Craft Essay: "Mississippi Sissy" by Kevin Sessums

After World War II, the American Psychiatric Community labeled homosexuality a mental illness and lobotomies for homosexuality were being regularly performed in the United States (Cowboy Frank). Despite great fear, lesbians and gay men experienced a continuous, dynamic, and growing political consciousness during the fifties.

Arlene Francis- "What's My Line"

“He don’t see you, Vena Mae.  He’s got his highfalutin mask on,” said my grandmother.  ‘Call him Arlene and you might get an answer out of him.’  Aunt Vena Mae cocked an eyebrow.  ‘He’s playin’ Arlene,” my grandmother said….

‘Who the Sam Hill is Arlene?’

‘That ugly woman that makes herself pretty on Sunday night after all them lies on the late CBS news,’ said my grandmother (Sessums 21).

            Life in the early 1950’s was still very strict and simple. Women were still obligated to the status of housewife and men were the main breadwinners in the family.   “My grandfather eyed me… ‘What’s up Arlene?’ he asked.  “You can’t take it in there anymore, either, hon” (Sessums 22).  Children, including teenagers, were to be seen and not heard but by the mid-1950’s, that was becoming more difficult because of newfound freedoms, rock and roll music, and other outlets teenagers had available to them. 

“All these outside Commie agitators,’ who seems continuously to be invading our state through my childhood, especially during those months when both my parents died.  When JFK died.  When Medgar Evers died.  When those three civil rights kids –– Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman –– died up in Venomous Mae’s beloved Neshoba County (Sessums 14)

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner

In 1964, three civil rights workers - James Chaney, an African American, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white - were found dead after having been missing for six weeks. The Ku Klux Klan murdered them because they were investigating the arson of an African American church.

In USA, segregation and racism was still part of life and although there were some major changes to erase both like in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools were unconstitutional, there were still problems forcing blacks to take drastic measures for equality and inclusion like in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus. 

“The preacher… pursed hips lips powerfully around those four perfect syllables e-pi-pha-ny in order to pronounce them… my grandmother had whispered down at me, my head in her lap, ‘Oh, honey, that’s just a pretty name for a little nigger girl,’ showing no compunction at all for using the N-word in a house of worship since the preacher… often used the word from the pulpit” (Sessums 98).

Religion was a major part of the Civil Rights Movement for blacks and for whites. Both proponents and opponents of the Civil Rights Movement understood their stances in religious terms, and both saw themselves as upholding a divinely ordained social order. In many respects, black and white churches as institutions failed to provide moral leadership in the midst of 20th-century America's greatest moral struggle.

KKK attacks the Freedom Riders 

In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation. 86% of all non-white families lived below the national poverty line (Cozzens).  One of the first major events in the sixties was the attack on the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white citizens who rode busses across the south in order to test laws enforcing segregation in public facilities. As they rode across the south, they were met by angry mobs and police brutality, which would beat them severely, sometimes to death.

“No hope. No hope,” she kept repeating.

‘Nigger’s a ugly word?” I quietly asked her, trying to understand the newest storm of tears in my presence.

‘Child, it’s d’ugliest.  Jesus never say nigger in d’Bible.  God made us colored folk in His own image too, you know.  So if we a nigger, God a nigger, too.  You think about that.  And you think about old Matty cryin’ here like this, if you ever think about sayin’ that agin” (Sessums 100)

The decade is remembered in world history as one of struggle and strife for families living in Korea and Vietnam. In the rest of the world, the unhealthy competitions between provisional and coalition governments hit family life with inflation and unrest. Subsequent humiliation of the defeated states did symbolize the end of colonialism, but also led to racial segregation.  The most influential American of the '60's was Martin Luther King, Jr. –– through his preaching on non-violent protest, he also soon developed many followers, both black and white. He was put in jail several times, but managed to write a book and continue his preaching. On April 4, 1968, he fell to an assassin's bullet.

“I got a name, child.  Call me by my right name –– Matty May.  That’s got a pretty sound to it.  You don’t need to use some ugly name when my mama gave me two pretty ones” (Sessums101).

It was until the 1970’s that the label of mental illness would be removed from being homosexual. 

"I don't want it to be just a gay coming-of-age story," Sessums said. ‘It's about race and a specific time and place in American culture, about otherness and survival. We know we're 'other' before we know we're gay. Before we put our definition on our sexuality, we feel like the other. Some of us deal with that, and some of us don't” (Provenzano).

Stonewall participants

Homosexual, in time became, gay; and in 1969 at the Stonewall Bar, and the Stonewall Riots Gay Rights became a national movement that continues to this very day.

“Then, as they saw serious I was taking my role, an appalled silence cast itself across them.  What kind of creature was this that had settled in their midst? ‘That’s not right,’ came a whisper, the judgment, once espoused, once passed, encouraging others to judge” (Sessums 135).

Born 1956 in Forest, Mississippi Sessums wrote a bold, "heightened" memoir of his early life growing up in the small town of Forest, Mississippi.  “If you're blessed with having the talent to write, that, combined with being gay, is a way to survive" (Provenzano). Mississippi Sissy made the New York Times Bestseller list and won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Best Male Memoir. The audio recording of Mississippi Sissy was nominated for a 2007 Quill Award.

“We better pray for that young-un.’ Yet this –– stuck with me above all others that night, a whisper that seemed to honed among those gathered in the elementary hallways… until it was shortened into the one-word condemnation that all sissies must deal with at some point” (Sessums 135).

            Shame is what so many of us carry as a silent burden when we are closeted. It's the very reason for the existence of the closet. It's a common refrain from our opponents when we appear in public in, say, Pride marches: "Shame on you!" "You should be ashamed of yourself!"

“Shame,’ came the utterance, ‘shame,’ the ‘sh’ of it like the rustle of that imagined petticoat Epiphany always longed for when she twist her hips back and forth and pretend she had one on, ‘shame,’ that phantom sound now found (Sessums 135).

The very existence of gay Pride was once described to me as "a natural reaction to undeserved shame".  Shame is intimately bound up with social activity, the social mechanism of shame as the "supposition of another's regard for self, of taking the view of another". It is a means of social control, more subtle and more effective than brute force or even peer pressure: make a person feel that others

will judge them negatively for the "shameful" thing and also make them believe that this judgment is correct. The person, through their own feeling of shame, punishes themself more effectively than through any further external means that could be applied.  But Sessums throughout the book would never have any of it.  He would never embrace the shame so many tried to thrust upon him.

Kevin Sessums

“This was for my mother.  This was for myself.  This was who I was.  If death…was making me, back in that Mississippi year of 1964, a pity –worthy spectacle for fellow Mississippians to focus on and feel less bad about the belligerence they were displaying in all its ugly glory…then I would take up its mantle” (Sessums 136).

            The struggle against undeserved shame is the struggle to believe that the judgments of others are wrong. Even after you may have spent a very long time believing that they were right.  Our society has long treated being gay as a shameful thing on the basis that being gay was seen as something that could be prevented or altered: making it shameful would therefore prevent people from engaging in it and encourage those who had engaged in it to stop.

“No longer would I be the child for whom overweening sorrow was a parental replacement.  No longer would I be a vessel for sympathy so that the sympathizers, through a sadness that was not even theirs, could cleanse themselves of their sinister culture and the sinister politics it bred” (Sessums 136).

The emotional coercion of shame was preferred over attempts at rational persuasion perhaps because of the view that being gay was seen as a "depravity", "mental illness", and many other labels –– all signifying the belief that gays must have taken leave of their senses and could not be reasoned with. 

“With a pride that confounded all who were in my path that night, I decided I’d go ahead and be the sissy everyone said I was.  Let them whisper as I walked through them all. ‘Shame.’ ‘Shame.’ I would really give them something to fret about, to fight against (Sessums 136).

I suspect that one of the understandable but unfortunate results of individuals' efforts to throw off this shame is overcompensation and oversensitivity. Having struggled so hard and for so long ––often from the very start of adolescence, against external attempts to, through the pressure to feel shame, over-ride feelings and emotions as fundamental to our being as those concerning sexual orientation–– it makes sense to me that such individuals would be very sensitive to so other people attempting to pressure them emotionally.

“I would show them that a sissy could be just as sinister as they all were.  I had had enough. ‘Shame.’ I felt like I was going to shit.  ‘Shame.’  ‘Shame.’  I shuddered at my power… ‘Call him Arlene!  That’ll slow him down! Arlene! Arlene!’ She (my grandmother) grabbed me by the shoestringed whistle around my neck but I shimmied free, continuing my rampage (Sessums 136-137).

Such people could even be labeled oversensitive, to the point that a gay person will absolutely not let other people's opinions and desires affect their behavior in any way.

“My father turned to me. That recurring look of sad disdain he could deliver my way stopped my tears.  He was even sadder than I was.  The, for the very first time, the sadness morphed into that more perplexed look of fear… It comforted me to know that my father, who was afraid of nothing was afraid of me” (Sessums 11).

Mississippi was a hotbed of racial tension during the civil rights era in the 1960s.  The period between 1963 and 1968 in Mississippi was a time of direct, intense racial confrontation, widespread Klan terrorism, crucial civil rights victories, and the beginnings of tepid accommodation to a changing racial order. How whites adapted to this change helped shape Mississippi politics for the rest of the century. Indeed, the mid-to-late 1960s saw a crucial evolution in Mississippi’s political relationship to the rest of the United States.

“Did you watch the Oscars last night, Matty?’ I had asked her that morning.  ‘Can you believe a nigger won Best Actor?’  Matty Mae sat down on the bed.  A long sigh slid from her… ‘Oh, baby…’ she kept saying over and over running her palm along the chenille spread… ‘I thought you was different, child.  Lawd be, if they can get you t’sayin’ such things, there ain’t no hope.  No hope” (Sessums 100).

Sessums adheres to "the cadence of Southern writing," which includes winding yet grammatically deft sentences, rich descriptions, and an occasional sense of lyrical dread.  Southern writing is much more than writing about the American South.  Certain themes have appeared simply because of the history of the South –– slavery, the American Civil War, Reconstructionist –– but also the significance of family, religion, and a sense of community on a personal and social level the use of Southern dialect,  the troubled history of racial conflict within the South, a strong sense of place, a propensity for "gothic" elements of horror and the grotesque, a strongly biblical narrative tradition, a deep sense of loss and defeat, and so on. But any of these elements can be discerned in the thought and art of writers who are in no other way southern. So, while such a list may help to define, it fails to delimit, and we are ultimately left with parallels rather than proofs.  Some say the south is merely a backward racial mindset: Bull Connor and his police dogs attacking peaceful protestors ––endless Selma blacks forever getting beat as they walk across that bridge.

“She (my grandmother) placed her index fingers against her thumbs and fashioned her own version of an Arlene Francis eye mask.  She positioned it on her face.  ‘Now I understand,’ she said… ‘I always thought you couldn’t see nothing when you put your mask on.  But I’ll be darn, if it ain’t just the opposite… that’s you magic, ain’t it?  I figured you out Arlene.  You can see everything ‘ (Sessums 25).

            Some critics specify that the previous definitions of southern literature still hold, with some of them suggesting, only somewhat in jest, that all southern literature must still contain a dead mule within its pages.  The very fabric of the South has changed so much that the old assumptions about southern literature no longer hold. 

“The souls of words reside inside their sounds… Always remember that.  That’s where the music is in language… Even a word we think of as a mean one can be pretty if you listen to it in the right way… Meaning has no meaning if you train your ear to listen to how lovely language is.  It has its own scale.  But don’t ever scrutinize it… Feel it “ (Sessums 88).

Still others, perhaps trying to speak with an intellectual bent, say that the south is a culture.  The south is no longer isolated, alone, or known exclusively for dealing with and losing on issues like race and modernity. The stereotypes of To Kill a Mockingbird and the endless books by William Faulkner detail a south that is as much a part of history as the Civil War.

“A companionless soul could comfort itself with the beauty of a well-chosen word, a well-written sentence, a well parsed phrase.  Salvation, she (my mother) imparted, was offered in a paragraph’s perfect form when one was capable of reading it with understanding” (Sessums 92).

    In truth, too many people are stuck with narrow views of what makes the south. The south isn't just about the Civil War or how some people still think the south was right to secede. The south isn't just about slavery, Jim Crow, and two races getting along or not getting along. And the south sure isn't solely about location or slow humid hot days.  Focusing on the old south, southern literature is ignoring the current dramas of the south. In one generation, racial barriers in the south have both fallen and remained in place while the dominant southern culture has disintegrated into something new that is still being born. Where are the stories about all of these events?

Works Cited

Cowboy Frank. Coming Out In America An Historical Perspective. 2 September 2007. 22 November 2014 <http://www.cowboyfrank.net/archive/ComingOut/02.htm>.

Cozzens. Mississippi & Freedom Summer. 29 June 1998. 22 November 2014 <http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/missippi.html>.

Provenzano, Jim. Sissy Fire. 1 March 2007. 23 November 2014 <http:// www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=books&article=232>.

Sessums, Kevin. Mississippi Sissy. Ed. Michael Flamini. First. New York City: St. Martin's Press , 2007.