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2435 Jesmyn Ward Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Entertainment/ Getty Images My True South: Why I Decided to Return Home Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977) was born in California but her family moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, when she was three. She has a BA and an MA in media studies and communications from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. She teaches at Tulane University. Ward has published a memoir and four novels and is the first woman to win two National Book Awards, for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She is also the editor of The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016) and Navigate Your Stars(2020), an illustrated book based on the commencement speech she delivered at Tulane in 2018. In 2022 Ward received the U.S. Library of Congress%u2019s Prize for American Fiction. KEY CONTEXT In this essay, first published in Time magazine in 2018, Ward addresses her conflicted feelings about her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, and considers how Mississippi%u2019s troubled history of race relations affects her experience of it in the present and her hopes for it in the future. This reading includes a racial slur, which we have chosen to reprint in this textbook to accurately reflect Ward%u2019s original intent. We encourage you to be mindful of context, both Ward%u2019s and your own, as you read. KEY CONTEXT In this essay, first published in When I moved home in 2010, I packed my two-door car nearly to the roof and drove for three days from California%u2019s Bay Area to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I took my preferred route, avoiding long, blistered I-10 through Phoenix and the very bottom of New Mexico and Texas in favor of I-40 across northern Arizona and New Mexico and into Dallas. Except for the bright puncture of pinwheeling stars across the night sky, I despised the desert. The dry air, suffused with heat, felt as if it were flaying me. The plants, so sparse and scraggly, offered no shade, no succor. When I crossed the 100th meridian west of Dallas, with moisture settling in the air and plants crowding the sides of the highway, tall pines and verdant vines and lush shrubs, it was as if the very water in the air buoyed me up so I could float through the heat. When I crossed the Louisiana-Texas state line, I exhaled. And I exhaled again when I crossed the Mississippi state line over the swampy expanse of Pearl River. When I turned right on Kiln DeLisle Road, driving past my grandmother%u2019s house, my grandaunt%u2019s house, my uncles%u2019 houses and my sister%u2019s house, where my uncles were fixing the roof on the pump shed and my aunt waved from her porch, another exhalation. When I pulled into my mother%u2019s rocky driveway and cut my car off, another; and then a deep breath to steady myself and gain my bearings. When people ask me why I returned home to Mississippi after years of living in the West, the East and the Midwest, I simply say this: I moved home because I love the beauty of the place, and I love the people. But this is a toothless answer, as weak and harmless as a baby%u2019s mouth. It is difficult for them to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public%u2019s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so. In the early 1800s, there were more millionaires in Mississippi than anywhere else in the country, Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.