if the paper addresses city taxes but doesn’t report on decisions affecting the maintenance of county roads or water utilities? How does a community benefit when no one reports on conflicts of
interest held by a city council when they provide incentives to some property developers and not others?
Initially, this project explored access to local journalism and solutions that combat the adverse impact of the loss of news. Something felt missing as I related those issues to my own life experience and the one-newspaper community of my grandparents. I could see the lightning bug, but it moved too quickly between flashes for me to catch it.
A college memory reminded me that mere access to information and perspectives isn’t always enough.
Both of my parents taught at the nearby university. I attended integrated public schools with teachers who held Masters and PhD degrees. I visited and lived in other parts of the country. Quite simply, my formative years included exposure to a vast array of ideas and cultures and people.
Yet, as an undergraduate student at University of Mississippi in the early ‘90s, like many others, I waved the rebel flag at football games. Looking back, I linger in disbelief with those actions and my baffling cognitive dissonance.
A decade ago, I wrote about the confederate flag in the Huffington Post, candidly admitting a lack of critical thinking on my part. It seems that Paul Shackel is writing about folks like me in “Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical Archaeology,” when he acknowledges that groups or even members of the same group do not “understand the past in the same way.”2 When one group gains the ability to promote a particular view (or history), its collective memory becomes “public memory” with the power to mask people or history. Conscious effort isn’t even required, simply a desire to validate experiences and memories. Not unlike the desire to believe that a confederate flag is “about heritage not hate” notwithstanding documented acts of violence when the flag was (and still is) used.
Access to information and different perspectives was simply insufficient. I needed to unravel the threads before I could recognize and admit the harm in waving a piece of cloth.
This project rapidly progressed into new territory: information alone isn’t sufficient. Critical empathy is needed to unravel and re-learn the past to counter dominant, flawed (and incorrect) narratives that perpetuate old beliefs.
What memories did I need to unravel and re-learn?
What fireflies did I need to see?
southern mythologies : threads of farm , family , and race
there ’ s a photograph
From high school: probably in the fall of 1990. Maybe early 1991. It’s my senior class. We sit in wooden retractable bleachers in the Starkville High School gym, not clustered by friend groups but assembled for this photo.
How many of us spent the previous twelve years together? Some of us attended kindergarten at the First United Methodist Church, organized into classes named after animals: monkeys, giraffes, crocodiles. The nearby university was our Mississippi town’s largest employer, so most of our parents knew each other before we formed our own packs. We grew up in neighborhoods without sidewalks, surveying the streets on bikes, knowing the freedom we possessed before E.T. showed it to us. We often sat on the same punishing church pews and scraped knees together in the red clay at one of the town’s three little league ball fields.
I vaguely remember that we got along well, although perhaps my memory is clouded by what I want to see. Then and now, in 2024, the county has a 30% poverty rate. First grade used a now defunct “track system” that sorted kids strikingly along racial lines, only a
few short years after Starkville’s delayed integration in 1971. County schools remained carved from the city schools for another 20 years, creating a severe gap in the quality of education that revealed sharp racial divisions based on geography. I have flashbacks where, each year, we had to prove where we lived to stay in school.
The neighborhood where I lived was integrated.
Integration didn’t mean one family who didn’t look like the others, but a quilted pattern of different households and people. It seemed normal. Expected. Didn’t everyone have neighbors who looked different?
Apparently not. We lived in one of only two such neighborhoods in Starkville, in contrast to Sheely Hills, a neighborhood adjacent to Mississippi State University, built with a restrictive covenant that expressly excluded any non-white families.
We lived in the echo of a false sense of acceptance of others that is often implied by college towns.
As Adolph Reed writes in “The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives,” culture and social structure in the South often imposes the same impact as the force of law.3 Restrictive covenants not required. Universities are no insurance against racism.
In the 80s, a small public housing project opened at the back of my neighborhood. House after house immediately went up for sale. Not fully aware what that meant, I remember riding bikes with my best friend counting “For Sale” signs in yards: I remember exceeding 50. A third of the community. Although I don’t remember fully understanding why, I wondered: do we need to leave too?
After one of my grandmothers became the fifth person in our three-bedroom home, we eventually moved.
How much of that decision was motivated by the impact of nearby public housing? A home’s value is influenced by the homes around it. But why? How did that mindset develop? Are we that afraid to live next door to poverty? How many of these questions are a veneer?
Given the diversity of my childhood neighborhood before the public housing development, it’s hard to pin the mass exodus on
race even though Mississippi’s poverty statistics fall heavily along racial lines.
But then, there’s this photograph.
I hadn’t seen it in decades until I stumbled across it a few years ago. I have not been able to find it again, lost among shuffles and spring cleanings. I vaguely remember the picture being taken in that literal and figurative court of a high school gym.
1000 words that mirror 1000 histories are embedded in one frame.
What I did not remember then is what I can’t unsee now: roughly 150 teenagers on bleachers, white students to one side and black students on the other. Everyone else scattered across the image. The racial line between white and black was as striking and distinct as the local “christian academy” founded in 1969 as the public schools prepared to integrate.
Was that photo a reenactment of something inherited from our parents? Our grandparents? How did we subconsciously re-enact that lingering, colonial narrative?
When did we become the Emperor with no clothes?
chickens and eggs : something comes first
“You really missed out on growing up with yard chickens.”
My mom has said this before.
“How?” I’ve only asked once. It doesn’t require a reminder.
“You didn’t get to feel chicken litter squishing up between your toes.”
Thank God, I think.
Barefoot summers in the South may be as ubiquitous as mosquitoes and chiggers and ticks. Yes, there are preventative measures, but why disrupt the teachable moments of stepping on sandburs and fire ants and yellowjackets? The cool comfort of a good patch of grass brings back memories of water sprinklers and lightning bugs and watermelon hearts.
Yard chickens. I’ve seen them, but never lived with them. My parents left the agrarian lifestyle for teaching. They didn’t want to continue gathering eggs or feeding cattle. When did they consider not farming?
“Not farming” hints at its opposite: when did it start?
My family has farmed for generations, sowing tales of working the land, the gardens, the house that burned, the great-great uncle who swindled the family gold. Even colonial-era records show landowning ancestors far back in my tree. Peter Alison Lewis, my six-great grandfather owned a mill along what is now Lawson’s Creek north of Spartanburg in the 1700s when South Carolina was a British colony, unflinchingly moving into Cherokee hunting grounds.
Summers and year end holidays consisted of road trips along Highway 82. We drove through Delta cotton fields, crossed the Mississippi River at Greenville, wound briefly through the Arkansas Delta into rolling woodlands, before arriving at a tiny dot on the map: Billstown, Arkansas. It was 342 miles of “are we there yet?” and McDonalds and bathrooms and roadside parks. Both sets of my grandparents lived about 3 miles apart.
John W. Bateman | 11
My mother’s parents lived on a farm, still in the family, that is less a plot of land and more like a quiet member of the family. It occupies as much space in our lives as the uncle who listens, never argues, and continues with life’s business without much fuss: silent, constant, stubborn, and reliable.
The story is ingrained into the family lore: my great-great grandfather left Reconstruction Mississippi in the middle of the night with his brother and sister and a couple of other families. By the mid-to-late 1870’s, they had settled along the Little Missouri River, staking their claim for homestead.
A family farm sounded easy: someone in the family worked the land. Passed it on. Cows and chickens and crops grew. Why didn’t everyone have one? The family legend on my father’s side for why the farm “was lost” is straight from the pages of Faulkner: a greedy great-great uncle swindled his brothers and left everything to Oral Roberts University.
Through the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1866, the U.S. government gave away millions of acres of land. By 1904, 80 million acres
These numbers belie an ugly reality behind the program. The Homestead Act of 1866 was intended to help give former slaves and poor whites access to land. Eric Foner deemed the 1866 Act “a dismal failure,” because only a few thousand African Americans ultimately benefited from the program.7 Most of the giveaway benefited white settlers and even then, only 25% of white homesteaders succeeded in making their claim.
At least one of those white settlers in Arkansas was my great-great grandfather who received a grant of land that became the ground for family mythology.
Historic context becomes important. This land had once been part of the Caddo/Kadoha Nation: mounds still remain, evidence of the former civilization. My great-great grandfather didn’t seem to fall into the category of “poor white” who were intended to benefit from the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Thomas and his brother John, who homesteaded land nearby, were children of James Gilleylen, listed in the 1850 Mississippi Census as owner of land and humans. A slaveowner.
A family farm often implies self-sufficiency, resiliency, and determination. Certainly, farming requires all of those attributes. Yet, property ownership in the South carried its own propaganda of class and power. When most homesteaders did not succeed, the reality is that external resources helped.
Context casts a long shadow across the family story. Under the disparate impact of the homestead acts: land ownership was predominantly a white experience with success often hinging upon more than hard work.
Who is a self-made farmer?
John W. Bateman | 13 had been given to homesteaders.4 By 1934, more than 270 million acres (10% of all U.S. land) had been passed to individuals.5 Almost 1/4 of Arkansas–33,328,000 acres–was homesteaded.6
a crack in the wall
“Why don’t we have white history month?” The question still echoes across the gym.
The assembly was fairly small. I don’t remember if Black History Month was the focus or if that question was a diverging tangent.
“Why don’t you come to my office and I can share more with you after this?” replied the counselor. Her response didn’t echo with accusation.
Decades later, through a lens of time and its accompanying factors, the counselor’s response feels tuned by dials of awareness. I don’t remember my reaction: did I share in the question or had I realized the gaps in curriculum involving Black history? I vaguely remember a pause before the counselor’s response. The white student didn’t argue. I don’t know if he ever went to her office.
My own awareness developed, and I started to learn about folks who should be in history books but haven’t been. Many of their stories were passed down, instead, through church congregations, at family dinner tables, or by the occasional teacher who departed from textbooks to add depth to Mississippi history.
Fannie Lou Hamer comes to mind quickly: I was roughly forty when I learned about the black woman who fought to register her people to vote, who was beaten in jail, and who, with some speculation, may have been sexually assaulted in that jail. The woman who stood up to the Democratic National Convention and asserted, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
A different anger grew within me. The question lingering now goes beyond “who is missing from textbooks” but to the much more critical question, why?
I am sick and tired of learning about gaps in the teaching of American history.
John W. Bateman |
eudora welty photographed it
There’s a story that doesn’t settle with me.
The Little Missouri River, on its relaxed run through Pike County, is nowhere near Missouri. Billstown is stretched thinly along a twolane highway above the narrow muddy delta created by the river. It’s all-white. Based on census records and family stories, however, that wasn’t always true. The 1880 U.S. Census for the area identifies several black households.
A family story hints that Billstown wasn’t too different from other mostly white towns in Southwest Arkansas. Although it earned a dot on the map, Billstown never manifested legal status as a municipality. It doesn’t share the same notorious history as
Mena, Arkansas, located one county over, which boldly promoted, in the 1920s, its lack of black families.
Even absent city ordinances, local social forces can create sundown rules. The 1954 edition of The Green Book: The Guide to Travel and Vacations identifies 17 towns across the state of Arkansas with places for black travelers to patronize and stay.8 None were located in Pike County.
Family mythology includes a story that Mom received from her father, who heard the story from his mother (my great-grandmother) Eunice Gilleylen that dates back to when the community was known as “Bills.” Born in 1879, Eunice purportedly witnessed these events:
At one point, there were black families that lived there. Two of the black families lived on our farm, the Stokes farm. There is a place on the farm where the well was at. We’ve been down there before, but we’ll have to go again. I’ll have to take you. You can see where the well is. Some large trees have grown up around it, and it’s filled in, or at least it looks like it’s filled in. I wouldn’t want to walk on it.
John W. Bateman |
One of the families had a child who was mentally handicapped, and he would just go to people’s houses and go in the kitchen and get things to eat. Supposedly it scared people. Mr. Stone, he kind of unified a bunch of people, and they moved those families down to Antoine. If you look in the 1880 census, you can see where all the Gilleylens and the Brown family and the other family, they’re all living. It’s Peter Conway and his family, and Rosa Brown.
The 1900 Census confirms that no black families lived in the community. A cultural “ordinance” effectively turned Billstown into a Sundown Town.
Love your neighbor as yourself, except when they don’t look like you.
Pointing fingers at history and ending the conversation with “but that was then,” embodies a laziness that avoids looking at the present. A study of extensive data from the 2020 Census shows that racial segregation persists across the United States. According to that study, segregation had increased from 1990 to 2019 in more than 80 percent of major metropolitan areas.9
Where do I want to live: in a neighborhood where everyone looks like me, thinks like me, works and lives like me? Or do I want to live in the middle of a quilted pattern of vibrant differences?
What actions today will break free from the choices of my ancestors?
the jurisprudence of sneakers
Dear Judge Griffen:
I wanted my grandfather to be Atticus Finch. He wasn’t.
Despite southern proclivities to romanticize everything from armadillos to zinnias, nostalgia unlocks the gate to dishonesty’s playground. Unchecked, it sweeps family secrets under a rug and adorns a grey (or blue) uniform to re-enact war battles instead of abolitionist speeches.
In writing about Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, Aida Victoria wrote how (white) nostalgia, in particular, avoids confronting memories “too shameful to face head on.”10
Recovery offers a novel promise: “we will neither regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” But it demands brutal, honest navigation of complex, uncomfortable histories. Particularly those close to home. Learning that my grandfather was not Atticus is, perhaps ironically, one of the most valuable legacies I’ve inherited.
When you hired me as a law clerk in 1998, you offered me several firsts, one of which we acknowledged during the interview. Until that moment, I had always worked for white men. Although it struck me in that moment, it should not have been a surprise: by 1996, more than three decades after the Civil Rights Act, fewer
than 7% of managers in the U.S. workforce identified as black. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 that number was still less than 10%.11
There’s a tendency among white Southerners to treat racism like a tattered, moth-eaten quilt, stashed in a closet or forgotten trunk in the attic. If we “other” a racist into someone who doesn’t look like us, isn’t educated the same way, doesn’t work or live where we do, vote, pray, or live like us, or isn’t related to us, then we can believe racism existed in a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away.
Actions teach us otherwise.
Hate is a backyard weed. It doesn’t grow in an appendix of cities listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. We only need to consider January 6, 2021, and the mob of angry, armed mostly white people who constructed gallows, called for the execution of the sitting Vice-President, and killed a cop as they stormed the Capitol. Some folks saw their neighbors. Some saw friends and family. The mob included veterans, business owners, elected officials, and ordinary folk from across the country.
The monster still lurks in the room, and sometimes we need to shine a light under the bed.
Sunlight is an amazing disinfectant: especially when it falls between a judge and his law clerk. In hindsight, I am sometimes surprised you offered me the job.
My parents attended the all-white school a few miles away in the tiny town of Delight as you were forced to attend the segregated Simmons High School in Okolona, Arkansas.
That’s after the University of Arkansas School of Law desegregated in 1948, after the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, after the desegregation of Central High School in 1957, after Little Rock’s “Lost Year” in 1958... ...and during the two terms my grandfather Alvis W. Stokes served in the Arkansas state legislature in 1959 and 1961.
When Pike County integrated in fall of 1965, the superintendent of the Delight schools asked my grandfather to remain as PTA President at the high school. According to the story shared by my mom, he accepted on the condition that every PTA officer in 1964 would also serve in 1965. For what purpose? Integration at Delight High School did not mirror the transition at Central High in Little Rock.
One question simmers in quiet moments of conversations with Mom: was my grandfather a silent segregationist?
His term in the legislature started more than 60 years ago. He died in 1986. No one alive remembers or recalls or will share what my grandfather believed (or didn’t believe) on this topic. I continue to hear the same answer: I don’t know.
If nostalgia is the devil’s playground, then wishful thinking can be a burning pit of hell.
Years ago, I tracked down the former superintendent for the schools, hoping to discover my grandfather’s forgotten advocacy. That call with Mr. Ferguson repeated an old narrative: integration was smooth “but a lot of blacks didn’t want to integrate.” You and
I both understand the layers embedded in that “but,” although no doubt some need to engage in critical empathy to understand why some black folk in the post-Jim Crow South would have wanted to avoid joining majority-white schools.
Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, reminds me that no answer is still an answer. If the silence of friends is what we remember, how does the silence of family members echo? A grandparent, whom I loved dearly, contributed to long-delayed justice even if it’s because he didn’t speak out against that injustice.
This requires me to hold two polarizing potential realities: a grandparent I admired and loved did not advocate for racial equality, not because he didn’t have the opportunity, but likely because he did not believe in it as a fundamental, moral truth.
Wanting my grandfather to be Atticus Finch did not make him so. Romanticized, wishful nostalgia fueled a family narrative that I wanted. Unraveling that nostalgia has been challenging, and likely not just for me.
Within this calculus lives my own relativity: I had considered none of this math when you hired me. Nothing had taught me (yet) to be aware of the lived experience of being Black in the South. Nothing forced me to navigate the lingering, insidious impact of slavery or Jim Crow, whom Adolph L. Reed has written “has had the most immediate consequences for contemporary life and the connections between race and politics in the South and, less directly, the rest of the country.”
Despite that layered history, one morning in chambers, I approached you for a conversation. We’ve talked about this moment in recent years.
“What was it like to attend a segregated school?” I asked. Although I still do not remember what sparked that query, more than twenty-five years later, I remember your pause.
“It’s like wearing only one shoe, not realizing they come in pairs,”
you answered, surveying either the Little Rock skyline or some memory that you did not share.
If empathy is walking a mile in another’s shoes, then equity is realizing when that person doesn’t have the pair of shoes for the walk.
You shared more. Under segregation in Pike County, students did not have textbooks. Teachers taught from a single student edition, not the teacher edition with answers. The gymnasium had no showers. There was no science lab. Integration in Pike County remedied several problems: students gained textbooks, a library, athletic facilities... a potential education that had been denied. Discrimination jumped rails. Black varsity high school coaches became junior high assistant coaches. Black science teachers became cafeteria workers and janitors.
You offered a striking perspective: “If our teachers ever regretted their loss, they never showed it. Our gain was theirs.”
Calvin Smith writes about this phenomenon in “Educating the Masses,” addressing the racist implications. “White school superintendents attempted to justify the dismissals and demotions on the grounds that many of those who lost their positions were incompetent or inadequately trained. The insinuation of black racial inferiority was a reflection of the inherent racism of many white public school superintendents.”12
Smith further points to damning evidence contradicting those demotions: “By 1963, 90 percent of all black teachers held college degrees in their speciality areas, the same as whites, and only two percentage points separated black and white master’s degree holders–13 and 15 percent–respectively.”
I cannot fathom the lopsided sacrifice black teachers paid for student gain nor the joyous celebration for their students in the face of racism that stripped them of their jobs.
We did not speak about my grandfather.
John W. Bateman |
Although history is a lesson, nostalgia is nefarious. We must accept whatever thin ice was created by the duplicity and failures of our ancestors, whether they lived 200 years ago or hugged us on birthdays.
“But I didn’t do that” is a cop-out. That very response reveals we know better now. That knowledge, in turn, gives us a path to do better, now.
My grandfather was not Atticus Finch. It has taken time for me to process and accept who my grandparents were--and weren’t. In dispelling that nostalgia, I am finding a more significant legacy through a different curiosity: if my grandfather would have, what could he have done?
What will I do?
In 1968, you graduated from an integrated Delight High School before continuing at an integrated University of Arkansas. Thirty years later, we talked about segregation and sneakers.
unicorn lumberjacks and their fabulous stables
a queer miss .
My final semester at the University of Mississippi in the spring of 1995 consisted of 12 hours and no Monday or Friday classes. “Less than rigorous” might be a fair assessment, although a particularly pointed memory pokes a needle through the bubble I’d blown around my southern life.
An English seminar class on comparative literature of the Civil War South and the Russian Revolution offered more than a critical look at southern literature. We met in the tower of Barnard Observatory, the restored antebellum building (a near replica of a Russian observatory) that would have held the largest telescope in the world in the mid-1800s but for the interruption of the Civil War.13
The visiting professor had some vague responsibility for the translation of Gone With the Wind into Russian and its release in the
Soviet Union. This class (located in the very room that would have held that giant telescope) generated a growing recognition of the religiosity of the Lost Cause: a fervent zeal in God, the land, and a nationalist ideology in the Confederacy.
The South is its own kind of religion.
Then, another memory stirred.
After the final presentation of papers, where I wrote about the zealotry of the Confederacy, a fellow Black student asked me to meet him before the class so he could share his poetry. Surprised by the request, I agreed. I showed up early before the next class, waiting outside that antebellum-era observatory.
I waited.
And waited.
Finally, the time for class arrived and I walked up the stairs into that failed observatory, where my classmate sat. Waiting. Ships passed, but we never rescheduled.
In retrospect, no doubt this Black man thought this young straight white fraternity boy had blown him off. Although I hadn’t, I made no effort to reconnect. Something gnaws: what perspective, what lens did I avoid?
Three decades later, I suspect I know the observation that I’d tried to dodge.
John W. Bateman
when i was nine , i wanted to be a stripper
The future goal of taking off my clothes in public probably fell between fireman and zookeeper. At least it did alphabetically. I don’t remember when I first heard of the Chippendales, but I knew exactly what they looked like.14
Did my Gen X childhood in Mississippi, 1,000 light years from Vegas, shed clues? Not on the surface, at least. Raised by two WASP parents who taught at the nearby university, I was dutifully christened in the Methodist Church. Each summer, I attended the Vacation Bible School of Heteronormativity, although its idea of “vacation” disillusioned me. In kindergarten, our most exciting field trip was to see the cannulated cow at the nearby veterinary school. But is a cow with a window in its stomach absurd enough to make a nine-year-old want to be a stripper?
A 1980s queer kid, I was so far in the back of the closet that I might as well have found another passage to Narnia. I didn’t know that I was in a closet or what “gay” meant, other than a reference to someone who sold flowers and lived alone with thirty cats in a lavender house. My only exposure to anything remotely homoerotic consisted of 1) the Solid Gold Dancers; 2) G.I. Joe; and 3) He-Man, the muscle boy who held aloft a magic sword and proclaimed he
“had the power” before transforming into a man wearing a harness, wrist cuffs on both arms, and matching fur briefs and boots like he’d dressed for a circuit party in Puerto Vallarta. Skeletor wasn’t the only one obsessed.
“No, Dr. and Mrs. Bateman, don’t give your son something gay like a doll house for Christmas. Give him a naked muscle man in a Speedo.”
Nine. Scrawny. Intrigued by a cartoon muscle kink daddy, I built a fortress–a stripper oasis!–out of the mustard yellow cushions from my parents’ 1970s corduroy couch. My Winnie the Pooh teddy bear (not an official Pooh, but he shared the same shade of dirty beige-yellow) served as my make-believe bouncer and stage manager.
“Pooh” wore a red velvet sleeveless monogrammed vest, as if he were the love child of Freddie Mercury and Dr. Frank N. Furter.
I have crisp memories of my makeshift dance club and its imagined accouterments: music, a disco ball, lights, and a stage where, within the safety of mustard yellow corduroy, I pronounced, “When I’m old, like twenty-six, all these women are gonna stare at me.” As I counted women in the audience (represented by the wales of corduroy), I took off every piece of clothing to imaginary cheers that gave me intense things that I later learned at the fourth grade playground were called “boners.”
One day, during a fabulous performance on that secret stage, I heard a voice cry, “Gotcha!” Then my grandmother extended her elderly hands through the cushions. In electric horror, I clutched my shirt, and pulled my Superman Underoos over my erect penis. I instantly wondered what cardinal sin I had committed in a town where we were already destined to hell because Walmart had just opened on Sundays. I might have wanted a room full of women (and their sons) staring at me, but I did not want my grandmother in that room.
Too traumatized to remember my grandmother’s reaction, I curled up in shame, believing that I was going to hell three times: once for taking off my clothes, twice for loving it, and a third time for hurting my grandmother’s feelings.
My childhood included other fantasies, from imaginary friends on a planet with twelve moons to a talking rat who flew a spaceship. Sometimes, I pretended to be a mermaid. We didn’t have a pool, so I’d strip and wrap my body with a long sheet to create a tail. The floor transformed into an ocean where I would flop and swim/crawl across the house. The secret life of a latchkey kid. Even my childhood best friend didn’t know.
Despite a childhood imagination that bent every concept, I still didn’t know I lived in a closet until I was thirty, married, and had already left Mississippi. How did a nine-year-old, who dressed for Sunday School in khakis, a fitted navy blue blazer, and a clip-on tie want to be a stripper? Did other kids want to take their clothes off for a living? Did I have some unseen lumberjack fairy gogo-uncle named Colt? If so, why didn’t Pooh spill the tea?
My coming-out story is full of misdirected detours. As the Christianity I learned in Mississippi slowly made me hate myself, my own homophobia came to light, including a very adverse response the first time another guy hit on me. I was seventeen. He was, perhaps, in his early twenties. A professional hockey player. When he first showed interest in me, the validation felt amazing. When he made his pass, I drunkenly ran to my friends, bawling. Natasha, someone I knew casually and peripherally, calmed me with a hug. Someone told the guy to leave (he did). More than the brief pass and the fact that someone saw through me, what lingers now is the shame that I vomited on the spot. Today, I want to believe this hockey player eventually found his own truth and peace, and, despite his highly questionable decision, he was driven by my same need for acceptance that I had.
Quite simply, I’d met myself in a mirror. So I drowned that person with booze. I ran away by staying in place, giving up a fantastic scholarship at a first-rate university to attend a different school where I would coast and endeavor to “fit in.” I conformed to the status quo. I questioned nothing critical--neither race, gender, orientation, nor class--lest it crack the bank-vault walls of my closet.
Perhaps there is truth in the idea that whatever bothers me in someone else reflects something I don’t like inside of me. Decades later, I’m still un-learning who I was then and learning who I am now.
Pre-Will & Grace, pre-Ellen, queer characters (if they appeared at all) felt theatrical and camp, covert and stereotyped, or lonely, criminal, and outcast. A lack of understanding fueled homophobia: “homosexuality” had only been removed from the mental health profession’s diagnostic manual in 1973 and would not be removed from the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organization until 1990.15 I remember derogatory jokes from comedians of that era. I also remember the fraternity brother who, in the early ‘90s, engaged in a personal witch hunt for anyone he thought of as gay. He admitted to fabricating lies to force guys to leave the fraternity, and scoured yearbooks to see who had joined which clubs and might, therefore, be gay. While he spent way too much time obsessing about others’ closets, I quietly waited out the bullying from the sidelines, desperately wanting to fit in.
Accounting for my journey feels like looking backward across light years into another galaxy. Foreign and distant, time is folded as if everything happened all at once. In some points, I don’t recognize myself; in others, old scars remain tender. Sometimes, I find moments--like my childhood fantasies--where I “should have known.”
But how do we know before we know?
My catalog of memories never made sense until after I came out. I remember being told “don’t talk with your hands like that” yet never understanding what “that” meant. I was called “ninny” and “sissy” and a “goody-two-shoes.” Crying was not permissible: I had to “shape up” or “stop blubbering,” even the day after my great-grandmother’s funeral. Over the years, I learned to hold back. Far removed from that restriction, I remain physically unable to cry for more than two or three seconds at a stretch.
Surely, the adults in my youth knew I was a queer kid and had tried to “groom” me straight--which is, of course, utterly impossible to do (in either direction).
When I finally came out, my mom first responded, “Well, I do think it’s biological and genetic.” Then, she listed various family members whom she’d “always suspected” were gay. While it had taken me thirty-one years to reach this moment, I watched her rapidly process the news with a whirling mix of curiosity, tears, and bewilderment. Meanwhile, my father never said a single word, while my stepmother asked a single question: was I happy and at peace? The pièce de résistance was a direct question from Mom: “What do you miss in relationships with women that you think you’ll get from men?” It took every tendon in my body not to collapse in laughter as I thought, “Don’t say penis, don’t say penis, don’t say penis.”
Of course, queerness is so much more than a body part or childhood make-believe. As I watched the conversation in Netflix’s series Heartstopper when teenage rugby star Nick Nelson (played by Kit Connor) comes out as bisexual to his mother Sarah (played by Olivia Colman, who couldn’t stop crying during rehearsal),16 I remembered my own beautiful moments with Mom. Over time, the elephant left the room, and she embraced me. She even tried–awkwardly but endearingly–to set me up with a former student of hers. As my mother told me about this “really creative and cute” designer, something prompted me to ask, “Is he even gay?” Mom
responded without hesitation: “Well, I don’t know, but he likes nice things!»
If it were only that simple.
Acceptance is, however, that simple. Lifelong friends and cousins never wavered.
Pastors and teachers and coworkers and neighbors are more interested in my character and happiness than the gender of whomever I love. Mom now wants to know when I’m seeing anyone: she wants a son-in-law. Regardless of what a politician, a judge, or a bigot says, writes, or thinks about me, I am worthy, as I am.
There are parallels between ‘80s homophobia and today’s pearl-clutching politicians and preachers who fuel hate in the name of their versions of “God” and “family values.” When mayors attempt to withhold funds over LGBTQ+ library books in direct violation of the First Amendment,17 when Florida prohibits educators from teaching young students about LGBTQ+ lived experiences,18 when politicians want to prohibit critical thinking in schools on issues like race,19 when the Supreme Court strikes at the right to privacy in a way that, according to Justice Clarence Thomas, extends far beyond abortion,20 I remind myself that history is a marathon. It progresses forward over long stretches.
That progress can mean my coming-out story doesn’t have to be someone else’s. “Love your neighbor” can and should be more than a catchphrase that makes folks feel good on Sunday mornings. It becomes a clear directive that demands critical thinking and intense self-awareness.
In a world of swiping left and right on apps, perhaps progress also means we haven’t fully lost the human magic of getting to know someone through the stunningly beautiful awkwardness of conversation and body language and internal debates and uncertainties: Do they like me? Do they want to know me? It’s the fundamental notion: am I worthy, as I am?
John W. Bateman |
The answer is yes. Always yes. A resounding yes.
I no longer need to unpack my childhood stripper fantasy. I can simply enjoy heading out for a night of dancing under a disco ball and lasers, covered in glitter, where I can take off my shirt (or not) and strut and shake without hiding in shame. At least now, at fifty-one, I have better taste than to buy a corduroy sofa.
And I own a much better harness than He-Man or Skeletor.
“ gays just don ’ t have lasting relationships .”
“Are you attracted to men because you didn’t have a good relationship with your father?”
“Does it bother you that the Bible says it’s wrong?”
I still remember the jokes from comedians and late night shows. Jokes that ignored any concept of humanity and lasered focus onto single attributes ascribed to all gay men: AIDS. Anal sex. Femininity. Gross. Dying. Some thing to be ridiculed.
A toxic obsession with closets pervaded locker rooms, fraternities, work, and social groups. “Bet he smokes pole,” said that fraternity brother who hunted for secretly gay members.
How did this obsession become a part of the societal fabric? A modern day Salem Trial, where the accused were tried and convicted outside their presence. Violence was often real: even set on fire.
Just ask Matthew Shepherd’s family.
It’s no wonder that the LGBTQ+ community turned to acceptance among themselves, building families of choice. We explored everything unconventional to the heteronormative community, not always with success.
Without the same freedom straight folks held to explore
relationships publicly, we found each other in dark rooms, parks, and alleys, and other times through surgically precise code switching communication… any means where secrecy ensured survival. When the occasional slip of secrecy broke, sometimes Monday morning’s drunken excuses or outright silence followed the weekend college party.
In Post, Herrera sees hope in this self-taught and self-defined romance: “Our romance is improvisation. Freedom to redefine entire love languages. There’s no shame in embracing that we make it up as we go along. We are how love poems are written.”
People as love poems. The emotions that course through one course through all. An x-ray of feelings would eliminate body, age, gender, orientation, race–the exterior things we use to define ourselves–and reveal a fundamental truth. We love. We hurt. We cry. We grieve. We laugh. We fear. We get excited or nervous or hopeful or sad. Humanity shares the common thread of emotional need.
Wedding ceremonies are embedded with language of social contracts for the couple and between the couple and the community. A shared public commitment to support a family unit. Funerals offer the same support at the close of a life, a change in chapters; yet, many elder LGBTQ folk today recall the AIDS plague when families shunned their dying adult children.
If grief needs a witness, so does love. Those two communal contracts have often been excluded to queer folk. Whether it’s a church’s refusal to marry two people simply because of what’s between their legs or because of the fear of AIDS, communities have long excised LGBTQ folk from the communal experience.
Aren’t we all–each and every one of us–love poems?
Love letters and tears are not lego pieces, lost behind the furniture. Our love and grief is as sacred as any other.
How do we know before we know? How do we learn when we’re the Emperor with no clothes?
The Lost Cause isn’t a unique playbook. Homophobia isn’t a new script. Both recur because they have a powerful, controlling impact with their harm.
How do we crack the foundation so we can build a better one?
These are my letters of remembering, of re-learning, of unraveling.
John W. Bateman
1 David Ardia, Evan Ringel, Victoria Smith Ekstrand, and Ashley Fox. “Addressing the decline of local news, rise of platforms, and spread of mis- and disinformation online.” Center for Information Technology and Public Life, 22 December 2020, https://citap. unc.edu/news/local-news-platforms-mis-disinformation. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
2 Shackel, Paul A. “Public memory and the search for power in American Historical Archaeology.” American Anthropologist, vol. 103, no. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 655–670.
3 Adolph J. Reed, Jr. The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives. Verso, 2022, p. 12.
4 National Archives. “Homestead Act (1862).” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/homestead-act. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
5 National Archives. “The Homestead Act of 1862.” https://www.archives.gov/education/ lessons/homestead-act#background. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
6 National Park Service. “Homesteading in Arkansas.” https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/ historyculture/homesteading-in-arkansas.htm. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
7 Andrew Muhammad, Christopher Sichko, Tore C. Olsson. “African Americans and federal land policy: Exploring the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1866.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, vol. 6, Issue 1, 13 October 2023, pp. 104. https://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aepp.13401. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
8 Victor H. Green. The Negro Travelers’ Green Book: 1954 Facsimile Edition. Snowball Publishing, 2017, pp. 5, 8-10.
9 Stephen Menendian. “U.S. neighborhoods are more segregated than a generation ago, perpetuating racial inequity.” NBC News, 16 Aug. 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/ think/opinion/u-s-neighborhoods-are-more-segregated-generation-ago-perpetuating-racial-ncna1276372. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
10 Adia Victoria. “The Creature Comfort of Aunt Jemima.” The Bitter Southerner, 29 Oct. 2020. https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/the-creature-comfortof-aunt-jemima-adia-victoria. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
11 Bureau of Labor Statistics. “11. Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.” Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
12 C. Calvin Smith. “From ‘Separate but Equal’ to ‘All Deliberate Speed.’” Educating the Masses: The Unfolding History of Black School Administrators in Arkansas, 1900-2000. The University of Arkansas Press, 2003, pp. 84-85.
13 Nomination Form. “Barnard Observatory , Chancellor’s Residence , and McCain Hall.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory. 19 September 1978. https://www. apps.mdah.ms.gov/nom/prop/32429.pdf. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
14 Originally published as “Chippendales, Winnie the Pooh, and Mississippi Corduroy” by Salvation South on 10 Feb 2024.
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16 Iona Rowan. “Heartstopper star accidentally made Olivia Colman cry on set.” Digital Spy, 29 April 2022. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a39857611/heartstopper-kit-connor-made-olivia-colman-cry. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
17 Keisha Rowe. “Mississippi mayor threatens to withhold thousands in funding for libraries over LGBTQ books.” Clarion Ledger, 27 Jan. 2022. https://www.clarionledger. com/story/news/2022/01/27/ridgeland-mayor-withholds-madison-county-library-funding-lgbtq-book-mississippi/9237979002. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
18 Jaclyn Diaz. “Florida’s governor signs controversial law opponents dubbed ‘Don’t Say Gay.’” National Public Radio: WBEZ Chicago, 28 March 2022. https://www.npr. org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
19 Sarah Schwartz. “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack.” Education Week, 11 June 2021. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
20 Nina Totenberg and Sarah McCammon. “Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades.” National Public Radio: WBEZ Chicago, 24 June 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abortion-roe-vwade-decision-overturn. Last accessed 15 March 2024.
caption & image attribution
Cover image Unraveling. Image text, 2024. John Bateman.
Page 2: Banner logo of the Murfreesboro Diamond. Unknown.
Page 3: Ole Miss football stadium, circa 1995. AP Photo/Tannen Maury.
Page 5: Homestead Deed. Photo by author.
Page 7: Writer, circa 1978 (?). Unknown.
Page 8: Sheely Hills restrictive covenant.
Page 10: Writer’s Mom and Friend with yard chickens, mid-1950s. Unknown.
Page 11: Spartanburg District map, 1820.
Page 12: Pike County, Arkansas map.
Page 16: Home by dark, 1936. Eudora Welty.
Page 17: Mena advertisement, circa 1920. Unknown.
Page 21: Simmons High School Gymnasium. By Valis55 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47196759.
Page 25: Writer selfie, 2021. Photo by author.
Page 26: Barnard Observatory, 1860. Edward C. Boynton.
Page 34: An artist’s interpretation of Skeletor & He-man. Ed Harrington, nothinghappenedtoday.