Leaving Mississippi

I talk to a lot of young people.  I like to talk about what they see as their future because they are the future.  At least once a week, sometimes more, some brilliant young person tells me there isn't anything that would keep them in Mississippi, that they've worked too hard to become whatever they're becoming to waste it here.

It's probably psychologically unhealthy, but I consider that a personal failure.  I didn't do enough to make this a place where they felt like they could apply their best selves.  Some of these young people are pretty dear to me, and I'd be willing to do quite a lot to get them to stay, but I didn't do enough.

When I was sick, I'd sometimes have breakfast with a guy who spent his life really devoted to making health care in Mississippi considerably better.  This was a guy who really cared all his life.  His grandchildren are brilliant, but he can't keep them here.  

That happens a lot.  We invest all this time and money into our young people, and by twenty-five, they've grown too large to fit into the nest we've built for them, and their hearts tell them they have to leave.

I don't actually know how to fix this, but I'm gonna act like I have a plan and try to work on it.  It won't work.  My father tried to do the same thing, and it failed.  His father and his father's father did the same thing, and it failed.  

I think we spent many generations pushing Mississippi down into the hole we're in now, and it'll take many generations of Mississippians throwing their shoulder into the wheel to make it better.  

For those who stay, I love ya.  God loves ya.  We're gonna do our best to make sure you made the right decision.  For those who go, I still love you.  God still loves you.  We really wanted things to be different, but by the time your wings were strong enough to fly, we just didn't have Mississippi ready to keep you.  That's our failure, not yours.  

I was born four days after Medgar Evers was shot.  I have no illusions about what Mississippi is and was.  I might have illusions about what Mississippi can be, but I hope, deeply hope, that maybe they're not illusions but predictions.

Lunch At Jitney

 I made my way to the fabled Fondren Jitney for the first time from the new digs today.  It's called something else now, but who cares.  For my generation, the Fondren Jitney was even better than Jitney 14 because that's where Mr. Henry lived and personally oversaw the day-to-day actions.

I got "yessuh'ed" twice today.  In Mississippi, being told "yes sir" means something entirely different from what it means in other parts of the world.  It happens because I'm very old and very white, and even with my beard and my fake biker's vest on, you can tell by my eyes what part of town I come from.  

People have been saying this phrase to me all my life.  I asked my Grandmother about it once, and she said it was a sign of respect.  I said I was eleven; why was this grown man respecting me?  It should be the other way around.  "That's just the way things are."  She said.  I think a lot of grandmothers gave that answer through the years.

One was a woman my age, and she was actually serving me from the plate lunch line, so I kind of understood it.  The other was a young fella, no more than twenty, who was just passing by.  That kind of bothered me.  

Most of the serious change between the races happened in the years around when I was born, some, particularly in the year that I was born.  By the time I was nine, the steam had run out of the engine, and it was just moving chess pieces around the board after that.  

Some guys tried to make substantial changes with the Ayers case, but it languished in litigation hell for thirty-five years.   To get everything on their wish list, Jackson State would have had to give up a lot of the uniqueness that made it an HBCU, so I think the settlement they ultimately reached was probably the right one, although, by the time they reached it, hardly anybody remembered what it was about, to begin with.

Mississippi can be a pretty amazing place but with a fractured soul.  That fracture holds us back at everything.  I love the people here, but I try to be as honest as I can about our past and our present condition.   Despite all that, we produce some remarkable people.  We generate Pulitzer Prize winners like they were cornbread muffins.  

Hell, a girl not ten months older than my Nephew just won one for Journalism.  I have life-long friends on that side of the aisle in her story, and I'm at a loss as to why they haven't yet fixed the things she wrote about.  They think they can get away with it because it's so hard for a Democrat to win anything in Mississippi, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to count on that because I just don't think you really can.

All I see are ghosts of the past now.  I was in Fondren Jitney when it looked like it looked in "The Help"  Most people don't have all-day domestic help that rides in and out on the city bus anymore.  That doesn't mean attitudes have changed all that much.  

My dad's mentor was a man named Ivan Allen, Jr., who was once the Mayor of Atlanta, besides being one of the most successful stationers in the country.  Allen famously said that "There are too many negroes in Atlanta for us to progress and prosper unless they did too."  One of the things he did to encourage this was to force the Atlanta Police to keep their foot off the neck of Martin Luther King, Jr. so he could do what he was doing.  He removed the "white" and "colored" signs from all public property, and when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, he made sure there were plenty of photographs of them eating together.

A month after I was born, Allen was invited by President Kennedy to speak before Congress in hearings that ultimately led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was the only significant white Southern public official to testify.  I know all this, not because I learned it in school, but because he was a legend at National Office Products Association meetings, and my daddy made sure I met him and knew what he'd done.  

I don't think you're going to see much more significant change to come out of my generation.  We're pretty set in our ways.  We ended up being born in sort of the middle years in the battle for America's soul.  Big things will come in the generation after mine.  I can see it in their eyes.  It may not seem like it, but this place is worth saving.

Father's Day

Good morning, Daddy. I miss you. Things got a little crazy after you left. I know you tried to prevent that, but sometimes you can't. Before you left, you said you were worried I lost my way. You were right. I lost my way, and it took a very long time to find it.

I thought I was following you when I focused my life on people who needed me rather than seeking out the people and things that I needed. That was a mistake on my part. I ended up spending much of my life alone because no one needed me forever. Helping people find what they were looking for often meant they weren't looking for me anymore.

I let Mississippi go to crap. I know it wasn't my responsibility to stop that, but I wasn't supposed to turn my back on it for so long. I let a lot of things I care about get in pretty bad shape, and now I have to haul ass to get them back on track.

I never really had anybody to talk to after you died. Many of your friends tried to help me, Robert Wingate, of course, but also Stuart Irby, Warren Hood, and Deaton and Taylor. Heck, J.O. Manning operated on my leg and forgot to charge me. No matter how sincere it is, I'm not very good at taking help.

I ended up spending a lot of time talking to Lance Goss. I know you weren't expecting that. Talking about his life helped me understand my own.

As healthy as he was, George Harmon left not long after you did. I suppose you guys had some project in heaven. We're still struggling to replace him. After a performance like that, how does anyone follow it?

Rowann ended up staying with Suzanne Marrs until the day he died. Both Jane Lewis and Brum Day caught Lou Gehrig's Disease. For a disease that's supposed to be pretty rare, it sure has taken out a lot of Jackson people. Brum was always one of the strongest guys I ever knew. The last time I saw him, he didn't have the strength to keep his jaw shut.

Things calmed down a lot with Jimmy. He died pretty peacefully. Whatever was eating at him never really went away, but it did get a lot less severe.

They ended up driving Missco into the ground after you left. This might be the first time I ever admitted that publically, but it's true. I tried to stop it, but I was outnumbered and in way over my head.  I think, ultimately, you built a chariot nobody else knew how to drive.  I certainly didn't.  

We fought a lot, but in many ways, you were the only one who ever really understood me, even though I think you wanted me to be something I wasn't. It took an awfully long time to understand what I was myself, so it's reasonable that you couldn't see it either.

Things were better when I could see you every day. I was pretty miserable, as you knew, but knowing I could talk to you whenever I needed made things a lot better. I never really found anyone to replace that.

I was born on Father's Day. A fair portion of my birthdays were on Father's Day. Now, I'm here, and you're not. I think the world would have been better off if those roles were reversed. I did everything I could to make sure I got where you are now before my time, but in the end, I decided I wasn't quite done yet.

I'd do anything to see you again, even for an hour. Happy Father's Day, Daddy. This year I've had more Father's Days without you than the ones when I had you. That's not really a milestone I thought I'd face. I miss you.

Aint From Here

Last night we talked about a guy who is something like a fifth-generation Mississippian and does business here, but for reasons of his own, chooses to no longer live here.  That happens quite a lot.  Mississippi, as you may know, has a shrinking population.  Despite a steady inflow of immigrants from Asia and Central America, there are more native Mississippians either dying or moving than being born, which keeps our numbers in the red.

One of my favorite parts about Thalia Mara is that she's not from here.  She came from a part of the world that generally doesn't think much of Mississippi, and we fairly recently had been in the news for blowing up a synagog and burying civil rights workers from the part of the world where she was coming from in an earthen dam.  She saw something in Mississippi that people who lived here couldn't.  She saw us as a significant place for ballet, of all things, and brought the world to Mississippi to appreciate dance.

The same is true of Catherine and Richard Freiss.  Their friends must have thought they'd lost their minds when they said where they were going to work.  Millsaps has a pretty great reputation, but it's not great enough to hide the fact that Mississippi is the poorest part of the United States, and we have a reputation for doing terrible things to people from their part of the world.  But still, they came, and generations of students from all over the South are the better for it, and students from around the world are better for the work they did while they were here.

Pop Primos came to Mississippi from Greece.  He could have gone anywhere in the world, but he chose to come here.  I guess in Greece, they didn't know that Mississippi was an economically depressed state, totally dependent on a non-sustainable crop and a caste system that was equally unsustainable.  Pop saw something in Mississippi to make his own, and there he built an empire of restaurants and real estate.

Woody Assaf's parents came from Lebanon at a time when maybe things weren't so great in Lebanon, but they weren't much better in Mississippi.  He could have gone anywhere, but he chose to stay here and became a broadcasting legend.

Stuart Good came here with his teenage son from somewhere like Wisconsin.  Jeff Good did really well at Millsaps.  He could have gone anywhere and done anything, but he saw something in Jackson that a lot of people who have been here for generations couldn't see, and that inspired him to start a business here and raise a family here and make himself a part of the fabric of Mississippi.

Peter DeBeukelaer came from Belgium, where his family had a successful business since the civil war.  He had an idea for a new product and wanted a place to make it a reality, and he chose Mississippi even though he could have gone anywhere.  

Mississippi is still a very troubled place.  It probably always will be.  There are still opportunities here.  Sometimes it's hard for the people who have been here for generations to see it, but it's still very real.  There are stories of successful immigrants to Mississippi starting today and tomorrow in areas that those of us who have been here a while might never see.    Sometimes, the keys to success is a fresh pair of eyes.