Sunday, April 20, 2008 | News, Sports, In this Issue...
Bedeviled, beloved, and “Breaking Free”
Herschel Walker scores points against a poor, isolated, rural childhood and a little-understood mental illness
Herschel Walker with the Heisman Trophy in 1982
CREDIT: UGA Athletic Association
By Stephanie Ramage
My brother Lyndon almost never talks about his high school football career, but there are two stories from that chapter in his life that I love. One is called “The 79-yard run”—a verbal memoir of an angelic flight toward the end zone, a ball-carry of such speed and grace that it prompted my father, who was up at the concession stand, to come leaping down through the bleachers, hollering at the top of his lungs “Ya’ll see that? That’s my boy! That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” You’d have to know how my middle-aged father looked to fully appreciate his spontaneous athleticism. I don’t know for sure if it was definitely 79 yards. It may have been—but you can bet that if it was, then West Laurens High School was not playing Johnson County High School. That’s because it was 1976 and Herschel Walker was playing for Johnson County, the next county over to the east, and Herschel would have caught up with my brother well before he’d made it so far. (In that part of the country, when we talk about football and we say “Herschel,” everyone knows who we’re talking about. There is no need for a last name.)
Which brings us to the other story, “Being Run Over By Herschel Walker.” When West Laurens did play Johnson County later that season, Herschel hit my brother on the 5-yard line, launching him into the air, where he sailed three yards to land on the 2-yard line just in time to see Herschel make a touchdown.
There is a cadre of men of a certain age in Laurens County who have this experience in common, and it is a story told with pride, with no gilding necessary. To have been brutally knocked flat on the grass by a supernaturally fast and heavy being who has become an NFL icon is like being struck by lightning and living to tell the tale—you have been touched by god; there is something special about you.
For those of us who grew up in the region of piney woods and cotton fields that embraces the lower reaches of the Oconee River, near Dublin and Herschel’s hometown of Wrightsville, and particularly for those of us who went on to the University of Georgia, Herschel is a powerful emblem of achievement. My sister and Herschel graduated high school and entered UGA the same year; she went on an academic scholarship, he on a ticket to play for the Bulldogs. Several years later, I was to follow in her footsteps, and just like Herschel and so many others, I would drive the stretch of U.S. Highway 441 northward as it roughly followed the course of the Oconee to toward Athens. When I think about it now, it’s as if we were some southern breed of salmon, fighting the currents of ignorance and poverty to go upstream to UGA where life and the river became faster and less muddy.
The school was founded by a Yale graduate in 1785 so that kids like us, the offspring of manual laborers, farmers and factory workers, could get a good education and make a mosquito- and snake-infested wilderness a better place. The journey of a little more than 100 miles from where the Oconee is crossed by U.S. Highway 80 (which connects Laurens County to Johnson County) to Athens is a trick of time’s relativity—it takes you much further away than the sign on the shoulder of the road says it will, and there is an excellent chance that you will go through life a “tweener,” as Herschel puts it in his newly published book “Breaking Free.” You become someone who never quite fits in anywhere, but can give the appearance of fitting in everywhere. You learn to shed your southern accent like a cottonmouth moccasin sheds its skin; when the time is right, you’ll re-grow it, then shed it again as you need to. Your past, littered with Holy-Roller “foot-washing” Baptist grandmothers, people speaking in tongues, terrifying stories of the Ku Klux Klan and conversations that included the “n” word as casually as if someone were saying “pass the biscuits,” becomes something best forgotten. Though my family and Herschel’s were on different sides of the racial divide, blacks and whites in middle Georgia share that strangely magical, superstitious and in some ways deeply shameful heritage, about which we also share the pain of a conspiracy of silence.
Given all that, the fact that Herschel narrowly escaped an exorcism really comes as no surprise. The fact that a psychologist from Zimbabwe was the person who rescued him from the exorcism, however, does.
The devil and the disorder
It is April 15, 2008, almost 28 years after Herschel first trotted out onto the field at UGA’s Sanford Stadium, and I am talking with his psychologist, Jerry Mungadze, who is at an airport between television interviews to promote Herschel’s book. It was Mungadze who wrote the foreward for “Breaking Free,” Herschel’s account of living with DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder, the illness formerly known as multiple personality disorder made famous by movies like “Sybil.” Mungadze’s name is prominently displayed on the cover, along with the co-authors’, Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield.
Flight boarding announcements keep blaring through Mungadze’s cell phone and interrupting the flow of his thick Zimbabwean accent. There is no good way to ask the question I need to ask, so I cannonball into it: “Was Herschel possessed?”
“The very first time that Herschel came out to see me, one of his ministers thought that, and they had told Hershel that, they thought he was possessed,” answers Mungadze. “And that made some of his alter-personalities very, very mad, that they were being accused of being demons when they were personalities.”
Rather than watching “The Exorcist” and stocking up on holy water, Mungadze diagnosed Herschel with DID.
But I had asked a fair question: In early September 2001, the evangelical magazine “Christianity Today” interviewed Mungadze about his belief that DID and demonization are not mutually exclusive. “By detaching a person from his or her personality, the disorder may open the door to demonic harassment,” the article states. “Even then the safer healing route is restoration of mental health, which gives the afflicted the strength to resist demonic attacks, Mungadze says.”
He assures me that he does, indeed, believe in demonic possession, but that he also believes that the vast majority of cases of alleged possession are in fact cases of DID, a message that he takes with him to “spiritual warfare” conferences back in Zimbabwe—where possession, he says, is considered a common occurrence. He explains that one reason for DID’s confusion with possession is that when “alters”—alternate personalities—feel threatened, they will try to scare away the threat by behaving like demons, taking on animal personalities that might, for example, “behave like dragons.”
So, at what point does one give up on the possibility of DID being the cause and deduce that demonic possession is to blame?
“If they say ‘I feel evil,’ it is usually because they have seen something evil, but if that is not the case, then there may be a symptom that someone is demonized,” he says.
DID usually results from severe abuse of some sort in childhood. Herschel writes that though he was beaten up, picked on and cruelly isolated at school for being a poor, fat kid with a stutter, he did not endure the kind of childhood abuse—usually sexual—that is often presented as a hallmark of DID. He did, however, see something that was pure evil.
The Klan and the Hero
On page 83 of “Breaking Free,” Herschel describes how members of the Ku Klux Klan would sometimes stalk black kids as they walked home from school through the fields and woods outside Wrightsville. He doesn’t explain how he knew they were Klansmen, but for me, he doesn’t have to. They were white, they were rednecks, and it was 1968—so it’s a safe bet that they were. I never saw a Klansman in his “robes,” in middle Georgia, but I knew people who were card-carrying members of the Klan. They had dwindled in number by the time I came along, but membership in the Klan, I believe, was far, far more common than most white southerners will admit. A Klansman I interviewed in the ’90s rattled off a list of names that were as familiar to me as my backyard—maybe not the first names, but the family names, and yet, if you asked most whites in Georgia about it, they will swear to you that no one in their families ever wore those sheets.
If the Klansmen, Herschel writes, caught a child, they might perform a mock lynching, something he witnessed first hand at the age of six.: “A young boy, not much older than I was at the time, standing wide-eyed and sobbing, his pants stained with his urine, his thin arms and hands helplessly tugging at the coil of rope around his neck, while all around him a group of white men poked him … knocking him off balance … The boy shivered in fear and begged and pleaded … What we witnessed was horrifying and did have the effect the Klan wanted—for years, we all walked around with our heads on a pivot, wondering who might be coming up behind us. … In time, I discovered that I was terrified of crowds … Crowds are anonymous and unknown, and who was to say that anyone of those people in that crowd couldn’t be a Klansman?”
Despite Herschel’s declaration that he never suffered perverse abuse of the kind that most Americans—thanks to Hollywood—associate with DID, David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University School of Medicine, says that what Herschel witnessed, especially because it occurred at such a young age, would certainly be traumatic enough to spark the fragmentation of his identity.
“The actual definition of DID refers to ‘experiencing or witnessing’ a traumatic event,” says Spiegel. “Certainly if you are watching someone go through something like that, it is going to affect you. It’s called having empathy.”
Furthermore, he explains, if Herschel were part of a community where he was discouraged from talking about what he had seen, the risk was greater that he would develop alternate personalities.
“When there is a conspiracy of silence, and you try to go on about your life as if nothing has happened, but your life is really pretty scary, you might become fragmented,” he says.
Far from anything as exotic as demon possession, it’s likely that it’s the brain’s chemistry, according to Spiegel, that’s to blame. Spiegel who has extensively researched DID, explains how the way two small parts of the brain, the hippocampus and amygdala, handle cortisol, a chemical released in times of stress. People who have suffered severe trauma, he says, tend to have smaller hippocampi and amygdalas. The hippocampi (humans have two) handle memory. The amygdala is a kind of processor for emotional reactions triggered by memories. The verdict is not yet in on whether people who are born with smaller hippocampi are more vulnerable to DID when exposed to stress, or whether it’s the stress—early in life—and its resulting big dose of cortisol that shrinks the hippocampi.
“It’s probably some of both,” Spiegel says. What the lack of ‘memory space’ means in the context of DID is that when a child is developing his identity, and experiences a traumatic event, he protects himself, in a way, by relegating the memory to some other aspect or ‘alter’ or blocking it out entirely. How exactly that happens, isn’t known.
Herschel directly relates the development of one of his alters to seeing the mock-lynching and his subsequent fear of crowds: “I developed the Hero alter to help me deal with crowds,” he writes.
Movie buffs might be disappointed by Herschel’s alters’ utilitarian names. Aside from “Hero,” he also writes about “the Sentry,” and “the Judge,” the ones who were always standing guard and rarely let him become emotionally intimate with people; “the Daredevil,” who loved motorcycles and fast cars (and probably the Olympic bobsled event at Albertville, France in 1992); “the Warrior” who won football games with sheer aggressive force but respected fairness; “the Consoler”; “the Enforcer”; and “the Shadow,” who was an “assassin,” violent and without a sense of right and wrong; as well as others. Herschel claims that he experienced bouts of memory loss during the time that alters were in charge, and Douglas Bremner, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine, says such bouts are common to those who have DID, but he hastens to explain that alters are not what movies like “Sybil” and “Three Faces of Eve” make them appear to be—almost entirely separate people, who seem to borrow one’s body for a while.
“They are all defective personalities,” he says. “They are all these half-developed personalities. The names come in because in some cases a person is giving them names just to keep up with all of them.”
Those personalities, Bremner adds, all fall within a certain range.
“A person with DID doesn’t go from being a sexy model who speaks French to being a totally different person who speaks Dutch.”
Yet, Herschel’s personality/personalities covers/cover a broad range. He loves Shakespeare, ballet—which he danced at one time—being a businessman, a football player, an Olympic athlete.
In the prologue of his book, he talks about the “Big Three” symptoms of DID: amnesia, depersonalization—feeling as if one’s body “operates on its own and has stopped being controlled by the self”—and derealization. With the last one, the image of little, rural, somewhat mysterious Wrightsville, Ga. comes to mind, and that early morning drive he took to Athens to join the Bulldogs, and later, his journey to the Generals, the Cowboys, the Vikings, the Eagles, the Giants, and somewhere in there the U.S. Olympic team in the snow of the Alps.
“Derealization,” Herschel writes, “is the feeling that the world is distant or disappearing; has become foreign, unreal, and strange; and that time has slowed down or even stopped.” SP