Mississippi Native: Amanda Furdge

"i do feel a sense of duty to this place because it is home for me. i know too much to not handle this place with a certain level of care. nobody can take care of your home the way you do."

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 organizer, revolutionary, and cultural worker Amanda Furdge.

Featured contributor Amanda Furdge, who lives in Jackson. Photo by Ariel Cobbert for NBC News.

Where are you from?

the answer for “where i am from” is such a beautifully nuanced one, because although i was born in a hospital in South Jackson, Mississippi, i was also raised in the Mississippi Delta between Yazoo City and Clarksdale, Mississippi, with my grandparents. i came to live in Jackson so that my siblings and i could attend Jackson Public Schools and be with our parents. that makes me from North Jackson. Brown Bottom is the neighborhood’s name.

Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?

i left Mississippi in the summer of 2006 after graduating from Lanier High School and joined the US Navy. i joined the Navy because it was a surefire way to escape my circumstances and still maintain the structure and discipline that i had come to know would serve me best. neither of my parents had completed college beyond a year and we grew up on the southern Black Mississippi side of economics (that’s a fancy way of saying we were living in poverty (relatively speaking) so there was no blueprint for going the college route and to be honest, i didn’t want to be tied to the traumas that had raised me to that point.

i wanted to see the world i read about in books and saw on TV. i wanted to meet the type of people i knew existed outside of the ones i was born to. i left Mississippi because i wanted to get away!

i went to the Naval Station Great Lakes and figured out how to be honorably discharged so that i could get to Chicago where my favorite uncle and cousins lived on the north side around Loyola University. i have also lived in Houston, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan.

Why did you return to Mississippi?

when i was discharged (honorably of course), i had to come back to Mississippi to recalibrate. it was the only home i had established at that point in my life. i knew i wouldn’t be staying for long, though. (but) at that point, i was becoming aware of what it would take to really live away.

i came home to Mississippi in the fall of 2006, “pretended” to be a student at Hinds Community College in Raymond, where i lived on campus long enough to learn the intricacies of “independent” living and get a check that i immediately used to buy a one-way plane ticket back to Chicago because from the first moment my feet hit a south side sidewalk, i felt like i was supposed to be there.

i had also met a tap dancer on Myspace during that time period who i had fallen in love with (and eventually married) and he lived in Chicago too! that time, i was gone until i returned in January of 2014 with my oldest son Titan, escaping the abusive relationship with his dad, and wanting Titan to have most of the same sweet southern things of my own childhood, like being raised with his grandparents and other immediate family members, getting bit by mosquitos on hot summer nights when you just don’t want to and don’t have to go inside because it’s safe, and eating soul food on a regular basis.