A Stranger Reminds Me to Check on My Heart

Meditations on home and writing through painful memories.

How does it feel to see that statue out there everyday? was a question posed to me by a young Black man who was browsing the bookstore I work in. 

I responded: I try to just pretend it’s not there.

As he took in my response, looking thoughtfully out the window towards the statue, I sized him up. He was wearing a shirt bearing the colors of the Pan-African flag and a necklace adorned with a wooden ankh. This made me a little nervous. I mentally prepared for things to go left. I feared he might chide me for being the only Black employee in a store that sits directly in front of a confederate statue.

Instead, he said: I just wanted to check in on you cause we have to check on each other and talk about these things.

I exhaled and nodded, but didn’t say anything. What could I say? His question caught me completely off guard. No one had ever checked in with me, asked me how it felt to have to go to work and see that statue everyday. His concern seemed genuine. 

And I thought, maybe, lying underneath that question was: How’s your heart? 

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I have been trying for so long to write about working at this bookstore, that statue, and all the uproar around it in the midst of the pandemic. I have been trying to write about my contentious relationship to Mississippi and how often I daydream about leaving. It is so hard to write about home because you cannot write about home without interrogating the shame and violence you experience in that home. 

But I don’t want to write about it, talk about it, or even think about it most days. Like the statue I walk by everyday, I try to pretend it’s not there. 

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Mississippi is the place you escape, or at least that’s what we are taught, and what outsiders project onto us. 

Why on earth would any Black person continue to stay there? An all too common question asked by folks of various races who seem to believe the brand of racism, sexism, xenophobia, queerphobia, and classism they live under is special, different, more tolerant. What I find the most laughable is that often the same people who antagonize Black folks who live in Mississippi, whether by choice or circumstance, are also the ones who benefit from the state violence in their own neighborhoods.

There is never any introspection. No self-awareness. Just rainbow flags, BLM posters, and vibes. 

Unlike our siblings in liberal-ish states and cities, we have never idealized this place. For the most part, Black folks living in and from Mississippi tell the truth in all its nuances. Mississippi has some of the most regressive laws in this country. Yes. Mississippi is also one of the blackest states in this country. Also yes. This is why it is inherently anti-Black to “throw away” Mississippi, or worse, tell us we deserve what we get for remaining here. 

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My grandmother who raised me left Mississippi in the early seventies shortly after my mother was born. She landed a job making more money than she likely ever dreamed of. She was the “Terry” of the family (See: Soul Food). She made it, but obviously not without bumps in the road along the way. 

When she left Mississippi, she vowed to never come back. The only job Black people could get was cleaning houses or being a teacher. She would say. And to her father’s dismay, she did not want to be a teacher. She had her eyes set on the corporate world. 

Better opportunities. Better quality of life. This is why my grandmother and three of her other eight siblings left. But the majority of the family remained. Worked. Loved. Survived. Content with staying put in the only home they’d ever known. 

And those who left never actually left. 

Christmas. Thanksgiving. Easter. Family Reunions. You name it, they were there. My mother, a Chicago girl through and through, spent a good chunk of her childhood between there and Mississippi. When I was born, my experience was the same. Mississippi was my second home away from Chicago , until I moved here permanently. 

As a child, I thought this place was cozy. Smelled kinda funny, different from the city. There was always sounds of insects I did not yet have a name for, vibrating out from the trees. And the stars, visiting here was the only time I could see and chase stars with my eyes. 

It seemed so magical back then. 

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The feeling of being stuck crept up on me. 

When I moved here to be with my mother, it was not what I expected it to be. We lived about 20 minutes outside of town down a road that started out paved, slowly morphed into gravel, and eventually turned into dirt by the time we made it to our house. 

We were surrounded by trees, open fields, forests that began high up and then sank down so far, all I could see was the tops of the trees, and imagine what was further below. And, of course, animals. Lots of dogs and stray cats that somehow found their way to us. Field mice, deer, raccoons, possums, and all the bugs.

One of the first things that stood out to me about Mississippi that I hadn’t noticed when I visited during holidays and the summer, was how quiet it was. A loud quiet of insects buzzing and chirping,  and sometimes a wailing sound that I would learn later was likely a bobcat.

When it stormed, the wind whistled a song I had never heard before. And the thunder beat against the house until I trembled and cried. It was not like the city storms. This was too close. All the wildness of “outside” seemed to overpower my home, my body, everything. 

At some point it began to feel lonely. Even on the days my brother and I ran around outside, kicking up red dirt, pulling peaches from the tree not too far from the house.

It was so lonely.

And suddenly I wanted to escape, for lots of reasons related to my dysfunctional home life, but also because I felt far away from everything and everyone. 

I had always been a daydreamer, but it became more frequent. More fantastical. Like maybe I’d grow wings and fly among the birds, fly so high until I get to heaven. During an extremely difficult time in my childhood, I decided to act on one of my fantasies of escape, at least as best I could. 

I wrote a letter to God. I don’t remember what I said, but I probably asked him to come save me or help my family or make my mama happy again. I took the letter and put it in a bottle, tied a balloon to it, and let it float up into the sky until I couldn’t see it anymore. 

I believed with all my heart it would make it to God. Adult me knows now that the balloon likely got too high and burst, and the bottle and letter is lost somewhere in the woods. Still, I appreciate the ways I imagined and hoped that something better was out there beyond this place. Something powerful and beautiful and magical and loving. 

At the very least, Mississippi taught me how to dream. 

***

I do not like remembering because I do not like the ways I have to dance around the most painful parts. How I have to write in a way that does not disarm me, implicate those I love, make me into a walking tragedy. 

But when I do allow myself to remember, I am surprised by the moments that seemed mundane at the time, but were actually everything, but that. 

How is my heart? Is the question that has traveled with me as I pushed myself to write and remember as much as possible about what shaped my relationship to Mississippi.

And, what happens to the heart when we look away, pretend things aren’t there or never happened, push the hurt way way down forcing our bodies to uncomfortably carry the load? 

The truth of what it feels like to live here, to work in one of the wealthiest and elitist towns in the state, and to walk beneath the shadow of the confederacy is that I really don’t know.  

I should have told the young man who checked on my heart the truth. I don’t actually know if my heart is okay.