Mississippi Native: Lee Durkee
"It’s been my experience that people are intrigued by you if you’re from Mississippi. I like how they squint at you, like you’re a different species capable of god knows what."
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 essayist and fiction writer Lee Durkee, whose first memoir, Stalking Shakespeare, will be published this month.
Where are you from?
Hattiesburg. Graduated Hattiesburg High in 1980. My mom’s people were McLain (Greene County, MS). My dad’s were upstate New York. My parents met in Honolulu, where my mom was a secretary for the Navy, and my dad recruited students from the outer islands for the University of Hawaii. We traded paradise for Hattiesburg when I three. So basically I peaked at two.
Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?
I left Mississippi after dropping out of both PRC (Pearl River Junior College, as it was then called) and USM. Eventually I attended college in Arkansas, grad school in Syracuse, and ended up married-divorced and raising a son in frozen Vermont for eighteen years, eighteen winters. I still have PTSD. It’s a lovely state, Vermont, but the winters last forever and will pummel you.
Why did you return to Mississippi?
By accident. I was desperate to escape my 18th Vermont winter, and curious what Mississippi was like these days, so I decided to spend a month in Oxford, and never left. That’s why it’s called the velvet ditch, I guess. I wallowed in that ditch twelve years, even lived inside a ravine while living in the ditch until I got evicted from my hovel eight months ago and moved here to Taylor.
Was the Mississippi you returned to the same one you had left?
When I returned to Mississippi after over two decades away, I pulled into some franchise grill in Tupelo, plopped down at the bar, and ended up talking to the woman next to me whose mother, it turned out, had taught at Lillie Burney Junior High (what we called it), a school I’d attended as a minority student during the late 1970s. When I mentioned the name of the street I was raised on, she thought that name over, located it in her mind, chewed on it twice, then proclaimed, “Yeah, the (n-words) got that now.”
I’d been back in the state less than an hour.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
To me home is where people get your jokes. Every state in every country has its unique sense of humor, I assume. Home is the place where you don’t have to explain, “Uh, that was a joke.” (I wanted to get a t-shirt with “That Was a Joke” printed on it in Vermont.)
Home is anywhere people get my weird sense of humor and don’t stare at me funny. Along those lines, sometimes Mississippi is my home, and sometimes it isn’t.
How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?
The service industry in Oxford made me feel very welcomed from the moment I arrived. And the local bookstore went out of its way to do the same—not just Richard and Lisa at Square Books, but the whole staff—Lyn, Cody, Slade, Caitlin, Al.
In my 18 years in Vermont I’d never met one person who’d read a book I’d written, so I was shocked to arrive in Oxford and realize that some people recalled my first novel (or at least the dirty parts). I’d been out of print so long at that point I’d given up. Oxford 100% plucked me out of the water (and threw me into a ditch). I would never have published again had it not been for the support I found in downtown Oxford.
Also it certainly helped to receive a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Randy Yates who owns Ajax Diner bought me more meals and beers than I can count. He was like my patron.
What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?
Nothing comes to mind, but I’ve always enjoyed the awkward moment of silence that follows saying “I’m from Mississippi.” It’s been my experience that people are intrigued by you if you’re from Mississippi. I like how they squint at you, like you’re a different species capable of god knows what.
In order to win a bet my dad once sent a friend in Hawaii a Polaroid of a power plant to prove we had electricity.
How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
Nothing I’ve experienced in life has influenced me half as much as public education during bussing in the 1970’s. I would be horrified to meet the grown-up version of myself who attended Beeson (the seg-ed academy in Hattiesburg). I’m grateful to my dad for sitting me down to explain the relationship between public education and civil rights. Ultimately I am a child of Dr. King’s and cannot begin to imagine my life without his influence. I think character is formed young and you carry it through life like an instrument you’ve learned to play. Mississippi to me was public education and then working every night at Pasquale’s Pizza to escape a grim home life.
That’s what I remember the most, and that’s what formed me: the Mississippi service industry and our public education system. I learned a lot in both, and one thing I learned was to see the world in terms of caste. That’s something I never shook.
What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?
While growing up here I learned about the obscene war on public education the hard way. As I got older I learned how the purpose of that war was to create the illusion that integration doesn’t work. Integration does work! But all the politicians—guys like Stennis, whose disciples used to call in bomb threats to our schools—all those racist politicians had to do was create the illusion that integration doesn’t work in order to ensure their precious private academies thrived. And that’s exactly what happened, and their evil plan is still working today. They purposely created the illusion that Dr. King was wrong, that integration got a fair trial but failed the test. That’s bullshit. Integration never failed, not even while it was being blown up from within. Of course racism got worse after that.
On the bright side my hometown of Hattiesburg has defied my dire expectations. It seems a nice city now, a grown-up. (And I’m real excited Joe Paul is at the helm of University of Southern Mississippi.) I fervently wish the four schools I attended there were still integrated, but the city itself seems to be fast evolving (if I may be allowed that word). More specifically, I think the influx of Katrina refugees helped enlighten Hattiesburg, but perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Something certainly changed for the better there.
Do you still think about moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?
Sure, sometimes I think of leaving. Weirdly enough my last novel did okay in France, and it’s fun to imagine myself a cranky old man walking the Seine kicking pigeons. But in reality I’m often broke, Paris is far away, I don’t speak French, and, like I said, I just got evicted from my Oxford hovel when a rich doctor bought up the neighborhood, took one look at my little house, and decided to level it. I thought about leaving Mississippi at that point but decided to dig in and move here to Taylor instead. I like it here inside my little cabin. There’s an abundance of hummingbirds. That said, I can’t afford Taylor and if I ever do buy a house—fingers crossed—I’ll probably buy in Hattiesburg. I like the idea of coming full circle, and Hattiesburg is thickly layered for me. I see what’s there and what used to be there at the same time. Maybe that’s what home is.
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
I wish people from out-of-state, as well as many people from in-state, understood the stark caste line separating public and private education here. We need to drag this subject of public education and integration and Dr. King’s Dream back into the town square and stare at it a long while. We need to stop living in denial. Integration defeats racism. Seg-ed academies by design perpetuate the delusion of white supremacy. The math is simple here.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
My two favorite Mississippi writers are Mose Allison and Big K.R.I.T.
Having recently read Embers Among the Ashes, I strong second Kiese Laymon’s suggestion that Charlie R. Braxton be Mississippi’s next poet laureate. (And I understand there’s a fifty grand grant that now accompanies that honor.) I think it’s past time we start emphasizing in-state educated candidates for that prestigious post. Mississippi is historically pretty good at poetry. MFA creative-writing teachers who move here already have steady paychecks and nice houses inside a state where so many artists live hand-to-mouth. I don’t write poetry myself, but I’d love to see that honor go to someone who graduated Hattiesburg High. I think we should all learn something from how Alabama just boosted the career of Ashley M. Jones by making her their state poet laureate following the success of her collection REPARATIONS NOW!
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
I think by now you can guess my answer. Public schools. The Buddha said to attack all problems at the root. And the root of all evils in Mississippi is the war on education.
My Ted Talk done, I’ll step off my soap box now.
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.)
I have a memoir called Stalking Shakespeare coming out soon. It’s about my two-decade obsession with searching for lost 400-year-old portraits of Will Shakespeare and my attempts to get certain pictures x-rayed and infrareded to see their original layers and even carbon underdrawings. The memoir is also about fatherhood, being trapped in arctic Vermont, seasonal depression, blatant Adderall abuse, etc. The book is funny, I hope, and has sections set in Vermont, Mississippi, Tokyo, Washington DC, and England. And it’s bawdy in an Elizabethan sort of way. It’ll be out from Scribner on April 18 complete with 18 color plates and more illustrations than I care to count. I never want to do anything half that hard again in my life.
I would like to meet this man. Maybe the next time I visit my granddaughter in Jackson. How far away is Lee from Jackson?