OPINION: Three miles to the world

By Selika Sweet, M.D., FAAFP

JA Guest Writer

I truly do not know anywhere else I would want to live. Mississippi is stitched into me like an old quilt handed down through generations and worn thin in places, imperfect, but still warm. The secret to my happiness is knowing I can leave at any moment, like Bilbo Baggins stepping beyond the borders of the Shire.

At the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo is content within the safety of home. Yet when adventure calls, he discovers that leaving does not diminish his love for home. It deepens it. What begins as a small journey becomes part of a much larger story.

I understand that feeling.

I live one mile north of the interstate and one mile south of the airport. From my front door, it is exactly three miles to walk to the world. That nearness comforts me. I can stay, but I can also go.

Many Mississippians understand that tension between rootedness and possibility. We love where we come from, even as we recognize there is a larger world beyond the horizon.

What troubles me is the feeling that some stories about Mississippi remain easier to tell than others. Certain histories are welcomed. Others are met with discomfort. Yet every community deserves the opportunity to narrate its own experience.

A friend once told me, “I read your story Mississippi Cotton, and I cried.”

Her words stayed with me because the Mississippi Delta changes people.

The Delta stretches so wide and flat it can feel endless. The sky seems larger there. The fields run toward the horizon in every direction. The landscape is beautiful, but it is also haunted by memory. History feels unusually close, as though it never entirely left.

The wealth of the Delta was built upon cotton, and cotton was built upon human labor. Generation after generation worked those fields under conditions that denied freedom and dignity. Reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, I was struck by the reality that resistance carried consequences beyond death itself. Families could be separated. Children could be sold away. Entire lives could be dismantled as punishment.

Mississippi was part of that world.

The land remembers even when people try not to.

Years ago, while working an emergency room shift in Ruleville, I stood beneath an enormous Delta sky and looked across cotton fields stretching for miles. The cotton appeared soft and beautiful beneath the sunlight.

Yet beauty can conceal difficult truths.

As I looked across those fields, I thought about the generations of men, women, and children whose labor transformed cotton into wealth for others. History became impossible to ignore. The landscape itself seemed to carry memory.

The Delta has a way of forcing reflection.

It reminds us that prosperity and suffering often existed side by side. It reminds us that history is not merely something preserved in books. It is embedded in communities, families, and institutions.

Those reflections have shaped much of my writing.

I write about racism, sexism, ageism, and the quiet humiliations that accumulate over a lifetime. I write about coded language, subtle exclusions, and the ways people can feel unseen.

When I write honestly about these subjects, some readers embrace the conversation while others would rather avoid it.

That reaction is not unique to Mississippi.

Many communities struggle to discuss painful chapters of their history. Difficult truths challenge cherished narratives and force us to reconsider stories we have long accepted about ourselves.

In Southern Black culture, there is a phrase that captures this reality:

“I watch it.”

The phrase means being careful. Choosing words thoughtfully. Understanding that honesty sometimes comes with consequences.

As a writer, I have submitted essays and collected my share of rejection letters. Rejection is part of the profession.

Yet I have often noticed there is a difference between writing about history and writing from within it.

Observing an injustice from a distance is different from inheriting its consequences.

America has long embraced books about Black life written by white authors. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped shape national conversations about slavery. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains an American classic. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, written by a Mississippi author, became a bestseller and an award-winning film. More recently, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility became a national publishing phenomenon.

I mention these books not to diminish their contributions. Many influential conversations.

What interests me is something else.

Readers have often been eager to engage with Black experiences when those experiences are interpreted through white voices. Yet writers who have lived those experiences firsthand sometimes struggle to find the same audience.

When I submit essays about Mississippi, memory, race, family, and belonging, I often receive another letter of rejection. My work may be considered too specific, too regional, or too personal. Yet I frequently encounter celebrated works discussing many of the same themes from a greater distance.

Perhaps that is changing.

I hope it is.

Because there is value in allowing people to tell their own stories.

Several years ago, I was invited to participate in a Medical Reconciliation Conference at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Before the conference began, I was quietly told that African Americans would not be speaking because “it would hurt too much.”

I remember wondering who exactly needed protection from pain.

The communities most affected by that history had already carried its burdens for generations.

When my opportunity came, I spoke anyway.

I told my family’s story. I spoke about the chicken plant on Clay Street, our family motel in Vicksburg, Medgar Evers, and the ways history continues to shape ordinary lives.

I expected criticism afterward.

Instead, I encountered something unexpected.

As I was leaving, a physician approached me and said quietly:

“Dr. Sweet, my family history was a lot like yours.”

Then he told me about his grandparents, their grocery store, and the motel they had owned. The similarities were striking.

Then he arrived at the part his family rarely discussed.

“I discovered my father’s half-sister. Her mother was Black, and none of us knew about her growing up.”

He paused.

“We owned thousands of acres while my grandfather’s own blood was ignored.

“It’s complicated.”

I stood there stunned by both his honesty and his grief.

What struck me most was not our difference but our connection.

Beneath Mississippi’s mythology were fractured families everywhere. Hidden siblings. Unspoken relationships. Entire branches of family trees carefully omitted from public memory.

That conversation changed something for me.

It reminded me that understanding does not begin with certainty. It begins with listening.

Too often, conversations about race and history become competitions over blame, responsibility, or suffering. Yet meaningful reconciliation requires something different.

It requires honesty.

Most importantly, it requires recognizing that history belongs to all of us.

Black Mississippians did not merely survive in the South. We helped build it, cultivate it, heal it, educate it, defend it, and enrich it. Through generations of labor, faith, music, military service, medicine, and community leadership, we helped shape Mississippi into what it is today.

Our stories are not separate from Mississippi’s story.

They are Mississippi’s story.

Like Bilbo Baggins, many of us feel the pull between home and the wider world. We leave. We learn. We return to carrying new perspectives and a deeper understanding of where we come from.

The journey does not weaken our attachment to home.

It strengthens it.

I still live three miles from the world. The interstate remains nearby. The airport remains nearby. I can stay, and I can leave.

Mississippi remains the place that formed me. It challenged me, inspired me, frustrated me, and taught me.

I do not want merely to inherit Mississippi’s history.

I want to contribute to its future.

I want to write honestly, serve faithfully, and help build a Mississippi confident enough to embrace its full story and not only the comfortable chapters, but all of them.

Because belonging is not the absence of struggle.

Belonging is having the freedom to tell the truth about where you come from and knowing that your story belongs there too.

I do not just want to survive in Mississippi.

I want to live all of it.

And that includes telling my story and being treated like all other writers, regardless of race.