Tuesday, September 22, 2009

It's just me

I'm going to post something meaningful about the family history as soon as the storm of data flying at me from the Mississippi State Archives, interviews with old-timers and local historians, snippets from the living family members, criminal court minutes, obituaries, articles, deductions and inferences all settles into its proper place. Beyond a bare chronology for Elma that includes delivering five children by five different men and losing two tragically and untimely, and beyond getting the point that Prohibition and the dawn of the Jazz Age turned a respectable, religious family inside out, I don't really have a narrative yet. My brain orders chaos quite nicely if I go away for a while and leave it alone. When I come back, I find nice patterns, or at least stacks of information organized by category.

I'll take the time out to record a few disjointed observations about this place, i.e., the Mississippi Pine Belt, including Hattiesburg, aka the Hub City.
First, I have to acknowledge the truth of some stereotypes: the place is hyper-churchy and dismayingly right-wing (I was told that the Bay Area has a bad reputation, you know, for being so liberal, but, well, we're not all so bad, really); many, many fat -- not just overweight or plump or sporting forgivable middle-aged avoir du poids, but FAAAT -- people trundle the earth here; every courthouse has a statue of a Confederate soldier out front.

But the surprises are more interesting, and they include seemingly better race relations than in California, i.e., better in that there are meaningful relationships between blacks and whites. I'm staying on the University of Southern Mississippi campus, and I see black and white students intermingle far more than I've ever seen on any UC campus, or at Bryn Mawr for that matter. Black and white kids walk with, chat with, kid and banter together regularly, routinely, constantly. It's humdrum. They share lingo, churchiness, exaggerated politeness, Southern-ness. They have almost everything in common -- I'm the outsider. The same easy black-white collegiality is evident at restaurants and other business establishments. I've even seen a few multiracial couples, as well as white folks who evidently had adopted black children. I'm told that both are trends and becoming more common. Hattiesburg is mostly white but has a black mayor and various black officials. I'm not feeling anything like the racial tension that no one likes to acknowledge permeates daily life in the San Francisco Bay Area, maybe because we have nothing to compare it with.

Other revelations: the earthy, rootsy, neo-Hippie elements in Hattiesburg and Jackson (cool music stores, restaurant/music venues, health food stores, book stores); the mini-Met museum in Laurel; the lack of hellfire at the Baptist church service I attended on Sunday with my cousin; the fact that Ed Payne's ancestors started a progressive/populist newspaper in Jones County (in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries?) and became Universalists. More to come I imagine -- I've only been here two weeks.

Oh, and in the spirit of the place I've discovered McDonalds' milkshakes are awful, but Dairy Queen's are perfect.

1 comment:

  1. Love reading every word about this journey. My favorite note of today is the news about the milk shakes.

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