When Enough Is Enough

I got home to Mississippi with my family last week, for the first time in a couple of years. We covered a bunch of ground in a very short while.

When you grow up in a place like Mississippi, you get used to being last in everything good and first in everything bad. You're the fattest folks, the earliest-dying folks, the least-educated folks. Your schools don't have enough books or chairs. Your schoolmates have babies, sometimes a couple of them.

Given the state of the rest of the world, I expected to find Mississippi in tatters. But a funny thing happened between New York and home.

 

The Delta, where my spouse took the picture above, is still doggone poor, miserable and depopulating and a lot of it just flat falling down. But it wasn't noticeably worse than when I was a kid.

In Meridian, the city my grandparents live near, they're rebuilding City Hall and the local opera house. The streets look good, with new flowers planted and a public plaza on the way.

In Jackson, my mother's house seems to have tripled in value. She lives in a neighborhood that has experienced a wave of white flight. On past visits, the blocks around her place were littered with for-sale signs. But now, new people of all stripes are moving in. They had a tornado there a year or so back — it was big news at the time, but you could never tell now because people worked so hard and so fast to fix up their homes.

My mom works as a teacher, and she explained her theory of the state's economy. As she tells it, the situation amounts to a permanent statewide recession. Sure, unemployment in Mississippi is higher than the national average, at 8.7 percent. That's just 0.1 percent lower than Ohio's, but we're used to it. We never had big union jobs to lose.

Look at her job, for example. Mississippi school teachers are among the lowest-paid educators in the U.S. The important part, where my mom is concerned, is that they do get paid.

"The money the state pays me hasn't gone up," she said. "But it still lands in my bank account at the end of every month." What she's got, she's got. And sometimes, that's enough, you know?