#timelineinthesouth Mississippi is a place to love

Day 5 Meridian and Jackson, Mississippi

I will just start off by saying I fell in love with Mississippi. On the way there, I conjured up a plethora of feelings, so it was probably not too hard to just melt once I finally arrived. I will not be able to fully explain in this blog my new found love for the state, but I promise to take time at some later point to hash it out.

On the way from Atlanta to Montgomery, we passed farm land, and I couldn’t help but hear the blood of my ancestors crying out. Hear me, hear our stories, don’t forget about us, don’t neglect to understand our experience and our space in the past. Make sure the world hears us. From Montgomery to Selma as I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t help but sit in the memory of the past work and pain and bravery of the Civil Rights activists bringing voting rights to blacks throughout Alabama and other parts of the south. And now slipping into Mississippi, Magnolia trees greeting us as we crossed the forest lined border, I was engulfed with feelings of entering an old place waiting to pour out its great tales.

Enter my white husband and I into Meridian for an early dinner with a friend, I had met just months earlier as I was sharing this idea of traveling through the south with other friends. Quickly I was surrounded by the past, the orderliness of a quiet place with roots further locked into a European culture of high society. If you were to drive to Meridian you might say I am exaggerating. The original buildings are mostly empty in the downtown. But it is not an empty downtown, that is the beauty, the uniqueness. There is no letting go of it’s glory and beauty of days old, there is no taking down the old to erect the new. There is a quiet and steady acceptance of the past and a clutching to -  the pieces that are the foundation.

Meridian was beautiful, the old buildings were neither pristinely preserved nor totally neglected and overcome. They were old with time, but not old in the hearts and minds of the residents. I appreciated that the longstanding restaurants had not been run out by fast food chains. The downtown still felt like the center of the city, even if not every building was occupied. This is what I came to fall in love with and appreciate about the state of Mississippi. The poorest state in our country, yet it’s rich, lucratively rich past existence is evident. No one came in and destroyed it (beyond what was destroyed in the Civil War), the downtowns, the centers still stand, though the economy can’t support any new or advancing growth. These are all opinions of course, which any is entitled to correct me!

But I fell in love. The stories, the society, the sites. It was straight out of a movie depicting the south, just 95 years later. But still in the same condition.

Scott and I’s dinner in Meridian and night in Jackson, were met with wonderful stories from two friends. Both had grown up in Meridian, one now lived in Jackson the other back in Meridian. Both from two different families, though family friends, both two different life experiences and providing two different perspectives of the past, both had gone away seen other parts of the world and country, and both two great story tellers and kind southern spirits.  

These moments were truly some of my favorite highlights of the trip. We got to record, film, photograph the time and Scott and I look forward to sharing the end products through the site in the coming months. We left both experiences energized, ready to take on the topic of interracial experiences in the south, racism in the United States, and the power of the people to share stories and do something about the hard places in this world.

Important thoughts from this day: 1) Texas is definitely not the South. 2) There is the Old South, and there is the Deep South. 3) The South is not the sole blame for racism in America, and is not necessarily the most racists region!

More on my love for Mississippi on the coming posts, but I will leave you with this!

“Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam”

-Nina Simone (in show tune style)