Preface: From Manhattan to Mississippi

For review copies and interviews with author Daisy Karam-Read, contact Dana Walker 1-800-343-1583 - dwalker@quailridge.com

Preface

This book is a collection of personal observations on Mississippi and the Deep South from one who moved to Mississippi from New York City in 1998. They are candid reflections about the people and the things I’ve seen and heard and felt over the past nine years. My experiences in the Deep South have been humbling, sometimes startling, and always affecting.

A conversation with one who’s never been to Mississippi usually begins with the assumption that everything and everyone there is decades behind the times, benightedly entrenched in the values of the antebellum South. I know this phenomenon well, because I was once just such a person. I would never have guessed, for example, that Mississippi was the first state to grant property rights to women (in 1839) or the first to maintain a state-supported college for women in 1884.

Living in Mississippi, however, yields a truer understanding. It’s a state of enormous complexity, in which contradictions and ironies abound. Behind the Greek Revival columns, the southern drawl, and the “southern belle” and “Bubba” images, there are educated, well-read, sophisticated people, who are as open to new ideas as their big city cousins. They just don’t sound and move like people from New York and Los Angeles.

The mindset of many people in other parts of the nation hasn’t progressed beyond the tragic violence and indignities that white southerners perpetrated upon African Americans for too many years. Some northerners seem to have closed their minds about what it means to be a Mississippian today, holding on instead to the 1960s picture.

Mississippi’s past includes institutional racism—there’s no denying that—but I can honestly say that in nine years of living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and spending a lot of time in New Orleans and other parts of Mississippi and Alabama, I have never witnessed a cruel act toward an African American nor heard an unkind comment. This is not to say that racial prejudice doesn’t still exist here, but I’ve personally never encountered it.

On the contrary, I’ve been struck by how easily blacks and whites work together. I suppose that centuries of living alongside each other created a comfort level, or at least a familiarity, between the races that ironically may have helped them through the social transformation that’s taken place in Mississippi since the 1960s. In other parts of the United States, there are probably still white people who’ve never even been alongside a black person in a supermarket line or a doctor’s waiting room. I would have been unable to enjoy life in Mississippi if racism were a part of this psychology. In fact, I wouldn’t have lasted one day, much less long enough to write this book.

It’s time to update our thinking. In this slim volume I attempt to uncover the treasures of the state and its people and to share my discoveries with you. My comments are obviously subjective and impressionistic. They sometimes give way to generalizations—even politically incorrect ones. People in different parts of the country do fit into particular patterns, though I understand that by painting with a broad brush, I risk oversimplification and stereotyping. But this is not a scholarly social study.

When I draw an occasional comparison with New York or Los Angeles that sheds a less-than-flattering light on those great cities, I may provoke the ire of my fellow Northeast and West Coast citizens. My love for those metropolitan areas, which formed my greater consciousness, is undiminished and ongoing. Transplanting myself to Mississippi has enriched my life and given me a deeper understanding of this great country and its endless assortment of distinctive flavors.