First In Cruelty, Last In Anything Good, There’s A Reason They Say ‘Mississippi, Goddam'

My sister once told me a story that I found almost impossible to believe. When we were teens (back in the yesteryear of the 1990s), she said she traveled back in time. I know. I know. I made the same face that you’re making right now as you are reading this. But she was convinced it happened. She talked about this place where Blacks could only go rollerskating on Saturday because Sunday was for the whites. She claimed that there were no signs stating this, but everyone knew. She talked about the racism being so palpable that she could feel it. She talked about how she couldn’t wait to leave.

The place was Tupelo, Mississippi. And my sister still talks about this time as if she were a part of an antebellum resistance; as if her leaving was an escape.

Mississippi.

The place where Reconstruction never happened. The place where Jim Crow stands still. The place where the poverty rate is almost 20% — one of the highest in the country. A state so hopped up on machismo and Southern bootstraps that it withdrew from a federal program to help feed children during the summer, because, as Atlantic writer Adam Serwer once wrote about Trump supporters who rejoice in the suffering of others, “ The Cruelty Is the Point .”

Jackson, Mississippi, still doesn’t regularly have clean water and hasn’t had clean water… since, wait let me check my notes… this can’t be correct… since 2022! The state government not only refuses to help the poor in their own state, but a major corruption case also alleges that state leaders took welfare funds to build a new volleyball court at a state school that a famous former NFL quarterback’s daughter attended.

And then there was this tidbit: For almost six months, Bettersten Wade has longed for her son’s