Mississippi Ippississim!

When I was a kid, I loved spelling Mississippi forwards and backwards, over and over again. All those s’s and i’s and p’s! They lilted up and down, like the waves of the great river of the same name. It wasn’t until 1977, the year I got married, that I finally saw both river and state in person. Hubby and I were not getting work in Hollywood at the time and had decided to lock up our rental house in Topanga Beach and strike out on a road trip for an indefinite length of time. We cut across the southwest and Texas in our trusty racing green 280Z, spent some days in New Orleans eating until we were etouffe, before finally cruising on into Biloxi, which is where my younger daughter is at this very moment. Fifty years ago she might have been a freedom rider. Today she works for Planned Parenthood (in Pasadena) and has gone down to the Deep South to work for No on 26, an initiative on the November ballot that wants to define “personhood” as beginning at fertilization. If passed, this initiative would certainly ban abortions in Mississippi but also many forms of birth control. Legally, it could mean that a woman who miscarries naturally might be convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Other states are proposing similar measures, all in the hopes of eliminating Roe vs. Wade. I remember visiting one of those lovely antebellum mansions, once the main house of a plantation, now a tattered tourist attraction. A romantic haze still hung in the atmosphere and yet it was obvious that that South had not only faded but was forever past. May Mississippi spell itself forward rather than backward in their upcoming election. The last time the Ippississim flowed backward was during Hurricane Katrina and we know what a disaster that was.