Coming On Home

Expatriates return, work for change

by J. Bingo Holman
May 28, 2003

Four years ago this week I was languishing at a picnic table in front of tent No. 11 in an area called Boy's Town in the majestic Yosemite Valley. I was working as a waitress in a hotel bar and living a life of hippie-like ease. I've called the two years I lived there the happiest of my life. So why am I back here now?

Like many people, I know the strong maternal pull of Mississippi, of the South,
was just too strong. People I knew and loved in Mississippi were dying off.
I could never afford to live outside the "valley" in a real town;
rent in California is exorbitant. They don't know how to cook out there (they'd
never
heard of boiled peanuts or had fried green tomatoes before my mama cooked them
in the small community kitchen). I missed my friends. I missed my family. Perversely,
I missed the ridiculously hot summers and mosquitoes the size of my hand. I
missed B.C. powder. And most of all I missed the feeling of being connected
to a place.
I discovered my southernness by moving 3,000 miles away. So, what exactly is
it about Mississippi that not only tugs at our hearts, but almost demands that
we do what we have to do out there, and then come on home?

Loved Ones

When I was young, I couldn't wait to get away from my family. "They don't
understand me," I lamented. As I grow older I'm beginning to realize that
they may be the only ones who ever will. Willie Morris said, "The older
I am, the more [the South] means to me, the closer the ties." Overwhelmingly,
the people who have returned say one word immediately when asked why they came
home: family. It's like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the prodigal
child returning home. And there seems to be no other way to explain the draw.
It's
just family. Roots. Place. Belonging.

And these roots are strong and deep, even
for those of us the state hasn’t
always been kind to. According to a 1997 Newsweek article, in the 20th century
more than 5 million African Americans migrated from a dangerous, unfair South
where Jim Crow laws restricted their freedom and mechanical cotton pickers
had taken many jobs from them. They were the largest internal ethnic migration
in
American history. Yet, today young African Americans are returning from where
their parents moved (Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, and St. Louis) to attend the
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and to be near their grandparents.
They
may never have lived here in the first place, but their family roots are too
strong to ignore.

Census data show a reverse migration of middle-class African
Americans back home to the South, a region that, paradoxically, enslaved them
even as it developed
its unique flavor—music, language, food, culture—because of their
presence. "If the demographers are right and the pace keeps up past the
millennium, a net tide of 2.7 million—more than half of the great post-1940
migration—will have headed South between 1975 and 2010," Newsweek
reported.

Mississippi is our extended family. With all of our problems, resolved
or otherwise, it is distinctly ours. Rapper David Banner told the Jackson Free
Press last
issue that he loves the state with painful passion, even as he loathes the
state flag.
Why? His people helped build the state, and died for him to live here: "I
deserve Mississippi; Mississippi deserves me." This is a message that
can be hard for white traditionalists to grasp: How many times have you read
a letter
to the editor that said people, black or white, who complain about the flag
or other problems here should just leave? Those letter writers miss the point—many
of us love our home, for better or for worse, and want to contribute to the
former, not the latter.

It’s as if we are bound to this city and this
state with invisible kudzu. "I
don't think you can be from Mississippi and leave it. It stays with you no
matter where you go," said Lea Barton, an artist who returned to live
and paint in Flora after getting an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn,
N.Y. And
she, like many emigrants says that it's easy to, as T.S. Eliot said, come back
and then "know the place for the first time"—especially after
you’ve gone out into the world and learned that Mississippi doesn’t
have a lock on bigotry and stupidity (although we can certainly claim our share).

Money
Talk

The reverse African American migration is happening for the "same reasons
it happened in the first place," said black musician Maurice Turner, who
returned to Mississippi in 1993 when his father passed away. People are looking
for work and safety. And, interestingly, many creative natives find that the
state can be surprisingly welcome to what they have to offer—especially
after they’ve gone out and polished up their skills in other places. Stories
abound about artists, musicians and filmmakers whose careers take off after they
return South armed with contacts, new ideas and experiences—particularly
if they choose to document the culture, problems and quirks unique to, or at
least pronounced in, this state. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the
country has an untiring obsession with the South.

"Mississippi has unlimited resources, unlimited opportunities," said
Carlton Turner, Maurice’s brother (the two were "Jacksonian" in
the last issue of the JFP). People are searching for a better lifestyle, a
better life
for themselves and their families. If you choose to, you can often better
afford to pursue your dreams here and pay the rent at the same time (or even
own a
house, perhaps one your family helped build). Poet Jolivette Anderson, who
came here
in 1996 and now is moving on to Ohio, says, "When [Southern migrants]
went to the steel mills, the meat factories, the car factories, they wanted
to work,
to have money, to feel safe. It's still what they want."

Everything costs
more in other places, not just housing—cars, gas, food,
entertainment, health care and transportation. And the trade-offs can be
worth it: no, the bagels aren’t as good here as in New York but, as my
editor likes to say, all you have to do here to make a difference in someone’s
life is to be willing. The flip side of being No. 50 (give or take) on about
every economic indicator is that the opportunities for meaningful work and
community volunteerism are everywhere. And the gratification is immediate in
a culture
where people express themselves—and hug—so freely.

Then again,
deciding to come home can be as simple as square footage. Friends of mine
in California could not believe that I had lived in a three-bedroom
house with a fenced-in yard for $650 a month here. One-room apartments go
for $900
a month out there. "We have the opportunity to live well here on a professor's
salary; the same was not true up north," said Matthew Dalbey, a PhD
who teaches graduate courses in urban planning at Jackson State University
and
is originally from New York.

In an online cost-of-living calculator, I figured
out that if you make $34,545 in Jackson, you'd have to make $60,000 in
Chicago to have the same quality
of life. $33,324 here is the same as $60,000 in New York City; the $35,055
in Jackson
is the same as $60,000 in San Francisco.

It’s About Y’all

"It may sound trite, but it's the people that make me love Mississippi," said
JoAnne Prichard Morris, a Yazoo City native and the widow of Willie Morris.
Trite? Maybe, but true. Mississippians are amazing: generally good-hearted,
often open-minded
and mostly kind, when taken one-on-one. (Groupthink has been known, however,
to get us in trouble, and has led to the love-hate many of us can feel here.)
I've heard a friend say upon moving away that he had never left a place missing
the people. Jolivette Anderson, whose poetry often documents the hardships
of black people in Mississippi, acknowledges the family feeling here. "There's
an extended family vibe" to Mississippi, she said.

While it is true that
we have still not mended all racial wounds, there have been strides toward
a joined Mississippi culture or, more correctly, toward
acknowledging that Mississippi culture is a fusion of black, white, Native
American and other
cultures. We are inextricably intertwined. Admittedly, we have a long way
to close old wounds and make the state a strong place for all of us to
co-exist. But if you turn and look at the path behind us you'll see that we
are past
the
halfway mark and steadily making progress. Everyone I talked to lamented
the still-wide divide between black and white, especially in social and
political arenas. At the same time, again paradoxically, most southerners will
acknowledge
that race relations can often seem more advanced here than in most of the
country.

We are the Hospitality State. Graciousness is a high commodity.
Manners are demanded.

Culture and Tradition

As Mississippians we are steeped in our collective history like so many tea
bags. It is inescapable. It's in the music that we hear, the food we eat, the
flags
that continue to wave. Being from Mississippi defines who we are whether we
like it or not; it's an unavoidable fact. If you have traveled outside the
state you
know that there are negative stereotypes attached to your native land—and
your accent.

"In Brooklyn people expected me to be either Scarlett O'Hara or Tallulah
Bankhead," Barton
said. Although this stereotypical response bothered her in the beginning,
she learned to use it to her advantage, that there is a flirtatious way to
use
her southernness as strength. There are elements of the Southern stereotypes
within
all of us, and whenever we leave the state we do so as an unwitting spokesperson
of our home. We go into the world and often find that we are not expected
to be the intelligent, creative, well-spoken people that many of us are. It
becomes
our duty to change people's view of Mississippi and her inhabitants. So not
only are we saddled with the charge to improve our home and our legacy; we’ve
got to change all them, too.

Prichard Morris, an editor of this magazine,
said that fans of history love to come here because everything's right out
there on the surface. A lifelong
Mississippian
who’s traveled extensively, she’s always found enough in the
people and culture here to keep her coming back and stimulated. "I've
spent my life peeling off the layers of Mississippi history, culture and
tradition and
trying to figure it out," she said. Of course, a buoyant Prichard Morris
sense of humor—which is common among southerners—doesn’t
hurt anything.

Our past defines our present and creates our future. We rely
on what we have to season what we can grow. Poor whites made cornbread because
cornmeal was
often all there was. Slaves created hush puppies out of left-over cornmeal
batter (according
to legend, escaped slaves then threw them at barking dogs to shut them up).
Southern blacks created the Blues to remove themselves emotionally from where
they were
during slavery and then dark Jim Crow days when they were called free but
weren’t.
Our writers write to help the world better understand us, and us to better
understand ourselves. We are determined to do things our own way. "Damn
them all!" we
like to say, especially if they happen to be Yankees.

What's Missing

Upon returning home, our expatriates admit missing the artistic culture and
international diversity and political open-mindedness of other places. And
we all agree there
could be more independent movies, better Asian cuisine and a proper falafel. "The
main thing I'll miss are the film choices. In California there are always 30
or 40 to choose from," said Laurel Isbister, a Californian singer/songwriter
who spent her childhood summers with her grandmother in Inverness and is planning
to move to Mississippi. But many of us who are disappointed in what Mississippi
doesn't have to offer have made a silent (sometimes loud) pledge to take Ghandi’s
advice: "Be the change you want to see in the world." People like
my editor Donna, restaurateur (and my boss) Malcolm White, attorney and businessman
Isaac Byrd, Maurice and Carlton Turner, Camp Best of the Fondren Renaissance
Foundation, and even me in my own small way, are actively trying to make their
home a better place, choosing not to believe that racial and other divides
have
to exist if we don’t want them to.

Most returning expatriates seem to
agree that this change starts with a moratorium on denying the truth about
our own past. Yes, racism and stupidity exist in
other places, but it in no way negates the work we have to do on the home front.
After
all, if sweeping our painful memories under a rug has left us squarely at No.
50, or 49 in a good year, clearly it’s the wrong approach. It’s
time for a new generation of hope, and work, and change—and natives,
with our weird mix of loyalty and shame, are the ones to spur that growth.
It starts
with
brutal honesty.

Call to Action

The Turner brothers are taking over the My Mississippi Eyes project at Lanier
High School begun by Jolivette Anderson in 1999. It is a program that uses
project-based learning through writing, reading and critical thinking. My
Mississippi Eyes
begins with a workshop that builds the knowledge base of students and then
moves them toward action. The students physically trace the African American
migration
with a bus ride to Chicago and New York. The students are then asked to tell
stories using the information they've gathered through their own eyes and ears.



Like the courageous volunteers in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement knew, if
you wait for something to change, it could take forever. But, if you participate
in the change, the time will fly by. Personally, and I've said this before,
I'm
tired of Mississippi always being on the bottom and idly agreeing with the
justice of this. Through grassroots efforts—by those who left and returned working
with those who never left—a change is happening. The Montessori program,
a hands-on teaching program for 3- to 9-year olds at McWillie and Van Winkle
elementary schools, was begun in response to a dissatisfied group of parents
who wanted better public education for their children. Both racially and economically
diverse, this program had 150 applications for the 32 positions opening this
year. The Fondren Renaissance Foundation has seen an 8.6-percent increase in
residents in Fondren since 1990 and has near-magically created a funky shopping
district cooler than you’ll find in many larger cities. These examples
show how a few determined people can change their environments.



A study called "Mississippi Economic Review and Outlook," published
by the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning in December 2002, and guest-authored
by Kenneth Chilton and Matthew Dalbey, states: "The City of Jackson is on
the right track in its efforts to further reduce the crime rate, improve infrastructure,
and build its urban diversity into a creative center that attracts more professionals." The
authors predict that the city has about seen the end of its out-migration and
is ripe to rebuild its inner core for creatives and others who want to live in
a diverse, urban environment. They say that if we want a better Mississippi we
must improve what they call the core city, while forging alliances with suburban
entities to facilitate smart regional planning (which is not a local strength,
yet). They write: "Experience has shown that cities and suburbs can both
prosper when political leadership, corporate citizens and grassroots organizations
work together cohesively and cooperatively for the benefit of the entire region." That
is, life in the entire "metro" area is affected by the condition of
the city and its residents. "[Q]uality of life is inextricably tied to the
health of the core city," the report warns.



Dalbey told me the city of Jackson is at a very hopeful place: "There are
a lot of reasons Jackson is on the upswing." Many people agree and are doing
their part to make the "upswing" go higher and higher. We’re
not there, yet. But, if we are consistently moving forward with unflinching devotion
toward the goal it will one day be attained. And, then, we’ll see even
more of our loved ones coming on home to be a part of something very special.

Jackson native J. Bingo Holman is the assistant editor of the Jackson
Free
Press.

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