Mississippi Expat: Jimmy Cajoleas
"Mississippi built me from the ground up. I don’t know myself without it."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Today we hear from author Jimmy Cajoleas, whose books include Goldeline, The Good Demon, and most recently, Gussy. Jimmy now lives in New York City, but he credits growing up in Jackson, outside of the “larger cultural discourse,” as helping him to shape his own distinct identity and voice.
Where are you from?
I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where I lived until I moved to Oxford when I was eighteen to attend the University of Mississippi for undergrad. After a brief stint in Austin, Texas, I moved back to Jackson, then back Oxford for graduate school. Altogether, I lived in Mississippi for around twenty-eight years.
When did you move to New York and why did you move there?
Eight and a half years ago. It seemed like an adventure.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
Home is where I know I’m loved and accepted. In some ways, Mississippi will always be my home. I’ve found a nice life up here, one where I have good friends and people I love, but there’s something about the place you’re from, where your family is, where every street and tree and empty building has a memory.
I miss my family and my friends. I miss the trees. I miss the food. I miss servers at restaurants who will sit down and talk to you about life and show you pictures of their grandkids before even taking your drink order.
What do you miss most about Mississippi?
I miss my family and my friends. I miss the trees. I miss the food. I miss servers at restaurants who will sit down and talk to you about life and show you pictures of their grandkids before even taking your drink order. I miss the tight-knit crew of artists and musicians I had back when I was growing up and all this writing and art and music stuff meant everything in the world. More than anything I miss the sound of the bugs and the tree frogs on hot summer nights. That’s probably the best sound in the world.
How have you cultivated community in New York? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?
It's funny, but Mississippi is never very far from me. Like two years ago when I was working at a soup kitchen line, I met a guy from Memphis and it turned out we had a mutual pal from Clinton. He’s become someone I count as a dear friend. Another example: during the worst of the pandemic, I was walking toward the subway and saw my friend Kieran Danielson from Oxford. I didn’t even know he’d moved to New York. We immediately started a new iteration of his long-running band Bonus and hang out all the time. That’s usually how it goes with Mississippians. I think I have four or five Mississippi friends living within half a mile from me currently. We hang out from time to time, and it’s so nice to have that easy connection, where you don’t have to explain anything and they just already know.
You so rarely meet anyone who has actually been to Mississippi, who has a clue what they’re talking about, who has ever seen what a wild, beautiful, diverse, conflicted, strange place it truly is.
Two of my best friends up here I met in Oxford in graduate school, one from Michigan and the other North Carolina, and I try to see them at least once every couple of weeks. And it was a real thrill hearing Brooklynites buzzing about the great Hattiesburg band MSPAINT the last time they played a show around town. Plus, the nice thing about living in a place like New York is everyone is always coming to visit, so I still feel rooted to my Mississippi life.
What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?
I remember back when I was touring a lot with my old band and we played somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I was maybe nineteen years old, seeing the country for the first time, and I remember this person coming up to us and asking us if it felt weird having to wear shoes. You know, because we were from Mississippi, and no one wears shoes there. Or asking us if we were shocked by indoor plumbing, if we knew how toilets worked. It’s just the basic assumption that everyone in Mississippi is backwards, ignorant, and still living like it was two hundred years ago. You so rarely meet anyone who has actually been to Mississippi, who has a clue what they’re talking about, who has ever seen what a wild, beautiful, diverse, conflicted, strange place it truly is.
How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
Well, this is the big question, isn’t it? Mississippi formed me, in ways both good and bad, that I’m still trying to understand. From growing up in church to playing football to wandering the woods to driving around hours aimlessly in high school to my first job I didn’t immediately get fired from at Musiquarium to sleeping on couches in Oxford to the early days of Sneaky Beans in Jackson. Learning about the horrors that took place on the streets where I walked every day and the immense power of the people who pushed back against them, who are still working so hard to change things to this day. Knowing my own complicity in Mississippi’s problems (specifically, my participation in so many of the institutions in which I was raised) and the lingering guilt of leaving.
And at the same time, despite living in a town full of frat guys who wanted to beat your ass, walking into City Grocery and being surrounded by geniuses who were kind enough to let me pull up a chair and join into the conversation, the weirdos and freaks who let me in immediately and without a single question asked. One of the great things about being in a place so isolated from the larger cultural discourse is that it allows you to develop your own voice and identity without needing to fit into any particular mold. Scenes can develop that are nothing like what they are in big media coastal cities, with their own feel and identity. Mississippi built me from the ground up. I don’t know myself without it.
What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?
Just how unique the experience of growing up in Mississippi truly was. Especially growing up being more into books and music than football. There were so few of us doing art that it forced my friends and me into this tight-knit group of artists and musicians and writers and actors all hanging out together all the time, going to the same parties, playing in each other’s bands, putting out zines and literary magazines, booking shows and readings, everything we could. At the time there was so little cultural infrastructure for that sort of thing that you just had to do it all yourself, and it was glorious. I thought that was a normal experience, having such a beloved group of friends spanning genres and styles and disciplines, people you loved with all of your heart and who loved you back and whose work you were in love with. There was very little competition because we were all in each other’s bands, editing each other’s stories, all trying to make it happen for one another.
One of the great things about being in a place so isolated from the larger cultural discourse is that it allows you to develop your own voice and identity without needing to fit into any particular mold.
Turns out that’s rare. Turns out when I say something like that, most people look at me like that’s as foreign as Heaven. Makes me sad, because while I lived it up as hard as I could then, I wish I’d realized how rare it was, how unlikely, and how precious. Because we were so isolated, we were allowed to develop our own voices, our own styles. We felt like everything was against us except for ourselves, and it made us band together into this crew that still exists today, even though we’re all separated now geographically. Mississippi sort of hammered us into that shape, and I’ll always be so grateful. The amount of great art and music and writing that comes out of that state is astonishing. Our writers are better than the writers from anywhere else. Better read, stranger, more fun to hang out with. It’s just the truth.
Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?
I think about it often. I really do miss my family a lot. But then again, there’s so much world out there, and I’ve only experienced a fraction of it. It’s so hard to balance the desire to go and see and do with the love I have for my family and my home. I’m not really sure what the answer to that is.
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
I wish the rest of the country understood that it is not exempt from Mississippi. It’s like, I remember talking to a person who had recently read a Barry Hannah book and was horrified by it, and they asked me, “Why does he write about all these freaks, these awful people?” And I had to say, “Those ‘freaks’ are you! They’re me! They’re all of us! The great and the horrible, it’s all in us too!” People can condescend to Mississippi and its problems, but so many of those problems are elsewhere too, only in Mississippi you can’t hide from them. It’s a place of contradictions deep in its heart, and that’s what makes it so essentially human. That inability to hide, both from the beauty and the shame, is part of what makes life so hard but the art so good.
I also wish people understood how many wonderful people are in Mississippi, working their asses off to make it live up to its own potential. How it doesn’t need to be like other places, it only needs to be the best version of itself. How incredible things are flowering there all the time in the face of so many institutions and traditions and political boobytraps that try and squash them. All that hope, despite everything.
People can condescend to Mississippi and its problems, but so many of those problems are elsewhere too, only in Mississippi you can’t hide from them. It’s a place of contradictions deep in its heart, and that’s what makes it so essentially human.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
I do have to always mention Lewis Nordan. The great Southern surrealist. His books can get away with anything, and they always make me weep. He seemed to understand that when an emotion or a truth becomes so big and horrible that words won’t work, only images and music will suffice. That’s why, in the midst of a moment so shocking and horrible, he’ll drop a line like, “A skinny yellow dog dragged a saddlebag full of harmonicas down the street in its teeth.” Going nowhere, headed off to whatever adventure, just wandering through this scene on its way to its own book that never got written. I’m rambling, but Nordan’s my favorite. His short story “Owls” from Music of the Swamp is my favorite story ever written. Just nothing like it.
Linda Williams Jackson is one of the great writers of our time. Her novels are full of so much pain and joy and wonder. Each is a little miracle. I remember the first time I picked up Midnight Without a Moon and it just floored me. She’s also one of the hardest working authors I’ve ever met, a kind person with an incredible artistic touch, an utterly unique voice out in the world. She’s a national treasure, and I can’t wait for her to get all the recognition she so richly deserves.
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
I know things like infrastructure and hospitals and schools and roads are the most important things. Hell, just fixing Jackson’s water would be something incredible. But since this is an impossible hypothetical (I can’t fathom a billion dollars), and if so many basics could be already taken care of, I’d really love to give it to people to make art. Because people need time and space to make things, and time and space are the hardest things to come by. Money helps with that, it really does. I wish I could give everyone enough money to quit their day jobs for a while, have their needs met, and just crank stuff out. There would be such an explosion of beauty and power out of Mississippi that it would impact the whole world. I truly believe that. So yeah. A billion dollars, that goes to buy the great artists of Mississippi all the time and space they need to show the world what they can do.
What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)
This list could be miles long. I’m not kidding. I could spend the rest of the day typing about Mississippi writers alone, both contemporary and of the past. There’s just too many, and I’m scared of leaving anyone out. Same with music and art. I’m constantly thrilled by the quality of the art made by people in Mississippi and Deep South expats sent out to everywhere else. There’s a special power to it.
My neighbor (from Tennessee) and I are working on a new publishing venture, Bitterroot Books, that will specialize in rural nonfiction from all over the country. It’s still in its early phases, but the idea is that it will be a worker-and-author-owned cooperative publisher that will seek to elevate rural voices and also get authors paid decently and on time, something that is increasingly a problem in publishing. We’re looking at a pretty amazing slew of others. It’s something I’m really excited about.
I love the Mississippi record stores map that The End of All Music (my former workplace) put out. I’m sure there’s one for independent bookstores too. So many places to explore, search the stacks, crate dig, make friends. That’s something I miss about home. The way you can walk into a space like that and leave with a new best friend. It doesn’t happen like that anywhere else.
Also, one more shoutout to Gerry Wilson, my high school creative writing teacher. She taught me to how to stretch myself with writing, how to revise and edit, how to never consider a piece finished until it tells you it’s done with you. Mrs. Wilson also introduced me to the works of Lewis Nordan, incidentally, and her son Clay Jones, who is a brilliant musician, producer, and songwriter, completely changed my life. I have so much to be grateful for in all that she showed me and introduced me to. Her new novel That Pinson Girl is coming out soon, and I have no doubt it’ll be a beauty.
Wowie this was a delightful read! Thank you, Jimmy!
Oh, Jimmy, love-- You were already finding your unique voice in high school! All I could do was nudge you along. When I look back on that year of the all-guy literary magazine staff, I grin from ear to ear. What a trip y'all were. Love you much!