A Mississippi Memoir

Narratives about Mississippi often focus on segregation and discrimination in the Magnolia State; however, Adam Gussow’s story chronicles love and reexamines race relations. Without dismissing Mississippi’s tumultuous history, Gussow shares his own experience, in which an interracial couple is embraced by their community in the midst of racial protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The memoir repeatedly returns to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision of America was a colorblind nation built on a foundation of love. As the book traces Gussow’s journey to Mississippi as both a professor and blues harmonica player, he reverently tells the story of his life with his wife, Sherrie, and their son, Shaun. The quiet simplicity of their happiness is central to Gussow’s narrative, as it challenges the dominant image of racial division in Mississippi.
At its core, Gussow’s memoir is infused with love and hope, qualities that endure even during the turbulence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Gussow himself remains committed to the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. and hopes readers will leave with a renewed belief in the possibility of a colorblind world.
Adam Gussow is a Professor at the University of Mississippi and a professional blues harmonica player and teacher. In addition to his current work, he is the author of the blues novel, “Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir and Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition.”
Reviews and Endorsements of this publication include the following:
“In an America increasingly divided by the clash between those who seek power in the reductive, skin-deep world of identity politics and those who wish to remain within our greater humanity, Adam Gussow’s My Family and I offers a powerful argument for the latter. Gussow’s refusal to betray his humanity for this nefarious ideology is what gives this book of his its enduring and enlightening power. Most of all, it gives us hope.”
– Eli Steele, filmmaker and director of Resegregating America (2021), What Killed Michael Brown? (2020), and How Jack Became Black (2018)
“Gussow’s harrowing account of attending an anti-racist workshop is an edgy parable on the dangers of thinking in racial categories. He is a first-rate scholar whose earlier work probed racial wounds in the American past, but his stimulating new study lets us see that racial healing can be on the horizon in our society.”
– Charles Reagan Wilson, editor-in-chief, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
“My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir is an unflinchingly challenging, provocative book that demands nuanced, careful thought. As an Ashkenazi Jewish and Black woman, I am grateful for the challenge that Adam Gussow’s book provides, and for the ways in which I was forced to consider my own belief systems as I read. What a gift.”
– Marra B. Gad, author of The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl
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