This is a bracing documentary travelogue in its honesty, simplicity and common sense. It takes about half a minute for Booker T to tell that he left Mississippi as a poor farmer and took his skills to Wyoming. He came back in a new Escalade to help out his family and now lives in comfort. In Mississippi. Does this sound impossible?
You know, this is Morgan Freeman’s story at a small scale, and it is directly parallel to one of the stories told by my friend Bert Cooper . He grew up in debilitating poverty on the border of indigence. But, like millions of Americans, he overcame.
I only have one Deep South story, which is the story of a cousin from around Monroe, LA who grew up picking cotton like the rest of his family, for the extra dollars as a teenager. On the first occasion he and his brother went to the ruling family’s gin with their bale to get paid, the man at the gin quoted a ridiculous price. Take it or leave it. He told me that he would either kill that man or leave and never come back. He left the next day and didn’t show up for over 30 years when I met him at our mutual grandmother’s funeral.
I have been thinking about the fact that we fall in love for the first time only one time. That we still dream about the house, or the shack, we grew up in. That our parents’ lives and voices remain with us our entire lives, and the first friends we ever had tend to be where we first started out. I remember the names of all of my teachers and close friends from elementary school. The fights I won and lost. The skateboard or BB gun Christmas. The neighbor’s fruit trees. I have asked the question in the abstract of why any self-respecting black American would want to live in the Deep South when so many other states never had a lynching, let alone slavery. The answer must be deeply personal. I have to respect that.
But here is Booker T finessing the very issues that seem to give the rest of us the Hershey squirts. He stands tall and proud in Mississippi, in the hometown of his birth - that place that failed miserably to provide him what he wanted for himself as a man. So he left. He worked his trade. He became that man and returned as that man, finding the stunted remains of a community that once was. Mississippi made it impossible for him. Wyoming provided the opportunity. He took it, and so Mississippi missed him. Booker T was healed and cured. So what should such a man fear? Nothing in Mississippi. That man is showing us all something.
He said it. “Git in where you fit in.” QED