Let Me Count The Ways

By Donna Ladd Wednesday, January 11, 2006 7:42 p.m. CST

When my assistant editor, Casey Parks, left the JFP last month to go on to graduate school, she wrote a goodbye editor's note that made me cry. I admit I was touched by what she said about me, the city and the JFP's mission, but more than anything, I cried with pride at the love and maturity such a young person was showing for her community, and herself.

I thought of myself at Casey's age. When I graduated from Mississippi State University, I could not wait to leave. In fact, I left the next day for a law program at a college I ended up hating in Washington, D.C. All I knew is that I wanted out of Mississippi. And I wasn't ever coming back.

Why did I feel this way? For one, I was so disgusted and ashamed of my hometown and home state's brutal race history—that no one bothered to fill me in on until I was almost grown because "all those things are in the past." But even more important for me personally, I didn't feel like there was a place for me in Mississippi.

Because I had progressive, non-conformist ideas (at least for Mississippi), I wasn't welcomed here. Beyond a handful of wonderful teachers and mentors whom I owe everything to today, so many adults treated me like I was a freak because I didn't think just exactly like they did. I remember a 10th-grade World History teacher who would get so frustrated at me because I challenged some of her ideas and tried to have a conversation when all she wanted to do was read out loud from the textbook. "Come back in 20 years and see how you feel then!" she'd yell at me.

I'm back, and I'm still feeling it, babe.

But when I left Mississippi, I didn't think I'd ever come back. I wanted to live among interesting, progressive, smart, educated people of all races who wouldn't tell me I was going to hell because I believed women should have equal rights. (A different history teacher told me that. And this was public school.) I thought Ionly belonged "out there." I moved, traveled, met, experienced, and learned so much. My education included the knowledge that race hatred, and other types, existed everywhere. I also learned that that fact never excuses it anywhere, here or there.

Eighteen years after I left, my homing beacon went off, though, and I came on back home. And when I got back, I learned that many things had changed, and many had not, and even more had changed a little. In Jackson, I found many open-minded, wonderful people—but many of them hadn't found each other, or spend too much time grousing about how the state sucked to help make it stop sucking. It suddenly made sense to use the experience I gathered out there to create a forum here to help them find each other and the power that lurks in numbers.

From the first day we started the paper, I had young people like Casey Parks in mind. She sent me a letter after seeing the first issue; it would be many months before we would actually work together, but we were drawn together. There is nothing more special to me than being able to provide something I didn't have when I stormed out of Mississippi—a positive way to make a difference here in the South, in our own state.

Casey was a transplant, a vagabond as she describes it, but she became a true citizen here. She didn't start out to be an activist; she wanted to be a good journalist. But along the way something happened that broke a little piece of her heart off: Mississippians voted overwhelmingly to demonize the idea of gay marriage, even though it wasn't already legal. It seemed like a vote of hate to a young woman like Casey who loves women instead of men.

So Casey became what I can only dream about having done when I was 22—a symbol of change, of hope, of love in my home state of Mississippi. She wrote a powerful, human column—"I'm a Decent Human Being, Too"—about the pain that vote caused her, a column that cost us one advertiser because the owner didn't like our gay column. Casey and I then talked about it—should we write a piece and tell everyone, including his many gay customers, that her column had cost us that account?

But we didn't. "He could change," I remember Casey saying.

Instead, Casey took the high road, helping to organize a group for gay and lesbian youth and becoming a role model for all young people whom she encountered.

She was a loving, but tough editor. She believed, as I do, that going too easy on interns and writers will not help their future. She dropped people who didn't show up when expected. She was known as "Little Miss Ironfist" around the office.

Casey showed the kind of responsibility that young people need to see. If I was out of the office on assignment or a day off, she came in earlier than usual, not later because "the boss" was away. "That's when I need to be here the most," she would say matter-of-factly. She made deadlines. She didn't take it personally when I criticized her work or told her to just "get 'er done."

As a result, she is ready to take on the world. But not because of anything I taught her. Because of what she taught herself. And what she allowed herself to learn from the people around her.

Casey isn't the only one. Not only the JFP offices, but Jackson and Mississippi as a whole are filled with young people with passion and spirit who can make a real difference in their world. They are influential, they are powerful, and they are to be reckoned with.

But most of all, they are the next generation of Mississippians who can finish what others have started, and then some. We applaud them and their efforts. We urge them to do even more, to help even more young people to be who they are becoming. They are building unity rather then division, doing rather than complaining.

We're in good hands, Casey. But don't be a stranger.

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