Hattiesburg

Hattiesburg, MS — 8.13.2016

I arrive at the vacated building on the corner of Front and Main, right in the heart of downtown Hattiesburg. It’s across from an antique shop with a sign in the window that says the owners took a summer vacation. They’ll be back in a few weeks. Next to that is Brownstones. Or was Brownstones. They were the fanciest restaurant in the downtown area, but shut down about a year ago.

Every store in Hattiesburg seems to be on vacation or closed, for good.

I’m set to meet with James McCrory, a local artist who’s paintings take up the vacated space on Front and Main. There’s a lot of this going on downtown — artists with their work up in vacant, run down storefronts. James was the only one with his information in the window, though, so I shot him a text and he was nice enough to respond.

James is young. His email address had 1990 in it, so I guess he’s recently graduated. He’s pale, white skinned, wears thick, square glasses, and has longish, brown hair with sweat taking it in all directions.

His space is huge. Tons of floorspace and high ceilings. There’s a front room where James has set up his gallery. And a back space where he can experiment and carry out his work. But James hasn’t worked lately, on his paintings at least.

Things at home have been tough.

We walk next door to Bianchi's, the local pizza spot, and find a table in the back room. James is nervous and says he’s not used to giving interviews. I tell him not to worry, that I really just wanted to grab a beer with a local and hear more about what it’s like to live in Hattiesburg.

I have this story in my head that Hattiesburg is on the up and up. Storefronts are mostly vacated, but many have allowed artists to display their work for free while the space is empty. AND there are a couple coffee shops downtown. This is how gentrification starts. Hattiesburg is like Detroit, except no one has heard of it. Soon more artists will move into town. Then more coffee shops. Then young professionals. And so on.

But James and his wife (both 26) are looking to move. To Atlanta or Philly, maybe.

“Things move too slow around here,” James tells me. He’s had this studio for 8 months now and is thankful for the opportunity, but doesn’t feel like his career is progressing like it could be in a bigger city.

“We have these ladies around here we call ‘blue hair ladies,’” he explains. “They’re older ladies who come to my shows and don’t want to see paintings of naked bodies. They’d rather see flowers in a vase.”

James primarily paints naked women. His main inspiration is Francis Bacon.

James and his wife have tried moving away before, though. Right after their wedding. In the fall of 2014, they packed up their bags and headed for Chicago.

It was a disaster from the beginning.

“We signed the lease to our apartment before we got there,” James remembers. “And when we arrived, we realized we were basically renting from a slumlord.”

The place was small and dirty and double their rent in Hattiesburg. The winter of 2014 was essentially an Ice Age in Chicago and they had no central heating. The fire alarm would go off in the middle of the night and the landlord’s fix would be to rip it out and throw it down the hallway.

But the last straw was one evening when James and his wife were eating dinner, a worker from the floor above fell through the ceiling, into their living room.

“We just looked at each other and knew we had to get out of there.”

So without telling anyone, they got in their car that night and headed back to Hattiesburg.

“That was the toughest moment of my life,” James tells me. “Especially because we had just gotten married.”

We’re almost through our first drink and I ask James if he’s able to support himself with his art. He wishes but works a secretary job for a local medical supply company.

He used to work at this pizza place and then before that, while in college, he worked at a Mexican food spot called Caliente’s.

It was the best of times and the worst of times at Caliente's. His roommate worked there with him and he remembers the shenanigans they’d get into.

“At the end of his shift, Chris would just go into the fridge and take three beers and walk out the door,” James cracks up at the memory. “People knew he did it, but I guess they didn’t care.”

The owner was rarely around. He went to New Orleans most weeks and when he came back, you could still smell the alcohol on his breath.

But he did catch James drinking on the job one day and his punishment was to clean out the rotting dumpster in the back, in the dead heat of summer. And then one day James showed up late. The owner didn’t say anything at first, but when the lunch rush ended, he told James to leave and not come back.

I ask if Calientes is still around. I can’t imagine after hearing these stories and James confirms that it’s not.

“It was a local business. Didn’t expect it to stay open too long,” James says under his breath.

It was such an automatic response, I’m not even sure he realizes what he had said.

But that seems to be what’s going on in Mississippi. At least in Hattiesburg.

People tell me that it’s boring and they want to get out. Everyone I meet wants to move to the big cities, where there’s excitement and opportunity. There’s little faith that anything here will survive.

Later that evening I’m at a bar with my hosts and I’m trying to dig deeper into this idea. Why have people lost faith in Hattiesburg?

They’re silent and you can tell they have trouble answering the question. Then Dom, a white, 25 year old history major with a dark, hefty beard, takes a stab at it.

He leans in and talks low.

“Okay,” he whispers sternly. “It’s because no one here is open minded.”

I thought he was going to talk about the lack of jobs and the dying manufacturing industry that used drive the Hattiesburg economy. But I’m intrigued where this is going.

“All the white people are afraid of the black people. They don’t want they’re kids going to the same schools, so they moved out. To the suburbs. Where they have shopping centers and parking lots and the people look like them,” Dom explains. You can tell this eats at him deeply. “It’s modern day white flight.”

It’s sad. It’s 2016 and we should be over this whole skin color thing by now.

But in a weird, twisted way, there’s something kind of beautiful about Dom’s answer. That a city cannot thrive without it’s people coming together. It can’t function if everyone is afraid of one another.

People need to work together. Side by side. Black and white.

Maybe then people would come out of their homes and support local businesses and a culture would form.

Maybe then, people would be motivated and take pride in their city and ultimately, stay.