I had lunch at the Madison Primos today. I ordered the shrimp remoulade and the gumbo. Dishes I've had maybe five hundred times before. As I understand it, the Primos family sold their interest in the business, although Kenneth sat just a few tables over from me. The purpose of the trip was to see how well I could get around using Uber. That part of the trip was flawless.
Before they died, both my grandmothers used a meal at Primos as a lure or reward for some task they had for me. Primos #2 across from the baptist hospital for smaller tasks and Primos Northgate for heavy lifting or longer trips. This continued from the beginning of my memory until their deaths, with a few trips to Morrison's Cafeteria and Shony's thrown in.
Both the recipe and the presentation of the dishes I ordered had changed considerably from those days. It was a bit unsettling. The shrimp remoulade remained exactly the same most of my life, but today it was different, both the preparation and the dressing. What I remembered was probably a recipe that Pop came up with in the thirties or forties, and that was what I was expecting, but I got something else.
What they brought me was good, but I couldn't help feeling the shifting of something lost. There was a time when most of the restaurants in Jackson were run by Greek immigrants, and they had a certain style and a very recognizable taste, and I'm worried that flavor is edging over the night's horizon. I tried to order a gingerbread man too, but they didn't have any. They had plenty of fudge squares, but that wasn't the memory I was trying to defrost.
Jackson peaked in the eighties. The poverty and racism that plagued us since Lefleur started trading furs on the banks of the Pearl River were at an all-time low. New construction was vigorous. Deposit Guarantee and Trustmark were so strong that out-of-state banks struggled to find a toe hold in our market; most didn't bother. It was the time of moderate democrat governors like Bill Winter and Ray Mabus and moderate mayors like Dale Danks.
Maybe we flew too close to the sun. The spell would soon break, and we began our decline that gained remarkable momentum as it headed groundward. The simple answer is that black families had a slightly higher birth rate than white families, and in the nineties, the balance of race electoral votes shifted along racial lines, causing something of a white panic to get out of town.
If you drive through Eastover or Woodland Hills today, there are actually more houses and more expensive houses than there were in the eighties. The Bible says that the poor will always be with us. It seems the wealthy are just as indelible. The upper middle class seems to have grown at a fairly steady pace. It's the middle class and the working class that fled. There was a dramatic rise in gun violence after Katrina that started an alarm bell warning everyone who could to get out of Jackson as soon as possible, leaving South and North Jackson with property values dropping so quickly that some people had to start all over from scratch in Madison or Rankin county.
In a sense, people panicked because people they knew also panicked, and nobody wanted to be the last one out. There was no Moses for this exodus, but there were property developers snatching up every bit of bottomland they could find, as long as it wasn't in Hinds county. There's this story that it was just the White middle and working class that fled, but that's not true, as many black middle and working-class people left as did white, leaving Jackson a city with very wealthy people on one end and very poor people everywhere else. That situation isn't sustainable, as evidenced by the crime crisis and the infrastructure crisis we're going through.
The mayor, I worry, has more allegiance to the pipe dream of the new Africa movement than he does to the idea of building a successful middle-class people where race isn't the only bonding factor. I understand the impetus that began the New Africa movement, and I even sympathize with it. I understand his father's work in it and why he did it and had I been in his shoes, I might have done the same thing, but that was sixty years ago. It wasn't a workable idea then, and it's even less workable now. People died for that movement and nothing was gained.
What does work now is finding a way to bond together the two broken halves of Jackson that can support and sustain a smaller population of poor and indigent. We always had a blended culture. It's time to recognize that, and embrace it, and recognize that it's our strength, not our weakness.
The best times for Jackson were when moderate democrats who did their best to be colorblind on all issues were in charge. Maybe it didn't last very long, but it did exist. I'm not sure how we get back to that, but I'd like to. I can't think of anything that's more bold or more new than a racially hybrid city, with a devoted focus not on the rich or the poor but on the working and middle class. I can live with somebody changing my favorite shrimp salad or second favorite gumbo, but my home needs some loving care. I intend to do my best. Hopefully, I'll find some fellow travelers along the way.
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