Ask the snake where she gets the poison.
& other stuff that doesn’t belong in another place.
Jackson, MS ︎
April 7 - 11, 2022
Our first trip as an office was to Jackson, MS to see the opening of A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The drive from Atlanta to Jackson is about six hours, not counting the detour we took into Birmingham to see Hallie Ringle and the exhibits up at the Birmingham Museum of Art. It was my first drive with my brand new car (!) and it was being put to a pretty big test. Four people. Seven hours. Three states. The spacious trunk of a Prius hatchback.
I like driving thru the South. Some say it’s boring, but nothing can beat the infinitly depressing drive across Kansas, which I have done in all weather and on all missions. In the winter, the sky and the road are all the same color and I remember pulling over to be sick outside Wichita on New Years Day, 2010.
But it’s spring, and the South put on a nice dress for us. The land felt rich and alive, and the air was so clean. Even with the constant use of nasal spray, the air was smooth. Once you leave Birmingham, its a slow winding journey on I-20 that narrows to two lanes, and then only expands to three at Tuscaloosa, AL and Meridian, MS.
To some afrofuturists, Mississippi is part of Drexciya, an Atlantis-esque realm created by the babies of pregnant African women thrown from slave ships, who swam out of their mothers wombs without ever having to learn how to breathe above water. The soil in Mississippi is ridiculously rich and elluvial, from the delta and because thousands of years ago, Mississippi was under the ocean. The soil, rich with blood and trauma and violence is a connection to the sea kingdom we could have escaped to, which is connected to the place in which we were stolen from.
I’m still processing the exhibit at MMA, which Burnaway will be covering this May. But Jackson was beautiful, and crooked, and strange and sort of soft and sad. I hope one day to return.
The infamous Dollhouse, Home of the Dancing Dolls. Jackson, MS.