During my
junior and senior years at Cornell (the summer of 1971) I took a summer
job in Mississippi working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in
their fire ant eradication program. At the time, I was still formally
majoring in biology at Cornell (with an emphasis on physics) and so
found myself in a summer job that could use my organic chemistry and
other courses.
That summer, I found a state that had changed greatly in the four years
since I had left and this impressed me. So while I drove a beat-up old
gray picku-up all around central Mississippi that summer digging up
fire ant mounds to see if the Myrex air-scattered, bait pesticide had
worked (mostly not) I started making contacts and doing research for an
article which was publisher on Jan1, 1973 in The Nation.
The state was optimistic, vibrant, on the move up. And that excited
me. When I wrote this story, the Old South was against the ropes
and the New South looked as if it could not be resisted.
Sadly,the Mississippi I saw in 2002 when I visited to research Perfect Killer
seemed stagnant and retrograde, schools had re-integrated, crack
cocaine and murderous gangs infested every part of the state,
unemployment was twice the national average.
It seems to to me now
that that instead of the New South, we have a New OLD South. I
tried to capture what I saw and that's the heart of the Southern novel
inside Perfect Killer. I see the Sunflower County Freedom Project, Teach for America, and the Mississippi Center for Justice as vital forces to get the state moving again.
