Summer/Fall 2016

 

A new movie about Mississippi causes one writer to re-examine her relationship with home.

July 2016

by Lyn Milner

 

I’m white, from Mississippi, and the child of liberals. My family and countless others don’t fit the stereotype outsiders have of white Mississippians—that we are racist, intolerant, religious to a fault, backward, anti-LGBT, and most likely obese.  Yet as I write this, I’m afraid I’ll out some below-the-surface belief that I don’t think I have. “Your Mississippi is showing” is a phrase you hear at home sometimes. Here goes.

In the 1960s in north Mississippi, my dad worked for a nonprofit agency helping young children in low-income families get ready for school—with education, nutrition and social services. He also registered blacks to vote. In the late ‘70s, my mom taught at a public high school in Jackson, which was still struggling with court-ordered integration. She remembers breaking up fights, seeing kids carrying switchblades, having the cops come many times, and watching the black assistant principal defend the white principal from belligerent teenagers.

My parents sent me to private school because… public education in Mississippi? Even some of the staunchest supporters of racial equality draw the line there. I think it soothed my parents’ consciences to choose a private school that admitted black people before integration, which had to be forced on some schools years after the court ordered it.

My parents’ work took courage, and there were many like-minded, courageous white people like them, but I want to be careful not to characterize any of them as saviors. I don’t think there were any white saviors in Mississippi. My parents and their friends were trying to do what seemed right to them, as did my grandparents, and at least one set of great-grandparents. Not so much me.

Being from Mississippi can make you restless in the worst way. Fellow Jackson native Richard Ford once wrote, “If you were born in Mississippi you either believed you lived in the vivid center of a sunny universe, or you believed as I did that the world outside of there was the more magical, exotic place and that’s what you needed to see.”

At 17, I was in Richard Ford’s camp. At our high school graduation, the commencement speech was titled “Commitment to Mississippi.” The 26 of us seniors sat quietly in the Episcopal cathedral that evening, knowing we’d be unpacking our trunks in three months at Dartmouth, Harvard, Wellesley and so on. The speaker encouraged us not to forget Mississippi. He hoped we would return and become leaders.

Yeah, right, I remember thinking. I am out of here. And my leaving went beyond geography. During my first semester of college at Emory in Atlanta, I deliberately lost my strong Southern accent because I felt sure that my classmates, many of whom were from the Northeast, would make assumptions when they heard me talk.

*

Being ashamed of the South is a tradition that goes back to slavery—our fight to own black people, which led to the Civil War. My favorite Civil War story, little known until recently, is the tale of the Free State of Jones, where my ancestors are from.

In 1864, Jones County and neighboring parts of southeast Mississippi declared themselves independent from the Confederacy. Led by a man named Newt Knight, soldiers from Jones County deserted the Confederate Army, came home and hid in the woods—piney woods that were nearly impenetrable. Before the war, the citizens of Jones County had voted not to secede from the Union, but when their elected representative went to vote on their behalf, he chickened out and cast his ballot for secession. So the men were conscripted, and they fought.

What prompted Knight and others to stop fighting was the Twenty Negro Law of 1862, which excused a man from fighting if he owned twenty or more slaves. Jones County had fewer slaves than any other county in Mississippi, and Knight and company (50 or 60 soldiers) decided they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war.

So they hid, and the people of Jones brought food and supplies into the woods for them. The Confederate Army tried rounding them up, sending men and bloodhounds into the woods, but they fought back. Their numbers swelled to 125, and at the height of their power, they stormed the county courthouse in Ellisville and overthrew their Confederate government, taking down the rebel flag and raising the Stars and Stripes, and that’s when they declared themselves The Free State of Jones.

The Union tried to help them by sending 400 arms, but the Confederates intercepted those and dispatched more troops and hounds into the woods. But catching the men proved difficult because those woods were an excellent place to hide. The Confederates did capture several men, shooting some and hanging some, but Knight and the remaining group endured and kept fighting, though their cause was hopeless and had been from the start. And many of them lived to tell the story. The war ended not long after the free state formed and, as Knight told a reporter more than 50 years later, “We just disbanded and went about our business.”

*

Thirty years after the Civil War, my grandmother Mother Mac and grandfather Daddy Mac were born in Jones County during the Reconstruction period that followed the war. Our family still owns land there—80 acres and not terribly valuable, money-wise, considering that it’s not in a desirable location and that parts of it are under water for big swaths of the year, thanks to beavers.

Daddy Mac farmed cotton on the land in his teens and then bought it when he came back from the Navy. Only ten of the acres were ever cleared for cotton farming, and the rest was woods. We harvest and sell some of the timber every 25 years or so, just as my grandfather and his father did.

When my father dies, his portion of the land will pass to me and my brother, Chip. Every so often, my father asks whether we think we’re going to want it. The first time he asked, I must have been in my 20s, and my reaction was no, why not just sell it? I’m a jettisoner by nature. It’s a personality defect. Anything without an immediate use, I throw out. Take mail, for instance. I get it out of the box and sort it as I walk up the driveway to the recycling bin, where I finish the job. Most of our mail never sees the inside of the house. Over the years, this compulsion has led me to throw out and give away valuable things I should have kept.

But when it comes to the matter of Daddy Mac’s Jones County land, I’m not as straightforward. When Dad asks how we feel about it—Do we want it? Is it special to us?—I’d prefer that he make the decision. He wants us to though.

About 15 years ago, I realized that I should at least see the property because I never had, and how could I make a decision without seeing it? Being on the land might help, I thought. Maybe I’d stand in those piney woods and feel something. At the very least, it could be a way to connect with my grandfather and his father, and with mine, of course. So Dad and I agreed to hike it together when I came home for the family reunion. The story of our trip is a metaphor that won’t be hard for you to see.

“Bring clothes you don’t care about,” Dad said before we hung up the phone. “And old shoes. It won’t be easy.”

*

That’s how my husband, Jesse, and I found ourselves at the Office of Mapping and Appraisals in downtown Laurel, Mississippi, in 2001, viewing an aerial photo of the land. When I told the mapping clerk we were hiking the property that afternoon, she said, “I’m sorry.” It was June, and southeast Mississippi is sticky, and we had already sweated through one set of clothes that day. The chubby, blonde mapping clerk hadn’t.

“There’s no way you’re getting into those woods,” she said.

She printed me and Jesse our own copy of the map. It smelled like ammonia and cost one dollar.

“Be sure you check each other for ticks when you get out,” the clerk said, and Jesse and I grinned at each other like newlyweds.

*

This long-ago trip is on my mind because I just saw “The Free State of Jones,” starring Matthew McConaughey as Newt Knight. Well-researched, it stuck close enough to the actual story as I understand it, though there were invented scenes. What I don’t like is that McConaughey plays a savior. I do, however, admire that it shows how complicated race in Mississippi was and is.

What the people of Jones County did was crazy, and the result of their actions was inspiring. Blacks and whites fought together, giving civil rights a foothold in an unlikely place. Even though the whites weren’t fighting for racial equality, the battle was heroic: if they were going to die, they would die for the right to be free.

Occasionally, Mother Mac mentioned Newt Knight. He was still alive when she was a young adult in Jones County. She said he was off-beat and out of step with others, but the way she spoke about the Free State of Jones, you could tell she was proud that where she was from was different from the rest of the state. I share that pride, I realized, sitting in the theater and watching the climactic moment when Knight and his men surround the Ellisville courthouse and run the United States’ flag up the pole. They were bad asses.

Until I saw the film, it hadn’t occurred to me that the events in Jones County might have something to do with my family’s attitudes. My great-great grandparents on Daddy Mac’s side came to the county in the 1830s. Mother Mac’s folks came after the war, and she was born in 1894. I interviewed about her childhood in there during the era of separate but equal, and she remembered that her family farmed cotton alongside their black hired help. And, yes, they kept separate—the blacks ate meals in the kitchen, the whites, in the main house. “We didn’t pay any attention to them then. We worked just like they did. But when we came home, they went home.” So that was the separate part. As for equal, she had no illusions that blacks were treated equally in Mississippi.

By today’s standards, Mother Mac would be considered prejudiced. But for that time, her family was liberal. Her father gave his workers their own garden patch and didn’t make them pay rent for it. When food supplies were short, he made sure they were fed, and when a storm threatened their houses, he opened his barn for them. Mother Mac’s beliefs evolved as she got older.

My family has taught me that education is the best weapon against racism, and I think this started in our Jones County roots. Mother Mac’s parents supported higher taxes in there for better schools, albeit segregated ones, the only kind there were. She and several of her siblings got a college education. Daddy Mac earned a master’s in psychology and completed most of a doctorate in education. They met when she was teaching and he was the principal at her school, and they devoted a big chunk of their lives to educating people. He became the president of a junior college and boarded 11 teachers in the president’s house. When a student couldn’t cover tuition, he found a way around it. There are stories of his accepting chickens as payment.

In the ’60s, after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were passed, when the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was doing its best to subvert them, my grandfather worked for the federal government, traveling all over the state to check up on public officials and those who were running for office, and of course, he was registering black people to vote. My grandmother often drove for him.

“It was a dangerous job,” she told me. The Sov-Com meant business. It kept a list of “suspects,” and it was complicit in the murders of civil rights workers. What Daddy Mac did was largely secret. “When I drove for him,” Mother Mac said, “I didn’t talk about where I had been or who I had seen. I was just driving for my husband in his work.”

The reason they did it was that, as my grandmother put it, “People wouldn’t do right,” a phrase she used when somebody did something she felt was wrong. It was up to the federal government to be sure that Mississippians were doing right, and my grandfather helped.
There’s a theory, proposed by Mother Mac about why liberalism came to be in our genetics, as Dad puts it. When Daddy Mac was an infant, his mother died, and he was nursed by a black wet nurse. For a black woman to nurse a white baby was acceptable in the South. Go figure, because it was the only acceptable intimacy between the races. Mother Mac believed that Daddy Mac shared a deep bond with his nurse, and that this was the reason he treated black people with respect and loyalty.

*

At 2 a.m. on the morning of our hike, Jesse nudged me awake. We were at my brother’s house, sleeping next door to my nephew’s hamster, which ran two miles every night inside a squeaking metal wheel, so in other words, we weren’t sleeping much.

“It just hit me,” Jesse said. “This hike. It’s going to be hell.”

“Yep,” I said.

“Can I stay in the car?”

“Sure.”

My husband had never been on one of Dad’s trips, but he had heard enough about them to be concerned. And Jesse is by nature trip-resistant anyway. He’s a homebody, and before every trip, he will express a hesitation, a concern—almost always valid, as in this case. Then, without fail, he gives in and goes.

“We’re going to be hiking through a swamp, right? It’s going to be hot. We’re going to get lost. What’s the point?”

“The point,” my brother told Jesse at breakfast, “is to find the property markers. I promise you, that’s what he will want to do.”

“But why?” Jesse asked.

Chip laughed. He wasn’t joining us on the hike. “Because they’re there.”

*

When we were on the way to Laurel, Jesse and I passed logging truck after logging truck, heavy with loblolly short leaf pine trees strapped to their trailers with fat yellow nylon. If you’ve never been to Mississippi, you wouldn’t believe the number of trees. We saw the mileage marker for Ellisville which, you’ll remember, was where the Free State of Jones was born. It was also the home of the Institute for the Feeble Minded, which Eudora Welty wrote about in Lily Daw and the Three Ladies. Its name has long since been politically corrected to Ellisville State School.

Having secured the map, Jesse and I met Dad and his now-wife Linda for a milkshake at Shoney’s. Then the four of us sped (my father speeds everywhere, in a perpetual hurry) up I-59 in Dad’s Oldsmobile Aurora. We exited at Sandersville and snaked down two-lanes to a gravel road that stopped at the edge of Daddy Mac’s property. We parked beside a squat house where a row of five washers, dryers and stoves sat on cinder blocks. A bloodhound stood up in the driveway, looked at us, and let out a series of long barroooos.

“Do you know the person who lives here?” Linda asked my dad. “Or is he going to come after us with a shotgun?”

“Sure, I know him,” Dad said. “We think he’s the one who grew the marijuana.”

Daddy Mac was 92 when Dad discovered marijuana growing on the property. I’d never seen my grandfather angry before that. Angry and irked, because he couldn’t prove it was this guy, we’ll call him Steve, a Vietnam veteran who was emerging now from the house. We shared Daddy Mac’s outrage.

Steve nodded at us without a word. Dad told him we had come to hike the land.

“Good luck with that,” he said. “I never go past that spot right there,” he said, pointing at the front bumper of our car.

Next door to Steve’s, there was a concrete slab and a brick chimney—all that was left of a house that apparently had burned. On the slab were sawhorses and an engine block and, above those, five stiff pairs of what I assumed were Steve’s jeans hanging upside down on a clothesline strung between a masonry nail driven into the chimney and a metal pole.

It should be nobler, I thought. Steve had made the place look like a white trash cliché with his rusted washers and jeans. This was my grandfather’s land. In my imagination, when I had thought about what we might do with the land, I pictured an isolated, peaceful writer’s retreat. It did not include Steve and his hideous dog, who had a gray tick, big around as a nickel, on his left ear.

Mosquitoes were on us. Linda fogged Jesse and me with DEET, and we slathered on Bain de Soleil, though, from the looks of these woods, we wouldn’t need sun protection. My father stripped to his underwear and slipped into pink cotton pants that tied at the waist like medical scrubs. Over these, he buttoned a long-sleeve white shirt. We locked the car and started down a sunken swath where light filtered through a prison of trees.

As we entered the woods, I felt the responsibility of six generations, and it was dizzying. I tried to feel whether Daddy Mac would want us to keep the land, and whether his father would want us to, and on up the line. I hoped for a vibe or a sign.

Dad was out ahead of us almost immediately, but he was easy to track in the pink scrubs. Jesse, Linda and I picked our way through barbed branches, holding them aside for each other and standing on the vines that threatened to trip us. I realized, too late, that we had left the map in the car.

Linda wanted us to know what poison ivy looked like, in case we didn’t.

“Come here,” she said. We stooped to look at a cluster of three heart-shaped leaves.

“Don’t touch your face. And especially don’t touch your clothes and then your face or arms.”

She ran through the procedure for preventing the rash: When we get back to the hotel, peel our jeans off inside out. Rinse all exposed skin with rubbing alcohol. Wash everything, including our shoes, in hot water with bleach. Linda always knows what to do when things go wrong, I’ve noticed. Later, I tell Jesse this, and he says, “She has to. She’s your father’s girlfriend.”

My shirt clung to my back as if glued there by saliva. I was dying to wipe the sweat off my face, but remembering the poison ivy, I let it drip. We pushed past magnolia, cypress, hickory, gum, pine, spruce, white oak, red oak, post oak and live oak. Spiders had built webs between the branches. Several times, I stopped short of ruining one of their webs. The forest got thicker. The floor was soft with oak leaves and mud. If it had been up to me to get us out of here, we would have been in trouble.

At last, Dad saw a property marker, a strip of orange plastic tied to a tree. We caught up to him, and stood and observed it as if it had some purpose, and I thought, Only three more to find, and then I noticed him looking left and then right, as if considering which direction to go. I felt uneasy.

Jesse, I could tell, was miserable. He announced that, if it came to it, if we got lost and he died, we had his permission to eat him. I brushed five mosquitoes off his sleeve. We went left, and I had only thought the woods were thick before. A set of fresh deer tracks made me wonder how any animal got through here. I easily saw how Newt Knight and the deserters evaded capture. The place was a trap. I had hiked enough with my father to know we were lost.

Being here wasn’t solving anything. There wasn’t a place to stand and reflect because mosquitoes would attack. Was my grandfather the way he was because he grew up in Jones County? Was it the wet nurse? I’m never going to know, and it doesn’t make any difference, and there’s no clear sign about what we should do.

We walked alongside a barbed wire fence, which I knew Dad was following because he hoped it marked the property line. We contorted our way through the trees and vines, bending so low that our faces nearly brushed the poison ivy. The brambles snatched our clothes.

Linda stopped in front of us and said, “Look at that wild hydrangea,” and I wondered how it was possible that she was still enjoying this. My father stopped and pulled on a sturdy cross vine anchored to a limb 20 feet off the ground.

“Wouldn’t you love to go swinging through the forest on this?” he asked, looking up it.

No, I thought. I was beginning to have a catharsis. What I’d love is to be the kind of person who didn’t need to enter these woods in order to make a decision. A person who could stand at the edge and not feel the need to go in. Someone like Steve, the stoner vet, or the blonde mapping clerk in her air-conditioned office. “I’m sorry,” she had said to me. Someone who could witness and walk away, as I had done at 17.

It is so hard to know what to do with this land.

“I see the car,” Dad hollered. Sure enough, the green Olds was waiting for us, though it took a while to get to. The last 20 feet were the hardest. Spiked vines were so thickly tangled that getting extricated from one passed us into the thorned grip of another. Stupidly, we split up, beating separate paths to the car. Dad got out first. Linda was last, having been completely snared, fight-dancing the vines. She wasn’t happy with Dad. He knew it.

He swatted at a bug on his sleeve, and I heard him say to himself, “What was I thinking?”

Later, he and I would debrief when I was back in Florida. He would ask again what Chip and I wanted to do: keep or sell, and I wouldn’t be any closer to knowing. But for now, there was the immediate matter of getting to a store and preventing a poison ivy rash, so we opened the Olds, waited for a yellow jacket to find its way out, then drove to Sandersville and bought rubbing alcohol.

At the hotel, Jesse and I peeled off our pants inside out, rubbed down with the alcohol, put our shoes in plastic bags, and then looked for ticks. We found seven wood ticks between us. They came out, leaving little wells in our flesh.

*

It’s 2016, and I’ve spent most of my life not thinking about the land except for those times when Dad brought it up, and then I’d soon forget about it again. I’m still hoping he will make the decision. If he sells it, that’s fine, but if he doesn’t, and if it passes to me and Chip, I now have an idea for what to do. I’m not proud that a movie brought this on—a movie that was filmed in Louisiana at that, not Jones, and in an overly picturesque swamp.

What hit me, watching it, was how Jones County’s citizens couldn’t begin to imagine what they were part of, and how long it would take Mississippi to move forward on the issue of race. How forceful Civil Rights would need to be, how many lives lost, the layers of racism and bigotry that carried all the way to the highest levels. They couldn’t look forward in time to see how naïve their skirmishing was.

And in that spirit, here’s my idea: Every 25 years when we harvest and sell the timber, I’ll give my share of the proceeds to a group that fights for equality in Mississippi—folks whose job it is to make sure people do right, as Mother Mac would say. Holding on to the land goes against my very strong impulse to throw things out, but if the result is a small, symbolic rebellion that keeps Mississippi complicated, I’ll do it. It’s hardly courageous on my part, but it sure is poetic.