Wading in the Water: Ode to Dr. Mason

—traditional spiritual

Growing up, I spent a lot of my time on Biloxi Beach. When I put my hands over my ears, I hear that wind and water and no other. My identity is so intertwined with that place—those tides and waves, those birds and fish, and the people and culture that attends it—that the most recent disaster feels like a personal assault. That place and I are inexorably connected.

Take, for instance, the barrier islands—some in plain sight from the beach, some not—they absorb the brunt of the Gulf’s waves. Because of them, the water of the Mississippi Sound is calm and flat; it looks like a hammered sheet of lead, whose dimples catch the sunlight and spin it like coins. The water used to roll and putter all the way across what is now Highway 90 (or Beach Boulevard or The Old Spanish Trail), but in 1928, the coastal counties constructed a stepped seawall. Costing three and a half million dollars, it was an engineering marvel of its time: the longest seawall in the world. Its job was to halt the erosion of the coastline and protect the newly paved highway, and it did (and still does) a fine job, except when big storms come roaring through. And to help the seawall in this task, the beach I love was built. Beginning in 1951 and completed in ’54, the Army Corps of Engineers pumped six million cubic yards of sand to create a three hundred-foot wide, white sand beach, which, at twenty-six miles, is still the longest man-made beach in the world. And that beach helped form a great deal of who I am.

Once, when I was five, I was wading with my oldest brother in the waters near The Biloxi Lighthouse, and I got taken down by a jag of jellyfish. I stepped in a school of them, and they stung me all over my little legs. I hollered a death cry and went under. But right before I did, I heard my brother shrieking as he ran for the shore, “Shark, shark!” He had sold me out, left me behind for fish food. My mom came, harried and red-faced, and dragged my crying self out of the water. She took me to the emergency room, driving full-throttle the whole way. And when we got there, I was brought into a white, white room where a woman with monstrous breasts and dressed in a starched white uniform cooed at me to quiet and rubbed my swollen red legs with some magic salve. The burning ceased, and I closed my eyes just enough so that I could only see her through my eyelashes. And she kept cooing and rubbing, and I could hear my mother’s sobs becoming more quiet as she sat in a stiff chair in the corner of the room.

Later, when I was ten or so, I caught my first fish—a really large lemon shark—on Moses Pier and just as I pulled it out the water, my sorry Zebco snapped and that big fish got away. It would not be the last. I talked about that fish for years, and the bigger I became, the bigger it grew too.

Eight years later I would pal around with kegs and large fires and dance nearly nude with friends who were nearly nude as well, friends I still admire to this day, who would sing and chant with me through the night. We’d get the bonfire going big and the wind would shuffle sparks, like orange stars, into the great dark sky. We were inventing an orgiastic tribe, and it would last forever, or at least until we went off to college or joined the armed forces.

I made out for the first time on that beach; I got beat up by a much larger wet-head on that beach; I got drunk for the first time on that beach after my friend stole two bottles of tequila from the Petite Bois liquor store—we howled tequila breath into the moon and low clouds, the lights of shrimp boats winking at us from the horizon; and I got arrested for the first time on that beach.

That beach is my ground zero. I moved away the year before Hurricane Katrina landed, but most of my people still lived there and stayed and suffered. Like all the big storms, Katrina came through and shuffled everything around, re-arranged and devastated people’s lives and property, killed and robbed and ravaged. I went there six weeks or so later and wanted to cry—not simply because of the unspeakable damage, which was heartbreaking enough certainly, but because I became overwhelmingly frustrated. Everything I knew was gone, and there was no way to repair that kind of destruction. Without my old markers, I became turned around and confused and could not describe to my wife, who was there for the first time ever, where this or that happened; I could not tell her what used to stand where we stood or even exactly where we were.

The Gulf Coast, though, is full of strong women and men, people of spine who have always rebuilt and restored—bootstrap people, who through will and strength have begun to raise their culture from the aftermath. I have faith in them, but I am weaker. For the first few years after that storm, I had difficulty conjuring the scenes of my memories, but thankfully, like the Coast itself, they’ve begun to come back, rolling and puttering to the surface of my consciousness. I can take you now to the very spot where my father and his brothers ran an illegal, but tacitly approved, casino in the late 1950s, with dancers and slot machines and gaming tables. The new Hard Rock Casino rests on the grave of one of these joints. I can take you down Veterans Boulevard and show you the bones of my uncles’ places—The Ace of Clubs, The Red Slipper, The Teddy Bear Lounge. These types of casinos freckled The Strip, and celebrities such as Elvis and Hank Sr., Jane Mansfield and Andy Griffith, Tex Ritter and Blaze Starr performed there. My father remembers meeting Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman at The Broadwater Resort.

But now a new disaster approaches the Coast, creating new forms of frustration for me and my fellow Coastians: Deepwater Horizon. I don’t know if we can take another disaster so soon on the heels of Katrina—neither psychologically, nor physically. The carcasses of sea turtles and dolphins and pelicans and an assortment of fish have begun to wash ashore. And least terns too. I love these little birds, and according to the National Audubon Society, the Gulf Coast has more least terns nesting on its beaches than any other site in the world. But their numbers are shrinking, a fact that’s most likely attributable to human disturbances. And now is the time of year for nesting, for both the endangered terns and sea turtles.

The wreckage of Deepwater Horizon is awful, and we know it will damage these animals, kill them off in droves. It’s already begun. Tar balls—these little black sticky coagulates of petroleum, these semi-solid blobs of oil that you aren’t supposed to touch with your naked skin—are already littering the beaches. According to some officials, these tar balls and the animal deaths have no connection to the spewing oil in the Gulf; it’s just a coincidence, we’re asked to believe. In late May, responding to a reporter’s question, Admiral Thad Allen, one of the U.S. Coast Guard's most senior officials and the point man for the Obama Administration on the BP oil disaster, said, “Some of them are naturally occurring.” And in an egregious suck up, the reporter agreed: “[W]hen I used to swim on the Gulf … I’d get tar balls in my bathing suit all the time.” I have been in those waters literally hundreds of times, and I have never once collected tar balls in my swim trunks.

Adding to the frustration is the disconnect between what federal and state governments are saying publicly, and what local authorities and citizens are actually living with. For instance, on May 18, a Gulf Coast news station, WLOX, reported, “Harrison County [of which Biloxi is co-county seat] officials say more tar balls turned up Tuesday [May 18] on the beach.” Further, on June 1, a local NPR reporter claimed that oil from Deepwater Horizon had indeed washed up on Mississippi’s beaches: “Oil from the BP Gulf of Mexico gusher hit beaches in Alabama and Mississippi for the first time Tuesday [June 1].” However, later that week, Mississippi’s governor, Haley Barbour, claimed on Fox News Sunday, “The truth is we have had virtually no oil. We’ve had a few tar balls but we have a few every year…. If you were on the Mississippi Gulf Coast anytime in the last 48 days, you didn't see any oil at all." Except, I guess, all the tar balls—natural and accidental alike—that just happen to foul up the lining of your swimsuit. It’s hard to describe the disgust and anger that rises in me. These statements are so off the mark, so maddeningly crazy, that I am dumbfounded. It would be like looking at a forest in which every tree had been illegally chopped down, the trunks fell in all angles of disarray, and saying, “Well, some trees die of old age and just fall over.” What in the hell does that have to do with the awful and overwhelming evidence of this man-made disaster?

And by the way, I’ve grown irritated by the rhetoric attending this latest Gulf disaster; would you say an active volcano was leaking or spilling lava? Hell no! When liquids, however viscous, are ejaculated from the earth, we don’t use the words “spill” or “leak” because that would mark us as lowly ignorant: instead, how about “spew,” “explode,” “gush,” or “pour?”

So, it’s little wonder that Biloxians are frustrated. I think it stems primarily from our sense of powerlessness, a sense that the world is run by people who do not consider us, at all, and who would eat their own children to stay in power or ignore burning school houses for the slightest profit margin. We are frustrated by the oil that we can’t stop from spewing into our water, from choking our wildlife, our livelihoods, our pots and pans and plates in the kitchen. We are frustrated because it appears—after all the money is hoarded and payoffs are made to the appropriate cretins and politicians and greed-heads—that once the gushing oil has been contained, things will return to business as usual. And we’ll be asked to sit by and wait for the next damn disaster. And we are further frustrated because too often it seems that there is nothing we can do to combat such forces.

But I don’t want to use this forum solely for the purpose of griping about this latest disaster. Rather, I’d like to turn the spotlight onto a man who, although the battle he fought is in a different arena, has much to teach us about overcoming great odds. His name is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, Sr., and he is the co-author of Beaches, Blood, and Ballots: A Black Doctor's Civil Rights Struggle. Dr. Mason well knew the frustrations that I have described. He was an African-American doctor practicing in the hatred of Jim Crow South. Dr. Mason organized and led the Biloxi beach wade-ins, a pivotal moment in the civil rights era. However, he is not discussed in history textbooks, and he was not discussed much at all when I was growing up. In fact, I’d never even heard his name, let alone his deeds, before I stumbled upon his name while perusing the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage website. I was reading about Hancock County bootleggers in the ’40s and ’50s, when somehow I stumbled upon the Biloxi race riots of 1960, and blam in the middle of them is Dr. Mason. The destruction, racial segregation, violence, and murder that ensued shocked me. How could I have never heard of this?

As a child, I grew up thinking that Biloxi, the whole Gulf Coast for that matter, had somehow escaped the ugly showdowns of the Jim Crow era, as if we were somehow too cosmopolitan to be in the same turmoil as Montgomery or Greensboro or Memphis, too logical and cool and together to be involved in bus boycotts or lunch counter sit-ins or racial assassinations. I never saw about the struggle on TV, nor read it in the newspapers, nor heard it on the radio. My parents never mentioned the race riots. My teachers—white or black—never did either, and I had to take a year-long class called “Mississippi History.” In fact, I had to special order Dr. Mason’s book because none of the local bookstores carried it at the time.

During the time I read the book, which I cannot recommend strongly enough, the Coast was engaged in a heated debate over a flag exhibition on the border of Gulfport and Biloxi. The official idea, apparently, was to represent every flag that had presided over the territory: the French, English, Spanish, Republic of West Florida, Mississippi Magnolia, Confederate State, Mississippi State, and the United States flags. Obviously, the Confederate flag became the focal point, people defending it and others opposing it. I thought it was all much ado about nothing, people looking for a fight, to stir up controversy over an ancient emblem. Many whites claimed a filial kinship to it; most blacks claimed insult and injury. I was ignorant. I did not know my history; I did not know my history was so recently charged. After I read Mason’s book, I no longer saw those flags—or that flag debate—the same way. No matter how much you love and admire your Confederate ancestors, you must recognize that their flag has been hi-jacked by the Klan and boosters of racial hatred, and in 1960 that flag was flown during the race riots in Biloxi.

On April 24, 1960, Dr. Mason led forty or more African-Americans across the white sands to swim in the waters of the Mississippi Sound. He and the other demonstrators were protesting against the "whites only" section of the federally funded Gulf Coast beach. I like to think I would have joined them. I shutter to think what I might have actually done.

During the wade-in, white citizens counter-protested. In full view of the police, they attacked the civil rights activists with bike chains, pool cues, golf clubs, any damn thing they could find. Four of the demonstrators were seriously wounded in this attack, which spilled over into the night. Riots ensued. The white thugs entered predominantly black Biloxi, beating anyone on the street and setting fire to blocks of buildings. Later, many black people retaliated. Bricks and bottles were hurled, and gunshots were frequent. During the mayhem, ten men were shot—eight blacks and two whites—and two others died from bullet wounds. Unknown assailants threw two firebombs into Dr. Mason’s medical office. Fortunately, his neighbors put out the fires before they did too much damage.

Many of the demonstrators who worked for white employers were fired. In response, the black community boycotted these white-owned stores, forcing several of them out of business. On May 17, 1960, the Justice Department filed suit in the U.S. District Court to force equal access for all races along the entirety of the twenty-six-mile beach. Sounds like an open-and-shut case, right? The problem, however, stemmed from many white citizens’ protests that their deeds claimed their land went all the way to the water; thus, the beach was somehow both private (because of their individual purchases) and public (because of the federal tax dollars). After eight years of struggle and litigation, on August 16, 1968, Judge J.P. Coleman, former Mississippi governor, ruled that the Gulf Coast beach was public property, available for use by all citizens, regardless of race. (Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a very similar case involving this private versus public debate about beaches in Florida; forty-two years later, the Court agreed with Judge Coleman.)

This anti-discrimination lawsuit against the state of Mississippi was the first such case filed in U.S. history. At the same time, Mason filed the first school desegregation lawsuit in the history of Biloxi, which he also won. Here was a man who had to have felt the same kinds of frustration we all feel now: a power greater than us standing on our chests, holding a knife to our throats, and cooing to us, “Everything will be all right, trust us. This world is all in the natural, normal order of God’s creation.” We feel helpless; how could Mason not have felt the same? But he stood up for what was right, and he was beaten and firebombed; his friends lost their livelihoods, and they were all jailed and ridiculed and threatened or attacked. He and his fellow demonstrators stood up against a greater power, just as we should now: no more drilling, no more purchasing of petroleum or petroleum products, no more cow-towing to big business, no more voting men and women into office who will sell us out. No more business as usual. It is time to follow the doctor’s prescription.

As a coda: I was proud, earlier this year, to read in the Biloxi Sun Herald, that in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the wade-ins, the city had designated July 30th as Dr. Gilbert Mason Day. Further, last Saturday, on June 12, Biloxi installed a marker at the base of The Biloxi Lighthouse commemorating and celebrating the wade-ins. Dr. Mason’s legacy of vision and courage, I hope, will far outlast—in meaning and purpose—the damages done by the oil debacle. This legacy, I hope, will buoy us against our frustrations and ignite us all to action.

—Michael Garriga

A native of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Michael Garriga now teaches at Florida State University. His work has appeared in New Letters, Black Warrior Review, storySouth, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. He's currently finishing a novel, Loosh: A Country Noir, an historical fiction set in 1960 Biloxi during the beach wade-ins.

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