Sources of Light (21 page)

Sometimes when I tell my son about growing up in Mississippi I sound like my older relatives when they used to talk about the Civil War years and the hard times that followed. My 1960s are like their 1860s, for in my lifetime, people in the United States went out and beat and killed other people and more often than not got away with it, got away with murder. Still, I think it's important to talk about such things in order to know. You can't pick and choose your history, and you can't turn away from it either.

Many people tried to talk me out of writing about the 1960s in Mississippi. "That's all in the past," several southern friends told me. "We've moved on, so you should too." But I think it's important to look back and reflect on the past, even if it's only to see how far we've come.

And now? Now the forty-fourth president of the United States is Barack Obama, a man of color, powerful proof that we really are capable of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. This hardly seemed possible. That difficult, violent time in Mississippi wasn't so long ago. But America is a different America now. The South is a different South. I know because my husband, my son, and I spend a lot of time on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi with my parents in a town that has survived two of the world's biggest hurricanes. We are all survivors—the people of this country, the South, this town, my parents, my sister, and me—and we all keep coming back.

I'd like to thank professors Dale Edwards and Cris Hoshwender at the University of Evansville and Richard Brown at Mississippi State for their help with endomology and cicadas. I'd also like to thank Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College, and the Eudora Welty Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Library, Gary and Cindy Bayer and the Writers' Gathering Jerusalem, Alan Huffman and Scott Saalman for their recollections, the Ya-Yas, the Bibliochicks and the Inkling Book groups for their discussions, and the Social Literary Circle for their food recipes from the 1960s. And always, my thanks go to my agent, Jennie Dunham, and to Margaret Raymo, Karen Walsh, Nadya Guerrero-Pezzano, and the many other talented people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.