Above is a photo of my grandfather, Leslie Harris McCain, seen here picking cotton with his mother, sister and niece, near Carrollton, Mississippi, circa 1910.  Several related McCain families settled in the wooded hills of north central Mississippi in the 1830s when the Choctaw Indian lands became available.

I am a native Mississippian and this has had a great influence on my life.  I am Southern and of a generation where it still means quite a bit whether you want it to or not.  I do  embrace and have grown to enjoy carrying this legacy. 

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in St Joseph Hospital.  My father got a job with United Gas located in Monroe, in north Louisiana, so I spent my growing years there.  We often went back to Mississippi to stay at my grandparents’ farm.  Many of the most profound memories I have is of gravel roads, staying in old farm houses, using outdoor toilets.  I remember the feel of sitting in front of the hearth in winter and the taste of homemade biscuits with freshly churned butter.  Nothing like it. 

I also remember many trips to Arkansas, to the Ouachita Mountains where we had a cabin; we also had kin folk in Arkansas that we would visit.  Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas are all places I feel completely at home.  

My background and experiences are all Southern and Celtic and it shows in my thinking and writing.  Many of my writing projects deal with heritage or is influenced by heritage.  Since age 12,  when I first realised that I had a Gaelic surname,  I have been on a very long odyssey to explore what that meant. 

It has been a long, weedy and wandering path I have walked. One day as I sat on a stone wall in the village of An Cheathrú Rua a light year or more west of Galway, I greeted an elderly man and his wife in Irish and as I did so it occured to me how far I had travelled from the Mississippi pasture in which a young tow headed boy used to charge across, toy gun in hand, to drive the Yankees from my Paw Paw's field.



Barry R McCain