At Home in the "In Between"
I may belong here, but I can't entirely claim Mississippi as home.
For most of my life, I have been pondering and obsessing over the question of home. I can partly trace this obsession to my childhood, when, starting at the age of seven, I split my time equally between my divorced mother’s and father’s houses. With two houses, the concept of “home” transformed from a simple concept into a philosophical construct.
Though my parents’ houses were only blocks apart, within each of these houses my routines, conversations, the food I ate, even the brand of toothpaste I used was completely different. Each house was like its own little country, and I adjusted my clothing, speech patterns, and sense of humor accordingly. At some core level, of course, I was consistently me, the same me I am today. And yet, on another level, I was aware that my external surroundings—my homes—tangibly shaped my identity and how I perceived myself in relation to the world.
How exhilarating and terrifying it was—and is—to be porous to the world, to notice how much of a place I absorbed without even trying! I probably would never have even recognized the influence of home from an early age, had I not traveled back and forth between those two very different spaces, had I not been both insider/outsider, belonging but...not quite.
It would be many more years (and miles) before I could understand the extent to which I had been saturated by home in a broader sense: the social and political dynamics of my family, school, neighborhood, and state, the landscape of central Colorado’s arid high plains, bright cerulean sky, and the ever present mountain skyline to the west.
Last month I attended Katy Simpson Smith’s reading for her newest novel The Weeds. Katy is a Jackson native who grew up a few blocks away from the Eudora Welty House. The Weeds is her fourth novel, and the first of her books to feature a Mississippi protagonist. In the discussion with Kathryn Savage that followed, Katy spoke about the trepidation she had felt in writing a Mississippi woman—a Jacksonian, no less!—whose roots and sense of place resemble her own. Would readers misconstrue author and fictional character? Would she successfully be able to translate her own intimate and specific understanding of Mississippi onto the page, via the universal medium of fiction?
I’m not a fiction writer, but I understand this trepidation. It can feel transgressive, even dangerous, to write our homes into existence, to bare our soft, vulnerable underbellies to the scrutiny of the wider world. And yet, the paradox of writing about home is that to do so requires a level of cold objectivity and distance, a severing of sorts. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Mississippi protagonist of The Weeds kindles a scientific and emotional curiosity for the flora of her home state while cataloging plants in the Roman Colosseum.
Recently, I was talking with an artist friend who left Mississippi after college, then returned after a handful of years away. She said that growing up, she had hated Mississippi’s omnipresent pine trees, had found them ugly and unimpressive. But after she came back, those same familiar pines seemed to her strikingly beautiful, as if she was seeing them with new eyes. For the first time, she noticed the way the softness of the needles contrasted with the straight column of trunk, the rough texture of bark. She doesn’t know what changed in those years that so altered her perception, only that there was a distinct before and after. Distance and time had changed her artist’s vision, made space for compassion and beauty.
I, too, have found that living in Mississippi has taught me to have compassion for my own place of origin. Here, I have become a student of place, of home. I have learned what it means to be from somewhere. Maybe I could have moved to Sacramento or St. Paul with the same result. But I moved to Jackson.
And though I’ve lived in Mississippi now for ten years—seven of those ten in the same house—I still feel that I’m between worlds, the way I did as a kid moving between Mom’s house and Dad’s house. Sure, I’ve mostly replaced my “you guyses” with “y’alls,” but no one will ever mistake my accent for a Southerner’s. I know when to plant turnip seeds in the fall and how to pickle okra, but I didn’t grow up with Yazoo clay caked beneath my fingernails. And I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the sudden downpour of summer rainstorms, which are so different from the fleeting and gusty thunderstorms of my youth. As much as I feel that I belong here, I can’t claim this place entirely as my home. Not the way my husband or daughter can. And that’s okay. You don’t need to be from somewhere to appreciate its beauty, to forgive its flaws, to want it to be better. I can do that just fine from here in the in between.
If you’re just joining us, be sure to catch up on all our May contributor issues.
Nora Katz describes the impact of volunteering as a Pink House Defender, and writes about how saying “yes” to everything when she moved to Mississippi helped her to quickly feel at home here.
Mississippi native Amanda Furdge had to first leave for Chicago in order to return and find her place and purpose here. She describes how her family and her activism keep her rooted in Mississippi.
A love of the Blues brought Scott Barretta to Mississippi over 20 years ago, and he never looked back. He writes that since moving here, he hasn’t once felt like an outsider.
Celeste Schueler describes her pride in being from Mississippi, yet the state’s poor healthcare rankings and lack of abortion access leave her doubting whether she would ever move back home.
Archie Skiffer writes about how traumatic acts of racism and violence have spurred him to advocate for justice. He underscores the contradiction of Mississippi being a place of great beauty and of deep pain.
I deeply appreciate the writer’s feelings, having moved often and then in my later years finally understanding the meaning of place but still moving once more to appreciate the difference in surroundings and what is Core and what is the Surround. And when the surround becomes so familiar and so tied into daily life and habits and thoughts and experiences that if becomes part of the core. And the willingness too let it happened. In a few weeks I will once again, living in the urban neighborhood of Coolidge Corner, Boston, visit with the Mississippi branch of my family and that will be just fine.
Why did you have to be in my head like that? For the first time in my 56 years of life, I feel like I am home, 4368 miles from my birthplace. It’s the people here, wrapping me in their inquisitive and welcoming arms. It’s the joy of cooking for those who have food curled tight around every memory. Home means more here, nobody loves Mississippi more than Mississippi and I am here for it!!