Editor’s note: This Mississippi Today Ideas essay is published as part of our Brain Drain project, which seeks answers to Mississippi’s brain drain problem. To read more about the project, click here.

When I think about my relationship to Mississippi, the first thing that comes to mind is a song by the Chicago rapper, Chance the Rapper, called “Together.” 

If you keep the house in the family, you can keep the family in the house

If you on the run, you got family in the South

Chance’s lyrics go on to pay tribute to the women who, week after week, cooked for big family gatherings while he was a child, playing blissfully with his cousins until the meal was ready. The chorus brings his feelings into sharper focus: he’s reflecting because his family doesn’t gather the way they once did, and he longs for those old times. He repeats this wish, line after line in the chorus, urging his loved ones to “get together” more — not just for holidays, but simply to share presence, love and support.

The home that stands out in my memory is my maternal grandparents’ house in Vicksburg. Nearly every Sunday of my first 18 years was spent there with my cousins — more than 30 of us on just that side of the family — alongside my 12 aunts and uncles, and whoever else happened to drop by.

After church, we all came over ready to eat. The main course normally featured chicken fried or baked, but it wasn’t a shock to have some coon or possum either. Classic side dishes included rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, collard greens and corn bread — sometimes rolls if my grandma had the time and energy to make some from scratch. We topped it all off with desserts that people barely eat anymore — jelly cake and tea cakes — and we’d watch whatever football or basketball game was on, depending on the time of year, joke and laugh about whatever happened last week and share our hopes for the next ones. 

I didn’t realize how spoiled I was back then. It was so much love I could bathe in it. Hugs from everybody, Grandma telling me to eat more, and aunts and uncles celebrating me for making good grades — all a boy could ask for. 

When I left for Mississippi State University at age 18, I never imagined I might never live in the state again upon graduation in 2014. Now, after more than a decade away, that possibility feels surprisingly real. When I started college as a wide-eyed freshman in 2010, I had no idea what direction my future might take.

During my first semester, I still dreamed of becoming a sports journalist — maybe even working for ESPN sounded appealing — but, truthfully, I had little sense of what I would actually do after graduation. Most of my family remained rooted in Mississippi, and I always assumed I would do the same.

But during college, I fell in love with literature and became remarkably disciplined. I earned almost all A’s, received recognition for a few essays and landed some reputable summer fellowships at Stanford and the University of Iowa. Before long, the Honors College noticed my efforts and encouraged me to apply for the most renowned international fellowship in the world, the Rhodes Scholarship.

I didn’t know what it was at the time, but they told me presidents and prime ministers, game changing lawyers and doctors, world-class writers and famous national news anchors had all won it in the past. If I happened to get it, an entirely new world of possibilities would open up before me.

Miraculously, I was awarded the scholarship. The only condition was that I would have to move to England and study at the University of Oxford, with all expenses covered by the Rhodes.

After graduating from MSU in 2014 and leaving for Oxford, England, I eventually found my way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I began a PhD at Harvard in 2016. It was there that I met my wife, and, as they say, the rest is history. Since that time, I haven’t returned to live in Mississippi. The Boston area has been my home for nearly a decade.

It wasn’t a deliberate choice to not return, but I’ve grown accustomed to a different way of living. While New Yorkers may shrug at Boston’s dining and cultural offerings, to someone who grew up in rural Mississippi, the abundance feels limitless. Sadly, I don’t throw down on collard greens and ham hocks as often as I once did, but whenever I crave a taste of home, I can always head to Roxbury for some Slade’s. 

If I choose, I can join my wife at a Beyoncé concert at Gillette Stadium, though, I prefer to just let her go with friends or plan a night out with my friends to watch the Celtics, or catch live concerts from artists I love, like Bryson Tiller or Rylo Rodriguez, who frequently perform in the city. At least three days a week, I run along the Charles River Esplanade. After, I normally grab a quick, healthy meal at one of my two staples Sweetgreen or DIG — two options that simply don’t exist back in Mississippi. 

As much as it pains me to admit, I’ve embraced this urban yuppy lifestyle and I like it. Mississippi just doesn’t offer the same experiences I’ve come to take for granted, and I’m reminded of that every time I return home for a visit.

Yet, I can’t say with certainty that I’ll never return. After all, at Harvard, I wrote a 500-page dissertation critiquing Isabel Wilkerson, who argues in The Warmth of Other Suns that Black Southerners who left Mississippi and other Southern states were the most ambitious of the Black South—and that they ultimately found better lives elsewhere. Leaving, people like her and others suggest, requires special determination and courage. 

But leaving, in and of itself, requires no more determination and ambition than staying. One of my favorite musicians, David Banner—himself a Jackson native—opens his 2003 album, Mississippi: The Album, by suggesting that those who depart the state might be avoiding the real, difficult work of making a difference when things get hard.

According to Banner, calling what Black Mississippians, in particular, did when they departed Mississippi during Jim Crow times simply “leaving” or “migrating” is generous and not neutral. According to Banner, they were “running away scared” while others stayed, fought and died for civil rights. 

And maybe I am running away from the real work, too. Consider another Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi, state Auditor Shad White. After degrees from the University of Oxford and Harvard, he returned to Mississippi.

In 2023, he authored a study, Plugging the Brain Drain: Investing in College Majors that Actually Work, proposing that Mississippi taxpayer dollars should not fund degree programs in African American Studies, among others, because they often result in graduates seeking opportunities outside the state for work.

In a particularly controversial Sept. 15 post of the same year, he declared that “degrees in garbage fields” are “bad for the economy,” insisting they “offer no real skills.” He took aim at universities who love their “cheap professors who specialize in sexual identity or urban stand-up comedy.” His parting shot: “By all means, go take that Latinx Environmental Justice class in Urban Studies. Just don’t ask taxpayers to pay for it.”

One can love or hate Shad White — and many Mississippians do either love or hate Shad White because he takes strong stances — but all can agree he isn’t running away scared. Instead, he’s actively shaping an environment where people like me, who have taught courses in African American Studies and other subjects he deems “garbage fields” at institutions like Harvard and Brown, don’t feel welcome back home. In my opinion, from the outside looking in, it seems to be exactly what he wants and is another reason I am less likely to return.

But it’s also the best reason to return. From my vantage point, there is urgent work to be done. My grandaddy — a preacher and civil rights leader in the 1960s — spent his life pushing Mississippi to recognize its Black citizens as full Americans, fighting for the right to vote and the right to see themselves reflected with dignity in classrooms and curricula. He never faltered, not even in the face of bomb threats. My grandad remains one of the most courageous and ambitious people I’ve ever known — and he didn’t leave Mississippi for the North. 

I should be doing more to create a better future for children living in Mississippi now — so when the next generation of Mississippi’s children attend schools like MSU or Alcorn they won’t have to depend on private donors just to study subjects I believe are vital to a college education.

Someone who is doing the real work is a cousin of mine, TJ Mayfield, who serves as an alderman in Vicksburg and is like a brother to me. We text all the time, and I feel like I’m still plugged in to the city through him. He’s launched some promising programs and initiatives recently to provide more jobs, more educational opportunities, and more role models of what success in Vicksburg — not elsewhere — looks like. 

He didn’t run away scared. In fact, he never left. He went to Alcorn for college and then returned as a teacher in the public high schools and then became alderman. 

In the summer of 2022, he came to visit me in Boston, just a month after I’d graduated from my PhD program. I took him to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — one of the city’s most celebrated arts museums, and we caught a Red Sox Game, too. 

But most memorably, we went to Game 6 of the NBA finals together, with Golden State holding a 3-2 lead over the Boston Celtics. That was the classic game where Steph Curry finally got the monkey off his back and secured his first and only Finals MVP. The energy in the arena was electric, but it was bittersweet for Boston fans (I don’t consider myself one). We watched as Steph Curry hit clutch three after clutch three, lifting Golden State whenever they needed it most, and ultimately celebrated his championship right there on Boston’s home court.

TJ and I stayed for the ceremony and reminisced on old times back in Mississippi. We used to watch the finals together at grandma’s house. Who would’ve thought — back then — that we would now be watching it live in person?

The next day, we went out for Thai food and Jamaican food, walked down Boylston and Newbury streets, through Beacon Hill, and crossed the Longfellow Bridge with the Charles River gleaming beneath us. It reminded us of home, growing up along the banks of the Mississippi River. 

And if every other detail of that week should fade from memory, I will always remember us striding across that bridge, the city at our feet, when he stopped, looked at the skyline, and said, “Man, I get it now. I see why you like Boston. I see why you been up here for so long.” 

I don’t know what I said in response—something casual like, “Yeah, man, it’s nice up here.” But I know what I should have said. 

I should have said that, despite all of the accolades, I wish I was more like him because he’s home fighting for the people I care about most: folks back in Vicksburg, a majority-Black, working-class town that, like many American towns, has fallen on hard times. He’s the one following in our grandaddy’s tradition, and he’s the one that’s still a 10-minute drive from grandma’s house.

Though many of us have left, and Grandma and Grandaddy are both gone — the house is still in the family, and the house is where the love is as abundant as the greens and cornbread and everyone knows our name.

Donald Kizza-Brown was born and raised in Vicksburg. After graduating from Mississippi State University, he pursued graduate studies abroad in Oxford, England, and later in Boston. Currently, he holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, where he is working on a biography of the renowned Mississippi author Richard Wright.