walk reflections: walnut, mississippi

After finishing up filming in Cane Creek, Alabama, one of our next stops along the rural highway toward Memphis was Walnut, Mississippi, a small community of around 800 folks. Within a few minutes of pulling into the parking lot of the town baseball fields, a friendly guy named Chase, who it turns out was the head of the Parks Department, came over to say hi.

When I told him what we were up to, he invited me over to the community pool — a welcome oasis on the hot and muggy day for lots of locals. He even hooked me up with some free snacks from the snack bar.

Chauncey soon joined me at the pool. He had experienced the same hospitality upon his arrival from other local folks. We were a bit in awe, curious what sort of place we’d stumbled into. Our timing was lucky, too, for that evening was the big championship for the summer softball league, which is a huge community event. Dozens of teams spanning all age ranges — from little kids to adults — competed for the top spots, and it seemed like the whole town was there to cheer on their loved ones.

The next morning, Chauncey and I presented at a career panel held by Mobilize Green, with some extra guests.

The cumulative experience of these interactions was one of oasis, or even mirage. Could a place really be this welcoming? What’s the catch? We had passed through countless small towns of a similar size, but altogether lacking the buzz and friendliness of Walnut. We met two dads in the park by the municipal pool, their kids playing on the playground together. They had driven over half an hour from Tennessee. “We just like the culture here, and they have really nice playgrounds.”

Walnut is a “proudly redneck” farming town, a residential hub among fields of beans and hay. Farmers work the fields in the traditional way, caring for relatively small plots, growing some for themselves and some for market. There’s a tractor supply store in town, and it’s not unheard of to see a tractor pulling into town on one of the main roads. Chase estimates that at least 80% of Walnut residents could live completely off the land — hunting, fishing, farming. There’s no local hospital, and the single stoplight count was recently doubled to two. They have a landfill on the outskirts of town, and a new industrial park, where folks build small parts for farming machinery. For any “big industry,” you have to travel the hour northwest to Memphis, which Chase used to do for years. Now, he’s back in his home town, hoping to build a new sportsplex for the benefit of the surrounding community. He’s also helped increase the offerings at the town wellness center, which now include dance classes and yoga, as well as a kitchen with classes for clean eating, which was made possible by funding from a state grant he applied for. There’s also a public food pantry in the middle of town, and it is customary for people to drop by on their way back from the grocery store to ensure it is stocked. Chase isn’t alone: most people (over 90% he thinks) who move away try to come back. “It’s hard to give up Walnut.”

It’s hard to say exactly where this community-orientedness comes from, especially for outsiders like us. One element that we know helps immensely is a person like Chase. He is a testament to the magic of creating community out of what seems like thin air. All you need are the component pieces (the people), and with the right catalyzing circumstances (a space to gather, like a public pool, or a structure to interact in a socially positive way, like club sports or yoga), you have created something out of nothing.

While there, many folks — locals and visitors alike — drew comparisons between Walnut and Mayberry, the fictional town of the 1960s sitcoms The Andy Griffiths Show and Mayberry R.F.D. “Walnut’s a town where everyone knows everyone, like Mayberry,” Chase said. “If there’s a tragedy, everyone knows about it and everyone chips in. It’s not about the money, it’s about where your heart’s at.” I’ve never seen the show, but I am familiar with its cultural legacy: the archetypal “small town USA,” an idyllic community where everyone is neighborly and life is simple. I imagine it as a Norman Rockwell painting turned TV show depicting post-World War II white suburbia.

the Andy Griffiths Show (1960-68)

We now know these suburbs and small towns could, and can, be far from ideal, particularly for non-white folks. On our travels, we have heard stories of a few communities holding on to their sundown town heritage. Many of them look the way they do due to exclusionary zoning implemented well before Jim Crow. The flip side to such tight-knit community could be the sense of always being watched, and at times scrutinized, by your neighbors; one person’s “neighborliness” is another person’s “nosiness.” This can also encourage scandalous happenings to be swept under the rug for the preservation of a cheery façade.

An important element of Mayberry is that crime always originates outside of town, which nefarious actors brought in to the peril of the locals. Chauncey and I have encountered this belief: away from the urban anonymity, we have at times felt like we were being “scoped out,” which occasionally takes the form of folks calling the cops on us, to assess whether or not we pose a threat. This relationship of suspicion presupposes a boundary between inside and outside, where that outside is the source of danger.

Typically, when we get the chance to interact, we are able to build rapport quickly, and folks have been friendly much more often than not. The real outside fear in the area is typically the nearest city. While traveling through the small towns of rural Alabama and Mississippi, it seemed like pretty much anyone we talked to would warn us that we should “be careful in Memphis, because it is a dangerous place.” When we inquired further, often times these folks hadn’t been to Memphis in years, if ever, and were basing their warnings on the local news reporting on gang violence and word of mouth.

This may not be a totally mistaken understanding — Memphis is likely a more “dangerous” place than a small town by the metric of violent crimes per capita. With a degree of magnitude more people, there’s more potential for crime. But there are many reasons why crime statistics in cities become warped and inflated, and why small town crime statistics can be warped as well (teenagers and queer people are much more likely to be assaulted in rural areas). The local Memphis news, which broadcasts to the surrounding rural area, seems to have a significant impact on perceived danger in the city by sensationalizing isolated and gang-related shootings in the city. There are also the few folks whom urban crime has touched in their personal networks. Many choose to carry concealed weapons for protection, as is their right in many Southern states.

I bring this up not so much to get to the bottom of whether the city is as dangerous as it is believed to be, but rather to investigate the tension between the mythologized ideal of the rural and suburban areas and the sensationalized danger and poverty of the urban centers. It should be mentioned that, due to the historical development of this country, the former are typically more white and the latter more non-white. The rural-urban tension is not necessarily a matter of class — Walnut is not wealthy by any means. It seems more a difference in quality rather than quantity of people, though perhaps the two are not mutually exclusive, and higher density may affect the way we live together. To me, this Mayberry dynamic illustrates a cultural notion of where danger comes from and exists, and where it can penetrate and reach, which unconsciously motivates peoples’ behavior.

Cultural institutions like Mayberry can wind up not so much accurately documenting a specific moment of American society at a given time, but rather coding a mythologized version of reality ever-deeper into our DNA, to the point where the warped copy becomes substituted for the real substance in our collective imagination, redirecting our attention away from the truth. Other shows and movies, like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the more recent Desperate Housewives, have played with the sinister underbelly of “small town USA” — not, perhaps, to insinuate that all small towns have something to hide, but rather that their belief in their edenic purity allows for nefariousness to proliferate unheeded and unchecked.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)

Whence this stark rural-urban divide in the first place? Going back millennia, the advent of large-scale agriculture made possible a division of labor that allowed some folks to generate a surplus of food in the fields, while the rest of the society in the population hubs work in other trades and industries, or enjoy more leisure time for creative or cultural pursuits. This historical form certainly applies to the United States — much of the early success of the nation depended on shipping crops tended by slaves in the rural, agricultural South to the manufacturing centers in Europe, while the North became more industrialized and urban, a regional split that would set the stage for the Civil War.

But perhaps more formative to this small town defensiveness is the way in which this country was settled. When colonizers arrived from Europe, they formed small, vulnerable settlements. The vast wilderness to the West, full of “savages” and other unknown horrors, threatened the very survival of these Puritan outposts, who took themselves to be beacons of spiritual righteousness. So what we see today as “rural vs. urban” could be better understood as “settlement vs. frontier,” where the frontier has shifted from unsettled Native land to hyper-dense urban areas.

Fueling this dynamic is the fact that small towns are shrinking and disappearing. The 1920 census marked the tipping point at which more Americans lived in urban than rural areas, the result of the increase in U.S.-based manufacturing for global export, among other things. The trend continues: according to the 2020 census, over 80% of the U.S. population now lives in urban areas, and only 1% of the population work as farmers. Today, it is increasingly difficult to stay in rural areas and make a living in agriculture, as the low-wage economy shifts toward the service industry. (I am not qualified to speak on this from personal experience, so please comment or contact if this is off-base!)

I want to reiterate that I do not intend to insinuate that all small towns (and least of all Walnut) have some sort of sinister undercurrent — I don’t believe that’s true. Our positive experience in Walnut illustrates to me that communities everywhere can be full of support and love, and can strive for a Mayberry-esque ideal of being truly good neighbors, even to visitors like ourselves. I merely want to take this opportunity to examine the rural-urban divide, which is all too real both physically and psychologically, for, as Chauncey and I have seen walking through the porous borders between rural and urban, we have more in common than in difference. We can all extend the “Walnut treatment” to strangers entering our communities, invite the outsiders inside, welcoming them with curiosity, and allowing for the opportunity to find commonality and solidarity.