Mississippi Expat: Susan Cushman
Mississippi Expat: Susan Cushman
"Mississippi in general, and Jackson in particular, still feel like home to me thirty-six years after I moved away."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Author Susan Cushman has lived in Memphis for over three decades, yet memories, family, friends, and her identity as a writer still keep her rooted in Mississippi. Susan’s latest novel, John and Mary Margaret, tells the story of an ill-fated romance between a white sorority girl and a Black law student on the Ole Miss Campus, set against the backdrop of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Where are you from?
I was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1951. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and their ancestors) were all from Mississippi, so my roots run deep. My mother was from Meridian, and we lived there for a couple of years in the early 1950s, but I spent most of the first 37 years of my life in Jackson. I still have relatives—cousins, nieces, and nephews—in Meridian and Jackson.
When did you move to Memphis, and why did you move there?
I moved to Memphis in 1988 with my husband and three children, who were six, seven, and ten.
So why did we move to Memphis? It’s a long, complicated story, but basically we moved for spiritual reasons. My husband is both a physician (Dr. William Cushman) and an ordained Orthodox priest (Father Basil). St. Peter Orthodox Church in Madison, Mississippi, actually started in our apartment in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson in the summer of 1970, when we were newlyweds. During the seventeen years (1970-1987) that the church evolved in Jackson, a similar church group was developing in Memphis. Some of the people in that group were friends of ours from our time at Ole Miss in the late 1960s through 1970. They eventually became St. John Orthodox Church in Memphis, and we moved here to join their community, where my husband is Associate Pastor. He also continued his work in preventive medicine, especially in hypertension, at the Memphis VA Medical Center and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
She told me that as we were wandering around the bookstore, she kept hearing what she thought was my voice, but she would turn around and see that it was another Mississippi woman talking. I never realized how much I sound like “my people” until that moment.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
The old cliché, “Home is where the heart is,” immediately comes to mind. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that one doesn’t always love a place just because it’s home, even if your heart is deeply attached to that place. Or those people. Mississippi in general, and Jackson in particular, still feel like home to me thirty-six years after I moved away.
I remember a visit to Oxford with a close friend from Arkansas a number of years ago. We were shopping at Square Books, and later, over a cup of coffee up on the balcony overlooking the courthouse and the beautiful square with all its wonderful shops and restaurants, she said something interesting to me. She told me that as we were wandering around the bookstore, she kept hearing what she thought was my voice, but she would turn around and see that it was another Mississippi woman talking. I never realized how much I sound like “my people” until that moment.
Community was important to me during my years in Jackson, whether it was being PTA president at our children’s public school in the 1980s or running an aerobic dance studio where I worked to help change the lives of many women who were, like me, trying to improve their health in a state that suffered then—and still suffers—from one of the highest levels of obesity in our nation. My home state and city also struggle with issues like crime and poverty, which is also very true of Memphis.
What do you miss most about Mississippi?
I think it’s the spirit of kindness and compassion that I experienced in so many ways during my years in Mississippi. One example that stands out has to do with my mother’s three years in an assisted living facility and eight years in a nursing home, where she died from Alzheimer’s in 2016. Those eleven years were difficult ones for her and for me, as I did long-distance caregiving from 200 miles away and relied heavily on the people who physically took care of her. I can honestly say that I never had any complaints about her care.
Every time she had even a small medical event like a sore on her foot that needed a prescription cream, a nurse would call me from the nursing home and tell me what was going on. Each time I visited I would hear the aids call out as I walked down the hall to my mother’s room, “Oh, look, Miss Effie, your daughter is here to see you!” She was obviously treated with compassion. And friends of mine who lived in Jackson and had a parent in the same nursing home would often email or text me after a visit and tell me they saw my mother and she was doing fine.
Yes, the kindness of friends and family and even strangers who cared for my mother are a big part of what I love about Mississippi.
Before my father died in 1998, he and my mother had run a sports store and aerobic dance studio. Dad was a marathon runner and trained other runners. One of the instructors at the studio was also a hospitalist. I remember once when my mother was in the hospital for a procedure and the hospitalist, who knew her from her years teaching at the aerobics studio, paid special attention to her and kept me well-informed about her situation. I have a first cousin who is a physician in Jackson who also attended to my mother when she was hospitalized, and he was actually with her in the final days of her life. Yes, the kindness of friends and family and even strangers who cared for my mother are a big part of what I love about Mississippi.
As an author, I have given readings at Lemuria bookstore many times, and have also spoken at various women’s clubs and organizations in Jackson, and there are always friends from my high school or Ole Miss or friends of my parents who come and support me. I feel loved when I return “home” to Jackson and to Mississippi.
How have you cultivated community in Memphis? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?
When we arrived in Memphis in 1988, the first things I did were to get involved in our children’s public school and get a job teaching aerobics at the newly renovated downtown YMCA. And of course I became very involved in parish life at St. John Orthodox Church, where I have served in various capacities over the years, including church secretary, Sunday school teacher, coffee hour chairman, parish life conference director, newsletter editor, children’s Christmas play director, and other activities. Our community at St. John is definitely the center of my life in Memphis. In the past several years I’ve participated with a number of people at our parish as a volunteer at Room in the Inn, which provides overnight shelter for homeless people.
As the mother of three adopted children (now in their forties) I organized a support group for adoptive mothers that met for several years in the 1990s. One of our children was adopted from Mississippi and two from South Korea, and we were still living in Jackson when we adopted all three of them. I think they all feel a bit “rooted” to Mississippi—as I do—although we all live in different states now. Another thing that keeps me rooted to my home state is that my father, mother, brother, and a Goddaughter are all buried close to each other at Natchez Trace Cemetery. I often visit their graves on trips to Mississippi.
How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
This is the question I’ve been most excited to answer! I remember once when I was driving down Highway 6 from I-55 to Oxford for a writing workshop and I saw this huge billboard on the side of the road that read, “Our Children Can’t Read—We Are All Losers.” The word “Mississippi” was written in large letters across the sign, with all the “S” letters drawn backwards. I found out the sign was put up by a citizen group from Tupelo, MS that was advocating use of the Orton-Gillingham method of instruction, a method of teaching reading to dyslexic students that has been in use in some form since the 1930s. So, this billboard was arguing that reading levels were so bad in Mississippi, that a special-needs-student approach was warranted, generally. I found it disturbing. Not too long after that I discovered the “Mississippi Believe It!” campaign through one of their ads in Desoto Magazine. The ad campaign highlights many of Mississippi’s strengths, but the one I want to focus on here is this one:
“Yes, we can read. A few of us can even write.” And there are photos of sixteen famous writers, all from Mississippi.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that one doesn’t always love a place just because it’s home, even if your heart is deeply attached to that place. Or those people.
My identity as a writer was definitely affected by my Mississippi roots, beginning with my work on the staff of our high school’s newspaper in the late 1960s and continuing as a freshman at the University of Mississippi in 1969-70 where I did research in the William Faulkner library for a paper I wrote on The Sound and the Fury. My husband was president of the senior class at Ole Miss that year, and their senior project was raising money for a renovation of Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home near the campus.
Even as I wrote freelance articles and essays for various publications after I moved to Memphis, I always felt connected to those famous Mississippi writers. Especially Eudora Welty, who is featured in my novel John and Mary Margaret, which is set in Jackson and Oxford, Mississippi, and in Memphis in the 1960s through 2020. John and Mary Margaret is about a Black boy from Memphis and a white girl from Jackson who fall in love on the Ole Miss campus in the 1960s. The book covers over fifty years of civil rights history. I was “in conversation with” Mississippi author Ralph Eubanks, hosted by Lemuria Books when John and Mary Margaret launched in 2021 during the height of both the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of civil rights protests in Memphis and across the nation. The book was also featured in the 2021 Mississippi Book Festival, which was held digitally due to Covid.
I feel that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants as I continue to write and publish. Since 2017 I have published two novels, two memoirs, one short story collection, and four anthologies. All nine of my books are available on Amazon and many are available at Lemuria Books in Jackson. My fifth anthology comes out later in 2024, which I will “shamelessly promote” later in this interview!
Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?
Not really. It’s been a long time…thirty-six years…half my lifetime ago! (I’m seventy-two as I write this.) We have friends here who were in our wedding…fifty-four years ago this June! We love our home and neighborhood (Harbor Town, right on the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis) and especially our church. We have purchased our funeral plots at historic Elmwood Cemetery. Our grown kids and granddaughters live in Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia with no plans to return to Mississippi. So, we are staying put in Memphis. But remember what David Cohn wrote in 1935, in his social history of the Mississippi Delta: ''The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” Maybe we never really left Mississippi!
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
Like Mary Margaret, the female protagonist in my novel John and Mary Margaret, I was raised in that proverbial “privileged white bubble” and only began to wake up to what really happened to my Black neighbors in Mississippi a few years ago. I know that slavery and decades of racial injustice didn’t only happen in Mississippi, but a lot of it did. As the state tries to get on its feet, it has so much to overcome from the ongoing effects of years of oppression. University Press of Mississippi published the Civil Rights in Mississippi Series, featuring eight books “written from the epicenter of the civil rights movement, documenting the struggles many African Americans and civil rights workers faced as they fought for an end to racial discrimination. The series concentrates on Mississippi during the 1960s, looking closely at the civil rights struggle of those years as well as important figures and events of the movement.”
As Mississippi native and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward said in this article in The Atlantic, “Racism is built into the very bones of Mississippi.” I believe that Mississippi will heal its wounds as its white residents make greater progress owning their part in the state’s civil rights history. My friend and fellow Mississippi author Ellen Ann Fentress addresses this powerfully in her memoir The Steps We Take, which was featured as Rooted’s January book club selection.
I feel that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants as I continue to write and publish.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
Native Mississippi author, writer, and essayist W. Ralph Eubanks is definitely a favorite! I met Ralph at an event at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, a number of years (and several books) ago. He was immediately generous with his time, wisdom, and encouragement. I read two of Ralph’s books right after I met him: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past (Basic Books) and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins).
A few years later, when I was writing John and Mary Margaret, Ralph accepted my request to be an early reader and gave me invaluable advice about how to write in the voice of John, my Black male protagonist. And then he wrote this amazing blurb about the book: “Frederick Douglass may have been right when he wrote ‘the white and colored people of this country can be blended into a common nationality and enjoy together . . . the inestimable blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Susan Cushman’s John and Mary Margaret is written in the spirit of Douglass’s vision. Set against the backdrop of the University of Mississippi in the mid-1960s, this clear-eyed book confronts the historical and social realities of those times and the once perilous nature of interracial intimacy.”
Ralph’s recent book, A Place Like Mississippi, which was published on March 16, 2021 by Timber Press, takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. Ralph is the faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and is at work on his next book, which focuses on the Mississippi Delta and has the working title When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning.
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
I have to second Ellen Ann Fentress’s answer to this question by agreeing that using the money to strengthen Mississippi’s public schools and libraries is a great choice, and maybe the best one. But I gave some thought to another good use of the money. And I did a little research. In a survey done by Mississippi Today, readers—especially younger readers who are part of NextGen Mississippi—were asked questions about Mississippi’s future. One of the questions was “What problems do state of Mississippi leaders need to address for a better future?” Among my favorite answers was this: “Safe water, reliable roads and bridges, access to health care, and better paying jobs. Oh and FULLY FUNDED PUBLIC EDUCATION.” So, I guess I would stretch that billion dollars out to help meet some of those needs.
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.)
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a volunteer for several years with an organization in Memphis called Room in the Inn. My parish, St. John Orthodox Church, is one of thirty-three Memphis churches currently working with Room in the Inn to provide overnight shelters for homeless people, especially during the cold winter months (November-March). A group of volunteers from St. John hosts sixteen people on Monday nights at a wonderful shelter owned by Calvary Episcopal Church downtown. “Jobs” for volunteers include driving people from the sign-up center to the shelter, cooking meals, hosting guests, serving meals, helping with showers and laundry, spending the night with our guests, and washing sheets, making beds, and cleaning up the next morning. The more I learned about Memphis’ homeless population—and other members of our community—the more I wanted to discover what our city is doing for these folks and how to get the word out so that more people can be inspired to volunteer their time and/or money to help.
Just like I did back in 2020 when I wanted to help protest racial injustice in the middle of a pandemic and wrote John and Mary Margaret, this time I turned to organizing and editing an anthology to tell the story of Memphis’s vulnerable populations and what we are doing to help them. I invited twenty-one people to contribute articles and essays about what they or their organizations are doing. They responded in spades with amazing stories about Room in the Inn, the Mid-South Food Bank, Church Health, the Hospitality Hub, Alpha Omega Veterans Organization, MIFA (Memphis Inter Faith Association), First Step Recovery Centers, Alliance Health Care, Rhodes College Liberal Arts in Prison Program, Flip My Life (homes for formerly incarcerated people), Door of Hope Writing Group, and more. There are also inspirational stories about personal interactions with people experiencing homelessness.