Illustration by Harry Tennant
In November 2023, I traveled back to the hometown I’d left when I was 19 years old. Fall in Natchez, Mississippi, is a welcome relief after the annual assault of a long, hot summer. I remembered the heat and the way the first cool breeze took its time arriving.
This was a homecoming fraught with conflicting emotions. I have a complicated relationship with my hometown, born partly of the obvious reasons—its dark history as a major slave market and the lingering legacy of oppression that followed. I was returning to do some research for the novel that would become The River Knows Your Name and to attend a literary awards ceremony in nearby Vicksburg. I drove into Natchez with my 25-year-old son, Paul, beside me.
Like many children with challenging childhoods, I made friends with the landscape early on. With trees and wildflowers and pristine white sandbars on crystal-clear creeks with pebbly bottoms. With the moon and the spectacular multitude of stars in a rural night sky. And with the Mississippi River.
I drove through the pretty downtown to the edge of the bluff upon which Natchez proper sits. Standing at a black iron fence, Paul marveled at the vastness of the river below. This was where I had brought all my teenage angst and been renewed and strengthened watching the river swell and churn, surging ever onward. It was here on this bluff that I fell in love, in true Southern Gothic fashion, with a traveling salesman from New York, a scene right out of a Eudora Welty or Carson McCullers story.
Much had changed. The bluff I’d known had sloped lazily down to the river—not so steep that I hadn’t been able to descend just far enough to sit alone and unseen when whatever circumstance I’d brought there called for communing with the river. But now the bluff ended in an alarming right angle, a concrete retaining wall attempting to hold the river back, keep it from swallowing up the fence and the familiar bandstand, just as it had swept away my old secret spot.
I had changed, as well, no longer the little girl who had stood on the side of a country road waiting for the bookmobile, making sense of the turbulent world around me through the pages of books by Solomon Northup and Anne Moody, Steinbeck and Welty and others who guided my coming of age. I had lived in a dozen other states, always feeling rootless, never looking back to this place about which I felt the need for a reckoning.
“You live in a dream world,” my father used to tell me, and I suppose I still do, writing stories for other dreamers to lose themselves in.
After that trip to the bluff, we made our way to Vicksburg, where the Mississippi Library Association awarded me its Author of the Year Award for Fiction, an award Eudora Welty had once received, along with Ellen Gilchrist and Jesmyn Ward and Willie Morris—a full-circle moment for me. Behind the podium, I was afraid I might cry, so moved at that honor in the place where I’d dreamed of being a writer. But my son, who understood it all, nodded encouragement, and the little girl waiting for the bookmobile was cheering.
Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library Association’s 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of Southbound.
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Brady Nash
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