I don’t like Mississippi.
And right there I know I’ve gone and stepped in it with natives and residents of the Magnolia State. So for the record, yes, I’ve got a nerve. Yes, I should be ashamed of myself. And no, neither the state of my birth (California) nor the state of my employment (Florida) exactly qualifies as heaven on Earth. Feel free to scorn them to your heart’s content.
I still don’t like Mississippi.
Although “don’t like” is probably not the most precise term. “Fear” is probably better. Mississippi scares me. Specifically, it scares me as an African-American man.
Not because I’ve ever had a bad experience there. Not because anybody there has ever said so much as a cross word to me. But simply because it is, in the final analysis, Mississippi. The Deep South of the Deep South. Meaning not just a state where cruel things were done to black people–they were done, after all, in Alabama, Florida and Georgia as well–but rather, the meanest and poorest of states where such things were done. The state that clutched with the fiercest death grip to the delusion of white supremacy. The state that has existed in African-American lore since slavery times as the one place where, if you have any choice in the matter, any sense in your head, you absolutely, positively do not want to be.
Naturally, an editor of my newspaper in Florida thinks it a splendid idea to send me there to find 10 good things, 10 things to recommend it to African-American tourists, 10 things to like about Mississippi.
“We have an image problem,” says Darienne Wilson, director of the Mississippi Tourism Division.
I’ve just finished giving her a general sense of the comments I’ve heard from family members and black friends and colleagues every time I’ve mentioned visiting her state.
My Aunt Mildred, a Mississippi native, launched into a story about a black man who ran afoul of white supremacists there. He was found dead in a ditch by the side of the highway.
This wasn’t quite what I had hoped for, so I explained that what I actually wanted was her suggestions of things to see and do. She told me she wouldn’t know because she left the state in 1945 and hasn’t been back since. Not for a visit, not for a pass through, not for nothing.
“I don’t like you being down there,” she said.
The state’s top tourism official has heard all this before. A voluble and friendly voice on the far end of a long-distance connection, she explains both the obvious–that Mississippi’s image problem stems from its history and its poverty–and the not so obvious: that white visitors are put off too.
“We have that image not only with African-Americans,” she says. “That’s something we have to work to improve. We have to work to change that.”
Interestingly enough, Wilson says that Mississippi’s image is worst among those who are farthest away. The state does a “huge amount” of tourism, but most visitors come from within a 500-mile radius.
According to Wilson, pollsters have found that people in Baton Rouge, just over the border, are “very positive” about Mississippi. “As you got into Atlanta,” she says, “we got into the `I don’t want to go there.”‘
I am going there.
My first stop is my mother’s hometown, Natchez. I’ve arranged to stay at the Monmouth Plantation, an antebellum estate that has been turned into a bed-and-breakfast. The man who shows me to my room calls me “sir” 10 times in 30 seconds, three times in a single sentence. It makes me so uncomfortable that I’m tempted to take him aside and slip into brother-man mode. As in, “Hey, brother, we’re both black here. Ain’t no need for all that bowing and scraping.”
Instead, I give him a modest tip and he leaves me to contemplate my room. It is a cheery yellow space, though a tad small for a place that calls itself a “luxury” hotel.
There is a big, poufy canopy bed, a television and, in the bathroom, a Jacuzzi.
Which is unnerving, because this room was originally where the slaves lived.
When I ask him about it, Ron Riches, the Los Angeles developer who owns Monmouth, will point out how many old castles there are whose dungeons saw use as torture chambers. Now, those torture chambers are hotels and tourist attractions, and nobody minds.
He says that when he restored the place, he originally wanted to make the slave quarters authentic to its antebellum appearance. Then he was reminded by a friend that nobody wants to pay to live like a slave. “They’ll want to live like the masters,” he said.
And so it is that my first night in Mississippi is spent in a slave’s old room in a big, comfortable bed eating the chocolates I have found on the pillow. I turn off the light and lie awake awhile in the darkness, reminding myself that “ghosts of Mississippi” was only a metaphor.
I like Natchez.
In fact, there are enough good things about this riverfront town that I start to get downright cocky about the possibility of finding 10 things in this state that appeal.
As a history buff, I like the antebellum mansions, though one gets wary and weary of the “Gone With The Wind” romanticism that sometimes accompanies a tour of such places. As a food buff, I like the succulent crawfish they serve at the Magnolia Bar and Grill down by the river.
Most of all, as my mother’s son, I like standing on the street where she grew up and realizing with a start that the view has not changed significantly since then. The rambling old houses, the sedate two-story buildings of downtown just blocks away … you get the sense that this is more or less the way it must have looked in the 1930s.
For good and for ill, you get that a lot in Mississippi. This sense that time has stopped moving. That this is a place to which change forgot to come.
Drive the scenic Natchez Trace Parkway–add it to the list of things to like, by the way–and you can easily seduce yourself into believing you have somehow left the 21st Century. The speed limit is low, the traffic is light, the lanes narrow, the road signs few.
Turn off the radio. You are alone in a silent world, passing through fields and forests that might be now, might be a hundred years ago.
Virtually every other state of the old Confederacy has done a better job than Mississippi in packaging history and heritage–particularly African-American history and heritage–for tourists.
Virginia has Colonial Williamsburg. Georgia takes tourists through the places where Martin Luther King lived and preached. Tennessee has made a museum of the place where he died. There’s a museum across the street from Central High in Little Rock, commemorating the 1957 standoff there.
The park in Birmingham, Ala., where civil rights soldiers won one of their signature victories, is filled with statues and inscriptions in their honor. Cross the street in one direction and you can tour the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Cross it in another, and you can walk through storied and tragic 16th Street Baptist Church.
“Alabama’s been doing an exceptional job,” says Wilson, a little wistfully. “They’ve been doing it a long time. The director of Alabama tourism, we brought in as a consultant because they’ve done a wonderful job. They turned a negative into a positive.”
And why has Mississippi, with a legacy of black history and culture at least as deep as Alabama’s, not been able to do that kind of job? “One easy answer is budget,” says Wilson, who adds that hers was cut by $2.5 million last year.
“It’s easier to be more niche-marketing-oriented when you have more money to work with. I’ve been here three years. Alabama has had an African-American marketing program for 10 years. We haven’t. And we do now.”
Still, there’s an interesting, albeit unintended byproduct of the state’s inability to market its history and culture. Elsewhere, these artifacts of the past have been shrink-wrapped and placed under glass for safe and convenient consumption. In Mississippi, both for better and worse, they are still visceral and raw and overwhelming in their very thereness.
For example, take a side trip up to Memphis, which a Mississippi tourism brochure describes, with somewhat self-conscious irreverence, as “the biggest city in North Mississippi.” The Beale Street area, where it is said the blues was born, offers a neon-lit and tourist-ready selection of clubs, bars and restaurants, complete with a statue of blues pioneer W.C. Handy and an amphitheater emblazoned with a beer maker’s logo. You get the sense that, whatever its place in legend, whatever role it once played in the development of the city, Beale Street is now mainly a place for people from out of town.
By contrast, the state tourism brochure warns anyone planning a visit to a juke joint in the Delta to be sure to watch their backs. “The best music is often played in less-than-the-best neighborhoods. Take precautions, be aware of your surroundings and don’t flaunt your cash or valuables.”
Even the museums I visit, places whose very existence is built on the packaging of history and culture, instead give you this sense that what was somehow still is. That you can reach out and touch yesterday on its own terms.
The Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale is the first. It is a humble place in a humble town, although the woman who sells me my ticket assures me the railroad depot next door is being refurbished into an entertainment center and the sidewalk will someday be a blues walk of fame.
There is no blues playing the day I visit, which seems purely blasphemous. But the silent room has vintage vinyl albums, photographs, tributes to giants of the blues and the actual cabin wherein the late McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, grew up. A figure of Waters himself sits in the middle of the room, guitar at the ready, disturbingly lifelike.
For me, though, the centerpiece of the museum is the cotton bale off to one side. It is bigger than you’d think if you don’t know about such things, a heavy cube of white gold, the cultivation and exploitation of which gave Mississippi its rhythm and black Mississippi its blues. I reach in and finger the stuff, pleased and a little surprised that I can.
There is a cotton bale, too, at the Florewood River Plantation State Park in Greenville. It’s a walk-through replica of an 1850s plantation. But, though the buildings are copies, the artifacts are all authentic.
It’s a chilly January morning, and I’m the only visitor. A very nice lady shows me the kitchen, handing the various implements of antebellum cookery down for my inspection and patiently explaining their use. I am struck again by the rawness of it, the unfinished nature of it, the fact that in Mississippi, history is something you can, quite literally, reach and out touch.
But if that is a strength of Mississippi’s appeal, it is also the central reason the state is a hard sell for African-American tourists.
So much of that history, after all, hurts like hell.
“Mississippi has a huge amount of history here,” says Wilson, “some of it pleasant and some of it not so pleasant. But I still think there are lessons there.”
I ask her what an African-American visitor might want to see in her state. She pauses for a moment. A long moment.
Then she says, “It’s hard for me to pick out what you would want to see different from what I would want to see. We do have some very significant universities here, some definite historical sites, the Fair Street Historical District in Jackson, there’s a wonderful museum in Natchez. Going through the antebellum homes and you have the slave quarters in back, it’s not necessarily …”
Her voice fades. Then she picks up the thought again. “But it’s here,” she says, “and it’s history and it happened. Sometimes, we pretend it didn’t happen. We have to say, it happened, this is our history. We’re different now.”
It’s a fair answer to what is probably an unfair question. Wilson points out that Mississippi has “the friendliest, most welcoming people,” and this, too, is fair. It’s not just a cliche that life has a different rhythm here. People take the time and the trouble to be nice.
And yet, there is always that other thing, that thing that, for an African-American outsider, sits large and uneasy astride any discussion of Mississippi merits. That thing is the reason for the look black people give when you tell them you’re going there, a look they don’t give when you say you’re going to Georgia or Tennessee.
It is the reason for that passage in “Black Like Me,” white writer John Howard Griffin’s famous account of passing for black in the late `50s. He tells a black confidante of his plan to visit Mississippi and the black man responds angrily. “What the hell you want to go there for?”
That thing is the heart of Nina Simone and the bitter song of protest she felt compelled to call “Mississippi Goddamn.” That thing is a United States senator torpedoing his career by expressing a fondness for the days of segregation and no one being surprised that a man who says such a foolish thing hails from Mississippi.
And finally, that thing is a late night, a deserted road, darkness pressing close and a fear that has nothing to do with being lost, everything to do with being lost here.
Which is ironic, because Mississippi is my family home. Both parents, all four grandparents, every single blood aunt and uncle, born right there. So you drive that road and you tell yourself that fear is irrational, that time has moved forward, that Mississippi no longer is what it was.
And you nod to yourself and drive too fast just the same.
Unfair? Maybe. As Wilson puts it, “I’m not sure some of the things that happened here did not happen in Alabama, or Chicago for that matter.”
But to her credit, she understands that Mississippi is not Chicago nor even Alabama. It is a thing unto itself and it must dealt with on its own terms.
“I think you say, `This is our history. Some parts of it we’re not so proud of, but come see it and let’s understand it.’ And let’s hold hands and move on.”
10 good things
OK, so here they are, 10 good things about Mississippi:
1. Some of the friendliest people you’d ever want to meet.
2. The Magnolia Bar and Grill in Natchez (49 Silver St.; 601-446-7670; www.magnoliagrill.com).
3. The Natchez Trace Parkway (2680 Natchez Trace Pkwy., Tupelo; 800-305-7417; www.nps.gov/natr).
4. The Delta Blues Museum (1 Blues Alley, Clarksdale; 662-627-6820; www.deltabluesmuseum.org).
5. The Florewood River Plantation State Park in Greenwood (1999 County Road 145; 662-455-3821; www.mdwfp.com).
6. The antebellum mansions in and around Natchez.
7. The proximity of Memphis.
8. The River.
9. The Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg (Vicksburg National Military Park, 3201 Clay St.; 601-636-0583; www.nps.gov/wick).
10. The closeness of history.
The African American Tour Guide, a brochure from the Division of Tourism, has dozens more suggestions. You can request a copy or get more information by calling 800-927-6378 or by going online to www.visitmississippi.org.
— L.P.
