Living in a Place of Mixed Feelings

Reflections on one whole year (!) of gray area, nuance, and contradiction with Rooted Magazine.

As Rooted Magazine turns one, I’ve been reflecting on the origins of this project. Sometimes, I think that I started Rooted in order to make up my mind about whether or not I should stay in Mississippi, devising an elaborate pretense to ask interesting people invasive personal questions about why they stayed here, or left, or returned. But really, if I’m being honest, the genesis behind this project was the 2022 Jackson water crisis.

That summer, the water coming out of our faucets was undrinkable. I didn’t even trust it after boiling. This was not the first time we had been under a boil water notice in Jackson, but it was the first time that the notice had lasted for weeks, without an end date in sight. Thousands of people had no water at all. I was angry at our state and city leadership for their failings, angry at the forces of structural racism, the apathy of people in power, the disinvestment from our capital city that had led to this point. And I was afraid, because the water crisis had exposed just how wobbly and unsound the underpinnings of my life here were.

How could I pretend to care about my own career and artistic goals when I was preoccupied with whether the bath water my daughter swallowed would make her sick? Clean water was at the foundation of our basic hierarchy of needs. Still, I had to acknowledge how lucky we were as a household who still had running water at all. We did not have to drive to pick up water jugs, or flush the toilet with buckets of collected rainwater. 

As Jackson made national news for the ongoing water crisis¹, I began fielding concerned calls and texts from out-of-state friends and family. Donations poured in to local community organizations who were distributing water to seniors and other vulnerable people. Mostly, I was grateful for the concern and offers to help. And I was grateful, too, for the pressure that national attention would put on state and national leaders to help fix our broken water system. And yet. All that hand wringing and concern from New York Times subscribers in urban metropolises began to feel vaguely like pity. I didn’t want to be pitied for the place I had chosen to live and that I still loved in spite of its crumbling infrastructure. There were real reasons why I still lived here. I wanted people to see the Mississippi I saw, its lush green beauty, its long legacy of grassroots activism, its music, art, and literature.