In defense of Mississippi, the place where I became a writer

When talking to people, it doesn’t take long before I get asked where I’m from. My thudding American accent, still firmly attached after nearly 20 years in New Zealand, gives it away.

“California,” I’ll usually say, which will typically bring up talk of Hollywood, skiing, surfing, Disneyland, or all of the above.

But I’m also from Mississippi, which often gets a very different reaction when I say that – a slight twist of the lip, widening of the eyes. Mississippi is a word which feels haunted, slippery with meaning. There’s no more evocative American state name, with all that entails. 

I visited Mississippi last month for the first time since 1999. It seemed much further from New Zealand than California where most of my family and friends live, and yet in the last year or two I’ve had a hankering to see those Southern skies again, to visit the friends and relatives still scattered around Mississippi, to get back in touch with a important chapter of my life that had started to seem so very distant. 

The roots of my family run deep there. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, in a quiet cemetery tucked away down shadowy side roads. 

I lived there myself from the ages of 18 to 25, from a freshman in college to a fumbling young working journalist. It’s a formative time in anyone’s life when you start to figure out who you’ll be. 

Oxford, Mississippi is where I became a writer, where I went from being one of those people who’d talk about being a writer to someone who actually got paid cash money for stringing words together. I was a performative oddball California kid dropped into the Deep South. 

At Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, I discovered more than the science fiction and fantasy that marked an awful lot of my reading through high school. My professors introduced me to everyone from James Baldwin to John Updike to Donna Tartt to Flannery O’Connor. I read widely, Southern lit and non-Southern lit. I wrote for a daily newspaper for the first time and I had my first paying journalism jobs there, and began avidly scribbling comic books and even a daily comic strip on the side. 

When I lived in Oxford in the 1990s I was at the end of eras, although I didn’t know it. Stark, raw Delta bluesmen like RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough would play to beer-addled frat boys, who didn’t know or care they were the last of their kind. At the local townie bar City Grocery, whiskey-soaked writing legends like Willie Morris, Larry Brown and Barry Hannah would hold court – they’re all gone now, memorialised by little bronze plaques on the bar. I took Hannah’s short story class at Ole Miss and churned out some pretty godawful tales before I realised journalism and comics were probably more my speed than great Southern literature. 

This year, I had a wonderful time returning catching up with old friends, mentors and co-workers, and despite the nearly 30 years that had passed in some ways it felt like yesterday that I had sat at the bars, that I’d browsed at Square Books and coffee’d up at Bottletree Bakery. Mississippi is a hell of a fun place, really.

But of course, it’s also full of shadows. 

Every place on Earth has a tragic past if you dig far enough, but Mississippi is unique in its stains and glories. I can think of nowhere else I’ve lived where the absolute worst and the shining best of a place are so deeply intertwined, where one seemingly cannot exist without the other. 

The horrors that were visited on the Black population in the 20th century still turn my stomach, the suppression, cruelty and casual dehumanisation. The story of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old boy tortured and murdered by white racists in 1955 for allegedly daring to whistle at a white woman – is as good as any to illustrate how horrible things could get.

My mother was just about the same age as Till and lived an hour or two away from where his blood was spilled. But she knew nothing about it at the time, until many years later when the story began to seep out into the wider culture. I often think about this, the two people of similar ages and totally, totally different worlds. The South endlessly romanticises itself, which can create both great stories and cover up hard truths. 

White Mississippian Wright Thompson, in The Barn, his masterful analysis of the Till killing, what led to it and the long suppression of it in history, tries to unpack the mysteries of an atrocity.

He writes that the more he looked at Till’s 1955 death, “the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view.” 

And yet, from that bloody soil has sprouted the seeds of change and art. Coming back to Mississippi, I felt loved by the Southern charm, the humidity and weedy kudzu (an invasive vine) carpeting everything, and the stories everywhere, the stories that inspired me and so many others. So much fine art and literature comes from there – William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, younger folk like Jonathan Miles and Kiese Laymon, music from Elvis to BB King that changed the world.

The best of its authors are constantly questioning Mississippi, instead of glorifying some lost cause endlessly. “Mississippi’s not an easy place to love,” Ralph Eubanks writes in Ever Is A Long Time, his excellent, deeply thoughtful memoir of growing up Black in small-town Mississippi and learning how the government actively spied on Black citizens. 

A place can have a terrible past and yet still have things to admire and love; in our everything-is-good-or-evil digital world that stokes perpetual outrage, it can be hard to explain a place that is full of troubles and pain, and still working hard to be better, and can be full of kindness, hospitality and talent. Mississippi is complicated. Isn’t everywhere?

“It is not hard to understand the fierce chauvinism of Mississippi patriots,” the late Stanley Booth wrote in his book of essays on Southern music, Rythm Oil. “To stay there, you would have to convince yourself you loved it.”

My time at Ole Miss in the 1990s was marked with endless wrestling over race in what we’d now call “culture wars” – over whether the anthem “Dixie” was racist, over the university’s white throwback plantation owner mascot Colonel Reb, over the Black editors at the Daily Mississippian and the waving of the Rebel Confederacy flag. It draws a fierce pride and at times defensiveness – lord knows I’ve had to defend Mississippi some over the years against the statements of people who’ve never been there. 

The Mississippi I visited last month felt like it was inching forward still with reconciling that past – the campus of Ole Miss was now dotted with prominent signs about the historic racial terror, and the looming town courthouse, as Southern an icon as it gets, now also features an account of the lynchings in Lafayette County. A monument to James Meredith, who became the first Black student at Ole Miss after bloody, fatal protests in 1962, now stands proudly beside the campus library.  It says “courage,” in bold letters.

Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and while that’s slipped into the realm of cliche, that’s still as Mississippi a thought as you can get. 

Despite what some folks running the country these days like to think, coming to grips honestly with the past doesn’t make you weaker. It takes, like the Meredith monument says, courage.

“Confronting its many imperfections, rather than hiding from them, makes it easier to love,” Eubanks writes. 

I’d much rather have a Mississippi that accepts and interrogates its past, rather than longs for imagined perfect glory days. I lived in Mississippi, loved a lot about it, grimaced at some things, and learned so very much about stories, writing and myself that I was happy to revisit for a few sultry August days and nights.

It is still not quite like anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without a little Mississippi in my blood.