An Ode to the Southern Exile

What happens when you love Mississippi, but Mississippi doesn't love you back?

Unlike most Southern expats I’ve met, I’ve never been homesick for the place I’m from. I left Colorado at age 22, shedding the baggage of a complicated adolescence and looking ahead to the metaphorical horizons of the future. Since settling in Mississippi I’ve often wondered: why do I not yearn for home the same way Southerners do? Sure, I miss the dry air and mountain views that I took for granted as a Colorado kid, but I don’t long for snow and high altitude the way my Mississippi expat friends long for frog song and humidity. 

I was thinking about this “phenomenon” after a recent visit from my Southern expat friend Jane. With a charming accent, a sweet tea addiction, and a love for Raising Canes’ chicken, Jane is about as Southern as they come. Her grandmother taught her to quilt and sew, and her father taught her how to identify native trees by their leaves and bark patterns. She has a tulip poplar leaf tattooed on her leg. For our wedding, Jane hand-quilted the chuppah that my husband and I stood under to say our vows.

Jane hasn’t lived in Mississippi since 2015 when she left for New York City. From New York, she went even further north, to Maine. During her visit to Jackson earlier this year, the sky was cloudless and the air balmy; the earliest daffodils and Japanese magnolias were just beginning to push out their first buds. It was the kind of day designed to tug on a homesick Southerner’s heartstrings. 

For Jane, the decision to leave Mississippi involved a complicated calculus. (Like being put “between a rock and a fucking hard place,” she’s said.) Jane is queer and came out as trans following her departure from the Deep South. She left for many reasons, including prioritizing her well-being, safety, and self-expression.

I need to say here that Mississippi is home to many LGBTQ+ people who choose to grow roots here. Mississippi also does not exist in a vacuum. Like Dennis Johnson wrote in his Rooted questionnaire: our state “is full of the same people that you can find anywhere.”

That being said, our state is also run by a Republican supermajority who repeatedly enacts regressive policies that hurt minorities, women, mothers, children, poor people, and LGBTQ+ people. 

This year alone, Mississippi lawmakers have filed more than 30 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including HB 1125, the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures” (REAP) Act, which was just passed in the senate on February 21 and will inevitably be signed into law by the governor.

This bill bans gender-affirming care for transgender youth, a move that will have dire implications for trans kids and their families, as it bars access to life-saving puberty blockers and hormone treatments for the roughly 2,400 trans kids in the state. The legislators who fast tracked this bill without consulting to any medical professionals, trans people, or parents of trans kids have spoken loud and clear: they don’t believe transgender people deserve access to healthcare. 

When HB 1125 was first brought forth, allies in Mississippi and beyond called the lieutenant governor’s office. Jane called, too, and then sent me a text. With permission, she’s letting me share a screenshot here.

A text from Jane on January 30, 2023.

I responded that “they” may not claim you, but we do. But even that statement, while true, felt hollow and not enough.

Which brings me back to my original question: what is it about that specific Southern longing for home? Perhaps it has to do with the reason for leaving home in the first place. When I left Colorado, neither my identity nor my sense of safety were socially or politically at odds with the place I left.

But many Southerners leave home because home poses a threat. They leave as exiles, unable to return home to a place they love, a place that doesn’t value their lives and autonomy.

The homesick longing of the Southern exile is sawtoothed with rage. These days I, too, am filled with a righteous, brimming anger for what Mississippi has lost—will lose—in driving out some of its brightest, most creative, most loving citizens. At the end of the day, I just want my people to stay be able to stay here, to grow and thrive. Here. Among the red oak, the magnolia, the tulip poplar.

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If you’re just joining us, you’ll want to catch up on February’s Rooted contributor issues.

Jianquing Zheng, writes about making a home in the Delta. Originally from China, he also beautifully captures the experience of being a transplant, how ”the place where you are from fades out into memories, into a place of no return, into the aromas of local foods.”

Jamie Dickson describes the inner-conflicts and contradictions of being a Mississippian, and how “being a writer means embracing (not necessarily understanding) complexity.” His “Sunflower Triptych” poems were featured in Rooted’s first lagniappe issue.

Rooted community editor Maya Miller shares photos and lyrical descriptions of her homeplace in southwest Rankin county: “A place of Black farmers and tradesmen, schoolteachers and slim-ankled women who dipped snuff and pressed their hair in the early Sunday morning hours.”

And Dennis Johnson reminisces about Mississippi gas station chicken and being close to family, but he doesn’t regret his move to Chicago. “I feel like I spent too much time there and that whatever I do next needs to be going forward and not in the other direction.”

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Lauren Rhoades is a Mississippi transplant, pro-choice mom, and Eudora Welty fangirl. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rooted Magazine.