Lincoln Wipes His Eyes

I have been struggling with how to reckon with and condemn white supremacy in my work for a long time. I made Lincoln Wipes his Eyes during my residency at the Vinegar Project.  The title is from a placard  in the silent film Birth of a Nation. I have been working with images from this painful and fraught film that inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.  My grandfather’s first cousin played the role of Ben Cameron, the little Colonel, who is pictured here.  I had grown up with stories of our family’s movie star and how he would bring Hollywood guests to the family house, only later learning the terrible legacy of the film.  The man who founded the modern Klan on Stone Mountain, Georgia created white hooded uniforms and burning crosses based on the film’s imagery.  He grew up in Harpersville, Alabama near our family place.  (Klein Arts & Culture now owns and operates this historic house, a former plantation, as a venue for arts, culture and education that fosters social justice.)

 I matched the image from Birth of a Nation with one of contemporary white supremacy, which is focused around a convertible rather than a horse. Red drops of blood-tears are layered atop both racist images. This work is a digital print from two reductive monotypes, made through erasure.  My plan is to photograph monotypes, create polymer plates of the images, and print an edition from each etching plate.  I will then add layers to contextualize the images, such as the red drops in the digital print here. 

Should one bring up this racist symbology, the klan, at this moment in time?  White supremacy/violence has reared its ugly head, with the police murders of Black Americans and the dog whistles by the US president to the far right, and our country’s systemic racism has been revealed.  Have I contextualized these images clearly and appropriately?  This was part of the discussion in my small group in the residency.  Should these images be surfaced into consciousness?   Or must they be in order to be reckoned with.  And if so, can a white artist make the statement.

This has left me wondering whether my work meets the challenge posed by our current moment.  Is it clear enough?  Is it well-contextualized?  Am I the right person to create it?  I must confess that I don’t know.

Codex: Map of my childhood

Codex: Map of my childhood was inspired by the 2019 exhibit Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th Century Mexico at the Blanton Museum in Austin.  These Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas were created by indigenous artists in the late 16th century for Spain and incorporate an amalgamation of imagery and symbols from their culture and from that of the colonizers.  As in many of the mapas, footprints mark my own transit in the 1950s around the community landmarks of memory.   Others would have represented this time and space differently.

Codex: Map of my childhood documents my childhood summers that revolved around two proximate former plantation houses, a small vernacular rural frame home on one of these places, the swimming hole, and the church.  The antebellum structures were in disrepair, and one would later be torn down and the other preserved.   The resulting 4 x 6’ canvas reflects the mapmaking tradition of Mapas, representing a history and interpretation of the space I traversed six decades ago.  The brown pigment is dirt from my childhood friend’s cotton field.  Cotton forms a sea around the buildings, crossing the highways, just as I saw it in 2018 when I returned.  

At the entry point to my Choked on Cotton exhibition at the Community Artists’ Collective in Houston this year, Codex carries childhood innocence and nostalgia.  At the same time, as a mapas, it presents a colonial representation of my family place and, with that, my identity in that space.  Confronting that identity fuels my art and my commitment to Klein Arts & Culture.

Kudzu: a shifting metaphor

Kudzu has long been a metaphor in my work.  Kudzu: the invader, suffocator, obscurer, and persister. An artist friend said it was for her, Whiteness.  Kudzu is an invasive species, introduced to the US from Japan and used to address soil erosion in the South.  For me, kudzu obscured and hid the truth about my history and experience.  Its suffocation led me to flee the South as soon as I was able.

However now I am understanding a new aspect of the metaphor.  Alice Walker wrote in 1973, “racism is like that local creeping kudzu vine that swallows whole forests and abandoned houses; if you don’t keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it.”   George Floyd’s murder by police has brought much of white America to the awareness of the insidious invisible nature of systemic racism.  We must all work together to pull it out by its roots.  Stronger work is needed: a call to me as an artist and as a citizen. Let’s join together to root racism out.

How the Millstone became a Touchstone

In 2016, when I began making art about and grappling with my family heritage, I made a pendant with our family house, Klein, etched into copper. I titled it Millstone.  I was coming to terms with what it meant that my family had enslaved 99 persons at that place. And, in my generation, we had closed off the cemetery with unmarked graves of those enslaved and many more recent graves of their descendants, first holding visitation to two days per year and then closing it to all burials.  I was also wrestling with the realization that I had grown up in Birmingham, leaving for college in 1962, and had no knowledge of the civil rights movement that was to erupt into national consciousness soon thereafter.   On some level, I understood the tension and conflict in Birmingham even though I didn’t acknowledge it.  I and many of my friends left that  year “never to return”…though some of us have.

My return was in 2018 when I unexpectedly inherited that old family place, built in 1841 and vacant since the 1960’s.  In a way I cannot explain, that house became a vortex of energy, not only for myself but for others who share a passion for tikkun olam and for reconciliation.   The necklace that began as a millstone has become a touchstone for my own life. Slowly, that house is becoming a symbol for others of the new narratives we are creating together.

In October 2018, we held our first reunion of descendants of the black and white Wallaces (the people of the place) and rededicated the cemeteries, opening them fully, and sharing a meal and conversation together at Klein.  In December 2018 we incorporated the non-profit organization, Klein Arts & Culture, and in 2019 transferred ownership of the house and surrounding land to it.  Since then, we have held our second reunion and, this January 2020, were the site for Migratuse Ataraxia, a transformative dance performance that brought the embodied black presence back into the house, moving it from the periphery to the center.  We  were invited to consider the interior lives of the enslaved persons who worked in the house.  The battered peeling walls of the house were integral to the performance.  The audience came from the community and from Birmingham and beyond, as it was the showcase for the Alabama Dance Festival. 

It is our hope that Klein Arts & Culture, as well as the house itself, becomes a touchstone and a catalyst for reconciliation and social change beginning in Harpersville and extending out from there.

‘Twas grace

Our second Klein Homecoming was October 5.  As we did last year, we met at the cemetery, sang Amazing Grace, and prayed together before adjourning to the house for conversation, fellowship, and a Southern lunch.  This time, however, we began with a sage smudge around our assembled circle and a prayer to acknowledge our standing on Muskogee (Creek) land.  In addition to the responsive reading of the names of ancestors buried in the two sides of the cemetery, Mr. Henry Smith placed a handmade floral wreath to honor our enslaved ancestors who are buried in unmarked graves and those similarly buried in other cemeteries.  Theo Perkins sang Fly Away, with those assembled joining in, to remember Ms. Nola Odem, who had attended the homecoming last year.

There were other ways it differed as well.  At the first homecoming, all of us were a little wary, unsure what to expect.  That eased as the day progressed, and we shared experiences, recollections, and hopes.  This year, those returning were eager to be together and others who had heard about it and decided to come were ready to join in.  Two sisters, whose grandparents are buried at the cemetery and who were participating for the first time, made beautiful floral wreaths for the cemetery and the entry gate.  There were more children brought this year, and the older ones contributed to the facilitated discussion.  At the end of this conversation, facilitator T. Marie King asked each person for a word to describe their feelings.  The words included love, grace, unified, thankful, intrigued, opportunity, destigmatizing, progress, choices, beautiful, blessed, educate, knowledge, history, empowerment, and important.  These words point to both reconciliation and to a desire to move forward together to create an important new narrative. 

We had two short information talks.  The craftsmen working on the house, who grew up and live in the area, talked about the progress that has been made over the past year and their experiences in reproducing structural elements from antique pine.  Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis, principals of the Wideman-Davis Dance Company, provided a taste of the site-specific performance of Migratuse Ataraxia to be held in January 2020 at Klein, sharing a video of the work at an historic house in Columbia South Carolina.  These talks summarized for me the mission-directed progress we have made at Klein Arts & Culture.  And finally, this year Bess Johnson provided video documentation of the events and interviews that will become part of our history room and social media.

I do feel that grace has led us on the path this year and into 2020, beginning with the marvelous experiential dance program that reinterprets the narratives of the house and continuing with two art exhibits later in the year. The Klein house has felt like a vortex, bringing together people and programs. Amazing Grace, indeed.

Logan's Creek, Sunday Afternoon

One summer Sunday afternoon in 1955, several children were baptized by the preacher of the Klein Baptist Church in Logan’s Creek.  As I recall, he had a weekday job at a factory in a nearby town.  But on Sunday he preached and inspired the community’s churchgoers.  On a previous Sunday morning, we had all walked to the front of the church when called to be saved.   My friend, Mary Ann Logan, and I went down; her mother played the piano in the one room church.  “Have thine own way, Lord”.   Then we found ourselves sitting by the creek bank, waiting for our chance to walk into the water onto the submerged roots of the big tree that marked the edge of the creek, to be baptized by the preacher who followed in the steps of John the Baptist.  Those attending sang, “Shall we gather at the river?... where bright angel feet have trod.”  

During the summers of the ‘50s, Mary Ann and I went swimming every day in the creek that flowed through the Logan land, the Scott-Bradford place adjacent to Klein from which the Logans are descended.  The creek served as our playground, as our bathtub (neither of us had running water), and now it was our baptismal font.  

I recently reconnected with Mary Ann after sixty years.  She and her husband had returned to live on the land, in the midst of cotton fields, and are pillars of the Klein Baptist Church.  She recalled my grandmother’s floating in the creek (the swimming hole was actually too small for an adult to swim), saying how grand it was… and that we are now the same age as my grandmother was.  Probably, neither of us would swim in the waters of the creek where snakes could occasionally be seen dangling in the trees or on the sides of the creekbed.  I’m sure I wouldn’t…. not that we could as the creek exists no longer.  It and the pasture surrounding it are now a backwater of the Coosa River system. Thomas Wolfe was right… “You can’t go home again.”

Reflections on the New Year

As I approach the end of 2018 and envision 2019, the Klein Homecoming looms large.

On October 20, 2018, about 40 persons whose ancestors were at Klein when it was a cotton plantation gathered together in the cemetery for a healing ceremony.  On behalf of the white side of my family, I apologized for closing off the African American family cemetery for burial some 20 years ago.  I also apologized for a much longer, unspoken history from slavery to the present.  We rededicated and opened the cemetery with prayers and the singing of Amazing Grace.  We then adjourned to the house for a facilitated discussion and meal together.  Many of the participants were inside the house for the first time.

Theoangelo Perkins, Peter Datcher and I, along with our facilitator T. Marie King of Birmingham, planned and carried out the event.  In the South, we are keyed into who is related to whom, and this was a time to learn about and celebrate these connections.  Theo Perkins’ mother is a McGinnis.  The McGinnises came to work on the land soon after emancipation and continued to do so for generations.  As a child, I had known Theo’s great-grandfather, great uncle and great aunt.  Peter Datcher’s great-grandmother was enslaved at Klein, and he has a beautiful picture of her and one of his great-grandfather, who was once whipped for leaving that plantation a mile away to visit her.  They had met at the Scott’s Grove Baptist Church where services were still conducted during my childhood.  So… in generational time, this wasn’t that long ago. 

Here I am, trying to come to terms with the fact that my family enslaved others.  We were sitting in the house their ancestors built, without pay.  The bricks were made, the cypress milled, the nails forged by them.  All part of the economy: the more free labor, the more land could be cultivated in cotton, the wealthier the planter could become to continue that cycle. The part of the story I had heard was of my great-great-grandfather coming down from Tennessee to settle the new territory; of my great-grandmother teaching black and white children to read; of the travails of the family and their persistence in the face of challenge. I had never heard the other sides of the story.

What is the size and nature of this debt? How can it be settled?  How can we give back to these families?  This didn’t come up in our conversations at the house.  However, what became apparent was that respect for each other, acknowledgment of our complicated past, and beginning a new relationship at that moment will sustain us as we enter 2019 together. This year, we will come together again for a Klein Homecoming, bring art to the house, and work to establish our shared home as a community resource through the non-profit corporation Klein Arts and Culture.