The morning light comes slow to Oktibbeha County, sliding through a stand of longleaf pines that hiss in the wind like whispering ghosts. Jamal Carter moves along the tree line with a metal drip torch, the flame bending and flaring as he walks. Smoke wraps around him, sweet and sharp—the smell of pine resin and char.

“This isn’t destruction,” he says, pausing to watch the fire crawl through the grass. “This is how the woods breathe.”

Jamal is twenty-eight, a forester born and raised a few miles from here, and the great-grandson of a logger who cut down trees for a company that never paid him fairly. His daddy worked cleanup for timber outfits that stripped the hills bare. Now Jamal burns the same land to bring it back to life.

The Forest That Forgot Itself

There was a time when longleaf pine covered nearly all of southern Mississippi—an ocean of tall trunks, open ground, and fire-fed grass. Folks said you could ride a horse through it for days and never lose sight of the sky. Then came the sawmills, the pulp mills, and the railroads. The forests fell, and with them went the rhythm of fire, the animals that needed it, and the people who once read the land like scripture.

By the time Jamal was born, the longleaf had nearly vanished, replaced by fast-growing pine plantations meant for profit, not life. But lately, a quiet movement has taken root—one part science, one part memory. Local foresters, elders, and small landowners are learning how to use fire again, supported by groups like The Longleaf Alliance, to restore what the land once knew how to do on its own.

Lighting the Line

Jamal learned the work from his mentor, a woman named Dr. Maria Sanchez, who runs a burn cooperative out of Starkville in partnership with The Nature Conservancy’s Mississippi Chapter. Her group trains landowners—many of them Black families—in controlled burning, teaching them that the same element feared for centuries is also what keeps the forest alive.

“Fire is not the enemy,” Maria tells me as we walk behind Jamal’s crew, the ground crackling beneath our boots. “It’s medicine. These pines need to burn every few years, or the whole system chokes.”

She bends to pick up a charred pinecone, still warm. “You see this? The heat opens the cone. That’s how the seeds scatter. The forest depends on what we’ve spent a hundred years trying to kill.”

When the flames die down, a faint hum rises—insects returning, birds calling from somewhere deep in the smoke. The land looks raw but not ruined. It smells like the beginning of something old.

What the Land Took—and What It Gave Back

A few miles away, in Choctaw County, Ms. Ruth Holloway sits on her porch, shelling peas with the patience of someone who’s seen too much change. Her family lost 200 acres of woodland in the 1980s after an heir property dispute—one of thousands of cases that stripped Black Southerners of nearly all their land across the 20th century, a pattern documented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing a 90% decline in Black-owned farmland since 1910.

“Everybody talks about conservation,” she says, dropping shells into a bowl. “But we were conserving before there was a word for it. We took care of what fed us. Then the land got stolen, or taxed away, and we were told we didn’t belong.”

Now she helps with replanting projects, volunteering whenever the local cooperative needs extra hands. “I guess it’s a way of staying connected,” she says. “If I can’t own the land, I can still tend it.”

Her words land like truth—simple, heavy, unpolished. The South is full of people like her: caretakers without titles, stewards without deeds.

Fire as Remembering

The next morning, Jamal drives out to a newly burned tract—black earth, white ash, the smell of smoke still fresh. He crouches, sifting soil through his fingers.

“See, this is what I mean,” he says. “The soil changes right after a burn. It loosens. It breathes again.”

He tells me his great-grandfather used to talk about fire as a “reset.” Back then, they didn’t call it ecology. It was just common sense—let the woods clean themselves so new life could push through.

Now Jamal teaches kids from local schools how to plant longleaf seedlings through a community reforestation program modeled on Mississippi’s Community Forestry Initiative. They come in vans, laughing and loud, holding small shovels and water bottles. He shows them how to press each seedling into the ground, firm but gentle. “You don’t force it,” he says. “You give it space to grow.”

When the sun drops low, he gathers them around the charred clearing. “Look close,” he says, pointing to the first green shoots breaking through ash. “You see that? That’s the forest remembering itself.”

The Slow Kind of Healing

Restoring land in Mississippi is slow work. It takes years for a longleaf pine to grow tall enough to hold its first cones. Some burns fail. Some families lose patience. But each fire, each seedling, is a kind of prayer—one whispered into soil that has seen slavery, sharecropping, and strip mining, yet still finds a way to give.

On a cool evening, Maria and Jamal sit in the back of his truck watching smoke drift above the tree line. The air hums with crickets and the faint rhythm of gospel from a radio in the distance.

“Do you ever think it’s strange,” Jamal says, “how folks spend their lives trying to control the land, when the land already knows what it needs?”

Maria laughs softly. “I think that’s the lesson. We’re not fixing it. We’re just learning how to listen.”

The forest darkens. Somewhere nearby, an owl calls. The smell of smoke lingers, familiar and forgiving.

Where Fire Lives On

In the days that follow, new grass pushes through the black soil, soft and bright against the ash. The woods look different—open, breathing, alive. Jamal walks among the pines, his boots sinking into damp earth.

“This is what belonging looks like,” he says. “Not owning. Not conquering. Just caring long enough to see it come back.”

The fire still lives here—not as destruction, but as memory. It moves through the land the way stories do, passed from one hand to another, glowing just enough to keep the roots warm.

And in that quiet, smoky air, Mississippi remembers—and forgives—in its own slow, burning way.