a sense of where you are

I have a tendency to historicize everything.  When I meet new people or visit new places, I see stories.   For me, the past is never completely buried.  The ghosts of history, both friendly and malicious, are always with us.  As I entered Mississippi and saw the phrase "It's Like Coming Home" on the welcome sign, this weight of history welled up inside of me.  I was entering a state with a well documented past of poverty, inequity, and institutionalized discrimination.   There was a serene sense of pastoral beauty--the rolling green hills, clear blue skies, peaceful fields all contributed to an idyllic, home-like atmosphere.   All of these things, however, were marred, in my mind, by the histories that existed behind these  landscapes.  If this was home, than this house was haunted.

This feeling was brought home even more profoundly by the 2001 HBO documentary Lalee's Kin.  Following three generations of an African-American family living in the Mississippi Delta, the film explores the legacy of cotton, extreme poverty, and systemic underdevelopment.  Like many places in the deep South, little was invested into the social, educational, and economic infrastructure of the Delta.  In this region, Cotton was king, and in lieu of providing adequate educational opportunities, individuals who did not graduate from high school (or failed to receive viable skills from their high school education) could count on the cotton industry to provide stable employment.   As the cotton industry relied more heavily on machinery in the sixties and seventies, the historical underdevelopment became more visceral than ever.  Underfunded, under-appreciated school systems saw their budgets being cut by the state for high failure rates on standardized tests.   Seeing the failing school districts, outside business refused to invest in the delta because they saw an illiterate, unskilled work force.  In this way, the injustices of the past were reanimated, and with the current economic conditions of the delta squeezing communities into even more abject conditions, they were also perpetuated.

More than a network of ideologies or a system of explainable parts, this documentary showed that these were human beings.  Names were given and relationships were explained.  It's one thing to talk about how systemic underdevelopment works, it is another, exponentially more noble project to reclaim the basic humanity of who live in such conditions.  More than statistics or victims the people in Lalee's Kin wanted the best for their families,  yelled at  their children when they were mad, and got depressed when the things they wanted didn't work out.  Unfortunately, the social circumstances at work in the delta temper possibility and make lower expectations a reality.  The ghosts of the past are real, and have yet to be exorcised.