Jackson, Mississippi

“Julio! Get the Stretch! Ride to Harlem; Hollywood, Jackson, Mississippi.” - Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, “Uptown Funk”

In the late 80s and early 90s myths would circulate and we believed them, having no real way to disprove them before the internet. One that went around Northeast Jackson was that our zipcode, 39211, was one of the most educated zipcodes in the United States per capita. Well we weren’t. Not even close. The best educated zipcode in the U.S. is in Boston, probably the zipcode with Harvard University in it. Or maybe it’s Stanford, California, or Washington, D.C. depending on how you define “educated,” but it’s not Jackson, Mississippi. That we believed this rumor and repeated it speaks to how we saw ourselves. Northeast Jackson was a thing, before the potholes and the water crisis and the flight to the suburbs. We were smart, our parents were smart. We went to Millsaps College, Bellhaven College, Ole Miss, Harvard and Yale. We were eccentric. We were artists. We liked to party, at Hal & Mal’s, at Martin’s Bar, at Jubilee Jam! and the Sweet Potato Queens Saint Patrick’s Day parade. We grew up, had kids, went to rehab.

Another myth that circulated around Northeast Jackson was that we read more books than anyone else. There was some truth to this story, or at least there was a beginning to the story. At some point the Jackson/Hinds library system would come to each of the libraries and ask them what their circulation numbers had been. The librarian at Northside Library at the time in the heart of Northeast Jackson had no way to track the circulation numbers, but she knew that she wanted to be at the top of the list, so she guessed very high, and was far and away off the chart. This might be why Lemuria Book Store chose to move about two blocks from where Northside Library used to be, to cash in on all those super readers in the neighborhood. That Lemuria is still selling real books from a real bookstore after all these years may show that the Northeast Jacksonians tried to live up to the compliment made up so long ago by the librarian. There is a power to myth.

And some of the myths are true. Jackson specifically and Mississippi generally have always punched above their weight culturally. The International Ballet Competition rotates between Varna, Moscow, Tokyo, and Jackson. Eudora Welty lived in Belhaven. John Grisham sold his first books out of the trunk of his car while working at the state capital. Backyard Burgers was better than Five Guys, prove me wrong. How can it be that the poorest state in the Union has an island of highly educated ballet fans?

Jackson was established as Mississippi’s capital as the actual geographic center of the state was too swampy for a city, so they picked LeFleur’s Bluff along the Pearl River as an attractive site. The first story of Jackson exceptionalism came with the discovery of the Jackson Volcano, one of only four volcanoes within cities in the U.S. The uplift of this volcanic dome had pushed up the high ground at LeFleur’s Bluff as well as oil and natural gas. The oil discovery in the 1920’s led then governor Theodore Bilbo, the “Redneck Liberal,” to predict that the profits from oil would pay all of Mississippi’s expenses and make the state tax free. Well, that didn’t happen but I believe that the natural gas deposits on the Belhaven College property fueled the college all the way through the 20th century. Today the center of the Jackson Volcano lies directly under the Mississippi Coliseum, where in 1989 you could have seen Metallica on their Damaged Justice tour which I assume was the cultural highlight of Jackson, Mississippi, or at least of my personal history here.

Jackson volcano

The next big uplift of Northeast Jackson came when the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) pushed the Mississippi Insane Asylum out to Whitfield and opened in Jackson in 1955. UMMC was one of the top new hospitals in the nation, and it brought an influx of doctors who settled in Northeast Jackson and built the community. Along with the doctors came lawyers, realtors, restauranteurs and retail. The kids playing soccer in the Northeast Jackson Soccer Organization in the 80s were the grandkids of this boom of smart professionals around UMMC.

But we didn’t stay. There were no Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Jackson in the 80s, and there still aren’t. Our best chance at a homegrown big company was Worldcom which blew up in accounting fraud and sent the CEO to prison. Mississippi is usually on the bottom of any list of states where you want to be on the top, and on the top of any list where you want to be on the bottom. For the super readers and future leaders in Jackson it’s natural to head to actual big cities. Jackson has some really good places to eat lunch, but it’s not enough to keep people from moving to Madison. For being located over a dense dome of rock Jackson has weak gravity. If you jump too high you fly out of its orbit.

Take the Amtrak out of Jackson headed to New Orleans and you’ll see little towns slowly losing the fight against kudzu and population loss. That’s Mississippi. Kudzu can grow a foot a day. It takes a lot of energy to keep it held back. In Jackson the wealthy and the middle class up and moved to the suburbs to watch Fox News and be outraged and misinformed. The roads are crumbling, returning to gravel. The government can’t provide the citizens with clean water, trash pickup, or safety. Jackson has the highest per capita murder rate in the nation. The main library for Jackson, the Eudora Welty Library, opened in 1986 to honor one of the most notable Jacksonians and has been mostly closed since 2017 due to roof leaks, mold, and general lack of maintenance. The story of the Jackson water crisis reads as a depressing tale of deferred maintenance, underinvestment, and government incompetence. There’s no longer a Backyard Burgers open in the Jackson metro area.

Maybe Jackson is just sleeping, lying dormant like its volcano. Maybe one day the beautiful and healthful surroundings, good water, abundant timber, navigable waters, and proximity to the Natchez Trace will attract a new search party looking for land. We still have vast untapped resources of sweet gum trees, useful for making chopsticks. Maybe the federal government would like to establish a national research center on potholes. Maybe the Mississippi River Basin Model will be the next engine of economic prosperity. Maybe a new generation of “Redneck Liberals” will return to Jackson, again challenge and reclaim the broadcast license of WLBT, and sing a new song from the Crossroads of the South. Then again a volcano coming to life is usually a bad thing. Like the ghosts of the patients of the Mississippi Insane Asylum buried under UMMC, it’s maybe best to let sleeping dogs lie.