A Canadian who lives in Maryland fell in love with Mississippi, a place so many people love to hate. She thought of herself as a Good White Person, and knew she needed to shake free of that bad habit — Mississippi helped.
Essay by Kyla Hanington
Photos by Brandon Thibodeaux, courtesy of The Do Good Fund
When I find out liquor laws change from county to county, town to town, I lean forward and tell my friends from Mississippi they live in God’s Country. What a place, I tell them. It’s like something out of a book, not a real place at all, but somewhere other worldly, full of magic. They blink back at me on my computer screen.
Maybe they think I am making fun of them. After all, what am I? A Canadian now living in Maryland. You can’t be from Mississippi, I know, and not expect people in other parts of the country to dump on you. “Everybody in America Hate the South,” writes Jacqueline Allen Trimble, the title of the first poem in her excellent collection American Happiness. And ain’t that the truth? I had someone sit on my couch once and tell me she never went to slave states. My couch in Maryland. Maryland, a slave state. If Maryland was not a slave state, how did both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman come from here?
But you know there are people in Maryland, just like there are people everywhere, who hate on Mississippi, even though they’ve never even been.
So when I tell my classmates at Mississippi University for Women — and also men since 1982 — that they live in God’s Country, half of them laugh and the other half of them look at me warily, waiting to see if I’m making fun of them, their homes, their lives, themselves.
It is the last residency of my MFA program, and because of COVID-19, everyone is on Zoom. I’m gearing up for my thesis defense, and we are sharing meals in front of our respective computers, laughing and reading and talking about geography, writing, publishing, optimism, and anxiety. I am sad I won’t see my thesis committee, people whose writing I admire and people I’ve come to love. I wonder if I will see any of them in person again, and if so, when?
But we aren’t talking about that right now on Zoom. Right now we are talking about Mississippi.
My friend Alec Hawkins makes up a song on the spot:
It started with a hug and ended up in ticks
Kyla wanted to see some ‘gators so I took her to the sticks
He puts on a faint country twang. I beg him to write the song for real.
I chose to study creative writing at the Mississippi University for Women because I had never been to Mississippi and because I was turning into one of those people who judges other people based on the color of their skin and where they were born. I guess because I am a white person and it was white folks I was judging, it kind of snuck up on me. I’d made it OK when I do it, negatively stereotype folks for their skin color and their accents, but not OK when they do it. Or, OK if it’s white folks.
It’s hardly breaking new ground to negatively stereotype white folks. It’s how white folks like me show we are Good White People. Throw around the name Karen a few times derisively, type “White people, amirite?” on social media with a face-palm emoji.
But up North — and right now I mean anything north of Mississippi — folks like to talk about “people in the South” derisively, by which they mean white people in the South. I’ve done it myself. I’ve caught myself mid-sentence saying something negatively stereotypical about “people in the South,” meaning white folks, folks I had at that point never met, folks who existed only in my mind in caricature form. This is me as a Good White Person, white-centering the South with my white gaze, reducing an entire group of people based solely upon their skin color and where they happen to live, and, in so doing, erasing from view all the Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and Black folks who live there, who choose to live there, whose lives there are rich, full, and vibrant. That I did this is no news to anyone who actually lives in the South, I realize this, but it was uncomfortable news to me.
I chose to study in Mississippi because I wanted to stop being a Good White Person, capital letters clanging into place. If I was going to be curious, open, willing to learn, I had to put that down. I had to be willing to stop advertising and claiming and demanding that I be seen as a Good White Person and instead just be. To sit with openness. To be willing to learn, including willing to learn that I can be wrong. And I was going to have to go to Mississippi.
To go to Mississippi is to fall in love with it. You understand why people live here. Their families are here, in the graveyard or in the town over. Their memories.
Mississippi is messy. Of course it is messy, but I have found it more honest than the woman who sat on my couch in Maryland boasting about how she doesn’t visit slave states. Honey, you live in a state that didn’t end slavery until more than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Although most of my classmates at MUW come from Mississippi, not all of them do. There are some folks from Alabama, Louisiana, New York, Nevada, Florida, Oregon; and there’s me — the immigrant, non-citizen currently living in Maryland. Before COVID-19, we flocked to Columbus, Mississippi, for our residencies. One day we will flock again, driving through a landscape that rises and rolls. There are ghosts in this landscape. When I drive past cotton fields the ghosts rise up and look at me, and I look back, gently, promising myself — promising them — I will not look away.
To get to Mississippi I have to drive through Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. I am surprised by how the trees of northern Alabama remind me of British Columbia; surprised by white ibises over misty marshland; surprised by how beautiful everything is. For a woman like me, Mississippi is otherworldly, from the way the mist rises from the cypress swamp to the scattered remains of armadillos on the road side to the kudzu clogging the hillsides. One has to pay attention to learn that kudzu kills, a blanket bringing not comfort but suffocation. I have to pay attention.
It turns out I am not surprised by how kind, curious, warm, interesting, complex, and diverse in thought, political opinion, and background the people are — they’re people just like people everywhere else.
But, I am surprised to discover how invested I had been in the sort of “Mississippi Burning” image I had in my head of the state, how much — and for how long — the othering of Mississippi had shaped part of my identity as a white person from the North — north as in Canada, north as in north of Mississippi. Looking down on folks is just a way to divert us from taking too good a look at ourselves. Mississippi shakes that out of me and I am thankful.
When I close the computer at the end of this residency, I will be closing the lid on my MFA program. But not, I hope, on Mississippi. It turns out that, despite my expectations, I was not too good for Mississippi. On the contrary, Mississippi is undoubtedly too good for me.
But Mississippians made space for me anyway, warmly, when perhaps they should have used caution. They invite me into their stories; tell me about their grandparents, how the blood of their families is in this soil. What do I know of geographic loyalty, of history rooted in location, rooted in generations. I am not the first Good White Person from the North to have looked down on Mississippi, and I suppose they were prepared for me even if I was not fully prepared for them.
Later I remind people, remind myself, that I have lived in lots of places and what I have learned, over and over again, is that people are people wherever you go: as kind and hopeful and small-minded and generous and confused and lovely as people anywhere else. This is true of Maryland. This is true of Mississippi.
I lean forward from my house in Maryland, as though if I lean far enough I will fall into my computer, fall into love, fall into Mississippi.
Kyla Hanington spent 14 years in a small town in British Columbia followed by four years in Hawaii, four in Idaho, two in Vancouver, British Columbia, three in Denmark, three in Indiana, two in Maryland, then eight on Vancouver Island, two in Northern British Columbia, and the last five plus back in Maryland again. Phewph!
Header photographs by Brandon Thibodeaux: “Harry Hope, Mound Bayou, Mississippi” and “Birds in Field, Mound Bayou, Mississippi.” Courtesy of The Do Good Fund and part of our photo essay Pictures of Us.