She doesn’t always love you back

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.”

• Charles Sallis: Mississippi as a Prodigal Daughter

Those words penned by Charles Sallis, a Mississippi Native & professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS, quote two of the more famous literary Mississippians. I couldn’t find a better way to summarize my thoughts and feelings about leaving (again) the place I’ve always thought of as home.

I first moved away from Mississippi in January of 1998 upon graduation from Mississippi State. Driving the big yellow truck, I wept from the time I left 1712 Lisa Lane until I arrived in Atlanta, GA. Everything significant I’d ever known was there; my future wife, my friends, my family, high school, college and a lifetime of memories. I loved Mississippi dearly and was determined to move back again some day.

After a series of moves around the Southern United States and one stay abroad (Atlanta, Birmingham, Houston, London, Houston), I accomplished that goal in November 2003. A confluence of family events seemed to necessitate our being nearer to family so we packed up and left friends, work and church in Houston, TX, put our belongings in storage and split time between Starkville, MS with my family and Hammond, LA with Holly’s family. Around that same time we had dear friends who lived on the Mississippi Gulf coast and after spending many weekends crashed on their floor, decided that we would give coastal Mississippi life a try.

Our experiences there over the past three plus years have been diverse to say the least; frequently challenging, sometimes joyful, often maddening, occasionally frightening, usually instructive. Now that we are leaving Mississippi again, my prevailing emotions regarding ‘home’ now include sorrow, anger and disappointment.

In retrospect, we likely didn’t need to relocate to be with the family. I was eager to get ‘home’ and am afraid I used those circumstances for my own selfish devices to expedite getting back to the Magnolia State. Don’t get me wrong, it is not that I regret the move as we really have learned a tremendous amount; but my perspective about Mississippi has changed. Again, Willie Morris captured it very well:

There is much of the South, I unhesitatingly confess …, that I wish I could escape forever. I wish I could escape the smoldering malevolence behind a … prolonged racial tirade …. Escape the tenacious righteousness of the "seg academies." … Escape every manifestation of institutionalized, right-wing, fundamentalist religion, richer and more pervasive than it ever was. Escape the ennui of the morgue-like Sundays….

• Willie Morris- Is There A South Anymore?

Yesterday, I wept again as I crossed over the Pearl River on Interstate-10 from Mississippi to Louisiana, unsure if I’ll ever live in my home state again. The “tension between love and hate, fascination and rejection” for Mississippi is somewhat new for me and I am just beginning to understand it. It is clear to me though that you can indeed love her, but she doesn’t always love you back.