A New History of Mississippi

Preface

ix Preface Mississippi is a place and a state of mind. The name evokes strong reactions from those who live here and from those who do not, but who think they know something about its people and their past. Mississippi is what the American Indians called the river along the state’s western border. Only a few Choctaw remain compared to the 30,000 who once dominated the area but shared it with the Chickasaw, Natchez, Tunica,Yazoo, Tiou, Grigra, Koroa, Chakchiuma, and Biloxi. These tribal peoples furnished the romantic labels for cities, counties, and rivers that help to shape the sense of place for the descendants of Africans and Europeans, who displaced Mississippi’s indigenous population and struggled to make the state their own. Mississippi ’s history is a story of violence, endurance, and strained human relationships that have produced America’s best music and literature.What has rooted Mississippi’s music and literature in a deep sense of place is that, despite their efforts, the human population has never overwhelmed the land. Human beings have abused the land and reshaped it, but Mississippians have never lost their feeling of impermanence, living widely scattered in small communities incapable of even giving the impression of dominating nature. William Faulkner and Eudora Welty conveyed the relationship between fictional characters and their environment in a manner that communicated the haunted, almost Gothic feeling that the blood-stained soil and streams impart today to visitors, to those who live here, and to readers around the world. The cotton planters’ antebellum mansions in Natchez, Holly Springs, and Columbus provide a sense that dominance almost happened once in the past, but the current mansions’owners are usually retired professionals who project the image of custodians for the ghosts of the lost era. The slave quarters and sharecropper shacks that housed the majority of Mississippi’s population until the Second World War have given way to ranch houses and trailers. Fifteen percent of the state’s population lives in trailers, often on a flat, bare piece of earth gouged out of a forest or on a clear-cut lot surrounded by acres of small trees and bushes struggling to replace the forests downed and sold to the paper mills. Those homes provide the clearest indication of the transitory nature of a major portion of the population, who escape the wilderness and the heat in their tin and x | Preface particleboard havens furnished with the appliances and veneer of twentyfirst -century American civilization. But weekends, when there are no college football games, find them, along with the ranch house and apartment dwellers from Jackson, Tupelo,Yazoo City, and Hattiesburg, escaping to the woods, streams, and lakes. Deer camps abound with storytelling, which is probably the most enduring hallmark of Mississippi culture. In the beginning , Indians recounted their war stories and hunting tales, to earn their adult names, and then mingled with Africans and the Irish, who brought their oral traditions of griots and bards to add to the tradition giving birth to Robert Johnson and the blues, to Jimmie Rodgers and country music, to Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll, to William Faulkner and the Nobel Prize, to Richard Wright and a scream against segregation, to novelist Larry Brown and ...Living here sucks any half-observant,even dimwitted inhabitant into the mystery of the place. This book is an interpretative narrative that attempts to tell the story of Mississippi in a readable, straightforward manner unencumbered with notes but based on the most recent scholarship. I shall provide directions to consult two other volumes for greater depth and understanding. One is Bradley Bond’s Mississippi: A Documentary History,which provides a reader a taste of the most important primary documents. The other is Marion Barnwell’s A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives, which provides biographical pieces by and about some of the characters from our past. ...