Jackson Free Press

OXFORD—A few hundred feet from the Square, three Obama t-shirt vendors have set up shop in the parking lot of Goolsby's Hair World. A banner proclaims this swath of concrete "Obama-Land." Business appears to be good. I didn't catch any signs of serious competition between them. There's an impressive diversity of shirts on sale--several referencing Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Seated in a canvas chair behind one of the vendors, Hazel Hull, James Meredith's younger sister, is selling "My Brother J-Boy," her self-published book about the Meredith children's early years. Hull says that the book's black-and-white illustrations were done by an inmate in a maximum security prison that her brother once visited.

"They say Obama is an African American," Hull told me when I sat down with her. "What is an African American? I'm still pondering that. I don't know what an African American is." Hull went on to describe why racial categories don't make sense to her. "There's no clear identification in my mind, what race you are."

As she spoke, two young black men pulled up to the light at Jackson Avenue and South 9th Street in a low-slung sedan, blasting the chorus of Young Jeezy's Obama-referencing "My President":

My President is black / My Lambo is blue / And I'll be goddamned if my rims ain't too

They looked meaningfully at Obama-Land and its residents and--as if to drive home the point--returned to the beginning of the song and its epic horn line.

"I can't be clear as to what race is. I don't think race is important; I don't think nationality is important" Hull said as the sedan drove off.

"You talk about Obama. And then when I look up my category, [white Mississippi Supreme Court Justice] J.A.P. Campbell was my great-granddaddy." she told me. "So now, what are we talking about?"