Mississippi Sissy

“When I am asked why Southern writers
particularly have a penchant for writing
about freaks, I say it's because we are
still able to recognize one.”

-FLANNERY O'CONNOR

“The first freak I ever recognized
down South where I was born a half
a century ago now was my own
reflection in a Mississippi mirror.”

-KEVIN SESSUMS

 

The American South of the 1960s was no place to be different, much less a freak. Back then, boys grew up to become football heroes and marry girls who were taught to be perfect Southern belles. Segregation ruled, and you never voted for a Democrat in a national election, especially not a Kennedy. As far as music was concerned, you never sang anything in public other than a hymn. But Kevin Sessums knew he was different. His hero wasn't Mickey Mantle. It was Arlene Francis. He knew the lyrics to Broadway show tunes as well as he knew the Baptist hymnal, and his grandmother's African American maid, Matty May, taught him that the color of a person's skin was not as important as what was underneath.

In his growing up, Kevin Sessums was a decidedly
different
resident of Forest, Mississippi, a solitary little boy whose parents died by the time he was eight years old. But he learned how to survive by drawing his family close to him, keeping dark secrets others feared to tell, and learning how to turn the word
sissy
on its head, just as his mama had taught him.

In a memoir set in Mississippi's small towns, as well as the wider world of Jackson,
Mississippi Sissy
is a memoir of Southern voices now gone that mixes the tart-tongued, race-conscious patter of Kevin's Aunt Lola with the artistic, politically liberal musings of one of his early mentors, the great American writer Eudora Welty. It remembers the literary and theatrical lessons of journalist Frank Hains as well as the opportunistic and sinister preaching of a traveling evangelist who taught other, darker lessons. And, finally, it looks clear-eyed at the bittersweet truth of a Southern life touched by a violent and brutal act, an act that brings home the lessons America's South can teach to those who are different.

In
Mississippi Sissy,
Kevin Sessums, one of our best-known celebrity journalists, creates a great panorama of the American South at mid-century as seen through the eyes of an odd little boy who took one small word —
sissy
— and made it bigger and stronger than anyone ever knew it could be.

KEVIN SESSUMS
is currently a contributing editor at
Allure
magazine after spending fourteen years at
Vanity Fair
in that same capacity. Before joining
Vanity Fair,
he was executive editor for Andy Warhol's
Interview
magazine. His work has also appeared in
Bile, Travel * Leisure, Playboy, Out,
and
Show People
magazines. He lives in New York City.

JACKET DESIGN BY STEVE SNIDEB

JACKET PHOTOGRAPH AND HAND LETTERING
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

www.stmartins.com

 

ST MARTIN'S PRESS

175 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10010

DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA BY H. B. FENN AND COMPANY, LTD

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

More Advance Praise

“I was so moved by Kevin Sessums's funny, sad evocation of his childhood and teenage years in
Mississippi Sissy.
His youthful instinct for finding the theatrical, musical, and literary locals who opened his eyes to the outside world that he yearned to know about is wonderfully touching.”

-Dominick Dunne

“Mississippi Sissy
is an unforgettable memoir. I think it will strike a strong chord with many, many readers. It's a far different book than
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
but it cast the same kind of spell over me while I was reading it.”

-Mark Childress

“Mississippi Sissy
manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking, often in the same moment. It is a poignant story of innocence and sexuality, tragedy and courage. But it is ultimately a tale of perseverance of the human spirit. Kevin Sessums not only has a great story to tell, he is a great storyteller.”

-Carole Radziwill

“Wow! What a book! I was both shocked and moved by it. It is said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Kevin Sessums examines his with wisdom and humor and a true writer's sense of grace. This book will create more than the proverbial buzz. It will cause a sensation.”

-David Geffen

“I could not put Kevin Sessums's memoir down. A young, white, gay boy, who grew up in a whirl and survived the injustices of class and prejudice, Sessums lyrically narrates his escape from this tyranny of Southern hate. This is the story of an angel with asbestos skin. Were this fiction, it would be on a par with John Kennedy Toole's A
Confederacy of Dunces.”

-Andre Leon Talley

“A gutsy, moving, richly textured, and immensely funny revelation, and a precisely remembered evocation of the Southern political and cultural landscape in the ‘60s and 70s.”

-Patti Carr Black

KEVIN SESSUMS

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS
NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

 

MISSISSIPPI SISSY
. Copyright © 2007 by Kevin Sessums. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

The “In Memoriam” column by Eudora Welty (pages 304-305) is reprinted by permission of the Eudora Welty Foundation, Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Sessums, Kevin.

Mississippi sissy / Kevin Sessums.—1st ed.

    p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34101-5

ISBN-10: 0-312-34101-6

1. Sessums, Kevin. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. 3. Gay journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN4874.S428 A3 2007

70.92—dc20

[B]

2006051677

First Edition: March 2007

 

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In Memory of
Howard Jean, Nancy Carolyn,
Joycie Otis, and Malcolm Lyle

For Karole, and for Kim,
who trusted me to base two scenes,
for which I was not present,
on his journal entries

 

 

 

 

 

Death and life are in the power of the tongue. . . .

—Proverbs 18:21

 

Author's Note

Acknowledgments

Prologue Ross Barnett, George Hamilton, and Arlene Francis

1 Skeeter Davis, Noël Coward, and Eudora Welty

2 Stephen Sondheim, Captain Hook, and Dorothy Malone

3 Johnny Weissmuller, Margaret Hamilton, and Katherine Anne Porter

4 James Brown, Jesus, and Jackie Susann

5 Audrey Whatshername

6 Pee Wee Reese, Dizzy Dean, and Erik Estrada

7 Dusty Springfield, Cloris Leachman, and Miss Diana Ross

8 Lewis Carroll, William F. Buckley, and Yvonne De Carlo

 

 

 

This book is a re-creation of my childhood and teenage years. All the people and the names are real. All the events actually occurred. The dialogue—as true to these people and events and what was said around me as my memory can possibly make it—is my own invention. I was not carrying around a recording device when growing up in Mississippi. But what I did have, even then, was my writer's ear. I
listened.
That's what most sissies do when we are children: We sit apart and listen.

My mother once told me that the power of language resides in its sound, even before—especially before—we can comprehend its meaning. The same could be said about memory. When I recall my life in Mississippi, what I hear are the rich sounds of the voices that surrounded me and from those sounds come the words, the movement of conversation. It's the way perhaps a composer hears a symphony before transcribing its notes, making it attainable for others who want to listen just as intently to what he hears. Although there is a kind of alchemy involved, there is an equal measure of faith in one's own voice, the sound into which all others combine.

 

I owe debts of gratitude to the following people.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank my editor, Michael Flamini, and my agent, Nina Collins. For a year and a half they were the only two people I allowed to read the first draft of this book. Their intelligence and innate taste proved invaluable to me. I cherish them professionally. I cherish them as friends.

I would also like to thank all of those who read the subsequent frighteningly thick manuscript and liked it enough not only to finish the thing, but also to furnish me with the quotes about the book that I found so encouraging early on. Their generosity—you can find their names on the book jacket as well as the book's initial page—meant the world to me.

I gave an early version of the book to those people still alive who are a part of my story so they could vet my own memory of our shared past and my accuracy in the telling of it. I am grateful for the trust and scrutiny of each of these people. We all have versions of our own lives, and I was heartened when mine mostly conflated, painfully at times, pleasantly at others, with the respective truths of theirs.

Finally, I have always had a problem remembering names. I panic when I have to make an introduction—even if it's two old friends of mine who've never met before. It is some sort of psychological hiccup, like my recurring stutter when I am nervous still about appearing to be too much of a sissy. But there is a group of names that I can, to this day, reel off without one mistake, one hesitation. They are the Mississippi schoolteachers I had who always encouraged me, whether I was an overly curious child, a confused teenager, or a college kid full of a kind of crippled hope. They are, in order, Miss Bridges, Miss Mills, Mrs. Johnston, Mrs. Hunter, Mrs. Rigby, Mrs. Waggener, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Fikes, Mrs. Donaldson, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Twiss, Miss Lewis, Mrs. Hays, and Professors Lance Goss and Dan Hise.

Mississippi
Sissy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing I remember from that night as much as I remember Frank Hains's blood-soaked bed, as much as I remember what was left of his gelatinous head after the crowbar had done its work, as much as I remember how his body had been bound and gagged with his own silk neckties, as much as I remember the instant nausea that those sights can induce in a teenage boy who discovers them, was the way my foot shook on the gas pedal after I cranked up my old Comet and headed straight to Carl's. . . . It was as if the shock and fright of finding Frank had puddled in a frenzy down around my right ankle. And yet the car—red leather interior, no power steering, a radio that longed for FM—did not jerk and sputter as I turned onto the Interstate. It seemed instead to head more smoothly onward with each spastic brush of my scuffed Bass Weejun against the gas pedal. That's the core of the memory that night, of all my memories really: the eerie smoothness of the ride. . . .