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Mississippi Sissy |  |
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Mississippi Sissy | |
Even as a very small boy, living in small-town Mississippi in the late 1950s and '60s, Kevin Sessums sensed that he was different. The son of the high school basketball coach "in a friendly hick-filled hamlet in the middle of the state called Pelahatchie," he didn't like sports (though he had "inherited an innate athletic ability from my father"), loved the movies, was infatuated with Arlene Francis (a panelist on the television show "What's My Line?") and was often called "sissy" to the point that, he thought, he was "the sissiest boy in Mississippi."
That was bad. What was worse was that within a year, he lost each of his parents. In 1963, when he was 7, his father was killed in an auto accident at the age of 32; his mother died a year later, at the age of 33, of esophageal cancer. He and his younger brother and sister, Kim and Karole, were reared by their maternal grandparents as well as a host of uncles, aunts and other relatives. They were given plenty of attention and love, but it was never the same as having their own parents, and it had lasting effects on all three of them. As adults, they have thrived -- Karole is deeply involved with the arts in Mississippi, Kim is a physician as well as an artist, and Kevin writes celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair and other glossy magazines -- but the memory of being what the Mississippi newspapers called "The Sessums Orphans" has stayed with them.
Mississippi Sissy is Kevin Sessums's attempt to come to terms with this complex and burdensome legacy. It's a strange book. It vividly recreates Mississippi in the 1960s and '70s, with bitter, brutal racism in the rural areas yet tentative steps toward change and acceptance in Jackson; its portrait of the Mississippi cultural underground is detailed and, so my own limited acquaintance with the phenomenon tells me, accurate; it is candid about Sessums's awakening to his homosexuality and his uncertain attempts to practice it in a place where it was anathema. But it also is filled, just about to overflowing, with dialogue. Though Sessums acknowledges that this narrative is "my own invention," albeit "as true to these people and events and what was said around me as my memory can possibly make it," the reader is likely to feel that there's just too much of it: long talks with his mother and grandmother (some dating to when he was 3 years old), a sermon by a preacher who eventually seduced him, an endless late-night bull session among the Jackson illuminati -- it's just too much, and it seems to cross the line between memoir and fiction.
This may be as good a moment as any to acknowledge that memoir is essentially a creative rather than a reportorial act; inevitably, it involves some degree of conscious or unconscious fictionalizing. The memoirist interprets his or her own life, making choices about what to include and what to omit, when to interpret and when to shun speculation. This can turn the memoirist into something close to a novelist (see, for example, Nabokov's masterly Speak, Memory), but a compact with the reader must be maintained. In the case of Mississippi Sissy, I too often found myself doubting that the author could have recalled conversations in anything close to the detail he sets down, especially those that ostensibly took place when he was very young; this raises suspicions that detract from the book's credibility.
It is in broad terms rather than specific ones that Mississippi Sissy is most convincing. The state really was, in the time of Sessums's boyhood, "a confusing brew of chicanery, malevolence, and kindheartedness." Blacks mostly were treated unspeakably -- Sessums's account of the indignities heaped upon his family's maid is especially poignant -- yet there were moments of understanding and kindness on both sides of the divide, a useful reminder that human beings and the society they inhabit can rarely if ever be summed up in stark generalizations. Sessums's account of the gleeful reaction among white Mississippians to the terrible events of the time -- the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers nearby in Neshoba County, the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. -- is faithful to historical truth. His portrait of the incestuousness and random cruelty of small-town life is also accurate.
That cruelty of one sort or another was frequently visited on a little boy who looked and acted different scarcely comes as a surprise. (I remember being mercilessly teased in the fifth and sixth grades of a small town in Southside Virginia around 1950 because my family had moved from the Northeast and I sounded like a "Yankee.") Small towns can be cruel wherever they may be, but the South in those years was especially isolated, defensive toward outsiders and intolerant of deviation in any form. It's clear that people (his father included) suspected that little Kevin was what used to be called a girly-boy long before he was old enough to find himself more attracted to boys than to girls.
From the beginning, though, he was more comfortable with women than with men, and his sympathies were more readily extended to them. Here, for example, he describes his mother and her friend, the wife of the football coach: "They weren't much more than girls, barely past thirty and stuck in a small Mississippi town with husbands that hadn't taken them out to eat on a Friday night since the men had put the word Coach in front of their names and the two women had to live their lives feigning interest while seated on the backless bleachers of muddy ball fields and half-filled gymnasiums."
His mother told Kevin, "I know people call you a sissy," but she argued that the word written on paper looks "pretty" and that he should stand behind it, and himself. She seems to have been quite a woman -- strong, independent-minded, funny, smart, kind -- and her early death is heartbreaking. As for his father, he was "a sports celebrity of local renown," a basketball star at Mississippi College who'd been drafted by the New York Knicks but forsook them for his home state at his wife's request. If he was bitter about this, he doesn't seem to have dwelled on it, but he looked at his first-born son with doubt and discomfort. He called him a sissy or "you girl." He tried to push Kevin into doing the things boys were expected to do and got angry when he didn't. Yet there were times when his love for the boy showed. It must have been a very confusing relationship, for father and son alike.
Eventually, inspired perhaps by his mother's words, Kevin decided just to be Kevin. One Halloween, he dressed up very fancily as a witch, earning near-universal scorn. He played sports for one year in high school and did well, but "I quit every one of them when I was a sophomore and concentrated on graduating from high school early, especially after I consciously admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, saying the four words silently to myself: 'I am a homosexual.' " He says that he was assaulted by an older man in a movie-theater restroom and that a much older preacher lured him into assignations that he mostly loathed but slightly liked. Not until he got to Millsaps College in Jackson did his sexual life take turns with which he was comfortable, though I wish he'd been a bit less graphic in his accounts of how this came to pass.
It was in Jackson that he encountered the Mississippi underground, homosexual and intellectual, sometimes both at the same time. He was taken under the wing of Frank Hains, the arts editor of the Jackson Daily News, a semi-closeted homosexual who never made a pass at him but introduced him to his close friends Eudora Welty, the writer Charlotte Capers and others who passionately if privately resisted the Mississippi status quo. Hains "was a father figure to me, but it was my mother's absence I was aware of when I was in his presence," and when Hains was savagely murdered in July 1975, it was as great a blow to Sessums as the death of either of his parents.
All in all, a tough start to a man's life, but Sessums seems to have landed squarely on his feet. Too bad that his prose is clunky and his memory suspect because Mississippi Sissy doesn't make as much out of his story as seems to be there.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From AudioFile
Sessums writes and reads his memoir with a passion for words, an active imagination, a life full of material, and the deep, full voice of a storyteller. He has the courage to tell the honest truth whether he's relating incidents of his father's rejection, the experience of being orphaned at age 8, or the inner conflict of growing up homosexual in an eccentric, prejudiced family in the Deep South of the 1950s. Sessums covers his first homosexual experiences graphically, but far more explicit is his confusing mix of emotions. His story is more about Southern culture than coming out; more witty than whiny; and his portraits of Eudora Welty, Frank Hains, and his loving mother are far more memorable than the issues that surround him. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
