And one that's not really talked about in your typical fifth grade history class, right?

Yeah, it's something I knew very little about.

Even so, when I, you mentioned earlier, I grew up in Connecticut.

I kind of landed in rural Mississippi in my post-college years.

And that's where I started my writing career.

And there are a lot of mounds or earthworks in this part of Mississippi.

Not necessarily huge ones, but just these sort of like... piles of earth.

It's more free-flowing, but has it always been choked and sand shoaled and mud and all of those other things that make it make it hard.

How have the local Americans responded to this new community? According to your reporting, how are the Afrikaners engaging with their new neighbors?

Yeah, I mean, the reporting is a reminder that American is a broad identity itself.

So when I'm up in Mississippi, what I find often is when I'm going into white-owned establishments, bars, restaurants, I went to a liquor store that specifically began to carry South African brandy to cater to these guys.

People say they're super nice guys, they're super hard workers, they're this great asset to the community.

But on the flip side, there is a lot of concern in the black community and also some, I've known white people that sort of work in civil rights and seek a racial equity that look at this and think about the history of Mississippi, the history of sharecropping, the history of slavery, and are really struck by the fact that this work in this majority black region is going to these communities white people that come from a region that has its own history of racial tension and racial oppression.

I have to ask, why the South?

The people that you spoke to, are they planning on staying in the area? How many are planning to go back to South Africa at some point?

they all have to go back to south africa at least occasionally right so it's a seasonal visa um in order to for it to continue they have to sort of reset and spend a few months at least back in south africa many of them roughly around half of the people i've met at least are seeking green cards some of the people i've met already have green cards um some several of the people i met have wives and children that they've met in mississippi and they're sort of established here and so Yeah, they're definitely seeking to stay.

Boyce, this is something that you've talked about, is kind of the romance behind the fishing industry, and whether the romance and kind of that connection that many of us have to where our seafood's coming from, if it's kind of enough.

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of reportly, reporting lately on...

I mean, like one of the potential futures of seafood is aquaculture, right? And it's here already in terms of off bottom oysters and other things like that, but there's, we'll get into later, I think, some proposals on the table to big, to build very large offshore fish farms in the Gulf, and I've been trying to figure out, is that a good idea? Is it a bad idea? What do people think about that? And one of the things I always hear as I'm talking to people about that is like, "We're losing this way of life," that Ryan's talking about, and one of the questions I'm still trying to answer for myself, like, like, does that matter? And I'd like...

[laughs] Not, not to be too glib, though, like I think it does matter mostly, but I'm like, well, we, I'm fine with coal mining fading away, and I'm fine with...

There's certain ways of life that disappear.

Uh, just to me, it's like an unexamined value, and I think there's this romance and beauty of being the one man out on a fishing boat, but can we have that in the world anymore? What does it mean when we lose it? Um, are some of the questions I'm trying to answer.

And I think one of the things, I mean, I think a lot about, I should've s- said this in terms of what surprised me.

Tell us about what happened, and how this one story is symbolic of a much bigger one in this region.