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 takes its name from Amos Kent, an early settler who established a brickyard and sawmill to kick-start the lumber industry that survived until the early twenties. He was also a confederate rebel, jailed for not swearing allegiance to the US during the American Civil War; a leader of a unit within the 12,000 Louisiana infantrymen who served the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Kent was one of ‘Lee’s Tigers’, which earned the sobriquet ‘The Fighting Tigers’ because its soldiers were rowdy fearless drunks whose behaviour was tolerated because of their immense achievements in battle, according to historian Arthur Bergeron. That work-hard, play-hard, fear nothing attitude is just as prevalent today and the ‘stars-and-bars’ of the Confederate Flag fly just as proudly in this town as Uncle Sam’s stars-and-stripes.
There is little to do for children growing up there. They become accustomed to a southern life of playing and hunting in the woods. Basketball and football are the main pursuits for boys and the girls’ focus is basketball and also cheerleading before settling into early domestic bliss.
The roads are so remote that fathers will ride with their children sat between their legs in the car, in front of the steering wheel; they ride with children on their laps in the same way as many dog owners do with their pets. When Britney became a mother and attempted to transfer this practice to the roads of Malibu in 2007, she soon realised a Louisiana way of life won’t wash elsewhere. But that incident served to highlight the conditioning influences spilling over from her childhood.
Kentwood is a hunt-shoot-fish town but it’s not ‘country life’ in the same fashion as England’s tweed jackets and picnic hampers, or Balmoral shoots. Men throw a rifle and ice-packed beer in the back of their trucks and hunt for deer and rabbit, sitting in ‘deer-hides’—wooden shacks where they sit to hide from the deer. They’ll then return home and throw a ‘crawfish boil party’, thanking God for the catches they’ve snared.
For God is one of the chief grandfathers of this ‘Bible Belt’ town. His presence is observed in the community and in locals’ vernacular. The Spears family merely had to walk across the road from their home to Sunday service. Christian values formed the backbone of Britney’s upbringing and education. The way that Mum Lynne explains it is that they are not a religious, but deeply spiritual family and yet they are strongly tied to the Christian faith.
As a child, Britney kept a prayer journal and was encouraged to have discussions with God and confide in her local pastor. Of course, as a child, it is easy to nod one’s head in blithe acceptance of a faith that perhaps holds more of a worship indoctrination than actual meaning. Britney almost certainly found pleasure in the ‘performance’ and rituals—the ceremonies that would ultimately allow her to showcase her talents. Yet, regardless of meaning, she was obviously influenced by the beliefs instilled in her by her elders.
What she was told, she believed. So, when Britney went to bed each night, she believed God was watching over her and that everything happened because of His higher reasoning. He was her mainstay. Indeed, this is illustrated as she grew up and found her dreams coming true, blessing Him for the opportunities she had, acknowledging His guidance in the albums she made and believing He places obstacles in our way to make us stronger. Britney’s early-stated philosophy on life was that: ‘He has a hand in everything, good or bad. It’s all part of God’s plan.’
In a book penned by Britney and Lynne together, called Heart to Heart, Britney wrote: ‘I pray all the time. I find a lot of comfort and strength in knowing I can talk to God and He’s listening. That’s the way we were raised.’ On the wall above her bed, she hung a cross-stitch of the 18th-century prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each night before bed, Britney wrote down her thoughts for ‘God to read’. Her jottings complete, she kneeled at her bed and prayed, hands steep led in prayer. Then she reached under the blue, glass-plated bedside lamp and turned out the light to disappear into dreamland.
‘Dancing and singing all the time…
Like a little girl should.’
–Britney, 2007
Kentwood may well have counted as home, but Britney was a girl who yearned for faraway places. She was, say friends, ‘always different’ and came across as a day-dreaming introvert, absorbed in her own thoughts.
Often she found places to go that were a million miles from her woodland playground, running toward secret locations where she felt happy and in control. This is something Britney learned to do from a tender age: to step into self-created bubbles that distracted her and denied access to insecurities she didn’t yet understand; allowing her to avoid a confrontation with a childhood far more distressing than has previously been acknowledged.
In getting to know Britney, one soon learns that it was in such day-dreamy places that the escapist performer was born and as will become clear, her hunger to perform was as much a coping mechanism as a desire to entertain. It was in a corner of her vivid imagination that she first located Klickitat Street, a place where ‘…growing up was the slowest thing there was’. All she wanted was to sing and skip, and say: ‘This is a great day…This is a great day!’, wanting to be universally popular. It was a make-believe world that she dived into, as created by children’s author
