On Floodwaters and Crossroads

For the past couple of years, every time I am at home, I take tours of my hometown.  I drive and ride a bike through the streets.  I look in the faces of the people, more unfamiliar than familiar now that I have been away for so long.  I pass the church steps where I lined up with a gaggle of laced and ruffled girls before marching down the aisle to recite my Easter speech.  I ride past the parks where I leaned against fences and watched the shirtless boys wrestle over basketballs.  I can remember the way the sweat ran down their shirtless, knotty bellies and recall my first understanding of the vast differences between boys and girls.  I rumble down the alley where I flipped my bike and grass stained my first pair of biking shorts.  I search the radio stations for the blues and the air for the smell of barbecue.  I seek all of the things that marked me in some way, whether it was through love or scars. 

The last such moment was over Christmas, and I guess I noticed for the first time that Clarksdale was poor.  Before that point, Clarksdale just was.  It took a tourist's eyes to really see how rutted the streets were and how many abandoned properties lined them.  How the houses collapsed in the yards and were full of patched windows and sagging porches.  With observing came the realization that this continuous deterioration stands in testimony to the legacy of sharecropping/racism/shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-ness that has always plagued Mississippi.  The place that gave America its music and culture has always been rewarded with failed policy and stunted economy.  Still, I never expected that time to be my last time seeing it as I knew it.

I have never been the person that got away from home and lied about being from Clarksdale.  I have, however, always felt the dichotomy of my hometown.  I always felt we were simultaneously blessed and cursed, celebrated and unrecognized, violent and beautiful, powerful and helpless, and these feelings were magnified in the wake of the recent rain and storms.  To see the damage from afar is heartbreaking.  The school district office, where my mom works, is flooded.  People are being sheltered in the Civic Auditorium, the place where I had my debutante cotillion.  It is frightening to see the places that punctuated my life under dirty water and to know that when I go back, the city is likely not going to be what it was.  It is disheartening to know that those who already had little now have less, and worse, that they must be at the whim of the sluggish, apathetic bureaucracy that put us here to get the needed help.  It hurts that in my artistic poverty, I have nothing to lend but my words.     

What’s so amazing, though, is that despite it all, Clarksdale regularly produces world class athletes, musicians, and thinkers; Clarksdalians do big things, abroad and at home.  My love and respect for my hometown is one of the main reasons I write.  It is beautiful to see my fellow citizens, especially those my age and younger, rushing to help each other, rushing to share of what they have.  It reinvigorates my spirit and reinforces the things that I am certain of: we have always been strong, resilient, and resourceful; we have always pulled together when things got bad; and once the storm is over, we will rise.

Dear Clarksdale, we been and we always gone be.  I love yall, and I know yall love me.