It is beatings, it is homes set on fire, it is home bombings, and this happened essentially in 1964 in McComb. I had a lot of reasons to have beef with Mississippi. Mississippi arrested my granddaddy, and he was one of the lucky people who came home, but a lot of people who got kidnapped in the middle of the night did not come home. 600 people, upwards of 600 people were lynched in Mississippi after they started taking a record of this at the top of the 20th century, and nobody was held responsible for that. Nobody.
LA: 600 people. Before you became aware of all that your grandmother was facing and protecting you from as a child, what were those early impressions of life in McComb, Mississippi? Describe it a little bit for me, even just the landscape.
AET: Yeah. Thank you for that question because I get to tell you about our trees.
LA: Tell me about the trees.
AET: So we had a farm, fields of green peas and corn and all kinds of greens and tomatoes. We were very self-sustaining. My grandmother would go out in her garden and get dinner for us. It was like that. So outside of one window, we had a fig tree. In the back, we had a pecan tree. We had a plum tree further in the back. We had a persimmon tree up the road to the right. We had an orchard of pear trees. I had a Whole Foods market at my house.
LA: I was going to say, just listing off every delicious fruit possible.
AET: We had cows and horses, and for a little while we had hogs and stuff like that. But what’s interesting and what’s crazy and horrific, and it mystifies me and my cousins, the fruit trees, the year my grandmama died, all of them stopped bearing fruit. All of them. Every one of the pecan trees, the pear. All of it’s still there, but none of them bear fruit anymore. Of course, I could be like, we could get really mystical and about it and be like, “When she died, they died.” I don’t know. I guess it’s maybe the thing that nourishes you, when it’s gone, you leave.
LA: How would you say if someone was passing through McComb, what was the town then, the town of your childhood, and how has it changed? What is it like for those who visit now or pass through?
AET: Yeah. There’s so many towns like that, like McComb. They’re all over the country, but a lot in Mississippi. These towns that just were just flourishing and alive, and then some industry came in and it replaced human beings and the economics of the town decayed. And here we go. Walmart came in.
LA: A classic American story. I feel like I keep saying living history and I don’t know if that’s the right phrase, but the history that you grew up among is that, also the time we’re living in now and that you commissioned a billboard in Mississippi as an act of activism and resistance, and I’d love it if you could just describe that billboard for me.
