Roots & Remains

Yesterday, I completed the 1st draft of a new audio piece. A question that I've struggled with this semester is how to incorporate my research and artistic process more into the finished work. 

In this piece, I wrote narrative describing my trip to Harris County in search of my ancestral home, Negro Heel, and Isaiah Parker Jr.'s grave. I combined it with a nature recording of my childhood home and recitation of and repeated excerpts from Alice Walker's poem, Turning Madness into Flowers. I'm currently exploring ideas for turning the piece into a video installation and will discuss this further as it develops.

The Water Knows My Secrets: Update

Just finished a new draft of this project with new footage, narration, and improved timing.

The Water Knows My Secrets

"But our native country is less an expanse of territory than a substance; it's a rock or a soil or an aridity or a water or a light.

It's the place where our dreams materialize; it's through that place that our dreams take on their proper form. . . .

Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. I cant sit beside a brook without falling deep reverie, without seeing once again my happiness. . . .

The stream doesn't have to be ours; the water doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring."  

- Gaston Bachelard

The following video is from a project that I'm working on that combines a field recording from my grandmother's backyard, a bit of narration I wrote last semester, and some video footage I shot. I consider it a rough draft. I would like to make another recording of the narration, continue to play around with the sound mixing, video editing, and timing the footage better.

Objects, Labor, & Identity: Mom

It's interesting to see how the narrative created by my mom's portraits overlap with grandma's, yet tell a completely different story.

Objects, Labor, & Identity: Grandma

Although this photo series differs a bit from work that I have made in the past there is one theme that is ever-present, references to the sense of touch. Working loosely with narrative, I tried to capture candid (with one exception) images that tell a biography of sorts. I also draw connections with line metaphor I've been working with and the visual theme of capturing and archiving gestures. I've chosen to desaturate the colors to unify the images and reference a not so distant past. This is a work in progress. I plan to incorporate sound and objects to expand the narrative.

Mentor Meeting One

Books
Monstrous Intimacies by Christina Sharpe
How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self by Brian Wallis
The Carolina Rice Kitchen by Karen Hess
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Artists
Willie Cole (specifically Ironing Board Print series)
Latoya Ruby Fraizer
Janet Cardiff
Marcus Coates (specifically Birdsong)
Simone Leigh
Moana Hatoum
Allora & Calzadilla (specifically Returning a Sound)
Andrea Buttner
Goshka Macuga

Things to Consider
Cooking and the qualities of food
Give yourself permission to be messy, What role could that play?
Shared experience
Trauma
Cookbooks and the idea of a meal
Mapping/Homesteads
Spend time with objects and determine what feels the most meaningful
Bookmaking can be a way to put all the elements together
Consider ways to represent objects other than photography
Research based Practice

Sardis and Prospect

While exploring the back roads of Harris County in the area that would have been known as Negro Heel in 1850, we passed a winding yet unassuming, tree-lined drive. Something called to me from the end of that drive. I asked my husband to back the car up and drive down. I could see a small rocky formation in a clearing at the end of it. In truth, I hoped it could be the ruins of a home or ancient church, but what we found was a cemetery. This cemetery seemed abandoned and partially destroyed. However, the freshly mown grass surrounding it and an empty beer can alerted me to the fact that someone knew it was here.

While looking around, I discovered some familiar names. Isaiah Jr.'s elder brother, Fleming, and his wife, Rebecca. This was a huge discovery. Before the probate records I hadn't paid much attention to Fleming because he was not in my direct line. I'm paying attention now though because after reading the documents we found in the court house, he seemed so much closer to Isaiah. 

In the same year that Isaiah Sr. died, Georgia seceded from the Union. Fleming, who according to his gravestone, enlisted in the Confederate Army was also knee deep in court proceedings concerning his father's estate along with his younger brother. By the end of those proceedings, Isaiah had brought for himself a slave that he fathered 3 children with and intended to live with (illegally) as husband and wife.  I can almost imagine the tension that might have been caused by such an act during that time.

Unfortunately, I could not locate any other blood relations in Sardis cemetery, although I did find Thomas, who married Fleming and Isaiah's sister. There was, however, a large number of unmarked rock graves. Could they contain Isaiah Jr. or his parents?

After leaving Sardis, we headed to Prospect Church. I remember visiting this cemetery with my grandmother as a child. Charity Ann and her eldest daughter, Virginia whom my grandmother is named after and who was the only surviving child Isaiah Jr. purchased in 1861, are buried there. My grandmother told me that because Charity Ann was not white, she and Isaiah could not be buried together. No one in my immediate or extended family knows where he rests.

Looking for Traces: Harris County Court House

Next, we headed to the county court house. A call I made earlier confirmed that the probate court kept marriage and probate records on site. I knew that there were probate proceeding following Isaiah Sr.'s death in 1861 and that there were likely to be some remaining records on file. However, I wasn't really prepared for the amount of records we found or their contents. 

We found numerous documents spread out across a dozen or so books detailing each step of the probate process of Isaiah Sr.'s estate. Isaiah Jr., my 4th great-grandfather, and his elder brother, Fleming, were listed by name in almost every one. Things got really interesting when we discovered a document dated 1829 asking for permission for Isaiah Sr. and his brother William, to sell property in Washington County they had inherited from their father, Cader. This was the first evidence I had ever seen or heard that named ancestors more than 7 generations back.

I also found a document closing out the division and sales of property included in the probate proceedings. It asks that all bills be paid in full with Confederate States Treasury notes by July 6, 1866. By that date the majority of Confederate forces had surrendered but the war wouldn't officially come to an end until President Johnson signed a proclamation a little over a month later.

Until reading this, I never would have considered the possibility of having blood relations that actually lived during this time and accepted the Confederate government as their own. This passage is written in such a matter of fact way, it seems as though at the time that it was written the survival of the Confederate States of America was taken for granted and the possibility that the South might lose the war was somewhat remote.

The more time I spent exploring these books, the more I appreciated their beauty as objects. I was mesmerized by the use of text. The precise penmanship, organization of objects and people into lists, and language of symbolic doodles enhanced their historic value. They became precious objects that I held and manipulated with reverence. Not only for their beauty and fragility, but also for the information they held.

The most fascinating document I came across was an inventory and appraisement of Isaiah Sr.'s estate. A seven-page detailed list of everything he owned that would be up for sale; land, mundane objects, tools, furniture, kitchen utensils, and people, including my 4th-great grandmother and her three children.

Looking for Traces: Harris County Library

Near the end of my first semester, I began referencing narratives concerning my 4th-great-grandmother, Charity Ann with a series of porcelain objects. Last semester, I began depicting those narratives more directly with Ode to Charity Ann. I've been particularly interested with her story because it is a narrative not only rich in oral tradition but, as I have discovered through months of research, also has extensive documentation. Her biography is a complicated one that connects my family with difficult subject matter such as slavery, the Civil War, interracial relationships, migration, poverty, feminism, and social class. 

In following the story of my family through time, from Charity Ann's life to my own, one can see connections between individual and historical narratives in the effects of slavery and its aftermath up through the fall of Jim Crow laws. For example, if you consider the jobs that women have held in each generation in my family there is a pattern that demonstrates changes in opportunities.

Recently, I traveled with my husband to Harris County, the location of the oldest official records that I can find documenting the existence of my ancestors. I recorded my own journey in photographs. 

I had three goals for this trip... 

1.  To pinpoint the location of Negro Heel. This district was listed as my family's home on the 1850 census which was oldest documentation I had uncovered. At some point, the name of the district was changed, making it difficult to determine exactly where inside the 473 sq. mile county my family resided. 

2.  To find a marriage record of Isaiah Sr. and Mahaley who were my slave-owning 5th great grandparents according to the 1850 and 1860 census records. 

3.  To uncover evidence of Mahaley's maiden name and family and/or Isaiah Sr.'s family.

Our first stop was to the Harris County Public Library which kept a county archive room that contained old maps, census records for 1830 and 1840, and a written history of the county. I searched the census records first and found 3 possible leads for Isaiah Sr. and Mahaley's household in the 1840 census. None of these leads are a perfect match: listing only the head of household by name, the use of an initial instead of the full first name, and inconsistencies in the number of children that should be in the household make it difficult to be certain. 

The photocopy of the 1830 census was in terrible condition. I could only find one person with the appropriate last name. The first name and number and ages of children did not seem to match what I was expected, so I doubt it was the family I was looking for. I did find one possible lead for Mahaley's family based on what is likely to be her maiden name, but it is far from the evidence I hoped to uncover.

The one remarkable discovery that we made at the library was to find a list of the 1850 census district names along with the Georgia Militia District numbers that they were changed to in subsequent census records. We used that information along with a older, yet detailed county district map to pinpoint exactly were Negro Heel was located. This map also contained roads and landmarks, such as churches and cemeteries. We didn't know it at the time but those landmark listings would become significant. 

Later on, we took a drive out to the area where Negro Heel would have been. There isn't much there; an old church, a few houses, and a lot of gravel roads through rural land. We stopped at Whitesville Methodist Church, one of the oldest in the county, hoping to find some evidence of my family in the neighboring cemetery. We were unsuccessful in that search.