Later during my trip, I asked McQueen and his manager what they envision for Jackson’s future. McQueen’s immediate response was: “What do we want Jackson to be like? Have you ever been to Atlanta? Like that … you know, something outside of the roads just being tattered and torn to bits.” He went on to say:

It would take a broader-minded person to say, “I know why this is. I know why Farish Street looks like it does, I know why Capitol Street looks like it does.” And it all goes back to fear … with that fear you can keep stagnation. And with stagnation, what happens? It gets old and stale and just deteriorates and evaporates and goes away. But that’s what they’re hoping will happen, the powers that be, that’s what they’re hoping happens.

Of course, if you were to ask the “powers that be” the same question they would tell you that there are plans in the works to revitalize Farish Street, which is true: the Farish Street Entertainment District development project is technically in the works right now. The problem is that the buildings still sit entirely empty, despite 2012 predictions that they’d be completed by now. Progress has obviously stalled.

John Cline is retracing the Great Migration route from New Orleans to Chicago for his Oxford American column, “Arterial America.” In his latest dispatch, he discovers Jackson, Mississippi’s hip-hop community.
“Mining and incarceration are both looming presences on the West Virginia landscape—both willfully obscured and misrepresented, their growth slopes neatly inverted. Mining is an industry in decline; incarceration is on the rise. The number of inmates in West Virginia has quadrupled since 1990. People with political influence and powerful economic interests allow the state to be exploited by new industries in order to repair the damage old industries have caused. In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it’s a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can’t see from any highway.” From “Fog Count” by Leslie Jamison
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“Mining and incarceration are both looming presences on the West Virginia landscape—both willfully obscured and misrepresented, their growth slopes neatly inverted. Mining is an industry in decline; incarceration is on the rise. The number of inmates in West Virginia has quadrupled since 1990. People with political influence and powerful economic interests allow the state to be exploited by new industries in order to repair the damage old industries have caused.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it’s a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can’t see from any highway.”

From “Fog Count” by Leslie Jamison

I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living. It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise.
Barry Hannah, “Why I Write”
The soulful, determinedly eccentric New Orleans r&b crooner Ernie K-Doe’s contributions to the American Songbook might be considered marginal by most musicologists, but the man who referred to himself as the ‘emperor of the universe’ took a more generous view of his own musical legacy. ‘There aren’t but three songs that will last for eternity,’ he often told audiences. ‘One is ‘Amazing Grace.’ Another is “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And the third is “Mother-in-Law,” because as long as there are people on this earth, there will always be mother-in-laws.’
“All Music Comes From Louisiana” by Chris Rose for The Oxford American, which is basically “The New Yorker with a side of hot sauce.”