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he day I moved back to Mississippi

after living in New York for 15 years, I drove into a full-fl edged

Confederate funeral procession. On the corner of North Lamar

Boulevard and Price Street in Oxford, I got out of my car and stood

under magnolia, maple, and live oak trees that shaded throngs

of sweaty white men dressed up like the soldiers of Lee’s army.

Some marched with guns holstered, hoisting a battle fl ag that took

up two lanes of the road.

Near the front of the procession, behind a grey hearse, was the

brown face of Paula Tingle Hervey, wife of Anthony Hervey, the

author of a book called Why I Wave the Confederate Flag, Written by

a Black Man, who’d been killed in a car crash two weeks earlier.

The whole pitiful spectacle, fueled by a longing for a time when

neither the Herveys nor I would have been free, was the kind of

demonstration that had prompted me to run away from the Deep

South 22 years ago. And yet it was also part of why, 22 years later,

I decided to run back home.

After leaving Mississippi for college in Ohio, graduate school in

Indiana, and ultimately a professorship in New York, I wasn’t sure

how much home I’d fi nd when I returned to the Deep South—nor

how much home the Deep South might fi nd in me. Born and raised in

Jackson, Mississippi, I spent summers and far more weekends than

I wanted to with my grandmother in the small poultry town of Forest.

Located 45 miles east of Jackson and 55 miles west of the Alabama

state line, Forest was what demographers call a minority-majority

community. Most of its citizenry was black, but most of the political,

economic, and social power rested with the town’s white residents.

When Grandmama was young, most of our family, along with

more than 3 million other black Americans from the Deep South,

moved to cities in the Midwest in search of decent jobs and less

terrorizing forms of oppression. Rather than join the Great

Migration, Grandmama chose to remain, working fi rst as a domestic

and later as a buttonhole slicer at a chicken-processing plant, which

meant it was her job to cut open the bellies and pull out the guts.

Even though she was legally forbidden to drive down certain roads,

to enter certain stores, to use the bathroom of her choice, or to vote

freely until she was middle-aged, she insisted that the region

rightfully belonged to black Americans, too. “We worked too hard

on this land to run to Milwaukee,” she told me. “Some of us believed,

and still believe, this land will one day be free.”

As a child growing up in the Deep South,

I found nothing speculative or surreal in asserting

that all who worked the land should have equal

access to quality food and housing, equal access

to transformative education, and equal protection

under the law. We descendants of those who

refused to run saw corpses hanging, but to us,

they looked like angels fl ying. We watched the

grey tears of the hanging moss trees dripping

over the land. When we think of those trees, even

more than the grey of the moss we think of the

dark, bleeding-red brown of those trees’ creased

bark. That same brown saturates the soil, birthing

cotton, soybeans, collard greens, and purple hull

peas in Greenwood, Mississippi. It coats our

hollowed manufacturing plants in Memphis,

Tennessee. It peeks out of the open doorways

of haunted plantations, mansions, projects,

trailers, and shacks in Little Rock, Arkansas.

It lines the cracks of the hastily built Confederate

monuments commemorating bruising parts of

yesterday we’ve yet to reckon in Atlanta, New

Orleans, and Charleston, South Carolina. We see,

smell, and feel the residue of that dark, bleeding-

red brown in our region’s music and literature,

our classrooms and country stores, our churches.

When I was a child, Grandmama strategically

placed box fans in the open windows of her pink

shotgun house, so that even when the

temperatures reached more than 100 humidifi ed

degrees, the interior felt like the coolest place on

earth. No matter the race or gender of those who

passed her house, if you were tired enough,

hungry enough, Grandmama welcomed you onto

her land. She welcomed you up on her porch. She

welcomed you into her house. She listened to your

story. She gave you ice water. She wished you well

as you left, and she let you know, in one way or

another, that the land would one day be free.

I ran from the land of the Deep South because

I doubted my ability to fi ght for, and live on,

land that should already be free. I ran back home

when I understood that, though our land holds

the most promise of any land in this world,

it will never free itself. That work belongs to us,

and I am ready to do my part.

Kiese Laymon is the author of a novel, Long Division, a collection of

personal essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and

a forthcoming memoir, Heavy. He teaches English and African American

Studies at the University of Mississippi. kieselaymon.com

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