Coming Home to Mississippi

Jesmyn Ward

111 JesmynWard Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels , Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Salvage the Bones is the 2011 winner of the National Book Award in fiction. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama. W hen my parents were young adults, they decided to return to Mississippi, where they were both from, with their two young children: my brother and me. They decided that a life in Mississippi was what they wanted, and they wanted to raise their children in the South. I was actually born in Berkeley, California, and when we moved home,I was three.As I grew older,I wondered about their decision , wondered what our lives would have been like if our parents had decided to raise us in California. My teenage years had been rough, and I’d suffered and agonized over who I was and where I lived in the same ways that I suppose all teenagers suffer and agonize.Of course,my time had been complicated by the fact that I was black, and also the fact that I came from a poor family, and also by the fact that I went to a high school where most of the students were not black or poor. A sense of promise seemed to exist only in the outside world, the world outside of the state, and I was eager to pursue it. So when I graduated from high school, I left 112 jesmyn ward Mississippi for college in California. And after California, I went to New York for my first job, and after New York, I went to Michigan for graduate school, and after there, I went back to California for a writing fellowship. From the moment I’d first seen the expanse of the Pacific Ocean stretching out over the horizon from a plane window at the age of twelve, I’d associated the West with possibility. There was something about the way the water stretched out into the distance, on and on, the way I imagined it wrapping around the world.All those places,I thought, all those people. I wanted to see them all, and when I returned to Mississippi at the end of the summer from visiting relatives in Oakland, I could not stop imagining those people and places. It was only when I was older that I realized that seeing the Pacific for the first time was an echo of another wonderment at the West, my first: standing at the edge of a road that ran east and west in front of my grandmother’s house in Mississippi, barefoot, watching the sun set through the oaks, the sky burning red and pink and orange. I was eight, and I knew beauty. My family wasn’t happy about my leaving and choosing to attend college in California. They loved me, and they didn’t want me to stray so far away from them. But I went because I felt I had to find opportunity . The world taught me that there are many people, and many places, that those things can afford pain or kindness. The world taught me that when I traveled outside of the United States for the first time to Oxford, England, I would meet a kind blonde stranger on the bus from London to Oxford, and that she would patiently tell me where I should transfer, how far away my stop would be, where I should get off, and how long it would take me to get to my final destination. The world also taught me that I would walk the streets of New York and encounter strangers who would give their seats to me on the subway after I fainted, but that there were also other strangers, men, who would brandish knives on the subway, who would shout insults at me when I refused to speak to them on the streets. I found a multitude of strangers in the world, some of them friends, some of them not. As I traveled farther, I found success and beauty, but I found something else as well: a sense of emptiness undercut by sorrow. My family, [3.137.161.222] Project MUSE...