Jackson Free Press

I was all but dragged to Mississippi kicking and screaming.

"You're taking me where?" I asked my husband.

"Jackson," he said.

Pause.

"Mississippi," he clarified. (Just in case I had thought Wyoming.)

"But I’ve never even been to the South," I tried to reason.

"You’re going to love it," he said enthusiastically. But neither one of us knew anything about Jackson, or that we could possibly come to care for it.

Aside from Florida and Texas (which don’t count, I know), and a handful of short layovers in the Atlanta airport, I’d never really set foot anywhere near the southeastern region of the U.S. And though life had already taken me away from my Oregon home to England, Germany, Austria, and the American Midwest, Mississippi seemed oddly more foreign than all of those places, or any others I could possibly imagine.

"I didn’t sign up for this," I said.

And then I went back to doing the laundry and hoped Mississippi might go away like a bad rash, or headache.

That was 2006. And in the summer of 2007, on what was to be the hottest week of the year, we navigated our little silver Civic south toward our new home via I-55 from Memphis.

It was 109 degrees when we arrived at the house, and it felt like we’d driven the car into an enormous steam room.

We got out to survey the neighborhood. "Belhaven," I said to the dogs, who were confused, and took turns yipping intermittently between bouts of panting. "Linden Place," I said a few times to myself.

Mississippi magnolia fanned across yards like elegant outstretched hands, as far as I could see down the street from where we stood in the sizzling driveway. A lizard scaled the fence, then quickly became the pattern and color of the cedar planks the moment I detected him.

"What have I gotten myself into?" I said to the fence, to nobody.

And then we unpacked and settled in. And the rest became a chapter in my personal history.

WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

―William Faulkner

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard “write what you know” uttered by a college writing instructor, workshop leader, MFA faculty member, or fellow wordsmith, I might actually be able to make a decent living as a poet.

And while the impulse to write about topics true to one’s own life experiences is one I can respect and understand—for a writer to mine her personal past and present for rich subject matter to give context to a story or poem—it’s not advice I would recommend that any writer live (and die) by.

Writing about the other is probably one of the most difficult things one can attempt. But it’s not nearly as difficult as writing successfully about the familiar, about what we already know.

To this end, I crafted an entire graduate thesis of poems that took their shape from the landscape I was born into, the place I call home. And their language and imagery is the language and imagery of that place and my people: my father’s mother and father; my mother’s mother and father; aunts and uncles and cousins; my sister; our childhood playmates and pets, and a cast of local characters who colored our days and gave life to our existence.

But more than a year after completing that collection, there are few I can honestly stomach. Even fewer yet that I would feel good about sending out into the world in hopes of finding homes for them in journals or a book. Because I did that—wrote about what I knew. And though it felt safe and honest at the time, I had failed to see what was right in front of my face all along. To view what I thought I knew through a different lens. To engage in an act of discovery and experience my surroundings with a sense of wonder—even though I’d spent the greater part of my life in their presence.

What I came to realize was this: we think we know something, someone, until we stop to look a little closer, long and hard enough to see them in a different light, and challenge ourselves to approach them from a different angle.

And that is the beauty of mystery. Where things we think we know and love have another side, yet to be discovered. And this is what we shall do, and what I have learned: to move beyond what’s comfortable, in search of a story.

WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.

―Richard Wright

In Jackson, my husband and I lived right up the street and around the corner from Eudora Welty’s former home on Pinehurst Street. I used to walk the dogs every morning up and down the wide lane, past her Tudor home with its sprawling lawn on the way to the pond at Belhaven College.

I’m ashamed to admit that before moving to the South, I’d never cracked open a single book of hers. Since then, of course, I have had the extreme pleasure of experiencing her unmistakable voice and skillful narratives.

Some time near the end of my MFA studies, a fellow student said to me: Write about what you don’t know about what you know. And I thought that was brilliant. And I wondered why no one had ever given me such sound advice. And it wasn’t until I sat down to write this article, that I discovered those sage words had been written by Miss Eudora Welty.

A STORYTELLING CULTURE

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

― Eudora Welty

I moved from Mississippi to Ithaca, New York, two summers after we arrived in Jackson. And then I moved back home to Portland, Oregon, two winters later. A lot has happened during that small clutch of years that doesn’t matter a great deal for the sake of this story. But what I will tell you is that the richness I experienced in the short time I lived in the Magnolia State, and in successive visits to Jackson, has yet been unmatched.

In time, that foreign place with its sudden, effusive seasons, its wide porches and lazy afternoons, its black-eyed peas and crawfish boils, became my home. Its distinct rhythms and stories became second nature. And I began to learn what it was to be Southern.

I grew to know and love the community as if it had been my own, all my life. To embrace my neighbors who possessed the kind of warmth and generosity I had always wanted to find, but had never actually experienced as an adult. A place where positive change seemed to be everyone’s first initiative, and where making change wasn’t just possible, but encouraged.

I wrote for the Jackson Free Press, which allowed me to come into contact with a diversity of local individuals and to have the privilege of telling their remarkable stories. I quickly made friends with a variety of artists, writers, musicians, academics, doctors, yoga instructors, coffee slingers, restaurant owners, editors and advocates.

And everywhere I went—whether Ace Hardware for a can of spray paint and some nails, the grocery store for a gallon of milk, the post office, or dry cleaners—I encountered someone new and had the pleasure of hearing their stories. It’s true what they say about Southerners being natural storytellers. And as a writer, I couldn’t have been more delighted to just sit, and take in their words, and listen for hours.

WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WHAT I KNEW ABOUT MISSISSIPPI

On a quiet day after a spring rain this stretch of earth seems prehistoric … you may feel you are in one of those sudden magic places of America. Known mainly to the local people and merely taken for granted, never written about, not even on any of the tourist maps. To my knowledge this area of the abrupt hills and deep descents does not have a name, but if you drive up and down them once on a fine day and never see them again, you will find them hard to forget.

―Willie Morris, from “North Toward Home”

This spring when I was asked by Visit Mississippi to be the first writer for a special social media project, I jumped at the chance to return to the South. I had been back to visit friends several times since moving away, but that was almost three years ago. I was eager not only to connect with them again, but also to return to the state with a fresh set of eyes and to challenge myself to see it through a different lens. And so it was that I found myself on a clear and sunny Wednesday morning, navigating my little Honda CRV south toward home via I-55 from Memphis.

As I wove my way throughout Literary Mississippi—Oxford, Clarksdale, Columbus, Jackson and Yazoo City—in search of its beloved writers and the landscapes they inhabited, I became aware of something I hadn’t expected. That this place, these people, were all at once nothing and everything that I thought I knew. The virtual strangers I encountered during my solo travels were simultaneously (and strangely) familiar. And though I arrived as a foreigner and former transplant, the hills and the great delta opened up willingly and took me in as one of their own.

All I could do was sit and listen, and open up to the landscape and people in return. And like the French photographer Alain Desvergnes, who came to Mississippi from 1961 to1964 in hopes of capturing Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County during a time of social and political upheaval, I chose to record both new and familiar surroundings and experiences, “As would a novelist, who writes as he sees, without interruption, without order or apparent coherence, without reassuring logic or enticing benefits.”

In so doing, I found that I knew very little about what I thought I knew about the place I call a second home. And I have returned from that magical region of the world with a better understanding of the land and people that have informed some of American literature’s greatest stories. And I am all the better for having done so.

Brandi Herrera wrote this essay as part of a project with Visit Mississippi. Visit her blog chronicling the trip at poetinmississippi.tumblr.com.