Coming Home to Mississippi

Carolyn Haines

77 CarolynHaines Carolyn Haines grew up in Lucedale, the daughter of newspaper owners /journalists. She joined the family business as a journalist, and after ten years switched to fiction writing. She is the recipient of many awards for her fiction, the latest being the 2011 RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for her mysteries, the 2010 Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing, the 2009 Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence, and a writing fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. She has published more than sixty books in a number of genres. She is an avid animal rights activist and an assistant professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where she teaches the graduate and undergraduate fiction classes. For more information on Haines and her work, go to www.carolynhaines.com. Home is such a powerful concept, especially for a writer. In a world where many people have come to view their“homes” as investments— a thing to be sold for a profit, some temporary place like a Motel 6—I am a homebody. My home is my refuge and my castle, though it is most ordinary to the gaze of others. Most of my days are spent on my small farm in Semmes, Alabama, with my abundance of stray animals and my solitary hours of imagination and writing. When I leave the farm, it is usually to promote my latest book or to go to the university to teach a class. It’s an amusing fact to many people that I live only about thirty-five miles from the place where I grew up—Lucedale, Mississippi. The border between the two states, along what used to be called 78 carolyn haines Bloody 98, is the Escatawpa River, an amber body of water with pure white sandbars. I learned to swim there with my mother and brothers. When I was growing up, the river wasn’t considered a boundary line; it was a place to play. We sank watermelons in the clear, cold water or hand-cranked homemade ice cream on the riverbank. My childhood is filled with memories of the small farms and pine forests around George County and the sidewalks of small-town Mississippi. I’m physically very close to my hometown—and I wasn’t one of the popular kids—so what then is this desire to live once again within the boundaries of a state with such a troubled past? I can only tell you that I long to go home. Perhaps the“home” to which I want to return is more in the vein of Dorothy and her desire to get back to Auntie Em and a Kansas that was a place of safety. I want to click my heels and return to the summer of 1960, to the place where I picked peas with Joe Vesely, the police chief of Lucedale and an honest and honorable man. A place where doctors came to my home at midnight and sat with my sick grandmother and held her hand until she felt better. A place where we slid on cardboard boxes down the pine-straw laden front lawn of Neal’s Hill at the end of Ratliff Street.And a place where my mother sent hot lunches each day to Miss Hattie and Miss Mattie, elderly sisters who lived two houses down from us. Home was a place where I could ride my horse for hours on end down narrow dirt lanes in the Bexley and Merrill communities and stop for water at a stranger’s house and be welcomed. Perhaps it is the past that I hunger for more than any particular place. All I know is that Mississippi—the best of Mississippi—has been lodged in my brain as this sun-drenched rural locale that I have now sought for the last thirty years. It is a place of dirt roads that lead through pine timber and hardwood groves. There are streams just wide enough for my horse to jump and clean enough that I can take a cool sip. Mississippi is populated with neighbors who come out to their front gate to greet a passerby and ask after my grandmother and family. In the Mississippi of my mind, people still live close enough to the carolyn haines 79 land to know that horses are flight animals.A car speeding past,churning gravel and blaring a horn, may show...