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Dear friend —
I ended up in Mississippi by accident. The original plan was to spend a week in Fayetteville, Ark., a college town that, according to the New York Times, is “flush with youth, culture and natural beauty.” But after one look at the Airbnb I’d booked (stained towels, plastic-covered mattress and pillows, stuffy odor — despite a 4.8-star rating!), I fled. My reaction against this place was so visceral that it didn’t even occur to me to try a nearby hotel. Instead, I took a long, unplanned detour through Little Rock, Ark., then kept aimlessly driving east, crossing the Mississippi state border to land in its capital city, Jackson. There, I finally landed, exhausted, in a pristine, 5.0-star rated guest house, wondering if I might be the only Asian person in town.
Jackson is a humid mix of thriving green foliage and decaying city infrastructure. Drive in, and the first thing you’ll notice are the gigantic potholes — some so large that the city, in lieu of filling them in, has strategically placed orange warning barrels encouraging motorists to swerve. Many sidewalks are badly cracked, with large swaths submerged in rainwater. The traffic lights aren’t timed — which means cars move at the numbed-out pace of a depressed cafeteria worker with the vague hope of getting fired.
But the weather was pleasant! Humid, yes, but the mid-April temperature was comfortably warm, not sweltering. It was Tuesday evening, happy hour time. I took myself for a walk around the cutest area of town, Fondren — a few-blocks cluster of locally-owned shops and restaurants. There, the town suddenly came to life! The bright, spacious patio at Babalu, a tacos and tapas place, was hopping with cocktail drinkers. They stared at me with friendly curiosity as I walked by —
Unwilling to wait for a table, I opted instead for Saltine, a southern seafood place with a shaded patio and half-priced drinks. The prosecco: bubbly! The cajun seafood pasta: salty as fuck, but edible! The patrons were a diverse group, by which I mean there were both Black and white people — plus me. Jackson residents are 82 percent Black, 16 percent white, and 2 percent all other ethnic groups. Asians make up less than half of one percent.
Afterwards I stopped at a grocery store called Corner Market (there’s no Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or Sprouts in town) and discovered that a lot of items I consider important staples of my diet — coconut ice cream, peach-flavored gummies — are just not available in Jackson. I made do with raspberry sorbet and returned to my Airbnb, still not having seen any other Asian people.
In the morning, I woke to an ominous, rumbling sound — thunder! Rain poured down all morning, then magically stopped mid-afternoon, just in time for me to head to the Eudora Welty House and Garden for a tour. Eudora, if you’re not familiar with her work, is Mississippi's best-known writer. She was born in Jackson in 1909, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter in 1973, and died — also in Jackson — in 2001. To be honest, I hadn’t read any of her work until I got to Jackson, where in preparation for the tour I started reading her collection The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories.
Here’s a line I liked: “It must stick out all over me, she thought, so people think they can love me or hate me just by looking at me.”
I stayed in Jackson for five days, which is four more days than you really need to see the town, despite the fact that Jackson happens to be Mississippi’s largest city. I walked through the historic Capitol building — and got slightly creeped out by the ghostly portraits of its governors. I found a little free library — and put a Cake Time in it. I drove to the Mississippi Petrified Forests — and discovered petrified tree trunks aren’t that exciting to look at. I went to the Mississippi Farmers Market, a slightly sad affair held in an echoey warehouse — and bought some goat milk fudge and cookies off a sweet woman.
And then — I saw another Asian person! One evening I sat down at an outdoor table at Walker’s Drive-In, a restaurant that’s actually not a drive-in but rather a higher-end restaurant for the area, and this Asian guy suddenly came right up to me — because he was the waiter.
He brought me prosecco, the halibut special, and three other guys — because I’d asked him to turn on the heat lamp and it took four guys to figure out how to do so. No, I didn’t ask him where he was from or how the hell he’d ended up as one of the fraction of one percent of Asian people in Jackson, Mississippi. Asian people have to answer these types of questions enough. If we want you to know, we’ll tell you.
That night I watched Jimmy O. Yang’s comedy special Good Deal on Amazon. In it he jokes about traveling through a mostly-white area of the U.S. People stare at him openly — they know Asian people exist, but they’d never actually seen one in the wild before!
It was funny! I laughed.
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
If you haven’t seen Jimmy O. Yang’s special yet, watch it!
“Since Reconstruction in Mississippi — the state with the highest percentage population of African-Americans — there has not been a single black statewide office holder.”
Read Eudora with new friends. Eudora Welty House and Garden hosts a weekly virtual book club, Welty at Home.