A Lafayette County Circuit Court judge on Tuesday found police had probable cause to arrest Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a 22-year-old University of Mississippi graduate, for the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
Judge Gray Tollison then denied bond to Herrington as Lee, a 20-year-old Black student who was well known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community, has been missing since July 8.
As sheriff’s deputies led Herrington down the front steps of the courthouse and into a squad car,nearly a dozen protesters – many of them students who were friends with Lee – shouted in unison: “Where is Jay?”
Lee was well-known on campus for his involvement in the LGBTQ community. Credit: Courtesy Oxford Police Department
Over the course of nearly six hours, the prosecution laid out a theory that Herrington and Lee had a casual relationship. Lafayette County Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Kilpatrick argued that following an argument in the morning of July 8, Herrington “lured” Lee to his apartment, strangled him, and then “staged a cover up” by driving Lee’s car to Molly Barr Trails and disposing his body somewhere in Lafayette or Grenada counties.
“In 2022 you do not need a body,” Kilpatrick said in her closing statement. “It’s not the 1870s.”
The preliminary hearing occurred on Tuesday as part of the bond hearing because Herrington was entitled to hear the evidence that Oxford police used to obtain an arrest warrant.
The prosecution argued that Herrington should be denied bond because his charge – first-degree murder – will likely be elevated to capital murder as police uncover more evidence; some of which is still being processed at a private crime lab. Kilpatrick also argued Herrington was a flight risk, noting that a forensic search of his MacBook showed he had searched for flights from Dallas to Singapore.
Herrington’s defense attorney, state Rep. Kevin Horan, disputed that Herrington, who has $1,910 in his bank account, could afford to flee the state. In his closing statement, Horan said the prosecution’s case amounted to “suspicion, conjecture and speculation.”
“We’re not supposed to be sensational in these cases – we’re supposed to come in and treat everyone the same … no matter how many cameras are up there or how many people are outside,” Horan said, gesturing to the windows of the second-floor courtroom. The protesters’ chants could be heard throughout the proceeding.
The hearing began with Kilpatrick calling Lee’s mother and Oxford Police Department Detective Ryan Baker to testify.
Stephanie Lee recounted all the signs that led her to realize Jay was missing on July 8. The first sign, she said, came around 7 a.m. when Jay, who had texted her, “Mom, it’s your birthday,” did not respond to the smiley-face emoji she sent in reply.
Baker testified he arrested Herrington on July 22based on the“totality of the evidence.” This included Snapchat messages, Google searches on Herrington’s computer, and DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department K-9s who he said identified the smell of a dead body in Herrington’s apartment, car and moving truck which belongs to his company, T&T Moving. Other evidence included video surveillance on July 8 of a man that Baker identified as Herrington running from Molly Barr Trail, where police believe he parked Lee’s car that morning, then retrieving a shovel and wheelbarrow from his parent’s house in Grenada.
The most damning evidence in Baker’s testimony was a Google search that Herrington made on July 8, minutes after Lee sent a Snapchat message saying he was coming over. At 5:56 a.m., Herrington searched, “how long does it take to strangle someone gabby petito.”
Gabby Petito was a 22-year-old who gained national attention last summer when she went missing; it was later determined she was killed by strangulation.
After Baker read the Google search, multiple people gasped in the courtroom, prompting Kilpatrick to ask him to repeat the line.
Baker then testified that 156 seconds later, Herrington made another Google search: “does pre-work boost testosterone.” Kilpatrick argued in her closing statement that Herrington “probably” took pre-work — a type of energy booster typically taken before exercise — prior to killing Lee.
During Baker’s cross examination, Horan argued that the K-9 evidence – without accompanying DNA evidence or bodily fluids – is not admissible in court in Mississippi and that OPD could not prove the dogs utilized by DeSoto County had ever successfully identified the smell of a dead body.
Horan then called four witnesses who testified, in an effort to obtain bail for Herrington, to his connections to the community in Grenada. Herrington’s mother, Tina Herrington, read several pages listing Herrington’s religious and academic accomplishments, including that Herrington was voted “most likely to be president” when he graduated high school in 2018.
Emily Tindell, the principal of Grenada High School, testified that Herrington and his family have “the best of character in Grenada County.”
During the hearing, Tayla Carey, Lee’s sister, sat in the front row next to her mother. The hearing was a “rollercoaster,” she said.
“I’m mad, I’m sad, I’m irritated,” she said. “I’m all over the place, honestly. I just want justice, I just want peace.”
Spectators steadily left the courtroom as the hearing continued. Before the hearing started, dozens of people were protesting outside the courthouse, including LGBTQ rights activists fron across Mississippi.
The next step in the case is the grand jury hearing; the date has not yet been set.
A Leflore County grand jury has found insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the kidnapping and lynching death of Emmett Till.
District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said the jury considered charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, but returned a “no bill” indicating they would not indict Donham, according to a news release from his office.
“The murder of Emmett Till remains an unforgettable tragedy in this country and the thoughts and prayers of this nation continue to be with the family of Emmett Till,” Richardson said in a statement.
Donham is in her late 80s and had a last known address in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported.
Till, who was from Chicago, was murdered at the age of 14 while visiting his family in the Delta in 1955.
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, founded by members of Till’s family, has been demanding justice by charging Donham as an accomplice in his death.
Family members from the foundation were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. On Twitter, the foundation wrote justice for Till will continue.
The grand jury met last week and heard more than seven hours of testimony from witnesses who detailed the case investigation since 2004, according to the district attorney’s office.
Last month, the original unserved arrest warrantfor Donham was found in the basement of the Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood. The FBI was notified about the discovery and there were discussions between Richardson’s office and federal partners, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Although prosecutors do not arrest people nor do prosecutors serve arrest warrants, the existence of the 1955 warrant along with additional information confirmed the decision to present this matter to the next regularly scheduled Leflore County Grand Jury,” Richardson said in a statement.
In July, an unpublished memoir of Donham was shared with and reported on by The Associated Press. In it, Donham said she didn’t know what would happen to Till after she accused him of whistling at and grabbing her in 1955.
Her former husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his family’s home and brought the 14-year-old to her in the middle of the night to identify. In the memoir, Donham said she denied it was him and claimed Till identified himself.
The FBI investigated Till’s case from 2004 to 2007, and in 2007 the case was presented to a different Leflore County grand jury by former District Attorney Joyce Chiles. The jury declined to indict Donham for manslaughter.
In 2017, a state and federal investigation was reopened based on information that Donham may have recanted previous statements given during the 1955 trial of her former husband or during the first FBI investigation.
The recent investigation, which ended in December 2021, did not result in new charges.
An independent arbitrator has sided with the first Black woman union president at a Yazoo City federal prison who faced gender discrimination, retaliation and violation of her union contract.
Cyndee Price, president of Local 1013 of the American Federation of Government Employees, was awarded $300,000 in compensatory damages, over 1,000 hours worth of overtime back wages and additional legal fees, arbitrator Ed W. Bankston ordered July 14.
“It’s been like hell for the past two years,” she said about her experience as union president.
Price became president in June 2020 and is the first Black woman to serve as union president at any federal prison in the country, according to the national branch of AFGE.
In her role at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Price said she called out prison management at Federal Correctional Complex Yazoo City for not providing staff and inmates with masks and following federal guidance to minimize the virus’ spread. She also reported management for misconduct to multiple agencies.
The former Michigan resident grew up around unions and to her, unions have a purpose. She became a union steward in 2013 and wanted to be someone who can speak for others in the workplace.
“What made me want to step up is I hate bullies,” Price told Mississippi Today.
Duties of a union officer can be like a full time job, which is why Price applied for 100% official time. Official time is paid time off for federal employees to perform union duties, such as negotiating contracts, meeting with administration and helping staff with complaints.
“Everything that we’re responsible for doing as a president, you can’t do that while overseeing 700 people and dual responsibilities,” she said.
Official time is part offederal law and the union’s contract.
As president, Price said she faced retaliation and gender-based discrimination by prison management.
In her grievance, Price said former prison Warden Shannon Withers and Assistant Walter Vereen did not grant her official time, saying it was no longer Bureau of Prisons policy.
She said the decision was gender-based because her predecessor, a man, had been granted official time and male union presidents at other federal prisons had been granted official time.
“It continues to be the practice of management under the direction of the Complex Warden, Shannon Withers, to allow management under his disciplinary authority and directions to engage in patterns of unethical behavior, and practices, unilaterally circumventing and repudiating the parties’ (collective bargaining agreement),” her Sept. 25, 2020 grievance states.
FormerBOP Southeast Regional Director J.A. Keller said he denied Price’s grievance because it was improperly filed, according to arbitration records. He also reiterated what the warden had told her: it was no longer policy to grant official time.
Because she wasn’t granted official time, Price said she took the work home with her. She worked on union matters on top of caring for two young children and a sick husband.
Price will receive back pay for 1,080 hours of overtime work. Bankston, the arbitrator, ordered the BOP to grant 100% official time for as long as Price is a union official.
In his decision, Bankston said Withers unilaterally chose to end the use of official time and he didn’t have the authority to do so. The union argued denial of official time is an unfair labor practice and violation of its agreement.
In her grievance, she also alleged the wardens and regional director directed other staff to retaliate against her by writing her up, following her and subjecting her to eight investigations and potential removal from her job as a case manager. Price has worked for the prison for 11 years and she said she had a clear work record until she became union president.
Price said these actions created a hostile work environment that filled her with anxiety.
“These managers here believe they are beyond reproach. And that’s what I was trying to report,” she said.
In the decision, the arbitrator agreed Price faced “adverse and unwarranted personnel actions with changed privileges, conditions, and terms of employment.”
A spokesperson from the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment, saying the agency does not comment on settlement offers, negotiations or terms. Keller, Vereen and Withers were not made available for interviews.
Price said Withers and Vereen no longer work at FCC Yazoo City. Withers is a warden at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Florida and Vereen and Keller retired from the agency, a BOP spokesperson confirmed.
Since new leaders have come to the prison, Price said hasn’t experienced harassment and retaliation.
Despite the arbitration, Price expects the BOP to appeal the decision to potentially get out of granting her official time and paying her for the overtime hours.
She hopes newer prison and agency leaders will hold the people named in her grievance accountable. Price would also like the investigations the previous management launched against her to be removed.
Price said the new management is trying to turn things at the prison around, but she wants them to form a better working relationship with the union.
“I just want to do my elected duties in peace,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s about what is best for the employees.”
On the same day, in uncoordinated events, Jackson restaurateurs and public school teachers sent out the same message to local and state political leaders – fix the ongoing water issues in the state’s capital city that have led to boil water notices.
The Mississippi Association of Educators said the water crisis impacts the ability of students in the city of Jackson to learn.
“When the water system fails, JPS schools are forced to transition to online learning, destabilizing students’ learning environments and putting more economic strain on families who now must choose between taking off work or hiring childcare if that is an option,” a MAE position paper released Monday said. “Moreover, with the unplanned transition to online learning, access to free and reduced breakfast and lunch becomes an additional challenge for students.”
MAE said it “interfaced” with Jackson residents at various locations and through a phone survey and found more than 90% of residents had experienced tap water issues at both home and school. All said they spent funds to purchase bottled water.
MAE urged Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba “to issue a proclamation declaring that fixing the ongoing water crisis and securing safe and reliable water access in Jackson will be made the first priority of the administration.” The local government should develop a plan, detailing cost, to address the problem.
MAE also called for the Legislature and state leaders to devote substantial funds from the $1.8 billion in COVID-19 relief money received from the federal government to address the water crisis.
MAE said “The composition of the system is dangerous. Lead and galvanized and cast-iron pipes make up large portions of the city’s infrastructure. These aging pipes composed of dangerous and degraded materials will continue to block Jackson’s development efforts if they remain unaddressed.”
Also on Monday, about 45 restaurant owners and managers sent a letter to Gov. Tate Reeves, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, Speaker Philip Gunn, Lumumba, Jackson City Council members and members of the Hinds County Board of Supervisors saying the constant boil water notices and at times interruptions in water supply were unsustainable. They asked the political leaders to put aside any differences and work together. Thus far, state and local leaders have not been able reach an accord on the water woes of the state’s largest and capital city.
During a news conference at the Iron Horse Grill, a local restaurant, about 20 restaurateurs raised their hands when asked if they had been contacted about moving out of Jackson to the suburbs.
The speakers said some of the restaurants are having to spend between $500 and $700 daily on ice, bottled water and other items, such as canned or bottled soft drinks to replace the fountain soda that is unavailable without pressurized water.
This is having to be done, said Pat Fontaine, executive director of the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, despite very narrow profit margins caused in part by the current level of inflation and labor and supply shortages.
The letter was described “as the first formal attempt to force attention on this crisis.”
The Legislature approved what is expected to be $25 million of the $1.8 billion in federal funds the state received to match $25 million the city of Jackson received in federal funds to deal with water and sewer issues. But those funds have been described as a small fraction of the money needed to deal with an aged water and sewer system. It has been estimated it will cost more than $1 billion to fix the antiquated and worn-out infrastructure system.
In addition, Jackson Mayor Lumumba has said the ongoing boil water notices are being caused by other issues – such as the lack of qualified staff to operate the complex Jackson surface water system.
“As a matter of fairness and practicality, if no solution is imminent, if this is to be the status quo, can restaurant owners expect to be compensated for their additional cost of operation and lost revenue?” the letter asked. They asked if they could get a discount on their City of Jackson water bill or an income tax credit from the state.
The Mississippi State Department of Health has now identified six cases of monkeypox across the state.
The monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected thousands worldwide since the outbreak began in May. Since Mississippi reported its first case on July 25, the number of nationwide cases has more than doubled. As of Aug. 5, there were 7,510 monkeypox cases in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
The monkeypox virus, which is part of the same family of viruses as smallpox, has not caused any deaths but does produce painful symptoms. Nearly all infections outside Africa have occurred among men who have sex with men.
Transmission often occurs through close skin-to-skin contact with an infected person. Airborne transmission also occurs during prolonged close contact with an infected person.
“Regardless of your gender, regardless of your sexual orientation, anybody can get monkeypox,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers said.
Mississippi’s initial allotment of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine included enough doses to inoculate 300 people. Due to the limited supply, the vaccine is only available to direct contacts of infected people. Byers said that the department is looking at making vaccines available to people who have had multiple sexual partners.
However, health department officials are unsure how many more doses the state will receive through the rest of 2022.
“We have so few doses right now that it’s very hard for us to expand our vaccination efforts beyond trying to make sure that we vaccinate those known contacts,” Byers said.
The Biden administration declared the monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency on Aug. 4. In addition to increasing public awareness of the virus, the declaration frees up federal funding for the further creation and vetting of medical treatments.
The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global public health emergency on July 23, the first time it has taken this step since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. monkeypox, COVID-19 and polio are the only diseases that have this designation.
Symptoms of monkeypox can include: fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Infected persons often experience a rash that looks like pimples or blisters that appear on many parts of the body. The illness typically lasts for two to four weeks.
Lindsey Trinh, a senior journalism student at the University of Mississippi, said she won’t be going back to school in person this fall after the killing of Jimmie “Jay” Lee. Credit: Courtesy Lindsey Trinh
Lindsey Trinh wiped her tearful eyes with the collar of her navy blue Ole Miss T-shirt as she described the fear and anxiety she has experienced in the month since police announced a student had been charged with the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
Trinh had only known Lee from class, but the 27-year-old journalism student, who is gay and Vietnamese, knew what it was like to live with an identity held by few others in Mississippi – and to be recognizable for it.
At home in Biloxi, she thought about going back to Oxford for her last semester. She had been looking forward to finally graduating; to dancing at Code Pink, a local drag show; and to walking around the Square holding her girlfriend’s hand. Now she started to wonder, what would happen if she went missing?
“Oxford felt like such a welcoming community, that when this happened, and this news came out, it felt like the whole world, the whole city, is against you now,” Trinh said.
The day after Sheldon Timothy Herrington’s initial appearance, Trinh made a decision. She opened her laptop and started writing an email informing the university provost and her journalism school advisers that she wouldn’t be returning to Oxford for the fall semester.
“I have had an immense amount of frustration, stress and anxiety from the lack of information, Jay’s unfound body disposed in the area and the injustice for his family, friends and all of Oxford’s hurting LGBTQ+ community,” she began, “including myself.”
“At the time and because of the unknown of why this has happened to Jay and the whereabouts of his body, I have decided that I cannot physically come back to Oxford for my last semester this Fall,” Trinh added. “I fear for my safety and well-being as an outspoken and proud gay person of color.”
Trinh is not the only LGBTQ student considering not returning to UM this fall in the wake of Lee’s disappearance and death. As court proceedings for Herrington have begun, the community is grieving and trying to understand how someone like Lee could go missing.
“It doesn’t feel real, especially since they haven’t found his body,” said Braylyn Johnson, a UM student who was roommates with Lee during the pandemic.
Eleven LGBTQ students, faculty and alumni told Mississippi Today they now fear for the community’s safety in Oxford, a town known for being more inclusive than most in Mississippi. Many also worry that Lee’s killing will lead community members, seeking safety from violence and harassment, to conceal their sexuality or gender identity.
“You never know, especially within our community, who becomes a target when you are free,” Blake Summers, a co-founder of Code Pink, told Mississippi Today at a rally for Lee on July 21.
Trinh said that Lee’s killing makes her worried “the generation after me,” including her 10-year-old brother, who loves Lil Nas X.
“He knows that Lil Nas is gay,” Trinh said. “He told me that being gay is normal. When I heard about Jay’s killing, I thought about my little brother and his friends and how some of them will probably never be comfortable with being themselves because of the society we live in.”
Since the Oxford Police Department arrested Herrington for Lee’s murder two weeks ago, local law enforcement has not released any new information about the case, compounding anxiety in the community.
Jaime Harker – the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at UM and the owner of Violet Valley, a feminist bookstore near Oxford – said she knows of at least one community member who is afraid to leave their house due to rumors about the nature and reason for Lee’s killing.
Harker said that she understands prosecutors need to act in a way that will ensure a conviction, but she wishes authorities would take steps to tamp down on the fear and help the LBGTQ community make informed decisions about their safety.
“I think people are filling the void with what their biggest fears are,” she said.
At the Lafayette County Courthouse on July 27, protesters hoped that Herrington’s initial appearance would provide some answers, but he was sent back to jail pending a bond hearing this week.Herrington has not yet entered a plea, but attorney Carlos Moore, his uncle who is retained in the case, has said he believes the 22-year-old is innocent.
Jose Reyes,one of Lee’s friends at UM, was standing in the shade of a tree near the courthouse after law enforcement escorted Herrington back to jail. Reyes said he views justice for Lee as Herrington going to prison for “as long as possible,” but that he’s anxious about the route the court case might take.
“I don’t want this happening to anyone else,” Reyes said, “and if we let him get away with it, it just shows how easy someone can go missing and be murdered, and no one’s going to do anything about it.”
Reyes and many members of the community, even those who did not know Lee personally, are determined not to let his killing pass by like that of so many other cases of missing and murdered Black trans and non-binary people.
“Justice for Jay Lee!,” an Instagram page started the weekend that Herrington was arrested, now has more than 2,000 followers. The page has called on the Oxford community to protest outside court proceedings and is organizing a fundraiser with Code Pink for Lee’s family – the “Jayoncé Benefit Night” – for Aug. 11 at Proud Larry’s, a local bar.
“We send our condolences to the family and friends of the victim,” read the caption of the page’s first post. “The entire world is watching Oxford, Mississippi to make sure that Jay Lee’s family gets the justice that they deserve.”
The community’s fears are magnified by the backdrop of a national backlash that Harker said she hasn’t seen since the 1980s, when she was a teenager.
Trinh, who transferred to UM from community college in 2020, initially worried she would get into “arguments with people all the time.” But she decided it would make her tougher. A first-generation student, Trinh sometimes felt like she was expected to entertain or educate her peers in class, even though she was at UM to get an education herself.
She recalled taking a political science class with Lee and reading his outspoken discussion posts. He was “opinionated,” she said, “but in a way that he was proud of what he thought.”
Sometimes, Trinh would reply to Lee’s posts: “I love that you mentioned this, because being here at Ole Miss, a lot of people don’t think the way that most of us in the LGBTQ community think or people of color think.”
The day after Trinh sent her email to the university, she was in the car on the way to Destin, Fla., for a family vacation with her girlfriend when she received a reply from Julie Glasco, the assistant to the provost. She read the email’s opening lines with a pit in her stomach.
“Thank you for reaching out to our office, expressing your concerns, and sharing your challenges as a student,” it began. “This has been an extremely upsetting time for our campus community.”
“Please know that you have resources available. Chancellor Boyce shared a message with the community last week offering a list of services and resources available. I’m providing the list below for you to access quickly,” Glasco continued, adding that she had cc’d the university’s vice chancellors for diversity and community engagement and student affairs and the dean of the journalism school.
Her first thought, Trinh said, was that the provost’s office hadn’t listened to what she was saying. She said the reply had “no sentiment.” In an Instagram story, she called the list that Glasco appended just a “quick copy + paste.”
“I was like, oh my god, they literally don’t care. They don’t care,” she said. “I can’t go back, because I feel like, if they don’t care about Jay’s case, then what does that say for the rest of us?”
Trinh is now waiting for the university to give her a new fall schedule that will allow her to take online classes and graduate on time. She’ll have to go back to Oxford one last time to empty her apartment. Then she’s moving to California – her job, a company that sells Tesla accessories is there, and so is a community she perceives to be less dangerous than Mississippi.
Without more information, she said that’s the only way she’ll feel safe.
“None of us knows what happened to Jay – we don’t know if it’s racially motivated or if it was homophobic,” she said, “They can’t sugarcoat that, because we’ve got to know. At the end of the day, we have to protect ourselves.”
Federally contracted call center workers are striking in Hattiesburg for the third time this year — this time, taking aim at bathroom breaks and time off policies related to COVID-19.
Some of the latest criticisms come from workers who take CDC information calls and say the call center isn’t giving workers the proper time off if they test positive for COVID-19.
“Right now, some of us only get one day of paid leave when we test positive for COVID-19, even though the CDC recommends that anyone who tests positive for COVID quarantine for at least five days,” Hattiesburg worker Jennifer Dundit said in a statement. “Therefore, if we don’t have any accrued time off, we might be unable to properly quarantine to recover and help prevent community spread.”
In a statement, Maximus said it follows the CDC’s workplace guidelines. Workers, the company says, have “24 hours of paid administrative leave,” which equates to three eight-hour shifts, if they test positive. But call center workers told Mississippi Today they only get one day off before having to dip into their earned time off – and that’s if they’ve accrued it. Often, they say, workers have to take unpaid time off while isolating – something they usually cannot afford.
Maximus’ Hattiesburg workers are about 80% female, according to union group Call Center Workers United. Despite the largely female workforce, workers say in addition to poor time-off policies they’re also given strict six-minute bathroom break rules outside of their allotted 15-minute breaks and 30-minute lunches. After the story published, Maximus clarified that “bathroom breaks are allowed for everyone and can be longer than 6 minutes if needed.”
“We need more than six minutes to use the bathroom,” Dundit said, “and should not have to risk discipline or shame for doing so.”
Maximus did not respond directly to the bathroom-break allegations, instead pointing out workers get two short breaks and one long lunch break during an 8-hour workday.
Since March, workers have called out Maximus for exorbitant health insurance costs. Workers have told Mississippi Today they struggle to stretch their paychecks to cover food, bills and basic medical costs.
Call Center Workers United recently announced a new “solidarity fund” to help support workers who choose to walk off the job in protest of working conditions.
Maximus cut health insurance deductibles from $4,500 to $2,500 since workers began speaking out. Maximus has said it meets regularly with employees to address issues and has a hotline where workers can report complaints anonymously.
“We welcome the opportunity to work directly with our employees and discuss and hopefully resolve their concerns,” Maximus told Mississippi Today after May’s protest. “We respect our employees’ legal right to attempt to organize, and any information we provide is designed to help them make an informed decision about union representation.”
Clarification 8/8/22: This story was updated with more detail about Maximus’ COVID-19 leave and bathroom break policies.
Have you ever wanted to relive your old memories? What would it mean if you could?
Jennifer Egan Credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem
In “The Candy House,” author Jennifer Egan imagines a technology — Own Your Unconscious — that allows users to upload all of their memories into a cube-shaped hard drive and review them with a headset. The technology evolves into the Collective Conscious, a shared database of memories anyone can access for the price of their own consciousness being added to the collective.
The novel exists in the same universe as Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning hit, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” but shifts the focus to new characters and the way the Collective Conscious reshapes their life. “The Candy House”is also written in the same structure as its predecessor — each chapter is an individual unit with its own style, and chapters jump back and forth across time, but loosely connect.
Egan, who will be appearing as a featured guest at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 20, spoke with Mississippi Today about her newest work.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited for clarity and length.
Mississippi Today: I didn’t realize when I started it that “The Candy House” is a sort of sister novel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” — another book to add to my reading list.
Jennifer Egan: I actually think that going in the direction that you’re going, starting with “The Candy House,” I think is optimal. It’s not a sequel, it’s just a related world.
MT: I’m curious, why do you think that’s optimal?
Egan: Well, I’ll back up a little, I had originally thought that “A Visit From the Good Squad,” would go in a backwards chronology. That ended up not working very well, so I ended up having no chronology, just organizing it around curiosity. But the reason I thought it would go backwards was that I was really delighted with the kind of unexpected surprise of, instead of saying, “Gee what’s gonna happen?” you’re saying, “Oh, what was that like?” So a kind of backwards pattern of curiosity, having curiosity be satisfied backwards instead of forwards.
I was very interested in that because there are all kinds of advantages that it gives the reader. The reader already knows the future, so the reader experiences the present with a particular character in a very different way than we do if we’re just wondering, “Gee, what’s gonna happen?” as the character is. That kind of relationship to time and narrative has been exciting to me from the very start. I couldn’t make it work in a straight backwards chronology, but it’s my general feeling that in books like this, finding out what did happen is as fun or more fun than finding out what will happen. That’s what makes me think starting with “The Candy House” would be more satisfying. It’s not a neat sequence. But I think that those surprises of hearing about events that came and went and then being plunged into the middle of them, that particular form of surprise and satisfaction is going to be more present going from “Candy House” to “Goon Squad” than the other way around.
MT: But in terms of the chronology of your experience of writing these books, you were choosing to return to this world, even if not really continuing the narrative that you had before. How did you decide to do that?
Egan: Well, another aspect of books constructed this way is that there’s no real end to them exactly. There’s a story arc in both books for sure, but because they’re such ensemble creations and each character has its own constellation of history, people, experience, et cetera, and new peripheral characters to be curious about and turn into major characters, there’s no clear end to it except the exhaustion of curiosity. That’s what would put an end to it, the exhaustion of my curiosity. That definitely had not happened after “Goon Squad.”
… Beyond just the kind of structural curiosity that is built into books like this, another reason that I think I was so eager to continue is that there’s a high failure ratio writing books like this. In other words, I would say about 50% of the first draft material that I created for both books really didn’t end up being viable. I think part of that is when you’re trying to take a different narrative approach every time, you’re going to strike out a lot. But what that means is sometimes I end up in a strange position of knowing things about my characters that the reader doesn’t know because I learned them in chapters that didn’t end up in the book. That’s sort of a strange feeling. Usually, in my books, I don’t know any more than I’m letting my readers know. I don’t withhold information. So that feeling of knowing things that the reader didn’t know led me to feel very naturally that this was stuff that I had to share in some way. These stories were not complete.
The final thing I would say is I really do love taking genres that are out there in the culture and using them to write fiction, and these kinds of books are a great way to do that. I wouldn’t want to have written an entire novel in Twitter at 140 characters, but it was a lot of fun to write one chapter like that. These books, if I can make them work, just become a really good vehicle for lots of development and experimentation on my own part.
MT: It sounds like a really exciting process personally that you work through when you’re building each chapter narrative and how they fit together.
Egan: It is. It’s a very intuitive process. It’s not cerebral — well, that’s not true. It’s an alternation between intuition and analysis. I rely on my intuition to come up with a very improvisational draft, and then I evaluate them very critically. That’s why 50% of it ends up on the cutting room floor, as they say. I take the best and try to work with that and shape it into something meaningful. So that’s my process. It’s an alternation, but I place a high value on intuition and improvisation. It’s where I get a lot of my best stuff.
MT: So, when you were saying that you were still curious about the characters 12 years ago, and that’s what drew you back to it — do you feel like you still have that curiosity?
Egan: I can’t totally tell, to be honest. There are definitely forms that I want to try. That list is still active — things that I haven’t done yet, or haven’t managed to pull off, frankly, that I hope I can. I am curious about certain characters, but I’m not sure the curiosity is at the fever pitch that it was after I finished “Goon Squad.” I think right now, I feel very eager to move away from the present day, which I did after “Goon Squad.” I wrote a historical novel set in the thirties and forties, which took a huge amount of research and was a very different kind of book told much more traditionally. Shipwreck, survival at sea, wartime, combat, I mean, it’s just really different. But I had written a bunch of first draft material for “The Candy House” before I kind of dove deeply into that book. This time, I think I’m going to move into writing about the past, possibly without dabbling anymore in these characters for a bit. I’m not quite sure why. I think part of it is writing about the present day feels inevitably like writing about technology, and I feel a little bit weary of that. I was after “Goon Squad” too, but more so this time.
MT: Well, technology plays a more central role in this book too.
Egan: And a more central role in our lives. That combination, I find it just wearisome in the end. I’m not anti-tech, I think that’s clear in this book, I take a pretty playful approach to it. It was a very useful tool, narratively, for me to engage with because it lets me do all kinds of things that I couldn’t have done otherwise. That was really how I arrived at the tech in the book. I did not start out with it. It was an invention that could do all the things I wanted it to do. But I also feel a real eagerness to move away from it, back to a time that I actually remember — no internet.
I was in my thirties before I ever got online. It’s really refreshing to imagine in the pre-internet period. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the internet. It does a million things for us, and it was a big help to me imaginatively in “The Candy House”, but the fact that all roads lead there just closes off a lot of dramatic possibilities. If you think about movies that involve technology, we spend more and more time staring at people clicking away on computers, and that’s not interesting dramatically. So the pleasure of going back in time is the pleasure of more dramatic situations that would be ridiculous now because these problems would be solved in ten minutes online.
MT: So the issue you were more interested in exploring in this book was more about memory than the tech. The tech was kind of just a tool to reach that question. Would you say that?
Egan: Not exactly, but obviously memory is a big part of it. I was interested in enabling connections and shared experience between people that was impossible without the machine, but my awareness of the machine came about very incrementally. For example, one of the early chapters I wrote was “Rhyme Scheme.” In it, Lincoln is trying to figure out how to make his colleague fall in love with him and he very briefly considers the idea that he could view her consciousness — that term gray grab was very instantaneous. I remember the moment when I wrote it and I thought, “oh, I see, I get what that is.” He has a way of being able to see inside her consciousness, so there must be some sort of sharing possibility there. That was my first inkling of what the device would be. And it just comes and goes, because he considers it and then immediately disregards it because there is clearly an interdiction against that. But that’s the kind of little clue that I got.
Then a moment when things became really clear was when I wrote the chapter called “What the Forest Remembers.” I started out with Lou and his pals going on this adventure to the marijuana farm, and then there came a moment where Charlene says “How could I possibly know all this?” and that was a moment where the machine really crystallized for me.
“Ah, I get it. She’s using a device that lets her see memories through other people’s eyes.” That was so exciting to me because it let me do something that you really can’t do in fiction that easily, which is to justify being in two people’s first-person viewpoints at the same time. I mean, of course, you can kind of do anything in fiction, but I love the idea of a technology that enabled and justified that.
Once I defined the machine and was really leaning into the way people fetishize the color that their cube is and etcetera, I would sometimes imagine myself giving one of these cubes a big kick and just having it disappear. Inside, there’s just the book that we’re holding in our hands. Because in a way, what I’m doing in the book is moving through a collective of different points of view and memories as I move through my 14 characters’ points of view.
MT: The end of the book and that image both seem to be an inclination towards fiction over tech, which I’m sure is natural as a writer, but I was curious if you agree with that.Egan: I would say that, as a general matter, we should spend less time looking at pictures and more time engaging with language. It’s important to keep our brains fit and pictures don’t do that. It’s a very lazy way of consuming information. I think we all feel that. Does anyone feel good after spending two hours scrolling on social media? I would love to hear from that person …
I don’t include watching a movie in that lazy category, but reading is different from all of this because there are no pictures. We have to supply them. Reading is harder to do if you fall out of the habit of doing it. And I think that we would all, and I include myself in this, be well advised to pick periods of the day when our phones are not near us, and it’s amazing how quickly you forget about them actually.
… I think that reading books is really important, not only for our mental fitness — there is a kind of learning and experience that we can have reading if we are fit, that we can’t have looking at pictures. It’s a very simple fact that’s inarguable.
Fiction is the only narrative art form that takes us authentically inside the minds and points of view of other people. If you are staring at a picture, you are, by definition, having the opposite experience. You are on the outside, anything the human in that picture tells you is performative. So I would argue that fiction still does something no other narrative art form can do. And therefore, it is worth staying fit in order to be able to have that experience.
MT: Do you worry there will be a day when the machine that you imagined or something similar becomes real and the experience of fiction becomes less relevant?
Egan: I think that there are so many other things to be frightened of if that machine ever came to pass that the disappearance of books is almost not even on the list. My assumption was that such a machine could not exist because we don’t understand the brain well enough, but people have been telling me since “The Candy House” came out that I’m actually wrong and that we are closer to that than I think. That is truly horrifying.
And I have to say, I think if that happened, a kind of resistance of the sort I’m imagining actually could be the response — where people are so unwilling to be represented in this collective that they actually might consider as radical a step as shedding their identities and starting over. That actually becomes imaginable to me if there is an online collective that contains actual consciousness. Right now, it contains performative consciousness, and inadvertent consciousness in the form of all the information we don’t realize we’ve given up as the price of access to A, B or C. But I really cannot fathom that such a machine could exist. I just don’t think we understand the brain well enough to replicate it. If we can’t fix mental illness, if we can’t solve schizophrenia and still don’t even understand what causes it, how on earth could we externalize consciousness? I truly don’t believe it.
MT: That feels funny though, for people to have told you since the book was released, that the impossibility you’ve created on purpose is actually possible.
Egan: It is funny. But I will say this. Sometimes things that seem ludicrously impossible do come to pass, and that is something I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Sometimes the ridiculous things do happen, but I share your feeling that this doesn’t even hold together as an idea if you look too closely, much to less a reality. One reason I think it feels so imminent is that to a certain degree, the internet already functions as a kind of collective consciousness, and that may be why all of this feels so possible. You can spend time on social media and learn an enormous amount about someone, far more than they probably realize. There is a collective of information. It’s not consciousness exactly, but it gets a lot closer to it than anything we’ve had before.
MT: This feels funny to say, in terms of this conversation — I don’t remember if this was something I thought to myself or something I read that someone else wrote, but reading “Candy House” feels a bit like an expanded version of scrolling through an Instagram feed. In a much more in-depth capacity, but because it’s an interconnected world, it’s like my interconnected circle of people who know each other and who overlap very loosely, and you’re like taking little snippets of each piece. Like, “Here’s a moment. And then here’s a completely separate moment, but it’s a little bit related, and here are the threads as to why.”
Egan: For sure. That’s to some degree intentional, in that I like the feeling of moving among consciousnesses as a way of moving among worlds. And I also connect that to gaming, something like dungeons and dragons where we move among pre-created worlds that are imaginative, but also have these hand-drawn corollaries.
I also want to say one more thing about what you said, “I’m not sure if I thought this or I read it,” which complicates our conversation a little bit — I would argue that consciousness is always collective to some degree. In other words, our individual consciousnesses consist of enormous amounts of shared understanding and cultural awareness that we share with everyone who is alive at this moment. We are always calling on knowledge that is not exactly “ours” originally but is in the culture around us. There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t think of, that I don’t even know consciously, that ends up in my books. Names are one of the most obvious places that I see this. Here’s one example from “The Candy House” that was just pointed out to me recently: in the chapter called “Rhyme Scheme,” which is really where we first come to understand the sort of Orwellian future we’ve ended up in, there’s an important character in that in that chapter called O’Brien who ends up being the defier of this new reality. O’Brien is the name of the protagonist in George Orwell’s “1984”, but I had forgotten that. These sorts of name clues pop up again and again in my books. What they show is that I, like you, don’t know whether I thought of things or whether they were already in me from other things I had read and done, because consciousness is collective.
