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 writer, JXN Twitter Persona, and creator of this hilariously renamed county map of Mississippi, Patrick Jerome.

Where are you from?

I spent the first 18 years of my life bouncing between Canton, Mississippi and a farm just south of Pickens. After that, I spent 18 years in Jackson, and then moved to the suburbs of Ridgeland.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

My entire life. If you want to do some math, I’ve lived in Ridgeland for five years.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

It’s an easy answer, but it’s a long one.

Home is the place that I know.

When I’m home, I know the timing of things. I know when the seasons change, when the months are dry, when the grass stops growing, when I’m going to need a coat. I know when birds are in the trees and when not to park my car underneath them. I know when I need to wear orange in the woods, and when the woods are flooded. I know when the cold week at the end of October is coming and when November is going to be hot.

I know what’s what when I’m home. I know which roads have potholes and which roads have roadblocks, which roads flood when the river is high, which creeks I can walk down, which creeks I can paddle down. I know which neighbor has a pear tree they don’t watch, which yard has a mean dog, which lots are abandoned, which “No Trespassing” sign means it.

Like everything else I try to keep my eyes open. I try to be myself when I recognize I’m in a safe place to do so, and I stay guarded when I see that I’m not.

I know where to go when I’m home. I know what neighborhoods have gates and what suburbs have the worst cops. I know where the cheap bars are, I know where the people I hate hang out, I know where the bartender will float me a few bucks if I run out of beer money. I know where I can get the right soup when it gets cold, which Chinese place has the best wings, which tacos are too expensive and which patio is going to be full on a Thursday night.

At home I know where the river is, where the creeks are, where the water is deep, where I can walk across the stream. I know where I can find a stand of elderberry bushes in the right of way, I know where a persimmon tree is, where the wild plums and lemons are, where fossils are in the mud, where bones wash up, where I can hang out without buying a damn thing.

They say home is about relationships, other people, or families. You can find all those things at home, but not everyone will help you, not every relationship will be pleasant, and some of the families you find are worse than the one you were born into. But home is where you know.

The Westinghouse Refrigerator that ignited the author’s creative imagination. Photo by Patrick Jerome.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Like everything else I try to keep my eyes open. I try to be myself when I recognize I’m in a safe place to do so, and I stay guarded when I see that I’m not. Before social media, I would read a lot of cork boards for announcements, to find people interested in the same things I am. I still do that. I eavesdrop, I listen for shibboleths. I have been known to butt into a conversation if I feel like I need to. I try to know things that people want to know, so they have a good reason to talk to me.

When it comes to praise or advice or even just decent human interactions I’m like one of those fish that lives at the bottom of the ocean: I get one little bit and that’s enough to keep me going for months. So it’s hard to mention all the people who gave me an important crumb; those crumbs can be as important as the big ones I really remember.

The assumption that we all sound the same is weird to me. Especially since you can find a sort of redneck accent everywhere from Alaska to Florida to Maine.

As a teenager, I met Constance Pierce, an artist up in Oxford. Her son went to my high school. She encouraged me to indulge my creative side, though at the time that mostly meant hanging out with “art kids,” and I just didn’t quite fit in there.

People at Millsaps helped a lot. I met daniel johnson, who doesn’t capitalize his name, and his wife Amber, who does. They really keyed me into the world that would keep me around Jackson. Arts and music, bands and dancing.

Daniel had this art project where he found an old Westinghouse fridge down by the Pearl River and propped it up, asked people to go add to it. Some people messed with it a little bit. I messed with it a whole lot. I was down there pretty often anyway. So that’s where I got the idea that the trash down by the river might be art.

At the time it seemed like everyone I knew was in three bands and had two art projects going. We all hung around Midtown and went to each other’s shows and showings. I wasn’t in a band, I didn’t have any art. But I was welcome anyway.

Photo of the Pearl River by Patrick Jerome.

And, of course, I’d be a wrong person, terrible person, if I didn’t bring up my wife. She joined this bellydance troupe, Missihippy. I drove her all over the place, to workshops, performances, classes. At first it was classes she was taking, and later it was classes she was teaching. They showed me this whole other side to Jackson that I should have known existed. Cosplayers and comic con goers and people in Starfleet, and this was back before that was all “cool” like it is now.

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?

There are two things that come into play. When I’m “up north,” as they say, people are surprised that I don’t have an accent, because mine’s not strong. Not usually. So the assumption that we all sound the same is weird to me. Especially since you can find a sort of redneck accent everywhere from Alaska to Florida to Maine. My twang doesn’t really come out until I’m real drunk or real angry. Or pulled over by the police. And while I run into a thick accent daily, it’s nowhere near enough that I’m in any way surprised when someone doesn’t have it.

The Bible-thumpers and norm-enforcers are just as bad as outsiders think they are. It takes a lot of social capital to ward them off.

The other thing is about people who move here from somewhere else. Transplants. Not all of them, but a lot of them, come here thinking they’re going to get this Dispatches from Pluto experience and all us quirky local eccentrics will come make friends with them. And I get it, I’m weird, I hang out with these people, but most Mississippians aren’t like that, especially the ones who go to church.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I don’t really know. At my age so many things have happened to me that it all tangles up into a thicket I can’t unravel. I don’t know that things would have been immensely different if I’d grown up in Alabama or North Louisiana or East Texas. Would I have been the weird kid in New York City? Probably not. But maybe I’d have worked harder at it, there’s no telling. I think a bigger library would have been nice. Might have become that mad scientist I wanted to be. Or maybe I’d be dead in a ditch. I don’t dwell on it. You never get a chance to go back, and you have to go forward whether you want to or not.

The first piece of trash Jerome photographed, in 2013.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

This place is full of traps. Slow traps. You start down a path and before long there’s no exit, hill’s too steep to turn around, road’s smooth and well worn, and it takes you to a very bad place. The Bible-thumpers and norm-enforcers are just as bad as outsiders think they are. It takes a lot of social capital to ward them off. Most people can’t do it. I don’t blame them, it’s not their fault.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

I think about it. Now, they can’t get me to leave. They’ll have to shoot me first. But they could get my wife or my kid to leave. And I’d have to follow them. They’re more vulnerable, because the state’s already really hard set against women and children and because this place is virulently anti-human. I’m barely human sometimes, so it doesn’t bother me as much.

It is a sense of duty, in a way. Stubbornness, mostly. There are some people I hate who would be happy to see me leave. So fuck them. I’m staying.

There’s a lawsuit to be had every time a city council sits down in this state, and I wish we could see some of them.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

William Gibson, the guy who coined the word “Cyberspace” and wrote a lot of great cyberpunk books, said “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” There’s a future out there in Silicon Valley and in Brooklyn and in Nashville that looks great, for a tiny sliver of people. But Mississippi is the future, too. Mississippi is the future for everyone else.

America tries to get rid of regressive ideologues just like a city tries to get rid of mosquitoes. We drive the big trucks around and spray stuff that keeps them off the streets when too many people complain. But we never go and fix up the old busted up abandoned road covered in tires full of water. Mississippi is one of those old roads. Maybe we’re the worst one, I don’t know. But as long as we’re here, the rest of America can never be sure of a good future.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I don’t. If you’re reading this you probably know five or ten of each that I don’t even know about, who are better than whoever I had in mind, anyway. Everyone is so good nowadays. So polished, so professional, the quality of production—be it music, or videos, art, costumes, writing, whatever—it blows away the stuff we did when I was young and cool.

Photo of an abandoned truck by Patrick Jerome.

If you had 1 billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’d create a long-lasting foundation that paid researchers and archivists to do painful opposition research on every official in Mississippi. Expensive stuff, digging through records, pulling up old files, gathering dirt on every petty elected or appointed official in the state, so all our local media people who work so hard with less than nothing would have a go-to resource and a place to go work when they got tired of their terrible pay.

I’d offer them a fat paycheck and give them expenses, I’d let them have a swanky office. A billion dollars is a thousand million dollars. I could set up something that burned a lot of money for a very long time.

And it would have to be long-lasting, because I don’t think it’d have an immediate effect—the authoritarian mindset doesn’t consider hypocrisy and corruption to be a negative. The rules are for little men, not those who are chosen by God. That mindset is drilled into everybody who hits the pews more than once a week.

But over time it’d offset the lack of transparency every organization in Mississippi seems to thrive on. It’d make some good people happy, and some preachers and politicians miserable. There’s a lawsuit to be had every time a city council sits down in this state, and I wish we could see some of them.

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.)

At the moment I’m between projects. Looking for a little something to do. But you can always check out my friend Walter Young’s music and visit my website.

Patrick Jerome is some guy who spends a lot of time in swamps, mostly the internet and the bayous of the Pearl River. He takes pictures of trash and writes some stuff. You’ve probably seen him doing something, read something he wrote, or heard him talk about something. There’s no reliable way to know where you might see him next, but he often gives hints on Twitter @pearlriverflow and on his website PearlRiverFlow.com.

Mississippi Native: Patrick Jerome