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.