Riddle of Sophocles : A Tale of Learning--and Wisdom

BANKS, Ark. — During the whole of a quiet morning in the Piney Woods, the old man tried hard to understand the way it had turned out.

His faded brown eyes looked straight at his visitor. He reached into everything he knew for an explanation. Once more, he failed; and he looked down at his shoes.

“I have,” he said deeply, “had a load on me.”

His name is Eddie Lovett. He had just turned 72. He is a dirt farmer, the son of a sharecropper, the father of six children and a man who has assembled a library of 40,000 books on his plowed and planted land here in the trees. He figures he has read 10,000 of them.

An Erudite Man

He is lettered through only the eighth grade but takes no shame in that. “I am an erudite man,” he says, speaking a fact and not a boast. He knows Aristotle’s philosophy, and he knows that “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton, the captain of a slave ship who got religion on the high seas.

The nature of prodigious self-education is freedom--to pursue the important and the unimportant, the significant as well as the simply interesting. Together, this freedom and the range that it offers, unfettered by the strictures of professional academics and pedants, would by now have made Eddie Lovett a wise man. So one would think.

His life has been filled with this rare kind of learning, an experience so natural it has been a pleasure. Unable to call himself a Ph.D., the honorific of many far less knowledgeable, he signs his name: Eddie Lovett, Polyhistor. “Poly, that’s the Greek root for many. A person learned in many subjects.” Among friends, he is known less formally, but with respect, as “the Piney Woods Thoreau.”

But his life also has been filled with pain, the kind that tests a man’s assurance of what he really knows. It would be the nature of this kind of experience--shattering; even, in this case, a cause for shame--to have turned Eddie Lovett into a doubter of himself and of everything he has come to recognize, over the years, as wisdom. So one would think.

One Errant Son

Five of his children have prospered; but, despite the extraordinary love, guidance, discipline and encouragement he has given to all of them--to learn and to grow and to do well--one of his sons was taken away not long ago to Cummins state prison near Grady, convicted of kidnaping: a kidnaping some think was murder.

“I taught my children,” Eddie Lovett said, looking up now from his shoes and back into his visitor’s eyes. Unfailingly gracious, he had offered a chair in his small brick home. He had put on a dress shirt and dark coat for the occasion. His hands were calloused but gentle--soft touches for the written knowledge of generations.

“I taught them right here, by the fireside, and later when they were in school, to get a good education and to try to make useful citizens, good, decent, law-abiding. That’s why it’s so crazy about Sophocles.”

This is the story of Eddie Lovett and Sophocles, his son. It is a story of learning--and of wisdom.

Eddie Lovett praises his own father--who, like his father before him, was a humble but learned man. His name was Bertram Lovett, but everybody called him Shoat, as in a fat, half-grown hog, because he was, indeed, chubby; even some of his kin didn’t know his real name until they saw it on his tombstone. Like 90% of the blacks in southern Arkansas at the turn of the century, he was a sharecropper. And he was a log cutter. But none of that made it any the less important to Shoat Lovett that his children follow in the family tradition: He saw to it that every one of them acquired learning too.

“He didn’t like us to roam around like other boys, shooting marbles and things,” Eddie Lovett remembers. “When he came out of the fields at night, we had to count and recite poems and things of that nature. ‘Course, he had the Bible and different books, and we’d get some books out. Oh, he had a lot of his father’s books. Some were McGuffey’s Readers. And then he had his own father’s Blueback speller. But the first book was the Bible--and a book written about the Bible, big and thick. It was known as ‘Daniel and the Revelation.’ It was beautiful. Very beautiful. Everything in there was pictorial--different things, the dragons and the Devil and everything. It would refer you to the Bible and would tell you where to find everything in there. It had a lot of poems. Allegories. Daddy would teach us to say these poems. Four beasts, you see them coming up out of the sea, and you see Daniel standing there. All them seven horns and them seven-headed dragons. They’d tell us to go to bed; and we’d be talking too much, and they’d say, ‘Better be quiet now, or that dragon’ll get you!’ Things of that nature.” He chuckles. “We loved it.”

By the time Eddie was 4, he could read. When he turned 6 and went to school, he was far ahead of his grade. So were his sister and two brothers. But school was not an everyday thing. Black children were allowed just five months of classes each year--two in the summer and three in the winter. But they couldn’t begin until the cotton crop was laid by--until all the plowing and planting and weeding had been done. That usually cost them one of the summer months. Then they couldn’t resume until the crop was in--until all the picking had been done. That usually cost them one of the winter months. Starting when he was 7, Eddie hoed, picked and chopped cotton from “can to can’t:” from the time he could see in the morning until he couldn’t see at night. He averaged three months of school each year--sometimes less.

But it created a desire to learn that was hard to satisfy. And in time, Eddie developed a special yearning: More than anything, he wanted books of his own. After 43 months in school, he finished the eighth grade--as far as blacks were allowed to go. And now, after the fields had been laid by and after the crops were in, he worked for wages, splitting rails, cutting cordwood, baling hay--for 50 cents a day, 60 cents, 75 cents, $1 a day. But it was not enough to live on and buy books at the same time--not even one.

Then, when he was 18, it happened. The day is as memorable to Eddie Lovett as the first time he fell in love. In a magazine, he had seen an advertisement for a book--about mathematics: how to measure, weigh, calculate. Farming problems. Corn. Beans. Tea. Milk. How many tons of hay in a stack. How to convert, figure sizes and areas and volumes, quickly, in one’s head. “Ropp’s Commercial Calculator,” it was called. He was making $2.60 a week. He closed his eyes and ordered it. Eddie was dredging a log pond when the postman honked from the road: There was a package, COD. Eddie ran from the field, gave the postman three-quarters of a week’s pay--and carried his possession to his house. It was an inch thick, and it was bound in leather. But there was no time to give it anything but a glance. The faster he finished the pond, the sooner he could sit down and look through it, then start over at the beginning and study it. With a mule and a slip--an iron shovel with two wooden handles--he dragged up half a square yard of mud at a time. In his excitement, he caught his foot under the lip of the slip. It cut deeply into a joint--all the way to the bone. He was taken to a doctor, who clamped his tendons together and sewed up the wound.

The doctor gave him pills for pain. Finally, when Eddie got home, he held his book in his hands. He opened it. He paged through it. Then, slowly, with a pen--and red ink--he wrote inside the front cover:

“September 8, 1934.”

The next year, Eddie and his family saved $50. They paid it down on 100 acres near Schuler and began farming for themselves. In his spare time, Eddie continued to work for others, and he bought another book--actually a four-volume set--called “A Carpenter’s Guide.” It, too, was leather-bound. It cost $6. He paid it off at $1 a month. He plowed behind mules 12 to 14 hours a day, made $10 extra each month--and bought another book: “Astronomy for Amateurs.” It told how to build a crude telescope--and an instrument called a degree ruler, shaped like a bow and arrow. He used it to find stars. He told people that someday man would walk on the moon. They laughed. He carried his books into the fields in a leather grip. At noon, while everybody else ate and talked under a shade tree, Eddie read. “Sometimes it’d be mathematics. Sometimes it would be my astronomy book, because I loved to read about the moon and stars. I never worked too hard that I couldn’t study me a lesson. Never. They’d call me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ I’d be under a shade tree studying.” In time, he made a fourth purchase--a larger set of books. “I think there was eight. Name of it was ‘The Educator’s Library.’ Hardback. American history. Ancient history. Plato. Aristotle.” When he got married, on May 1, 1940, to Lucille Sheppard, he owned a trunk; it held two pairs of khaki pants, a few shirts--and books.

The country was at war, and their marriage fell victim to his first tour of duty with Army engineers in North Africa and Europe. They had a son, Lawrence, whom Lucille took to Indiana after their divorce. She reared him well. After the war in Europe, Eddie re-enlisted. He was sent to Japan. Eventually he returned to Arkansas, where he married Nelsie Lee Jones, who had a 2-year-old boy named Ralph. She and Eddie had four more children. He named each after someone he found in his books. One was Enima, a name suggested by Nietzsche. Another was JoAnna, whose namesake was one of the women at Jesus’ tomb. Still another was Yuri, honoring Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut and the first man to defy gravity and fly among the stars. And there was Sophocles, named after the Greek playwright.

Because the country had gone to war again--this time in Korea--two of the children were born while Eddie served his third tour in the Army. But everywhere he went, his heart and mind were on his family--and his books. He had taken some overseas with him. He carried about 50 books through North Africa and Europe in a blue denim barracks bag. Friends would help him lug the bag up gangplanks; in return, he wrote letters for them. At night, he would go to the latrine, where the lights stayed on, and he would read until 2:30 a.m. He underscored passages, boxed paragraphs and wrote notes to himself in margins. On leave, he visited some of the finest libraries in the world--in Germany, Belgium, France, Holland, England, Italy, the Vatican. Sometimes his choices were singular: At a library in Naples, he read a 56-page commentary by Thomas Jefferson on the Bible. Other times, he selected more conventionally: Roman history. European history. World history. Descartes. Shakespeare. Even some physics. But more than anything, he fell in love with history. He took Army courses, including one on Far Eastern history while he was stationed on Guam. Before he was mustered out for the last time, at Ft. Gordon, Ga., he indulged in one of the few extravagances of his life: He paid $506 for a rare history of the slave trade.

In his years in and out of the Army, he acquired a remarkable number of books. Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The complete works of Shakespeare, in 40 volumes. “He’s the greatest.” The entirety of “The Story of Civilization,” by Will and Ariel Durant. Voltaire. Rousseau. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” by Edward Gibbon. “He’s hard to beat.” All the writings of Thomas Jefferson, including 400 words of his original Declaration of Independence that were cut before it was published. “You know, he said slavery would eventually disappear from America.” The complete writings of Woodrow Wilson. A 120-volume Department of the Army history of the Civil War. The collected works of Abraham Lincoln. All of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote.

Complete sets of the Britannica and World Book encyclopedias. National Geographics and Race Relations Reporters by the stack. Hundreds of phonograph albums. Brahms. Beethoven. Duke Ellington. Blues. Spirituals. Old slave songs, collected by the Smithsonian Institution. Bluegrass. All of Roy Acuff. Red Foley. Tennessee Ernie Ford. Eddie Arnold. Hank Williams.

In all, the books, periodicals and records totaled more than 2,000. He stacked them on shelves, tables and the floor in what he had finally come to call home--an unfinished house of tar paper and weathered boards with a tin roof on an acre of cleared land at the end of a dirt road, about three miles from Banks.

Then Eddie Lovett got another yearning. “I said, ‘I’m going to build me a library.’ ”

He drove into Banks, paid $40 for an abandoned building across from the general store, tore it down and had its quarter-sawed lumber hauled out to his place. He framed a 14-by-28-foot shack, covered its wooden walls with sheet metal, put in an attic, roofed it with boards, covered the boards with tin, hung double doors and installed a wood-burning stove. He ran short of money, so he did not have the chimney joints brazed; and he did without a metal vent where the chimney pipe passed through the roof boards. But he put in row upon row of shelves.

He moved in his phonograph, typewriter, a globe and souvenirs from every country he had visited. He found places for a few tools and his children’s bicycle. He hung pictures in oval frames: people of importance--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Queen Anne, Hirohito, Shoat Lovett. On the rows of shelves, he placed his record albums, periodicals--and all of his books.

It was the realization of a dream: He had a library of his own. He called it the Hippocrene Library, after the Hippocrene fountain, where Greek myth has it that the winged horse Pegasus pawed the ground, uncovering a spring sacred to the Muses.

He arranged his books according to the Dewey Decimal System. And he put up a hand-lettered sign: Hic Habitat Felicitas.

Here Lives Happiness.

Eddie’s wife died, leaving him with five children under 12. People said he ought to let others raise them. “I said, ‘Well, we Lovetts don’t do that.’ I said, ‘We raise our own children and eat our own bread.’ Some people said, ‘You need a woman.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she would have to be my wife.’ ” And there was nobody else Eddie Lovett loved as he had loved his wife. “So I raised them by my lone self.”

First, he committed himself to being there for them. That meant he would not turn his knowledge into a career. “You know, some people, for money, they walk off and leave their children. But not me. No. I said, ‘Now, I’m going to raise my children,’ and I said, ‘I think that would be my greatest monument.’ ” He adopted his stepson, sold his car to pay leftover medical bills--and farmed. He received a veteran’s pension and eventually some Social Security. That was about the only time people saw him--when he came to Warren, the Bradley County seat, on the third day of each month to cash his checks.

Second, he saw to it that his children got the learning that he and his wife valued so highly. “I started them,” he says, “in the cradle, so to speak.” By the time Sophocles was 5, he could read--well. On his first day in the first grade, Sophocles, along with JoAnna, who was in the third grade, and one other black youngster, also in the third grade, desegregated the school at Hermitage, 12 miles away. It had been more than 10 years since the Supreme Court had ruled that schools had to be integrated. “I told the Board of Education, ‘It’s got to be done,’ ” Eddie says. He insisted that his children be allowed to leave the district’s inferior all-black school and attend the school for whites. “I said, ‘Do you think a child can get a quality education in a school that is the lowest rated?’ ”

When his children came home every evening, dinner was ready. “I had plenty of chicken and everything roasted for ‘em, and then I’d get them right onto their lessons. I kept TV out of my house altogether--there are a lot of programs, now, that’re nothing but trash. Sometimes they’d do the lessons in the library, because I had heat out there. After they got their school lessons, they’d be out there researching on other things. I always had them go to bed at 10; but over the weekends, they wouldn’t come out of there sometimes until after midnight. Same thing when my girls started to courtin’. My cardinal rule was ‘in by 10.’ And I didn’t have not one tittle of trouble. In the mornings, we took our baths in washtubs. And I had a portable bathtub; you could sit down in that one. I had the bath water heated for them every morning when they’d get up. And then I’d listen to their lessons. My children never left without going over their lessons. I saw to that.”

The children did well, including Sophocles. “He was good in his books.” But he had a mind of his own. A kindly woman, Madge York, who was his sixth-grade teacher, remembers that he had metal tips on the toes of his shoes. “He’d clack down the hall, deliberately tapping the metal tips on the hard tile, clacking and echoing,” she says. “I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ He said, ‘Well, I will.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know about that.’ And I wrote Mr. Lovett a note and said I was having problems with Sophocles. And he said, ‘You will have no more.’ And he had the metal tips taken off. Sophocles wanted to study--even more than Yuri. But he wanted to do his own thing too.”

Eddie Lovett was a rare sort of father. His heroes and heroines were Socrates, Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin and Marco Polo; Prudence Crandall, Mary Magdalene, the Venerable Bede and Confucius; Jane Fonda, Spartacus, Thurgood Marshall and Hannibal; Ho Chi Minh, Susan B. Anthony, Robert E. Lee and Anita Bryant; Eleanor Roosevelt and Geronimo. He was not fond of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon or Sigmund Freud. He read widely--but held firmly that the Bible was the most important book. “I’ve read it from Genesis to Revelations eight times.” He was for protecting the environment--but against fighting wars. He was adamant about civil rights--but never militant. “I’m not for all that protesting and marching. I told my children, ‘When you grow up, you can decide for yourself; but until then, Daddy don’t allow it.’ ” He wrote letters to Robert Newton, editor of the weekly Warren Eagle-Democrat, who printed them so often and at such length that he was introduced one year at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast as Eddie Lovett’s publisher. Eddie’s subjects ranged from bloodhounds to Jefferson Davis to the origins of Christmas. “His letters sure beat the other letters to the editor,” says Virginia Cuthbertson, the Warren librarian, who began keeping a file of them. ‘They’re fascinating.”

Charles Kuralt profiled Eddie on the “CBS Evening News.” Eddie enjoyed it. The children went over to an uncle’s to watch the show. Eddie didn’t go, just as he had not gone to watch when men had finally walked on the moon: He had known what he would see--he had told people how Neil Armstrong would hop like a rabbit, because gravity was weaker up there. He welcomed people who came to visit and sign the guest register in his library. But as he told Kuralt, “I’m really living for my children”--they were his greatest happiness. And when colleges and universities asked him to come to speak, enticing him with the prospect of honorary degrees, he politely declined. “I’ll stay home,” he replied, “and be with my own.”

Enima made straight A’s. She was salutatorian of her class, went on to college, received a bachelor’s degree, married a chief petty officer in the Navy and had two sons. JoAnna made straight A’s. She was valedictorian of her class, went on to college, received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, married a captain in the Army and had a son and a daughter. Ralph’s grades were not as good--”He made some Fs”--but he won a number of commendations; and after graduation, he went to work for a timber company in Warren. Yuri could not match his sisters’ grades, either. “He made a few Fs--not many. They were in his lower grades.” But he, too, got commended. He joined the Air Force.

Sophocles made A’s, Bs and Cs--”didn’t make no Ds at all and no Fs.” He read a lot, but “mostly science fiction and mysteries,” his father recalls. He seemed to run with a rowdy crowd. “He could be stubborn,” says Madge York, his teacher.

“He was,” his father says, “kind of a rambler.”

Jan. 7, 1975, dawned cold. Eddie Lovett stoked the stove in the library and went back into the house to put water in the tub for the children. He stayed a bit longer than usual. As he turned to go back out to the library, he glanced out the door of his house--and saw smoke.

“I said: ‘Oh, wait! Good God!’ ”

Sparks had blown out through the unwelded joints in the library chimney--and caught in the attic where there was no metal vent for the chimney pipe. “It was burning and roaring. It didn’t take it long. See, it was old lumber. Pitch pine.”

JoAnna ran into the burning building.

She came back out with his pictures and an adding machine.

The others wanted to try for more.

“I said, ‘Huh-uh. No. No.’ It was falling. I said, ‘No, no, no.’

“Within, I was crying.

“The children, they all was crying. ‘Let me save that there, over yonder! Let me get it!’

“I said, ‘Just let it go, Baby.”

Over time, the Hippocrene Library collection had grown to 4,000 books--and the fire burned for four days.

It destroyed everything.

Charles Kuralt heard about it. “We mentioned the fire on the evening news,” he says. Others broadcast and published accounts of what had happened.

On the ashes of the Hippocrene Library, Eddie began to build. People started sending books. And they mailed money. “I took that money, and I bought materials. I used every nickel of it--and I sent them statements of what I bought with the money. And some of them said, ‘Oh, you didn’t have to do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I wanted to let you know I’m honest.’ I had no insurance, and I couldn’t have built it if my well-wishers hadn’t sent me money and books.” At the exact spot where the Hippocrene Library had stood, he framed a slightly larger building--20 by 48 feet. Again, he covered its wooden walls and its wooden roof with sheet metal; he put in double doors; he built stairs, and he installed shelves.

He called it the Phoenix Library.

“Like a Phoenix bird,” he said, “it shall rise from the ashes.”

People sent new souvenirs: a mini cannonball dug out of the sand at Ft. Sumter; a piece of metal melted by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. He added a new globe and small tables he made from Honduran mahogany and inlaid with eagles. He set up the adding machine JoAnna had saved. He considered where to hang the pictures of FDR, Hirohito, Queen Anne and Shoat Lovett. A high school in Houston fashioned a 4-foot bird shaped like a Phoenix and sent it with best wishes. Someday, as soon as he had enough money, he would ask an artist to add plumage in gold and crimson. Then he would encase the bird in glass, mount it on casters and place it proudly in the middle of the floor, surrounded by his books.

Some things were gone forever, including his rare history of the slave trade--and “Daniel and the Revelation,” with its seven-headed dragons. But the books he received were astounding. Eighteen-wheelers pulled up the dirt road and unloaded thousands of volumes directly from publishers: “Psychological Foundations of Education.” “Search for Human Understanding.” “Comparative Studies in Organizational Behavior.” One truck brought 20,000 books from Milwaukee alone, where people had gotten together and collected every spare they could find. Some of the trucks had trouble turning around. To leave, their drivers had to negotiate the dirt road in reverse for nearly a mile. And books kept coming. Merle Miller’s “Plain Speaking.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s “A Thousand Days.” Margaret Truman’s “Harry S Truman.” William Manchester’s “The Death of a President.” New sets of Shakespeare, Will and Ariel Durant, Edward Gibbon, Bruce Catton. A new set of McGuffey’s “Eclectic Reader” and Burnham’s “Celestial Handbook.” Books by Martin Buber, Robert A. Caro, Walt Whitman, Pearl Buck and Jack London. “Trial,” by Tom Hayden. “My Life,” by Golda Meir. “Abraham Lincoln,” by Carl Sandburg. “The Life and Works of Flavius Josephus.” “The World of George Washington.” “The Dawn of European Civilization.”

He began rebuilding his collection of record albums: Handel’s “Messiah.” “Eight Sonatas for Diverse Instruments.” Tchaikovsky. Mozart. Beethoven’s “Bicentennial Collection.” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Early Blues.” Elvis Presley. Chet Atkins. Merle Haggard. Johnny Cash.

Albums and books began arriving faster and in greater number than he could accommodate. He stacked them temporarily in crates. He figured the 4,000 books in his Hippocrene Library had been worth about $20,000. Now he estimated that he had 40,000 books, worth at least $100,000. They were more than his Phoenix Library could hold. He decided to build his brick home--and to give his old house over entirely to books.

Eventually, he would arrange them all, again, according to the Dewey Decimal System.

They arrested Sophocles on Sept. 26, 1975.

He had written two bad checks over in Calhoun County, for $50 apiece. “Get $13 worth of gas, but he’d write a $50 check,” Eddie says. “Then he would have some cash money that would go in his pocket, you know.” Eddie’s son pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years, with 4 1/2 years suspended on condition of good behavior. “That hurt me, and it hurt a lot. I got a lot of friends, and they know he’s from a good family, see? Oh, that hurts--that hurts me. Oh, Lord. Then I meet so many people. So many people ask me. In Warren, I’d walk maybe half a block--’Hey, where is Sophocles? Why did he do that?’ ‘Well, I just really don’t know. I’ve asked him, and he said he just did it.’ Things of that nature. Oh, it’s something--something to face.”

Sophocles served 115 days. He was released and went back to school. He graduated from Hermitage in May, 1977. On June 3, 1978, he drove Sue Ann Hall, a young woman from Warren, down Highway 15 south of town. “He told me we were going to have sex,” she later told the police. “I refused, and he told me he had a knife--and showed it to me in the glove compartment of the car and threatened to use it on me. He grabbed my shirt and started pulling on it and scratched me. I jumped out of the car and ran and hid until a car came by, which I flagged down, and which was a sheriff’s department car.” Sophocles was charged with criminal attempt to commit rape. He denied the charge, but deputies came up with a folding knife in a leather scabbard. He was tried at the Bradley County courthouse, in the middle of the square in Warren. A jury convicted him and fined him $500. The judge allowed him to pay the fine and court costs in weekly installments.

Eddie Lovett was pained, even more deeply than before. “Sophocles’ teachers, they were surprised. They’d say, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I’d say, ‘Don’t ask me; I can’t explain it. I just can’t tell you. I don’t know.’ They’d say, ‘We can understand a young boy getting in some trouble one time.’ They’d say, ‘We can kinda go along with that. But when he just keep on getting into things. . . . ‘ “ Now, when people ran into Eddie Lovett, “he was mostly on his way to court,” says Virginia Cuthbertson, the librarian. The “white Establishment” in Warren, says Robert Newton, the editor at the Eagle-Democrat, “got upset with Eddie because of the things Sophocles was doing.”

Then, on July 22, 1979, Sophocles stole two checks at the Selma Timber Co., south of Monticello, in Drew County. One was for $718.44. The other was for $504.83. “He was working there,” Eddie says. “He went and picked them up and left with them. He went to another county and cashed them.” Seven days later, he stole a chain saw from the P. E. Barnes Lumber Co., near Strong, in Union County. Neither place had been broken into. But he had left his fingerprints. The two stolen checks rested heavily on Eddie’s mind. He asked a brother for help. “He’s an old bachelor, he’s never been married, and so he paid the $500 off in one lump sum. And the $700, well, I paid that out at $50 a month. Didn’t want those people losing their money.” Sophocles was charged with burglary and theft. And then the shame got even worse. Eddie’s son claimed he had a venereal disease--”the claps,” he said. He was taken to a clinic in Monticello, where he escaped briefly by crawling through a restroom window. Then he tried to plead insanity. The judge ordered an evaluation. Psychiatrist Joe Hutchison concluded that Sophocles was “without psychosis” and recommended that he be returned to court. Sophocles stood, handcuffed and shackled, next to his father, in front of the bench. “Now, if you’re from a family of criminals, then it don’t amount to very much. But folks said, ‘Look-a-here! Eddie Lovett’s son.’ Everybody’s buckin’ their eyes and saying, ‘Oh, Lord!’ Everybody--it’s hard to face.” After some plea bargaining, Sophocles admitted his guilt and drew concurrent sentences. They totaled 10 years in prison. Eddie mortgaged his place to pay the attorney. “It was a hard pill to swallow.”

Sophocles served three years. He was granted parole, and he began seeing Barbara Sue Harris, a woman with a 7-year-old son, over in Harrell, not far across Moro Creek in Calhoun County. It was a stormy relationship. On July 22, 1985, Sophocles was charged with kidnaping the boy. The prosecuting attorney, Hamilton Singleton, says the youngster was returned four days later. “The family didn’t want to pursue the matter, so I dismissed the charge.” Sophocles took a job as a diesel mechanic at a quarry in Seagoville, Tex., on the southeastern outskirts of Dallas; and Barbara Harris went to Texas with him. Off and on, she would leave him, come back to Arkansas, then return to Seagoville. Last summer, she came back to her mother’s home in Harrell; and on Aug. 29, Sophocles arrived to ask Barbara to return with him to Texas. They spent the morning together; and then, at about noon, they got into his car in front of the house. She sat with her legs across his lap and with both feet sticking out his partly opened door. There was a gunshot. Sophocles pulled away with Barbara in the car. He drove to Texas--and Barbara’s family said they never saw her again. Twelve days later, Sophocles was arrested in Seagoville and charged with kidnaping. He waived extradition, was brought back to Arkansas and was jailed in Hampton, the Calhoun County seat.

“Eddie Lovett was in the sheriff’s office a lot, sitting there, after Sophocles was brought back,” says David Walters, publisher of the South Arkansas Accent, the weekly newspaper in Hampton. People were saying terrible things about Sophocles. “I heard he was downright mean,” Walters says. Although Eddie could hardly afford it, he engaged the best lawyer he could find--David F. Guthrie, from El Dorado. Sophocles’ trial started on Dec. 1. Each day, Eddie drove his old Ford pickup to Hampton, past the stoplight one block to the tan brick courthouse. The black hands on its white clock were stuck on Roman numerals that said it was 7:25--forever.

Sophocles was tried by an all-white jury. Guthrie, the defense counsel, and Hamilton Singleton, the prosecutor, say the court heard this testimony: One of Barbara’s nephews, who was 8 years old, saw Sophocles drag Barbara into the car. The boy said he heard her scream, “Help me! Help me!” Then there was the gunshot. Another of Barbara’s nephews, who had a car, said he tried to follow Sophocles and Barbara. He said he caught up with them at an intersection but could no longer see Barbara’s legs hanging out the door--or anything else of her. He said he gave chase, overturned his car and did not see Barbara or Sophocles again. On the stand, Sophocles said Barbara had gone with him freely. The gunshot, he said, came when Barbara took his pistol--he bought and sold guns for extra money--and fired it out the open passenger window of his car. He said he and Barbara heard gunshots in return--and left. When they arrived in Dallas, he said, Barbara wanted drugs. He said he bought her some cocaine. Then, later that week, he said, he gave another woman drugs, beer and $20 for sex--and Barbara found them together. He said Barbara got angry and left with the other woman. He said he never saw her again. “The state pointed in the direction of murder,” Guthrie says. “They pointedly asked Sophocles where the body was.”

The judge reminded the jury that the charge was kidnaping. The jurors convicted Sophocles of an even lesser charge--false imprisonment. They fixed his sentence at the minimum: Six years back in prison.

Prosecutor Singleton wondered aloud if it might have been to Sophocles’ benefit after all to have had a jury of whites--who knew him best as Eddie Lovett’s son.

But Eddie was grieved to distraction. Although he was pleased that the sentence had not been harsher, he was mortified that the testimony had been so sordid. And then there was the question of Barbara Harris. “I saw one of her sisters the other day in Harrell,” Eddie says, “and I asked her, and she said, no, they hadn’t heard nothing from her, and I told them I hoped she would come back, because that’s a stigma on my family, you know. Yes, that’s a stigma.”

The sun moved into the afternoon sky as Eddie Lovett sat quietly in his living room trying to explain it all to his visitor--and to himself.

How could this happen to him--to a man of exemplary virtue; a God-fearing man; a man who lived by his convictions that a good life means learning and that learning means “hard work, self-respect, respect for others, honesty, frugality, aspiration, inspiration and a lot of perspiration?”

What went wrong?

“I don’t know. I just--I really don’t know.”

Eddie Lovett groped for an answer. Maybe it was that Sophocles was knowledgeable--but that “he didn’t have any wisdom.”

He paused.

Wisdom, he offered, is what makes most people know not to take their second step before their first. Sophocles, Eddie said, thought he could get rich quickly. “I think he got with the wrong bunch, and somebody told him he could.”

Wisdom, Eddie added, also is not trying to be someone you’re not. “If I had to pick a philosopher, I’d pick Aristotle. Alexander the Great was one of his pupils. But he didn’t heed Aristotle’s admonition. Aristotle told him, ‘You are now about to embark upon a great enterprise that will take you far into many lands and amongst many peoples. Some are highly celebrated in arts and in arms. Some are savage and almost unknown. But wheresoever your victory be, the last counsel that I give you is that wheresoever your victory lead you, do not forget that you are a Greek.’

“In other words, Aristotle was telling Alexander the Great, ‘Be yourself.’ That was a man of wisdom talking to a man of learning. And this man of learning, Alexander the Great, thought he had more sense than the man of wisdom--and he was going to conquer the whole world. And it didn’t work.

“ ‘Be yourself,’ Aristotle was saying, ‘and don’t let knowledge be your ruin’ “--which includes realizing that you are not smarter than you are, and that there are some things that you cannot do.

“The more I learn,” Eddie Lovett said slowly, “the more I learn that I need to learn.”

Sophocles’ namesake, the Greek playwright, realized this. That was clear, Eddie said, when the playwright told fellow Greeks: “I know nothing and know that I know nothing.”

“That,” Eddie noted, “made him a wise man.”

Where does wisdom come from?

Eddie Lovett paused again.

“You really don’t get wisdom from books. No, no, no. That comes from--”

Pause.

“Above. That comes from above.”