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Everybody knows and has an opinion about
Mississippi.
Actually, there are several Mississippis. There is a
Mississippi as seen by outsiders who have never been here
and there is a Mississippi as seen by many white
Mississippians and there is a Mississippi as seen by many
black Mississippians. Historians may see Mississippi in
one way, sociologists or novelists or economists or
ordinary people in other ways. There are many
Mississippis; they are all different and they are all
real.
Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe,
and Willie Morris often wrote of the ambivalence that
native Southerners feel for the South. We Mississippians,
perhaps more than other Southerners, feel for our state a
tension between love and hate, fascination and rejection.
William Faulkner spoke for many Mississippians when he
wrote: “Home again, his native land; he was born of
it and his bones will sleep in it. . . . Loving all of it
even while he had to hate some of it. . . . He knows now
that you don’t love because; you love despite; not
for the virtues, but despite the faults.” As Willie
Morris said, “You can love Mississippi but she
doesn’t always love you back.”
I deeply feel this love-hate relationship. I am a 5th
generation Mississippian, my folks having come here from
the Carolinas in the l830s and settling in Itawamba
County in northeastern Missis- sippi. Fifty-four of my 65
years have been spent here. I married a pretty
Mississippi girl and I plan to live the rest of my life
here. I stay, in part, because I am fascinated with the
place where I was born and raised. I love the good but I
hate the bad.
Mississippi is a unique place, a study in contrasts, a
study in virtues and faults. It has produced some of the
nation’s literary giants (William Faulkner, Eudora
Welty, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, just
to name a few) yet it has the nation’s highest rate
of illiteracy. We are known as the Hospitality State yet
on occasion we can be vicious to outsiders; we lead the
nation in the numbers of lynchings, and our domestic
homicide rate is frightening. On the other hand,
Mississippi has a rich cultural heritage. It has produced
Leontyne Price, Jimmy Rogers, the “Father of Country
Music,” Robert Johnson, “The Father of the
Blues,” B.B. King, Elvis Presley, who combined blues
and country into a new sound that forever changed music
worldwide, Pulitzer prize winners, progressive public
servants, courageous newspaper columnists and editors,
such as Bill Minor, brave civil rights advocates who
sought racial justice during a “reign of
terror,” bold college professors who spoke the truth
against the criticism of a whole society. That’s why
Hod- ding Carter, editor of the Green- ville Delta
Democrat-Times, in 1967 called Millsaps College
“perhaps the most courageous institution in the
land.” Mississippi has some of the best people in
the whole world here. And I know many of them.
Well, what about this “strange kingdom” that
Morris and others have written about? Mississippi was
mainly populated in the late eighteenth century by
settlers from Georgia, South Carolina, western Virginia,
Kentucky and Tennessee. The first settlements were at
Natchez, Vicksburg and other points along the Mississippi
River. Many, like my ancestors who came here in the
l830s, were poor whites, small farmers, non-slave owners.
The overwhelming majority of Mississippi settlers were
Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish Protestants. Even today the
white population of Mississippi is remarkably homogeneous
with 98% being of British, Irish, and northern European
ancestry. Until about l940, African Americans were in the
majority, but now they make up only about 35% of the
population, a larger proportion of African Americans than
in any other state. The small Chinese population, found
mainly in the Delta, is descended from farm laborers
brought from California in the l870s; most of them soon
abandoned farming and became merchants. In my hometown of
Greenville, I had friends among my Chinese, Jewish,
Italian, and Greek schoolmates. Unfortunately, in
segregated Mississippi, I had no black friends my age.
Recently, a number of southeast Asians have migrated to
our Gulf Coast region. The Native American Choctaws have
been here the longest, having been evicted from their
lands by the pressure of white encroachment and
settlement.
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