Mississippi Native: Snowden Wright
"That’s how Mississippi has affected my identity. It made me a novelist."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Novelist Snowden Wright fled Mississippi—and his hometown of Meridian—when he left for college in the Northeast. “I wanted to exile myself from home so I could better understand what home had done to me,” he writes. While stalled on the writing of his second book, he moved from New York City back to his home state. After a stint in Atlanta, he now lives and writes from his home on his family’s farm in Yazoo County. Snowden’s newest novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, which follows a jaded female P.I. enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy in 1980s Meridian, MS, is forthcoming in August. Below, Snowden tells us what keeps him rooted in Mississippi.
Where are you from?
At the center of a loosely affiliated crime circuit between New Orleans, Birmingham, Jackson, Biloxi, Phenix City, and Atlanta sits Meridian, Mississippi, the state’s erstwhile “Queen City,” where white supremacists plotted the “Mississippi Burning” murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964; where the KKK bombed a synagogue in 1968; where, in dive bars, truck stops, and no-tell motels, the infamous Dixie Mafia conducted its extra-legal business of drug-trafficking, numbers-running, loan-sharking, election-rigging, racketeering, prostitution, extortion, protection, and assassination.
That’s where I’m from.
But also in Meridian, Mississippi, James Meredith began a legal campaign against Ole Miss that eventually led to the state university’s integration. Also in Meridian, Mississippi, after the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, an all-white jury convicted seven people, including a white deputy sheriff, the first time in the history of the state a white jury has convicted a white official on civil-rights charges. Also in Meridian, Mississippi, progressively minded individuals live and work and strive for progress in a too-often and too-easily maligned city and state.
Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?
In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce writes, “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” My decision to leave Mississippi for college as a young man who was neither cunning nor silent perforce involved exile.
I wanted to exile myself from home so I could better understand what home had done to me. I wanted to figure out who I was, what Mississippi had created.
To my myopic teenaged mind, Meridian felt like a Dixie Jonestown. Everyone had eaten the Kool-Aid pickle. In Hanover, New Hampshire, essentially another planet to some kid who didn’t even know how to use chopsticks, I wanted to surround myself with people from all over the country and all over the world. I hoped to encounter new modes of thinking, a broader sense of culture, and a diverse range of life experiences.
And I did encounter those things. I was surrounded by all kinds of people. I also spent a lot of time explaining to those people that, yes, you can make pickles with Kool-Aid.
Why did you return to Mississippi?
Back in 2014, I was living in New York, working on my second novel, American Pop, while also working a full-time job. The book was taking forever to write. Every day I woke up at five in the morning to work on it before heading in to the office. Then, sadly, my grandfather passed away. With the small inheritance he left me, I decided to honor his memory and his generosity by using the money to quit my day job and return to the state he’d lived in his entire life.
I spent a year and a half in Oxford, Mississippi, writing full-time. Was it an amazing experience? Of course. Do I realize how fortunate I was? Absolutely. Did I decide to stay in Mississippi? Nope!
After finishing the novel, I moved to Atlanta, where I worked a day job once again. The sale of my second and third novels enabled me to not only quit that job but also build a house on my family’s farm in Mississippi. For the house site I chose the spot in a pecan grove where my grandmother’s childhood home had stood before it burned down. The construction crew literally had to dig up the foundations of her house before I could put down my own.
I’ve been living in Yazoo County, Mississippi, maybe for the long haul, since the start of 2020.
I wanted to exile myself from home so I could better understand what home had done to me. I wanted to figure out who I was, what Mississippi had created.
Was the Mississippi you returned to the same one you had left?
Cue the COVID pandemic. During that difficult time, I had sunflowers planted in the field in front of my house—usually row-cropped with corn or soybean—and my pandemic doldrums led me to research the plant. Did you know sunflowers extract pollution from soil? In her poetry collection The Bamboo Wife, Leona Sevick writes of sunflower “florets dripping dew while threaded / roots finger delta soil, seeking / copper and zinc, drawing them / up and into leaves and stalks. / They hold it all, mouths cupping / poisons unseen by the casual / observer.”
Sunflowers were used to clean up the fallout after Chernobyl. It’s a lovely metaphor. Beauty cleansing disaster, nature absolving humanity—though slowly, across seasons, through decades.
With fiction, writers are taught, correctly, to create characters who, over the course of a novel or a short story, change and grow and evolve. But fiction isn’t real life. In real life, people rarely change, and if they do, it’s a very, very slow process. Whenever I think about how slow Mississippi has been to progress—in matters of race, poverty, and other social issues—I try to remember that sunflowers, the plant kind as well as the human, flourish in this state.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
One of my earlier answers omitted part of the James Joyce quote. The full sentence begins, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.” When I left for college, I’m not sure I believed in “home,” the sacrosanct, overly fetishized idea we have of place, of culture, of roots. Part of me still feels that idea is overly fetishized, particularly by younger generations, but another part of me sees the value in it.
Home can offer a sense of stability in an unstable world, roots for the rootless, hope for the hopeless, a sense of place to the systemically displaced. I’ve been granted a great deal of privilege in this world, I know, and I try to keep that in mind whenever I’m feeling hard-hearted or cynical. I believe introspection should lead to extrospection, and I suppose that’s what home means to me. Home is community. It helps us to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves.
The foundation of much of what’s wrong in Mississippi can be found in a misunderstanding of home. Heritage is not absolution. A hearth can be an aegis, but it doesn’t offer amnesty. Consider the difference between patriotism and nationalism: The former is pride in one’s country, while the latter is pride in one’s country to the extent one believes the country can do no wrong. That Mississippi is your home does not mean Mississippi can do no wrong.
The foundation of much of what’s wrong in Mississippi can be found in a misunderstanding of home. Heritage is not absolution.
How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?
If home is community, an ability to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, then literature allows us to exercise and strengthen that ability. It so happens that the people who create literature are Mississippi’s most abundant natural resource, and I’m honored to have been able to pad out a comfy little bed within the remarkably tall grass of Mississippi’s literary community.
The Mississippi Book Festival and its executive director, Ellen Daniels, have, within a few short years, built the country’s best literary lawn party. I’d be remiss not to mention the wonderful folks at Square Books, all of whom provide generous support to any writer passing through Oxford. And many thanks to Lemuria for being the closest thing I had, physically and spiritually, to a “hometown bookstore.”
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?
I went on a vacation a few years ago with some friends from up North. In the kitchen, I took on the admirable, often unsung duty of prepping the cooler for the beach. But the ice maker wasn’t working. No ice?! My friend Darren, originally from Long Island, said it didn’t matter, that because the beer, water, and sodas were cold from the fridge I could put them in the cooler and they’d stay “cold enough.”
I gave Darren a look like he’d kicked my dog.
Mississippians, the rest of the country often correctly assumes, know many things: how to lock a hub and how to clean a grill, how to shuck an oyster, how to shell a shrimp, how to peel a crawfish. But above all, the rest of the country often fails to assume, we know how to keep a beverage ice-cold.
How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
While I was on tour for my first novel, Play Pretty Blues, my father drove me to a signing at Turnrow Books in Greenwood, and on the way, I told him how I like to start my book events with an anecdote particular to the site. I explained that for this event I would tell a story about his father. In Greenwood, where my grandfather grew up, the local newspaper held an annual contest whereby the person to bring in the first bloomed cotton boll of the season won a year’s subscription. My grandfather won each year.
“What nobody knew,” I recited to my father, “was that he’d built a small greenhouse, inside of which, each year, he grew a single cotton plant.”
My father cocked his head. “That’s funny, but it’s not true. Your grandfather won the contest each year, but he didn’t cheat.”
I soon realized that, over the years since I’d first heard the story as a child, my subconscious had fictionalized the truth, making it, I believe, not only more interesting but also, I hope, more entertaining. That’s how Mississippi has affected my identity. It made me a novelist. What had once informed who I’d become eventually informed how I write. In my work, I always try to find the most interesting, the most entertaining way to tell a story, just like any decent Southerner, just like any decent Mississippian.
What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?
In the South, if you’ll allow me the indulgence of paraphrasing my own work, families typically have one of two intentions when conversing among themselves: to make each other laugh or to make each other bleed.
I learned the truth of that aphorism years ago, when I visited a now-ex-girlfriend’s family in California. They were so loving and kind, never saying a single inconsiderate thing to each other. Clearly they were monsters. What are these people hiding? I thought. How many dead bodies did they have buried in their basement?
Although that California family could make each other laugh, I honestly don’t believe they knew the value of making each other bleed. You have to be willing to be as hard on your family as you are on your home. The best citizens of Mississippi understand that.
They also understand the conflation of those dual intentions, the humor to be found in the wound, how one can help heal the other. In Mississippi, I’ve come to learn by living here, we blood-let through jokes.
I always try to find the most interesting, the most entertaining way to tell a story, just like any decent Southerner, just like any decent Mississippian.
Do you still think about moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?
Do I think about leaving? Yes, but only every day. That said, I tend to bristle at the notion of a “sense of duty.” Is your sense of duty aimed toward a loved one in need of, say, medical or emotional help? Then, sure, follow that duty. Know it is kind and generous and, above all, human.
But if you feel obligated to stay in Mississippi out of some amorphous loyalty to your home state, I’d ask you to interrogate that notion, to consider the difference between it and, say, someone who keeps the Confederate flag in their yard because of “heritage.” I highly discourage anyone from remaining in this state out of some facile notion of “duty.” Loyalty should never go unquestioned. Duty for duty’s sake engenders bitterness in the dutiful.
When I left Mississippi for college, the neologism for such an exodus was “brain drain.” That term belittles everyone involved, both the people who left (the presumed brains) and the people left behind (the presumed no-brains). We shouldn’t denigrate anyone who chooses to leave Mississippi. Everyone has their reasons, and this state offers a lot of reasons.
I do, however, respect and laud those who choose to stay and fight to make this state better. They manufacture hope, the people who stay and fight. If I ever do leave, it’ll be with the knowledge that individuals far more diligent, courageous, and honorable than I will remain behind.
What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?
Aside from the obvious—that we use the word “ain’t” far less often and sweat far less profusely than easy cinematic signifiers would imply—the one thing I wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi is that it is, in fact, a part of the country. Mississippi is America.
Ever heard the saying “As goes General Motors, so goes the nation”? For decades Mississippi has been General Motors. Nobody listened. I remember in college my friends asking me about my home state as though it were the only part of the country troubled by racism.
The election in 2016 of a blatant and unrepentant racist proved Mississippi is America. We were the canary in the coal mine, and now the entire country has breathed the deadly, poisonous gas.
America is a story we tell ourselves. The people in charge of it, unfortunately, are terrible storytellers. In Mississippi, we don’t tell ourselves stories in order to live; we live in order to tell ourselves stories. We’re a bunch of liars who hit at the truth, and this country deserves a better class of liar.
Mississippi has known that for centuries. Our liars have sat at the top of bestseller lists. Our liars have won Pulitzers and Nobels. Our liars have been chosen for the book clubs Oprah, Jenna, and Reese.
Take note, America.
In Mississippi, we don’t tell ourselves stories in order to live; we live in order to tell ourselves stories.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?
I owe my career, in many ways, to Robert Johnson. Back in the sixties, somebody pulled Keith Richards aside, said there was something he needed to hear, and played him a track by the then-unknown blues guitarist. "Yeah, that's pretty good," Richards said, "but who's the other guy playing?"
Only one guy was playing.
That story, because it may well be apocryphal, exemplifies how I came to choose the subject of my first novel. Not only was the most well-known event of Robert Johnson's life fictional—the selling of his soul to the devil at the crossroads—but his work continues to inspire fiction to this day, my own included.
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
Has any other interviewee answered this question with “education”? I’m kidding. Of course, that’s the most obvious and the most correct answer, but because the soup can on the lowest shelf gets pulled the most often, I’ll go with . . . second-run picture shows.
I long for the day when every town in Mississippi has what Oxford once had with the Hoka, your typical café-slash-bar-slash-art-house-movie-theater. You know how you know it’s Sunday if you have a hankering for Chik-Fil-A? I feel that way, every day of the week, about what we called the “dollar picture show” when I was a kid.
What better way to instill a sense of community than to communally watch The Monster Squad.
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.)
On the morning of March 26, 1983, Richard Lutes, a petty criminal, called an equally petty criminal named Robert “Peanut” Griffin and said, “Tell that lady her rooster died last night.” The lady was Gloria Tiffee. The rooster was her husband, Larry Tiffee, a wealthy real-estate developer, prominent citizen of Meridian, Mississippi, and holder of a substantial life-insurance policy.
The “Tiffee Murder” case, prosecuted by my father, the district attorney at the time, drew a great deal of media attention. That attention reached a climax when Peanut Griffin broke out of jail and, during a filmed stand-off, threatened to jump to his death from the county courthouse. Although, in reality, Griffin was talked off the ledge, The Queen City Detective Agency begins with a fictional turn to the actual events. The character based on Griffin, Turnip Coogan, either jumps or falls to the ground, taking with him the definitive truth of what really happened on the night of the murder.
After her son’s death, Coogan’s mother tries to hire a private investigator to discover who “killed” him, but only one PI in town has the wherewithal, determination, and brashness to take on such a volatile, high-profile case.
Meet Clem Baldwin. A young Black woman and former cop, Baldwin is resourceful, capable, kind, tenacious, daring, quick-witted, and an absolute pain in the ass. If a door is closed, she kicks it in. If a drink is proffered, she asks what the hell took so long. Baldwin only uses one drawer of her dresser, one shelf of her fridge, and one frame of her mind: solve the case, whatever it takes.
Clem’s investigation into the case leads her to places she never expected. One thing becomes clear. The murder was not about the insurance money. What does the Dixie Mafia have to do with it? Is there possibly a connection to Baldwin’s father, a jewel fence whose own daughter put him behind bars while she was still a cop?
Mississippi Burning meets Veronica Mars, True Detective set in the land of Faulkner, Queen City is a literary Southern Gothic crime novel. It utilizes a panoply of genre conventions to address issues still relevant today. To solve the case, Clementine Baldwin will have to confront racism, classism, misogyny, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, and corruption, in Mississippi as well as the South at large.
Against this hard-bitten, hard-living shamus, the legacy of the “Old South” never stood a chance.
The Queen City Detective Agency, forthcoming from HarperCollins on August 13, 2024, is available for preorder at Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and, of course, your local independent bookstore.
I love the sunflower metaphor!
Great interview, lots of fertile thought. Thanks Snowden, thanks Lauren.
"Heritage is not absolution". I’ll think about that one for a while.