What we remember about a situation can be telling, not just about the situation itself, but also about our biases. Memories aren’t perfect – and they are far more easily manipulated than we give them credit for. Memory-making, then, is a creative act.
Jubilee Performing Arts Center was begun around 2007. The school officially closed its doors in 2021. The seed of this school, or so I’ve been told, began far beyond 2007. It began when a man decided that he had enough teaching public school. Or it may have begun while he was still in college, peering into the future and telling the young woman beside him that she was going to join him in opening a school one day. When she said she didn’t want to, he told her to unpin her hair from its tight little bun – how dare she pretend that she didn’t know what the Lord wanted her to do. From that time to the last day that I knew her, the vice principal of Jubilee Performing Arts Center, her hair was never beyond her shoulders, and it was never pulled up.
T. was a prophet, and under his hand our lives would flow smoothly. There were insights, shades, and nuances of right and wrong that we could safely avoid if we just listened to him. This school, he said – and everyone believed – was more than just a school. It was a way of life that we could embrace and carry beyond the graduation stage. When we sang, the people cried – when we spoke the people understood.
While I was enrolled at JPAC, I believed that place taught me how to live – how to make friends, how to dedicate myself, and of course, I received some education. Up until this time in my life I had been homeschooled. I had friends the first sixteen years of my life, but they floated in and out, and by the time I entered JPAC, had mostly dissipated.
JPAC also afforded me the opportunity to travel to New York City in a bus full of my peers. I saw the real-life city for the first time, trailing in a line of students, pigeons wandering underneath buildings that spiraled towards the clouds. At night, the lights outside the hotel window I shared with four other girls blinked cooly, like something come to life. It had a soul and so did I. It was a place of dreams, artwork on every corner, a museum on every street. This was a place where people could grow as tall as a skyscraper if they wanted to.
Jubilee gave me a chance to see life outside of lonely afternoons with only my neighbor’s horses to talk to. But during those three years, I also thought that I was on the verge of insanity, that I had been personally selected by God, and that any moment of perceived idleness on my part was a liability to my community and to my value as a person. My every moment was tinged with the fear that I would stumble over my own imperfection, lose my chance at succeeding in life, and embarrass my school. The thought of disappointing T. troubled me more than being a disappointment to my parents.
To be clear: there were never any angels over Delaware Avenue or Presley Boulevard or Main Street or any of the places Jubilee Performing Arts Center haunted in its nomadic lifetime. There was a group of kids from Mississippi, used to being counted last in the country, rescued from a failing public school district. Compared to the risk of getting shot, or never leaving McComb, seeing angels doesn’t seem so bad. That was why it worked – Jubilee Performing Arts Center wouldn’t have worked anywhere but a small, poor town with a history of gang violence, poverty, and strife and a backbone of traditional religious values. Cultish beliefs take root in people searching for hope or for something beyond the ordinary – it’s the same with places. T. didn’t need to run away to a remote location to start his cult like Jonestown or Waco – he had before him a whole town flailing in desperation for a shred of light. McComb was the perfect place to put down roots.
The front door of JPAC’s building on downtown Main Street was frosted glass set into a ruddy brick building. Across the front window panel our logo was stamped in purple vinyl: “Jubilee Performing Arts Center: Creativity. Academic Rigor. Excellence.” It was affectionately called “Kramer Roof.”
For some of us, walking through that door was the first time we had been pushed to do anything in our lives (certainly not me – I was always trying harder, harder, more modesty, more prayer, more cleaning). He told us that we were special, gifted. All we had to do to unlock the destiny the Lord had for us was follow his instructions – leading us from the desert spirits he said clung over McComb. That was why we all felt so depressed, so lost. It was the evil of our city, the lack of Godly creativity. If we followed, followed, then one day we would leap onto the path God had revealed. After that being told that, what child wouldn’t jump when T. said jump? Who wouldn’t go when he said go? He told us, over and over, that those who didn’t were “the weakest link,” and that we were spoiling the privileges of all the other, stronger links.
On the first day of school, I came through the front door with jeans, battered cowboy boots, and a teal backpack. I had wanted to make the day as comfortable as possible. My mother had asked if I wanted to buy a first day of school outfit, but I told her no. It didn’t seem practical to me to buy a new outfit when no one there had ever seen me before. All around me there were girls with sharp eyeliner, girls with squeaky clean converse, one even wearing a pencil skirt. My mother snapped a picture of me standing just inside the front entrance, my left hand clutching the padded strap of my bag close to my chest.
Thank you for sharing this each week. I just want to keep reading every time one of your posts ends!