Robert Reece quit looking for his roots in distant lands that have not affected him so deeply as the history, culture, and people of Mississippi.
A few years ago, I got curious about my family history. I remember calling my grandma, the oldest person I could access, to ask her about it. I only asked her one question, which in retrospect is a bit of a naïve question, “Where is our family from?”
I don’t really know what I expected her to say. Maybe I had delusions of her telling me a story about some African or Caribbean nation, maybe even of some tale of traveling from her grandparents escaping from a plantation in Virginia. I’m unsure, but she didn’t tell me any of those things. She told me, “Mississippi.” Again, I don’t remember whether I was satisfied with that answer at the time, but I didn’t inquire any further because I knew that there was nothing else I could ascertain from that conversation.
Soon after I asked her that question, ancestry testing begin to boom, becoming increasingly popular and accessible, enabling people hungry for a greater sense of belonging to find out where they are “really” from. (And for a brilliant critique of ancestry testing, how you’re being ripped off and reifying biological ideas of race, check out Dorothy Robert’s Fatal Invention.) But for me, what my grandma said that night—“Mississippi”—is more than enough.
I almost certainly didn’t recognize the magnitude of that one word at the time, but it was loaded with meaning. Though my family’s history was certainly truncated by slavery, Mississippi provided me with an equally rich history of resistance and cultural depth that I wouldn’t trade for any stylized ties back to the “Motherland.” I’ll gladly stand for my “Step-Motherland” and declare the state my “old country,” and the “negro’s natural habitat.”
I’m from a place where bold Mississippians stood unafraid in the face of racist terror even when death was surely the price they’d pay for resistance. People like Joe Pullen, who single-handedly battled a mob of angry whites—for seven fucking hours!—killing nine and wounding another nine, and Rudy Shields who organized defense squadrons across the state to defend black residents from white retaliation as he used boycotts to force local white power brokers to negotiate.
I’m from a place where sharecroppers walked off one of their area’s most prominent plantations in protest of their wages and weathered one of the state’s most bitter winters using only army tents, a hand pumped well, one single wood structure, and hope. They endured the terror of cowards who’d drive by at night firing into their camp, all in an attempt to inspire. One of the leaders, John Henry Sylvester once said:
Negroes still living on plantations see what we are accomplishing and are becoming less afraid of what will happen if they decide to leave or if they are forced to leave.
I’m from a place where the entire state came together to protest and vote down the oppressive “Personhood Act” that would have not only banned abortion in the state but limited access to certain types of birth control and emergency contraceptives. In a virtually unprecedented political move for the state, people of both genders and political parties and many racial groups showed solidarity, even if it was only temporary, to achieve a common goal and protect the reproductive rights of the state’s women.
I’m from the home of “America’s Music”—the blues, music that moves the body and soul and chills the bones with the sound of struggle and oppression. Arguably, black America’s (maybe even America in general) first original music, it influenced every other genre in the country and even some international genres.
See what I mean? Why would I ever attempt to tie my roots to somewhere else when Mississippi has given me so much? Each of these things are a part of me. I’m inspired by the resilience of Joe Pullen and Rudy Shields. I’ve walked on the ground where those sharecroppers made their stand. I personally protested the Personhood Act. And some old blues music can always calm my racing heart. I don’t know if I was ever truly ashamed of Mississippi, but I’m certain that even though my pride now runs deep, in it is a recent development.
I’m truly in love with my state; I wouldn’t trade it and its history for anything, and it all started with my grandma’s one word response: Mississippi.
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