How Do You Pass Down a Place?

I struggle with the fact that my daughter is growing up in a culture that isn’t mine.

Her childhood can't look like the one that made me.

She won’t wake up on Sunday mornings in rural Mississippi with bacon in the pan and heat pressing against the windows. She won’t hear giant drops of spring rain hammering the roof. She won’t spend long afternoons fishing with cousins or walking down to the spring with my uncles and aunts.

She hasn’t pulled the sweet end off a honeysuckle flower. She hasn’t picked plums from the tree on the hill above the little house where my family gathers. She doesn’t have so many cousins that the older ones feel like extra aunts and uncles. She hasn’t watched the women in my family clean chicken feet at the table or hand out sugar cane to whoever passed through the yard. She hasn’t raced bikes under a Mississippi sun that seemed to sit right on top of us.

I know she has a good childhood. We live outside New York, in a place with comfort, safety, and opportunity. I’m grateful for that.

Yet, I still feel the trade.

I wonder whether distance from the people who made me will leave an empty place in her that she can’t name. I wonder whether she’ll go back South after I’m gone because it feels like hers too, or because she knows it mattered to me. I wonder whether she’ll learn that some of the best watermelon comes from a truck on the side of the road, and some of the best barbecue comes from gas stations with paper plates and smoke in the air.

We visit. I tell stories. She knows faces and names. But visiting gives you a map. Belonging gives you muscle memory.

I grew up in a blistering, beautiful, complicated state. Up here in the tri-state area, Mississippi sometimes feels like a private language. The “y’alls,” the “how you’s,” and one I don’t hear much anymore: “How you doing, baby?” The sayings and mannerisms of people who know joy and struggle. It’s in the food. It’s in the way we hug every Sunday after church. It’s in how somebody can call you “baby” and make you feel claimed, corrected, and loved all at once.

Home is climate, accent, the smell after summer rain. Home is the people who raised you while they cooked, fussed, laughed, and handed you something to eat.

I don’t know if my daughter will ever feel what it means to be from Jackson, Mississippi.

I may not be able to give her that.

I can give her names, roads, stories, recipes, songs, summers, funerals, reunions, porch conversations, and enough return trips that the place stops feeling borrowed.

I can give her enough of my childhood that one day, she’ll understand why I carry it with me. I hope. Hope is all we have have after all.

DD