Well into middle age, after years working as a writer and an editor in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, I found myself unemployed and floundering. I eventually stumbled across a job, teaching as the Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies at Millsaps College, a place loved by Miss Welty (to call her anything else would violate Southern propriety) and a quick walk from the house where she wrote her novel “Losing Battles.” I grew up on a farm near the small town of Mount Olive, and attended Ole Miss, a college where the Confederate battle flag was flown at football games. Upon graduating, in 1978, I left for the North and vowed never to return. But when I needed somewhere to go and sort out my life, there were no questions asked. After years as a black Southern expatriate and sometime critic of the place that shaped the man I have become, my loyalties were not scrutinized. In spite of everything, Mississippi left the door open for me and had my room ready.
At six every morning, I run a loop from my home, in the tidy, liberal enclave of Belhaven, through downtown Jackson, a mile and a half to the south. I rarely see another person, but along State Street flags are my constant companions. One version of the state flag has wide red, white, and blue stripes, and bears the Confederate Army’s battle flag in the top left corner. The other is white, with a magnolia tree in the center, a red stripe on the right, and, in place of the Confederate emblem, a white star on a square canton of dark blue. After the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the official flag (the one with the tribute to the armies of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson) flew at half-mast outside the State Supreme Court, almost low enough for me to snatch it down—an idea, I admit, that held some appeal.
Mississippi’s current flag was introduced in 1894, around the same time Alabama and Florida introduced flags that were similarly reminiscent of the Confederate battle emblem. By that time, the Reconstruction era was over, and efforts by conservative Democrats had disenfranchised most African-Americans once again. The new flag was meant to honor Confederate veterans—to preserve the memory of those who had fought for secession from the Union. That the secession itself was intended to preserve the institution of slavery against the federal government (which, the secession declaration stated, “advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst”) is mostly glossed over in Mississippi today, where the flag is just as Southern as sweet tea and cornbread.
The magnolia flag flies above an office building across from the capitol and on the lawn of my neighbor, a white Democrat and Teach for America alum whose cheerful yellow bungalow I admire on my cool-down. It is an unofficial alternative for those who feel that the time is up for the Confederate emblem—although even the magnolia is not as innocent as it might seem. Its canton, the white star on a blue field, is derived from the so-called Original Lone Star flag, a banner first flown in 1810 by the short-lived Republic of West Florida, which encompassed a portion of modern Louisiana. It was then adopted by the about-to-secede Mississippi legislature, on January 9, 1861, and had an unfortunate second life as the Bonnie Blue; in that year, it inspired a popular song, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” which celebrated the spirit of rebellion in Southern states (“We are a band of brothers and native to the soil / Fighting for the property”—read: slaves—“we gained by honest toil”).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jackson’s municipal government, largely black and Democrat, has refused to fly either flag over the city’s municipal buildings, and most residents don’t fly one, either. With a population of just more than a hundred and seventy thousand, Mississippi’s largest city has a majority black population and a white liberal minority, who live in established neighborhoods like Belhaven or emerging ones like Fondren (whose motto is “keep Fondren funky”). Jackson is also distinguished by its high volume of potholes. In a rural state with a genuine distaste for urban spaces, the city is neglected by the men and women in the state legislature, who cannot be blind to the decay, since they experience the city’s bumpy streets on their way to the capitol.
To Jacksonians, as to the rest of the world, Mississippi’s adherence to the Confederate symbol seems strange. Economic arguments against it—like those against recent laws allowing Mississippi businesses to refuse to serve gay and transgender people—have won credibility as an increasing number of groups have taken steps to boycott the state. The push to remove the flag gained further urgency last June, after a young white gunman killed nine black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, in a racially motivated hate crime. When South Carolina’s legislators voted to remove the Confederate flag from their state capitol in July, Mississippi seemed to be next in line, especially after Philip Gunn, the conservative Republican speaker of the house, proclaimed that he thought the flag should be replaced. A group of sixty-four notable Mississippians signed a letter (“It’s time for Mississippi to fly a flag for all its people”) that was published last August, around the time of the state’s first book festival, held on the grounds of the capitol. The author John Grisham, who had initiated the petition, gave an opening speech in the sweltering heat to a crowd of three thousand—including a small group of men waving Confederate battle flags. None of the men spoke and, following Southern protocol, the rest of the crowd politely ignored them.
Just a few days before my return, in January, Mississippi’s legislature began its opening session, and by February nineteen different bills related to the flag were on the agenda. Perhaps it was naïve of me to be shocked that, by the end of the month, every last bill had been declared dead. There would be no commission to design a new banner, no discussion of replacing the battle flag with the magnolia; neither would colleges and local governments who refused to fly the flag be stripped of funding. Rather than inspiring a flood of tent-revival conversions, Gunn had fuelled a revolt, leading to the appearance of signs in rural north Mississippi yards that read “Keep the flag, change the speaker.”
Then Governor Phil Bryant declared April to be Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi. Such contemporary secessionism is not merely symbolic. After a period of racially integrated governance from 1980 to 2000, Mississippi has entered a second phase of disenfranchisement—much like the period that followed the two decades of Reconstruction—in which the legislature’s mostly black Democratic minority has been locked out by the entirely white Republican majority. The state has refused to expand Medicaid coverage to its poorest residents, in the name of curbing the federal government’s encroachment on Mississippi’s affairs. In January, Bryant also refused to sign a waiver granting food stamps to single unemployed Mississippians, even though doing so would cost the state nothing, and not signing the waiver will leave more than an estimated eighty thousand unemployed residents hungry.
Since my return, I have been constantly reminded that resistance to changing anything in Mississippi, whether the flag or the heightened black poverty, is primarily a resistance to ideas that come from outside the state—from South Carolina, from Mississippi writers who have emigrated, from Washington, D.C., and, most often, from the Obama Administration. If the idea did not originate in Mississippi, the logic goes, it is not best for Mississippi. In 1965, the novelist Walker Percy described the Protestant Anglo-Saxon minority’s reaction to its common tragic past as resulting in a “chronic misunderstanding between the state and the rest of the country.” Around the same time, the historian and native Mississippian David Herbert Donald wrote of the “self-contained world” in which the Mississippian lived: “When he traded, it was with other Mississippians. When he read, it was his own local newspapers, edited by Mississippians. When he got an education, it was at Mississippi colleges, where Mississippians taught. . . . These people have no idea of a world beyond themselves.”
The Mississippi mentality implies that ceding any power to the federal government would result in losing all the power the state has. The same goes for ceding to cities like Jackson, in which the new is prized. Mississippi is still a state where, the Times found, more than seventy per cent of people who live here were born here, in towns like the one where I grew up, and are consequently resistant to changing things. It is telling that Mississippi has the lowest passport-issuance rate per capita in the United States—the product of low income, surely, but also of a clubby, connected familiarity.
It is difficult to admit that the very insularity that made me want to leave Mississippi after graduation has also made my return relatively easy. After the shock of reëntry, the soothing rhythms of the place have taken over; conversations seemed to pick up right where I left them. On weekends, I leave Belhaven for the college town of Oxford, a liberal enclave where I can dine at an award-winning restaurant with fellow-scholars. In Mount Olive, my home town of a thousand people, I visit old friends who live on acres of well-manicured landscaping. Some might say that it is a sign of progress that a black man born in Mississippi can be part of a socially élite class, but it’s not necessarily a point of pride. It’s hard to forget that, for years, this club excluded me.
One of the reasons poverty is so ingrained here is that people like me are never forced to encounter it directly; in fact, simply talking about poverty anywhere but Jackson leads to accusations of inciting class warfare. Rather than facing problems, most Mississippians who want to change things give up trying, or learn to sidestep the issue. It is perhaps only downtown, where the state flag flies over the potholes—one, opposite the capitol, larger than my size-thirteen foot—that it becomes impossible to ignore the state’s growing rift. Tony Yarber, the mayor of Jackson and a pastor, has adopted another strategy to circumvent the state legislature’s intransigence. “Yes….I believe we can pray potholes away,” he tweeted to his constituents last year. “Moses prayed and a sea opened up. #iseeya #itrustHim #prayerworks.”
