Sweltering in the Heat of Injustice...

Remembering Mississippi and Not Forgetting the Past on the Occasion of Inauguration

Every Monday morning I’m at SoulCycle sweating and taking inspiration from all the riders around me. Today, our instructor David played a portion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’ s historic speech while we took a moment of silence.

I rarely listen to these words. The reverence of Dr. King feels so new to me. I was born some years before the day became a federal holiday. However, this one line caught up with me, “the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.”

You see, my maternal grandmother was born in Mississippi in 1920 on a plantation. She was the second of ten children born to my great grandmother, Luella. Her earliest memories were of picking cotton. Her sharecropping family were still doing the same thing their slave forbearers had done.

Photo by Trisha Downing on Unsplash

My grandmother’s stories of working in the sweltering sun, without shoes, her toddler hands bleeding with the pericarp of the cotton bolls tearing into there fingers. (I looked up that word when I saw my first cotton plant in Smith College’s greenhouse). For her parents and her siblings there was no option not to work.

The last straw came when my great grandmother had just given birth to her seventh or eighth child, and she was in their tiny shack in Shubuta. The foreman rode up in a horse and asked why Luella wasn’t working. My great grandfather, Samuel, pointed out that she had a newborn. Massa (as he was known) said that was no excuse and he expected to see her picking cotton the next time he came by.

There were some whispered conversations between Samuel and Luella and in a few days, the family escaped from the plantation in the dead of night. They stacked a few belongings and musical instruments in a car, pretending they were going to play at a Sunday church service.

Instead, they left in the dead of a Saturday night driving until they were too far a way to be chased, captured, and returned to their plantation. Days later they landed in Albany, New York on some land a Mississippi Pastor had purchased for escaping families.

My grandmother returned to Mississippi only a single time, for a wedding. She was up and back in a single day. She warned me to stay out of the south, and for the most part, I’ve heeded her warnings. Her stories of brutal injustice she witnessed are enough to fill several books.

What I learned from her, though, is that America is a particular kind of country. One that will let injustice fester for a long, long time. While I sympathize with the sadness some of my friends are experiencing today, for me it’s merely a continuation of our long and complicated history.

I regularly honor my grandmother. The one thing you should probably know about her is that her name was Aime.

Aime Austin is the author of the Casey Cort and Nicole Long Series of legal thrillers. She is also the host of the podcast, A Time to Thrill. When she's not writing crime fiction or interviewing brilliant creators for her podcast, she's in a yoga pose, knitting, or reading. Aime splits her time between Los Angeles and Budapest. Before turning to writing, Aime practiced family and criminal law in Cleveland, Ohio. His Last Mistress is out April 24, 2025.