Book Review: Back to Mississippi

Title: Back to Mississippi

Author: Mary Winstead

Date: 2002

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: 0-7868-6796-5

Length: 294 pages plus endnotes and bibliography

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “I attempt to explore the roots of hatred, fear, and ignorance that caused people to commit the unthinkable in the context of a family, a community, and even a nation that didn’t want to admit that it was happening.”

Mary Winstead was the product of a mixed marriage. Her Swedish-surnamed mother was blonde, rich, and Catholic, and lived in Minnesota. Her father’s “Scotch-Irish” family (Irish Protestant refugees from religious persecution) had picked up an English name—many did—and lived in Mississippi.His community was triracial, though not isolated. He might have been bi- or triracial; at different times he said he was and wasn’t. Most Scotch-Irish adults have dark brown hair, even if they were remembered for having pale or reddish hair as children. Winstead describes her grandmother’s hair as black; her father describes it as auburn, as Winstead admits his hair was in youth. Winstead had black hair as a child. She was also timid and nervous. Maybe that was why her father’s pet name for her was “Spook.” Or was it? “Isn’t that what you call Black people?” It was not apparently what Winstead’s father called them, but the multiple meanings of her nickname weighed on Winstead’s mind when she thought about them. Maybe that was why she wrote a book that, she admits, caused her to be shunned by her relatives.

Mississippi had social problems in the 1950s. Those problems had been exacerbated by the previous generation’s “progressive, scientific” sociological thought about how humankind had evolved into distinct “races” that could not be expected to coexist on peaceful terms. By 1950 the “progressive, scientific” clique were trying to correct this error and, rather than make positive changes in their own community and publicize them, they were shipping social workers down to Mississippi to impose even more changes on people they didn’t know or understand.

When my parents crossed the continent we usually went through Tennessee. My one visit to Mississippi coincided with one of Winstead’s. I saw some of the same things she did—widespread, public things, landscapes, buildings, monuments. I perceived it as a strange, sick place. I felt strange and sick the whole time I was there. The sensation, I have since learned, would have been a reaction to the heavy use of now banned “pesticides” on land that technically belonged to cities but was still being used to raise cotton and soybeans. I was deeply uncomfortable with everything in Mississippi, even the beauties of its strange exotic nature. Not having been brought up to fantasize about “self-sacrifice to the good of Humanity,” I had a natural, healthy reaction: I wanted to get out, and did. I have fond memories of people, and sometimes I still draw images of landscapes and houses from Mississippi, but I knew it was not where I needed to be.

In the North, however, some people had carefully conditioned into their children an unnatural desire to go into Mississippi and change things to suit themselves, never asking themselves, “Which of these people is asking me to stay here, and why? Why am I getting involved in a conflict of interests in a place that is not mine, among people who are not mine? Did I just imagine that I had something to teach to a whole community of people who are mostly older than I am, rather than being here to learn something I can take back when I take up my own rightful responsibilities back in my own town? I did? Do I have a fever?”

Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman were two New York boys who took it upon themselves, not just to teach adult education classes in Mississippi, but to agitate for leftist “progress.” They claimed they were preparing people to pass a literacy test and vote in elections. They just happened to be urging those people to vote their way, to “rock the vote” and change the outcomes of local elections. They found one local person willing to claim them as friends and colleagues. His name was James Chaney. His racial identity was Black.

Everyone knows what became of those young men, though “family” newspapers omitted several details. They were murdered. For the murders there is no excuse, but there is a simple explanation: Mississippi’s Choctaw people had had a good neighborly relationship with what used to be the southwestern part of Cherokee country, and evidently shared the idea that undesirable behavior should be punished in horrific ways as a deterrent to future misbehavior. There may be some benefit in a book repeating and emphasizing that “cruel and unusual punishment” is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. There is no particular benefit in a book trying to ignore the obvious, logical explanation and wail about “hatred, fear, and ignorance.” People who are not convinced that their ancestors’ approach to a problem was wrong are likely to try refining their ancestors’ approach to that problem.

If we want to wring our hands and ululate, yet “refrain from the self-righteouness that characterizes many of the accounts...written by people...in the North,”as Winstead avows on page 9, we might begin by examining the “hatred, fear, and ignorance” that prompted Goodman and Schwerner to abandon their own community, which also needed a lot of help (they came from New York City), and meddle with Mississippi. I am not suggesting that the murders were right when I say that probing the inadequacies of Goodman’s and Schwerner’s lives would have produced a fresher, more informative book than any attempt to join in the Once-“Progressive” chorus of “Ooohhh, ooohhh, the hatred, fear, and ignorance of people who don’t agree with us!” I’m willing to resell Winstead’s book yet, at the same time, I can see why her family stopped speaking to her.

What Winstead offered her “progresive” Northern friends seems a little more respectable, in fact, when we consider how far short it falls from its own stated goal. Winstead had reason to believe a cousin of hers, a Baptist preacher and Ku Klux Klan organizer, knew something about the murders. She has no inside evidence that he did or didn’t, and in fact she does not offer any explanation for his attraction to the Ku Klux Klan,which caused her relatives to avoid him too. She never knew the man. If we read Back to Mississippi as a long way of saying “He’s a relative so I feel for him, but honestly, Officer, I don’t know the man!”, then its lengthy but shallow research and its hand-wringing tone make sense too.

What she offers, and her Northern audience apparently “need,” is the “feeling” her cousin’s indictment stirred in her—a mix of nostalgia, normal family loyalties on both sides, and most of all that frantic clinging to an ideology that probably is due for an update. Good girls of the 1950s wanted to reduce everything to a simple good-bad dichotomy. Segregation was bad; therefore opposing segregation was good; therefore she wants to believe she would have liked Goodman and Schwerner, if she’d ever known them, more than she liked her cousin, if she’d ever known him. If everything is a good-bad, or nice-nasty, dichotomy, then...North nice, South nasty? Black nice, White nasty? (Trying to believe that brings on positive paroxysms of cognitive dissonance in White Northerners.) If you seriously seek enlightenment from history, nice-nasty thinking almost never works and should probably be discarded. If you feel a need to find a way to make yourself have the emotional feelings you associate with “nice” when you think about White Southerners, reading Back to Mississippi might help.

So it’s not a historical study; it’s a story about a young woman’s family relationships. History as Chick Lit. As such, it’s a good read, vividly written, more realistic than most stories of its kind, and entertaining. I found it more enjoyable bedtime reading than the average novel.