If you aren’t already familiar with “Ode to Billie Joe”, the song I featured in yesterday’s column, do yourself a favor and listen to it before continuing to read this one. For over fifty years, listeners have speculated just what it was that the narrator and Billie Joe threw off of the Tallahatchie Bridge, and Bobbie Gentry – a woman almost as enigmatic as the song that made her famous, who abruptly stopped performing at the height of her fame forty years ago and has barely been heard of since – has steadfastly refused to explain it, or even to comment on the disappointing “solution” used by screenwriter Herman Raucher in the 1976 movie inspired by the song. Given that she is approaching 80 and is more reclusive than ever, it seems likely she will take the secret to her grave, just as her character in the song apparently did; rather than share her grief with others, the narrator “spen[t] a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge/And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” As a young teen, the general consensus among the girls in my circle was that the object thrown into the water was a self-aborted fetus which had resulted from the narrator’s relationship with Billie Joe, and that the overly-sensitive boy had killed himself in a fit of inappropriate guilt, possibly due to being seen by the “nice young preacher, Brother Taylor”. And while a number of other possibilities have been proposed, and good arguments could be made for some of them, it’s the one from my adolescence that inspired this essay upon my re-listening to the song last week.
Not everyone wants to “shout her abortion” as the activists urge; some prefer not to talk about it, and some may feel shame, sorrow or some more complex mix of emotions and prefer not to discuss the subject at all. Similarly, while sex workers like me are almost belligerently open about it and others are only out with close friends, still others prefer not to admit their history of sex work to anyone. Some LGBT people are “out and proud”, some more quietly queer, and some still deeply closeted. The same range of coping strategies (if that’s even the right phrase) can be seen in relation to kinks or fetishes; mental health issues; a history of rape or sexual abuse; drug use; a criminal record; family issues; and nearly anything else for which guilt or shame, appropriate or not, can be heaped upon an individual by society, family members, or even one’s own psyche. And while it’s certainly true that repressed shame can lead to all sorts of harmful outcomes (like jumping off of bridges or letting one’s life be consumed by bottled-up grief or anger), and that talking about taboo subjects certainly helps to normalize them, not everyone has the psychological mechanisms or social tools required to “shout” her abortion, discuss her whoredom on television, march in pride parades or display family skeletons in the front yard. Some people have the psychic anatomy necessary to be honest about subjects that were or still are considered shameful, and some don’t; some may feel comfortable displaying some skeletons and not others (for example, being open about queerness but not about sex work). And the only person who is qualified to make decisions about which laundry to air and which to pack away in the cedar chest is its owner. While I would like it if more sex workers were “out”, I have no right to pass judgment on anyone who isn’t; their lives are theirs to live, not mine, and they are the ones who will reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of their decisions. And the exact same thing is true of every other such secret. To drag someone’s secrets into the open against their will is an act of psychic violence which could potentially trigger physical violence in some circumstances, which is why outing, “doxxing”, and tattling are condemned by all ethical adults. Minding one’s own business is a virtue, locked closets should be respected, and sometimes silence really is golden.
If we believe in individual autonomy and choice, then that includes other people making choices that differ from ours, so long as no harm is done.
“To drag someone’s secrets into the open against their will is an act of psychic violence which could potentially trigger physical violence in some circumstances, which is why outing, “doxxing”, and tattling are condemned by all ethical adults.”
Police and prosecutors’ rarely display the type of “adult ethics” you cite in this excellent essay.
While it has thankfully become unacceptable for regular folks to out the sexual choices of others, outing sex workers and their clients has become standard operating procedure for those in law enforcement who take a smug, self righteous delight in publicly outing, doxxing and shaming the most personal, salacious out of context details of sex workers and customers (to include details about things like infidelity that are not criminal, but certainly do incredible harm to family members forced to deal with the public broadcast and humilation of their personal lives.
As I think your excellent documentary “The War on Whores” explains, this behavior in places such as King County almost certainly led to the suicide of a good man and did incredible damage to his remaining family members who remained.
Once dead, rather than reflect on the likely outcome of their callous actions, law enforcement instead took his suicide as an opportunity to doubled down on their lies about him since he was no longer around to defend himself. Hell, they even monetized his public shaming and suicide through Demand Abolition.
This was an excellent example of law enforcement using their extra constitution powers to investigate suspected crimes to instead run elaborate shame/smear campaigs. The only thing exceptional about this story is you where their with the resources, humanity and ethics to draw attention to this tragic story. I find it astounding that such monsters who would do this to him imagine they are in any position to pass moral judgement on you, or anyone else based on their sadistic use of his personal information to raise money and promote themselves.
It’s not that law enforcement does not understand the permanent pain and suffering they willingly (and all too often joyfully) take in inflicting such pain of the accused and their close family members. Law enforcement has worked hard over the years to ensure them and their families are almost never included in public shaming campaigns for their crimes and misdeeds beyond the minimum requirements of public access in the most extreme cases. If you doubt me, send in a public record request the next time someone in law enforcement is accused of a crime.
On top of all this, their qualified immunity ensures they’re never held accountable for the public lies they spread to an overly cooperative local media that willfully refuses to point out the obvious inconsistencies in the official narrative they re given.
Law enforcement has created a panopticon that ensures public humiliation and doxxing only flows in one direction. Until they have an equal amount of skin in the game as the public they will continue to lack the empathy required to act as “ethical adults.”
That’s because humans have the pernicious habit of putting the least-evolved members of society in charge, the better to act out their own ugly, animalistic impulses that they themselves would never act out except as part of a mob.
Well said, Diogenes.
Remarkably well done.
The article was very true at all points given. Things we should learn once again as humans in just the basic way. Respect the right that your buisiness is your own..
I’ve often thought that perhaps Bobbie Gentry never knew what had been thrown off the bridge either. Writers (poets and songwriters moreso than most) often use ideas that are never fully formed. Just little things that pop into their heads, so they mention them, even if they have no idea what they could mean.
It could be that she simply needed to connect the narrator with Billy Joe and the Tallahatchie bridge somehow, so she just used the first image that came to mind.
I really need to look up her other songs sometime. I only know Ode To Billy Joe and Fancy.
When asked, Gentry has always stated that she knows what it was, but won’t tell.
Thank you Maggie. I am going to save this and reread it. This has touched me in ways I am yet not comfortable to talk about.
Thank you again.
WOW … This has brought up memories for me, too.
My mom, a retired teacher, could never stand hearing this song, and didn’t tell me why until I was eighteen. She knew a student who struggled with depression, and for whom she did all that she could to help him. The first summer he was away, he sent her a letter expressing his struggle, but still thanking her for being “the only one who listened to me.” Coming back to school that fall, she learned that he had killed himself jumping off a bridge near his family’s home.
The storyteller in me wove that into Gentry’s song. Maybe she grieved because she was “the only one who listened”; maybe what they dumped off the bridge was a gun or knife or bottle of poison; maybe, ironically, that gave Billie Joe the idea to jump.
I agree with the need to mind our own business. But I temper it with always expressing to those we care for our willingness to listen, and to offer what support we can. And not just those close, but anybody facing a struggle. Sex workers do that for so many clients; imagine if more in our society did that for them
https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/bobbie-gentry-exit-stage-left <- great podcast about Bobbie Gentry… you can listen to it with song samples and what not or just read the transcription.