Mississippi (North Gulfport)

The author spent the first six years of her life growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi. She was born in 1966 and she writes of the tumultuous era of the Civil Rights movement to provide a greater understanding of the context in which her mother came of age and gave birth to her. She notes that she was born on the 100th anniversary of Mississippi's celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, "a holiday glorifying the old South" (16). In the years preceding her birth, there were several high profile murders of Civil Rights activists in Mississippi, including Medgar Evers and the Freedom Summer activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

North Gulfport, where Trethewey lived among her mother's family, began as a settlement for former slaves. Trethewey remembers it as a somewhat idyllic small town where she was doted on by her grandmother and great aunts and uncles...