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| http://www.wearejuxt.com/2011/12/15/to-understand-the-world-you-must-first-understand-a-place-like-mississippi-william-faulkner/ |
William Faulkner is quoted as saying,
"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi".
That line has strangely haunted me for years like a distant echo that resonates somewhere within myself that I can't quite pinpoint.
My father and his father before him and so forth on down the line are born and raised in the state which infamously carries with it much judgment in the eyes of the rest of America. Mississippi is top of the charts for all the wrong reasons: Poverty, racism, poor education, obesity,
the list goes on and on.
And yet it's a place of pride to many, including my family,
who have called it home for many years.
Though I was born in Texas while my parents were serving at their first church just out of seminary in Temple and have thus claimed all my life to be a Texan, I look back now and realize that I have spent more years of my life living under the controversial Confederate flag than I have under that of the Lone Star. Living as a child in Natchez and Meridian, and as a college student and young adult in the Jackson and Hattiesburg areas, altogether total I've spent over half my life in the place to which Faulkner referred in his famous quote.
And I find much to my somewhat surprise that this is a source of pride to me; now that I have moved back to Texas to make BGC my home I feel this hold the Magnolia State has on me more than ever.
And so, lately, I have found my spirit pondering these echoes and questioning not only why Faulkner said what he did, but why it resonates with me so.
Mississippi is a place where cotton and contradiction are king.
A place where according to legend Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in order to create one of the world's best known music genres and where Robert Kennedy stood at the threshold of Hell on earth as he witnessed the plight of children in the Delta that would later go on to inspire his War on Poverty.
Its a place where literary minds like Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, John Grisham and Tennessee Williams called home and where illiteracy among our youth ranks highest in the nation.
It's a place where the juxtaposition of politics and poverty, religion and basic human rights, culture and kinship connections collide around a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and greens served up family style after church.
And yet there is great beauty there.
In between the ashes and muddy waters, where catfish jump on the lines of black men in lakes and reservoirs named for segregationists, in the night song of the cicadas that sings no matter who you are, in the restoration and preservation of places like the Fondren and Rowan Oaks and in the pine trees that grow so tall that they inspired my grand daddy to stare up at them as a boy and first find God's grace, in this I find the strange dance that is Mississippi, where truth and beauty collide beneath an oak dripping in hanging moss on a moonlit night in the shadow of it's past sins.
For in order to understand a place like Mississippi you have to feel it, you have to live it.
The Blood and tears and broken bones.
The Dust and sweat and dirty knees.
The Yearning and redemption and Glory Hallelujah!
of it all.
And in the same way my kids at BGC are beautiful.
Broken, scarred, beaten, weary.
Lost, alone, forgotten , abandoned.
And yet..
Rising from the Ashes
because Love exists even these places.
That's what I've learned to be true in Mississippi and in all parts of the world.
Love exists even in the unlovable.
That infamous segregationist I spoke of earlier for whom the Ross Barnett reservoir is named, he has a famous quote about Mississippi too.
On a fateful night in 1962 before the riots would break out protesting the African American student, James Meredith's entry into Ole Miss, then Governor Barnett, stood before a crowd in Jackson on the 50 yard line at a stadium where the Rebels were playing Kentucky. Barnett was in staunch opposition to Meredith as were most in the crowd who cheered as he said,
" I love Mississippi! I love her people! Our customs. I love and I respect our heritage."
I can agree with this quote until I read it in context of what Barnett was saying and it saddens me how limited Barnett allowed himself and his state, to love.
Mississippi is greater than Barnett and countless others have given it credit for being,
and so is Love.
The way I see it in order for something to be loved it doesn't have to be lovely. It doesn't have to be worthy, or whole or holy.
It can be ugly, and messy and shameful, otherwise what are we all hoping for in the end?
In order for me to love the kids at BGC they don't have to be perfect and neither do I.
We don't always have to fit together and look like the All American family whose got it all together.
We are going to mess up as parents and there are going to be times when it's hard. Hard to endure. Hard to cope. Hard to love.
But the beauty of love is that, that's ok.
The truth of love is that no one ever does it perfect save for the One who is Love.
And the power of love is that even the most unlovely find it exists within them after all.
So, to Mr. Barnett I say, with a heavy heart that heaves beneath the weight of bearing and loving deeply a mixed race child, though it pains me to do so, I forgive you for not understanding the limitlessness of my Father's love.
To James Meredith, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Bridges and Medgar Evers, and countless other black Mississippi brothers and sisters I say thank you for your courage, your endurance and your lessons on true love.
And to My Mississippi, filled with childhood memories so precious they drip from my soul like Tupelo honey, brimming to the top and spilling over like the banks of the Pearl River baptizing me in the Spirit of the South that I have grown to see as lovely because of its scars, to you I say I am blessed. Blessed to have seen your beauty, to have understood your history, and to go forth in love more fully bc I understand a place like you.
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