Obviously, the hack who wrote this article on the disappearance of the custom of “family honor” has never been to Mississippi. All through my life–even today–my dad’s had the same response to anything the least bit unconventional that my brothers and I might do: “Well, now, that won’t look good.” “To whom, dad?” we’d ask, “Who on earth is going to care if we stay home from church tonight to play a little Dungeons and Dragons? We’ll stay away from the windows….” “It just won’t look good, son.”
The closest I ever got to making my father realize the foolishness of worrying over our family’s (meager) reputation came in the early 1990s, when my then-boyfriend, Martin, and I moved into a kick-ass swankster pad in the middle of the Quarter with our friend Victoria. Dad’s admonishment came right on cue: “What on earth will the neighbors think? Living with a woman!” And of course, he wasn’t just talking about my neighbors, he was talking about his.
My response went something like, “Well, dad, my neighbors are really too gin-soaked to give a damn about how I carry on. And as far as your neighbors are concerned, considering that I’m living smack-dab in the middle of the French Quarter, in the middle of what Baptists like to call Sodom on the Mississip’–aka New Orleans–with my boyfriend, the fact that I’m living with an honest-to-goddess, biological woman is kind of a saving grace. I mean, who knows–maybe the Sauciers and the Bushes will think I’ve moved down here to be a closet heterosexual, which might reflect well on all of us…. Of course, that begs the question how on earth they’d find out in the first place: are you planning to take out a classified ad in the paper? Does the Baptist church have an army of robot rats, mounted with high-tech spy cameras? Or maybe Brother Billy tagged me with some kind of tracking device when I got dunked in the baptismal font?” Though Dad didn’t admit defeat, he didn’t try to argue with me either, which is kind of the same thing.
I should point out that the notion of “family honor” doesn’t depend on money: my family isn’t particularly wealthy, just genteel. And I should also point out that I’m not the only one who’s been through this. Throughout my childhood, I overheard similar conversations murmured at friends’ dinner tables, hissed to children at the mall, and shouted in cars that passed me by in the school parking lot. There were many others with me–many others intent on following my teen idol, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, down the path of bad behavior, sleeping with an army of gardners, carpenters, and circus freaks along the way.
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