What Jackson Carries

Cities carry their histories whether they want to or not. Jackson carries more than most.

It carries the memory of Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound ninety miles northeast, and the people who built it and were forced off the land that became this city. It carries the nickname Chimneyville, for the two times it burned. It carries Farish Street and the Crystal Palace and the economic universe that Jim Crow built inside the city's Black community and that desegregation and urban renewal subsequently disassembled. It carries the Smith Robertson School, where Richard Wright graduated at the top of his class in nineteen twenty-five and then spent the rest of his literary career explaining to the world what Mississippi had been to him.

It carries the nine Tougaloo students who sat quietly at a library table in nineteen sixty-one. It carries Anne Moody and Joan Trumpauer and Pearlena Lewis at the Woolworth's counter two years later. It carries Medgar Evers's carport and the three decades his murderer spent free and the thirty-one years his wife spent making sure he was not.

It carries the Sovereignty Commission's files on more than eighty-seven thousand people. It carries Jackson State on May fifteenth, nineteen seventy, and the names of Phillip Gibbs and James Green, which are still not as widely known as they should be.

It carries the water mains that failed in twenty twenty-two and the decades of diverted investment that made the failure inevitable.

And it carries Eudora Welty's house on Pinehurst Street, where she lived for more than seventy years and wrote with precision and grace about the life of a place she both understood and, in important ways, could only partially see.

None of these things cancel each other out. They all happened here. The city holds all of it, the way cities do.