Mississippi Stories

So, if you have been following this blog longer than a week you will be surprised that I am posting again. I usually average about three or four posts a year.  But it's January and I am inspired and excited and it’s too cold for me to be distracted with outdoor things so you are getting more writing, yay! 

Last summer the editors at the Christian Century asked me if I would like to visit the new Civil Rights Museum in Mississippi and write about it for their magazine.  I jumped at the opportunity. They even helped pay for the trip!  I also used money from my Louisville Institute grant and tacked this trip on to a visit to the Federation for Southern Farmer’s Cooperative in Epes, Alabama, where I was born (…I'll have to write more on that later).  I brought my fifteen-year-old son while my husband and daughters stayed home to tend the chickens and dogs. I asked my brother and his dog Stripes to come up from New Orleans and meet up with us in Jackson. (For the record, I paid the extra fee for the dog to stay in our room, he's a very sweet and well-behaved dog)

On our way home my son and I took a detour to drive up Mt Cheaha to watch the sunset from the highest peak in Alabama. After wading through such emotionally intense waters in the museums, I wanted to be intentional about pausing and
soaking in natural beauty.

Then I wrote and rewrote and asked for an extension and stressed and agonized and dealt with sciatica and plantar fasciitis.  (I include this because I'm convinced that many of us carry psychological trauma from racism in our bodies.  Ross Gay wrote one of my favorite essays in Some Thoughts on Mercy, maybe I just needed to stretch and wear better shoes, maybe it was a combination) I wondered how to write a review that was honest and balanced and something that might make people think and be challenged and be encouraged and I finally finished.  I was pretty surprised to hear that it ended up on the cover of their January 16 print edition and is available to read here

 In the spring I had written a piece for Sojourners about the new Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum and Memorial in Alabama.  In that case, I asked the editors directly.  This invitation from the Century was the first piece that I didn’t pitch to anyone. It was so cool to be “on assignment.”  Two museum pieces in a row doesn’t exactly make me a museum reviewer but if museums could be “my beat” I’d be so thrilled.

The staff at the Mississippi museums were all super helpful and gracious.  I hope that in my writing I was able to convey the very valuable work of the two Mississippi Museums, while also conveying the very unfinished work of healing from racism in our nation, in the south and in our hearts, minds and bodies.   

The weekend we came to Jackson, there was a large Gun Show happening at the Jackson Trade Mart not far from the Museum and across the street from where we were staying.  This truck was among many that flowed in and out of the parking lot as I spent my day inside the museum.  I wish they knew, I wish they were listening to the stories in those museums. My brother was walking his dog at night near the hotel and a man who was there for the gun show told my brother to be careful, not to walk this neighborhood at night.  "He thinks I'm white," my brother told me later, "he thinks I'm on his team, that I would agree with him and be afraid."

As I mentioned in the Mississippi piece, we ate dinner at a very good soul food restaurant where I met a civil Rights Veteran named Ineva Mae Pittman.   She graciously allowed me to record and share our conversation recorded on September 1,2018 at Bully’s Restaurant.  You may listen to it here: 

I had to pause because she gave me her phone number.  I'm still learning how to edit sound so you can listen to part two of the conversation here.  I included here what I took out of my piece, a conversation about my confusion that a current member of the Klan is also a current member of the museums.  Since it was based on hearsay, I can understand why the editors didn't want to include it.  I kept her response "That is the Mississippi way of life" and called Mrs Pittman later (in a conversation that is not recorded) to get her permission to change it to fit the finished piece: 

I also spoke with Greta Brown Bully, who runs the restaurant with her husband.  We talked about racism, confederate flags, mass incarceration, education. I also told her that when I saw the name "Bully" I said I really didn't want to go because I felt like my spirit had been bullied too much in the museum and I didn't want to be in a place called Bully's!  My experience at Bully's was full of joy and sincere welcome, the opposite bullying. You can listen to that conversation here:  

Earlier in our conversation, (before I asked if I could record) Greta told me to watch a 2012 film called Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story. It's about a restaurant owner named Booker Wright who spoke honestly about racism in Mississippi in the mid 1960's. His interview aired on NBC documentary called Mississippi a Self Portrait.  Mr. Wright's honesty cost him his business and his life. He was shunned by the black community for speaking up, his restaurant was firebombed, he was pistol-whipped by a police officer and ultimately murdered- all for admitting that when he smiles at his white customers, he is giving them what they want, not his true self. The story also focuses on the journalist who interviewed Booker Wright and his regrets over the consequences of airing the interview.

Greta told me she wasn’t afraid for me to record our conversation. We can count this as progress. Yet that memory of Booker Wright and the real consequences of speaking honestly were at the forefront of her consciousness.  You can watch a short preview of the film here:

Booker's Place Short

While I was recording these conversations my son had wandered off to take pictures.  It got dark, quickly, and I was nervous.  He didn't know the neighborhood and nobody knew him and he is walking around with a big camera around his neck.  Of course, I was scared.  It's a different kind of scared that I feel when I see large trucks with Confederate flags, but it's still fear.  Greta hopped in her car and drove one direction and my brother and I drove the other direction.  When she returned my son to me I hugged her and said, "Now we are family."

I feel sick every time I hear Jamaal Kashoggi’s name mentioned in the news. I feel sick when people say his "death"- as if it happened by accident, not his "torture and murder." I'm sick that our president and his cronies consider Saudi Arabia a close friend.  I imagine them taking notes, asking just how they too could succeed at successfully dismembering and silencing the press, their enemies, one finger at a time.  I wonder if this trip to Saudi Arabia was seized as a learning opportunity, just as the framers of South African Apartheid traveled the American South to learn best practices in repression. (Yes, they sure did, look it up).

This may seem like a random aside.  Why bring up the killing of a Saudi journalist in a Turkish Embassy if you are writing about racialized violence and fear in the South?  We can't stay in our lanes here.  We need to be attentive to the insidious ways of injustice at all levels including at our border and across the world.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute just rescinded the Fred Shuttlesworth Award which was to be presented to Angela Davis this February.  Davis is a Birmingham native and a strong voice for human rights, including the Palestinian people.  In 2001, my sister and I traveled to Durban, South Africa to attend the NGO Forum of the UN World Conference Against Racism and we heard Angela Davis speak.  She has spent her life working and speaking up for human rights.  She is being accused of anti-semitism even though she has been quite clear, among many other activists including many Jewish activists, that justice for Palestine is part of a larger human rights conversation. Here is a video with her response to these events.

There is a calculated risk that comes with speaking up. But the alternative- silence, a smile and a nod, another generation of hatefulness- we can’t bear.  All the fire inside would surely destroy us and our families faster than any external attempts at violence.

So, I write. I look out my window at cardinals at the bird feeder.  I thank God for my cold fingers. And I pray.  Thanks for the work that you are doing, wherever you are, to spread love at all costs, it matters. And thanks for reading, listening, and speaking up.