Land Of Pain And Promise

Land Of Pain And Promise

The day I moved back to Mississippi after living in New York for 15 years, I drove into a full-fledged Confederate funeral procession. On the corner of North Lamar Boulevard and Price Street in Oxford, I got out of my car and stood under magnolia, maple, and live oak trees that shaded throngs of sweaty white men dressed up like the soldiers of Lee's army. Some marched with guns holstered, hoisting a battle flag that took up two lanes of the road.

Near the front of the procession, behind a gray hearse, was the brown face of Paula Tingle Hervey, wife of Anthony Hervey, the author of a book called Why I Wave the Confederate Flag, Written by a Black Man, who'd been killed in a car crash two weeks earlier. The whole pitiful spectacle, fueled by a longing for a time when neither the Herveys nor I would have been free, was the kind of demonstration that had prompted me to run away from the Deep South 22 years ago. And yet it was also part of why, 22 years later, I decided to run back home.

After leaving Mississippi for college in Ohio, graduate school in Indiana, and ultimately a professorship in New York, I wasn't sure how much home I'd find when I returned to the Deep South — nor how much home the Deep South might find in me. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, I spent summers and far more weekends than I wanted to with my grandmother in the small poultry town of Forest. Located 45 miles east of Jackson and 55 miles west of the Alabama state line, Forest was what demographers call a minority-majority community. Most of its citizenry was black, but most of the political, economic, and social power rested with the town's white residents.

When Grandmama was young, most of our family, along with more than 3 million other black Americans from the Deep South, moved to cities in the Midwest in search of decent jobs and less terrorizing forms of oppression. Rather than join the Great Migration, Grandmama chose to remain, working first as a domestic and later as a buttonhole slicer at a chicken-processing plant, which meant it was her job to cut open the bellies and pull out the guts. Even though she was legally forbidden to drive down certain roads, to enter certain stores, to use the bathroom of her choice, or to vote freely until she was middle-aged, she insisted that the region rightfully belonged to black Americans, too. "We worked too hard on this land to run to Milwaukee," she told me. "Some of us believed, and still believe, this land will one day be free."

As a child growing up in the Deep South, I found nothing speculative or surreal in asserting that all who worked the land should have equal access to quality food and housing, equal access to transformative education, and equal protection under the law. We descendants of those who refused to run saw corpses hanging, but to us, they looked like angels flying. We watched the gray tears of the hanging moss trees dripping over the land. When we think of those trees, even more than the gray of the moss we think of the dark, bleeding-red brown of those trees' creased bark. That same brown saturates the soil, birthing cotton, soybeans, collard greens, and purple hull peas in Greenwood, Mississippi. It coats our hollowed manufacturing plants in Memphis, Tennessee. It peeks out of the open doorways of haunted plantations, mansions, projects, trailers, and shacks in Little Rock, Arkansas. It lines the cracks of the hastily built Confederate monuments commemorating bruising parts of yesterday we've yet to reckon in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina. We see, smell, and feel the residue of that dark, bleeding-red brown in our region's music and literature, our classrooms and country stores, our churches.

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