On Being from Mississippi

I have lived in New York now far longer than I lived in Mississippi, but the fact remains that I did grow up there for the first twenty years of my life.  From time to time people have asked me about that, thinking in particular about the civil rights movement, which also has many roots in Mississippi.  The sequence of the questions makes it vividly clear that they expect me to have marched against racism, which is much easier to identify if one did not grow up in the midst of it.

When I think about that,  I believe it is a lot like growing up in a dysfunctional family.  You don’t really understand how dysfunctional your family is until you see someone else’s with which to compare it.   In other words, people who never leave the place of their birth really do not know what the rest of the world is like.

But I do have one particular memory of exactly what happened and how I felt about it.  It was 1963.   It felt so odd and strange and ironic even at the time, that I made a conscious effort to impress it upon my memory for posterity.  Word got out that James Meredith was going to enroll in Ole Miss.  Most of the young males in my town,  including my brother, and presumably across the state, all hopped in their pickup trucks, along with their guns, to go and protest.

My friend Bill did not go.  I think he was just a pacifist.  I remember that he badly did not want to go to Viet Nam, either.  He came to my house and we studied for our Civics exam scheduled for the next day.  I thought to myself-- here we are in the midst of history surely being made, studying for a history test about our state.  How ironic!

I did see the vestiges of cruel racism all around me and hated it.  It broke my heart, the stories of harassment I heard about James Meredith at Ole Miss. I knew we were all missing so much because no eye contact was ever made between the races.  I understood completely that all this was entirely contrary to the Gospel I heard on Sundays.

I did not march with the civil rights movement, nor against integration.  I was a teenager who was only mildly aware of what was happening in the world around me. 

 I suppose I did protest, however, in my own way.   I left.