Holding the Beauty and the Ugliness

Thoughts on Mississippi's contradictions, ahead of the launch of our first contributor issues.

Last week I was at a rooftop bar in Cleveland, Mississippi with a friend who is a poet and another couple—J. and S.—who work with youth in the nearby towns of Rosedale and Sunflower. The bar is typically low-key and quiet, but that night happened to be the Friday of graduation weekend and also, we discovered, there was an engagement party. The clientele that night was mostly very young, very white people who were becoming increasingly louder and drunker as the night went on.

Still, we—two Jews, a Marxist, and a Latinx poet—were enjoying ourselves, drinking whiskey, and talking about everything from Kafka to the demise of Twitter to the politics of Mississippi non-profits, and more. It was the kind of progressive millennial conversation that might get parodied on SNL.

The night wore on, the atmosphere kept getting rowdier and rowdier, and J. and S. went inside to order another round of drinks. Suddenly, there was a loud, piercing whistle from over by the bar. My poet friend and I glanced at each other, rolled our eyes, and kept talking. A few minutes later, J. and S. came back looking visibly shaken.

“Did you hear that whistle?” J. asked. My friend and I nodded.

J. proceeded to tell us what they’d witnessed inside. A young white man, maybe a recent college grad, had whistled, probably to get a drunk friend’s attention. In response, one of his buddies had said, loud enough for everyone around to hear, “Watch out, that didn’t work out so well for Emmett Till!” And the guys around him had chuckled.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I felt disgust, horror, and a deep sadness rise up in my gut. I am not naïve. I know many white people say terrible things in the privacy of their own homes, or cloaked by anonymity on the internet, or among friends, their tongues loosened by alcohol.

I have been privy to casual, offhanded bigotry, both here in Mississippi, and spoken by members of my family, none of whom are Southerners.

I know there are cavalier, racist frat boys who treat their legacy of violence with the casualty of sport, who are taught to care for their guns and their trucks with the reverent devotion that should be reserved for human life.  

And yet it was the specific, mocking cruelty of this joke that shook me. Here we were, less than 25 miles from the place where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched, his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. This joke was a defilement of Till’s memory, a violent statement akin to shooting bullets through the Emmett Till historical marker, then posing next to it for a photo, as if it were a trophy deer.

“Let’s get out of here,” J. said. It was almost 11 p.m., and he knew of a Black-owned bar just a few blocks away. I was ready to go, too, but didn’t have the stamina to keep drinking. I said goodbye to my friends, all anti-racist prison abolitionists who live in the Delta, and retreated back to the camper on the nearby farm where I was staying.

The next day, I decided to drive to the Bryant Grocery historical marker in Money, Mississippi. I had never been before, and the words of the night before were still rattling in my brain. The air was warm and damp, the sky a steely gray. The Delta land spread out to the horizon, flat and placid as the surface of a lake.

My poet friend, who is a great observer of the world, had told me his theory that the landscape of the Delta will magnify whatever emotions you happen to be feeling in that moment.

I was feeling a deep melancholy, and I did, indeed, feel that melancholy magnified by the big gray sky, the open lands

The Bryant Grocery Historical Marker, with the ruins of the Bryant Grocery in the background.

The most beautiful stretch of the drive happened to be the last 9 miles down Money Road. The fields had been seeded with rye, and were covered in bright, tender green grass. The road hugged the bends of the Tallahatchie river, which flowed a rich brown. I saw few people out front of their homes, and passed almost no cars.

The historical marker sits right off the highway in front of the ruins of the Bryant Grocery Store, where Till supposedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the action which was used as justification for his abduction and murder. The Bryant Grocery Store, now collapsed and covered in vines, is surrounded by yellow caution tape and “private property” signs. The owners of the property, descendants of one of the jurors who acquitted Till’s murderers, have refused to sell the property and allow for it to be turned into a museum or memorial.

It is one thing to read about an act of unimaginable violence and human cruelty, and another to stand in the place where it happened.

As a teenager, I had a similar bone-chilling experience when visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany. The difference is that the concentration camp had been designed with the express intention for brutality and extermination. Here, in Money, Mississippi, brutality seeped into the mundane. I was, after all, standing in front of a grocery store.

“It is a cruel truism to say that the beauty of the region is what makes it bearable, or a sign of the glory of the South despite its hauntings,” historian Imani Perry writes in South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.

And Mississippi is beautiful, especially the wide, flat Delta. And the farm where I was staying. And I met such beautiful people in the Delta, too—artists and teachers and community leaders. And this is just to say, that when many people think about Mississippi, they think about the white men slurring violence in their words. And yes, there is that, but there is more, much more, to this place.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to hold the beauty and the ugliness, the contradictions, the complexity together in both hands.

Starting January 4, Rooted will be publishing weekly contributor questionnaires full of this very complexity. You’ll hear from Mississippians who appreciate our state’s beauty without turning a blind-eye to its ugliness, who are willing to not shy away from hard truths. We’ll also publish original essays, poetry, fiction and more. (I’ve gotten to read these early submissions, and let me tell you, they are fantastic.)

If you haven’t yet, subscribe now to get new issues of Rooted Magazine delivered straight to your inbox. If you’re already subscribed, forward this email to a friend who’s never been to the Deep South. We’ll be having some important, deep conversations here. I hope you’ll take part.