hidden away in 7 acres of pine woodland, set off a narrow country road.
It also proves one truth about Kentwood life for the Spears clan: no matter how successful life might appear, there is no leaving this foundational bedrock. Here, they are tethered by generational roots that have grown deep into the red earth, bound by a sense of community that makes everywhere else seem distant and foreign. Whatever glamorous façades are erected, whatever the trappings of wealth afforded, they remain deeply ingrained as country folk.
Behind the church, Britney’s childhood home is tenant-occupied these days, but it’s still the place visitors seek out. Kentwood’s proximity to the state border is evidenced by the property’s very location—a short run, hop, skip and a jump to Mississippi, where the homey pavilion of Nyla’s Burger joint sits on the main road and celebrates its near-neighbour with an entire room decorated in memorabilia. Even the menu boasts: ‘Britney Spears’ favourite family restaurant’.
Then there is Kentwood Museum, a converted funeral parlour near the relic of Main Street, where curator Hazel Morris showcases Britney’s career to date. It was first opened in 1975 to honour veterans of war and Britney’s grandparents take pride of place—Jamie’s dad June Austin Spears, a former sergeant in the US Air Force in the Korean War; and Lynne’s dad Barney Bridges, a technical sergeant with the US Army during World War II. With 66 headshots to a frame and 15 frames around the walls, Kentwood’s contribution to America’s freedom is evident.
In another section of the room, among these men, are reminders of ‘The pin-ups who went to war’: Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, Vivien Leigh, Jane Russell and Barbara Stanwyck. It seems apt that the door adjacent to this display leads through to the area celebrating the modern-day icon: Britney Spears. She dominates three separate rooms and everything the eye sees used to hang on Britney’s walls until dad Jamie decided to loan to the museum in 2000: platinum record plaques, framed magazine covers, family-framed photos, childhood dresses and awards—MTV Awards, American Music Awards, a CD: UK trophy, and awards from Smash Hits and Hollywood Reporter.
If visitors are not arriving as fans, this town is automatically on the back-foot. The official speed limit is 35mph, but locals drive 25mph so anyone travelling that 10mph faster provides the giveaway that an outsider is in town. Heads turn and beady eyes take note. If the local sheriff spots the number plate of a rental car, the ‘suspicious’ invader will be asked to pull over and some searching questions will be posed.
Locals have one another’s backs covered, and everybody knows everyone’s business. It is the essence of a close-knit community that many city-dwellers would find alien. But if your intentions are good, and you tread respectfully, then people shake your hand and give you the time of day, consistent with good old southern hospitality. These are down-to-earth, hardworking and honest folk, the working rather than educated type. There’s no tolerance for idealising, moralising or posturing but there is warmth to their simplicity and an enviable contentment. Here, working life is authentic, insular and raw. Its small-town sensibilities don’t contemplate the filters that would ordinarily check conversation that might shock and offend. The social rules are simple: if you don’t like it, keep moving on through.
Whether or not they know you, questions will always be respectfully answered in a thick southern accent—‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, ma’am’. They will address you as Mister or Miss, as a title attached to your Christian, not surname. If an ‘Alan Jones’ wanders into town, he’ll be greeted as ‘Mr Alan’. Should his wife Mary join him, she’ll be ‘Miss Mary’. The vernacular and attitude belongs to a bygone age.
In Britney’s younger days, there used to be at least six drinking holes but now there’s just one: a rough-and-ready pavilion, once called the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) but, now decommissioned, it is known as ‘The Dub’. From the outside, it resembles a mini-warehouse with its window-less, corrugated iron structure. Local laws mean it has to hide its neon-Budweiser signs inside. The Dub is the community gathering point and it’s the kind of joint where all eyes turn to the door when an outsider first enters and walks into a wall of automatic wariness. It’s the same at Country Boys, a bar 14 miles away in another cultureless land, attracting people from both Mississippi and Louisiana, and it’s a tribal feel that becomes a recipe for regular brawls: ‘Mississippi’s in tonight,’ one local warned, ‘it’s going to break.’
For many men in these parts, decompressing after six days’ hard graft on the land or faraway refineries, the week is not complete without several beers and a good fight. They are not afraid to tell you that fighting is regarded as a release of pent-up energy. Men—and women—will even fight among themselves when bar banter is fuelled by alcohol, spilling outside into the gravel parking lots. The next night, those same combatants will sit down, share a beer and recount the incident with laughter.
Until recently, each patron had to sign in at the front door of The Dub, but it still remains advisable to walk in with someone with whom the locals are familiar, otherwise you’ll be invited into that same parking-lot and asked what your business is. Those who ‘don’t belong’ include lone outsiders, the paparazzi and African-Americans. Locals regard The Dub as Kentwood’s white-bar. The black-bar, ‘The Sugar Shack’, is further into town.
At Kentwood High School, only a handful of white faces can be seen in a predominantly African-American enrolment. White families tend to send their children out of town: to Amite’s Oak Forest Academy or Park Lane Academy in McComb, Mississippi—Britney’s former school. Both these private schools, which come with relatively affordable fees, have good educational standards but there is no escaping the fractious attitudes concerning race. State segregation may be illegal now but segregation from choice remains a way of life. They will tell you it’s no different in countless other areas of middle America.
All around the town, frank conversation about colour and creed is not for the ears of the easily offended because there is an unapologetic use of the word ‘nigger’. It forms an everyday part of many people’s vernacular; the legacy of generational hand-me-downs which has left a deeply-entrenched mind-set among people who don’t care for worldly experience, or what the world thinks. But it seems to be a powerless mind-set, as indicated by the 2002 election of the first non-white mayor, Harold Smith, erstwhile assistant principal at Kentwood High. Now there is talk of a new dawn and increased integration.
Smith is the Barack Obama of Kentwood with a Herculean mission to alter hearts and minds. He travelled to Washington to witness the President’s inauguration in January 2009 and returned to write a piece in Amite Today: ‘It revived my spirit and motivated me to return home to share the necessary ideas and feeling of hope and change to benefit all people, regardless of background…because there is no place like home’.
A mother who knew Britney from school, and still talks to the star’s cousins, is quick to point out that, ‘Britney knows how people talk but she don’t agree with it. She’s had black friends, management, dancers and bodyguards. It don’t matter the colour of a guy’s skin.’
It would be unjust to apply a broad brush and say this one issue sums up Kentwood. In fact, whites from Mississippi are viewed with just as much suspicion as blacks. But it remains a social indicator of the background in which Britney has grown. Inevitably, her fame has broadened her own perspectives and afforded her a life education that few will sample. But Kentwood is also where she feels safest and most known. In her 2008 MTV documentary, Britney—For The Record, she referred to her ‘meltdown’ and wondered out loud why she didn’t seek out its sanctuary and serenity of home: ‘You would think that I would have gone home…I think back now and I’m like, “Why did I, in that fragile state, why didn’t I just up and go to Louisiana?’”
Her aunt Chanda McGovern, formerly married to John Mark Spears, explains: ‘People here love Britney for Britney, and nothing else. People see past all the fame and celebrity, and accept her for who she is. Kentwood is where people have got her back covered, where she has all the love and support she needs. Whatever the image of Britney, she is a country girl and Kentwood’s own.’
Kentwood