Black Southerners, Storytelling, and Remembering in the Digital Age
While conducting interviews at the Crossroads, the subject of my dissertation had become a regular topic of community conversation. The women I interviewed, as well as other members of the community, began to ask how they could follow the project—how they could listen to and engage with their interviews as well as those of other community members; how they could invite new collaborators to the project; and how they could record new memories, when they came. In response, and thinking about the archive of the future (Derrida 1995), I developed a mobile application, which is tentatively titled Storied, that functions as both an interview streaming platform and an interview recording device, enabling users to listen to oral
histories from a particular project or collection; and to record, upload, transcribe, and share their own—right from their smartphones or tablets.
Taking a feminist ethics approach to archiving—which entails seeing archivists as caregivers and “centrepieces in an ever-changing web of responsibility through which they are connected to the records’ creators, the records’ subjects, the records’ users, and larger
communities” (Caswell as Cifor 2016, 25)— my goal when conceptualizing the app was for its design to reflect my views on community-engaged and public-facing research, that scholars and community members are equal partners in producing knowledge. Users of the app, then, are encouraged to not just explore existing interviews, but to actively participate in the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of new ones. It is my hope that Storied will encourage users to create digital archives of community and family histories for populations that have traditionally been marginalized, and whose stories have historically been relegated to the background. Like Makeshifted, Storied is an example of makeshifting for community studies. It was developed out of a particular kind of necessity—mobile storytelling—but has evolved into a tool for
empowerment. What kinds of archives could working-class communities of color build if they had the tools oral historians use right on their smartphones? Like Makeshifted, Storied also serves as a portable way to remember.
Chapter 6: Conclusion “That Land”
“Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I use to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
This dissertation ends where it began: in Mamie’s neat, white shotgun house, down the fork and to the left, directly in the sun, in God’s spotlight. This time, though, there was no TV playing; no box fans blowing in the background. The rooms were dark and deep and held material memories of the world she had left behind.
Her bibles. Cast iron pots. A glass cake plate. Her eyeglasses. Combs and brushes on the dresser, next to a framed portrait of Barack Obama, a statue of a black angel, and a bottle of
White Diamonds perfume. Church hats. Pearls. Her pocketbook.
My grandmother, Mamie Barnes, passed away on April 13th, 2018, on a Friday
morning—she gave us time to prepare. Friday was her day, too. She was always up and ready early because she knew somebody would stop by and offer to take her somewhere. She knew what she was doing. Women like that don’t leave here by mistake.
On the way to her funeral—I rode with my mom, sister, and niece—we stopped by the church so that my mother could drop something off before the service started. On our way from the church to my aunt’s house—we were meeting the rest of the family there so that we could
take the funeral car back to the church together—we passed all those houses that held all those black folks who had made the Crossroads, but who too had gone on.
Like Sam Neal and Sugar Bee, whose white shotgun house still had that 1990 navy-blue Dodge Dynasty parked out front, like it was waiting for somebody to come outside, or for them to come back home [Figure 26].
Figure 26: The home of Sam Neal and Sugar Bee at the Crossroads. Photo by Kimber Thomas.
We drove up and down those winding roads, and after we passed that last curve—that real deep one before you get to the brown and grey and green Spanish moss trees—we met the white Cadillac hearse that would carry my grandmother to her final resting place.
I was driving, and my mother, who was sitting on the backseat, trying to talk through tears, asked me to turn the car around so that she could go get her mama. She raised up and held onto the back of the seat where I was sitting and said it again: it still echoes. My mama wanted her mama and I wanted her, too. But we had to go on.
That day, those things, that memory, I will never forget. Never forget.
Because what we had just witnessed was that shiny hearse bringing Mamie Barnes, my beloved grandmother, through the Crossroads, for the last time.
On Objects, Oral History, & Remembering
My grandmother and the other black women who worked as sharecroppers and domestics at the Crossroads during Jim Crow had shared with me their memories of making, doing, and being—makeshifting—and how they made their lives significantly meaningful through these acts. They had negotiated their collective identity through their communal representation of this shared experience. In their memories of “making do,” they described how they repurposed
Prince Albert tobacco tins into hair rollers, flour sacks into dresses, and Sears Roebuck catalogs into wallpaper, in order to organize the logics of culture and community, to reimagine their circumstances, and to resist in the face of racial, class, and gender discrimination during the early twentieth century. At the root of their oppression was always the prospect of their liberation; and through makeshifting, the black women at the Crossroads both demonstrated an extraordinary level of creativity in the act of living and found a way to articulate the breadth of their humanity despite the forces that were pressing on them.
To let my grandmother go was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. This was her project: she helped me schedule interviews, answered questions, provided phone numbers and addresses, and rode with me to my interviewee’s houses. She passed away the day after I completed my last interview.
As I watched her body being lowered into the ground at our church’s cemetery during her homegoing, I reflected on what she had left with me.
Stories:
Of you and your best friend Christine Taylor, who, in the 1940s at Second Union School at the Crossroads, would hold hands and swing each other around in a circle singing “shoe fly,” and how Ms. Taylor would be looking back at herself while singing to see if she was “shaking behind.”
Or about our old preacher at Rohelia Missionary Baptist Church, who wore gold chains around his neck, gold rings on all his fingers, and knew he could preach; but who hung with bad men in his off-time and lost his sight—what you said was God’s way of punishing him for not practicing what he preached.
God don’t like ugly.
Or about that red bird that flew into your bedroom to comfort you after Ann died.
God will make a way.
And finally, about the black women at the Crossroads, who worked, stayed home, cleaned houses, sewed clothes, raised babies, raised hogs, picked cotton, shucked corn—worked their fingers to the bone—but who knew that there was power and agency in survival, that survival was a creative force, and that “making do,” or makeshifting, signaled their own participation in God’s liberation.
Those stories, those things, those memories, I will never forget. Never forget.
***
In this concluding chapter, I discuss the implications of makeshifting and what the concept suggests for future research.
Makeshifting and the Study of Black Life
Makeshifting is defined as black women’s logical, material, temporary responses to discrimination, oppression, racism, or lack. Makeshifting, which requires patching and piecing, also requires black women to view objects as multifunctional; that is, objects meant for one
domain will almost always overlap with or be utilized for another. Makeshifting is time
consuming. It is an arduous, laborious process that requires black women, especially, to imagine, conceptualize, and create, again and again. Makeshifting is also provisional, which means that while it provides temporary remediation to forces of oppression, dispossession, and constraint, it can never permanently erase them.
Because makeshifting is provisional, it is also cyclical. It is a process that requires black people to constantly develop and imagine material strategies, methods, and tools to overcome dispossession and structures of inequality in America. Makeshifting is generational practice—we pass it down from one generation to the next in the things we do and make and in the stories we keep and tell. “The House that Black Built” demonstrates how makeshifting allowed rural black women, in particular, to—in spite of their social and economic conditions—reclaim a measure of control over their lives; literally and symbolically shift power dynamics within their community; [re]imagine rural geographies; and create alternative spaces that both responded to their needs
and enriched their lives with beauty and sometimes, joy. Makeshifting—as a mode of practice, a memory, and a way of life—was articulated by black women who worked as domestics and sharecroppers in a rural Mississippi community, demonstrating the ways in which black folks in community are already doing the theorizing for us.
This dissertation contributes to a growing body of work in African American Studies that examines the creative strategies (black) communities employ to reclaim black life in America. Anthropologist Aimee Meredith Cox’s Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (2015), for instance, explores citizenship through the lens of black girls who lived in a homeless shelter in post-industrial Detroit between 2000-2008, and “describes how young black women living in the United States engage with, confront, challenge, invert, unsettle, and expose the material impact of system oppression” (2015, 7). Through the lens of shapeshifting— which Cox defines as an act, a theory, and a form of praxis (2015, 7)—the author describes how young black girls shift “the terms through which educational, training, and social service
institutions attempt to shape young black women into manageable and respectable members of society whose social citizenship is always questionable and never guaranteed” (2015, 7). Like my work at the Crossroads, Cox is interested in the potential for black women and girls to inform and transform theory “and its ripple effect on…material realties” (2015, 8), and she explores these dynamics by examining the “quotidian spaces of meaning-making that black women and girls enliven and invent” (2015, 25). Like shapeshifting, makeshifting is another tool that black folks include in their cultural toolkit to move through and exist in the world as freely as possible.
“The House that Black Built” also contributes to work in black studies that explores how race—which is often thought to be “invisible” (Bonilla-Silva 2018)—is sensed, experienced, and lived, and how black people respond to these dynamics. While I argue that race is experienced
materially—and that black folks respond materially—African American Studies scholar Simone Browne, in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), for instance, explores these issues through the lens of surveillance. She argues that an understanding of blackness is integral to understanding surveillance—that “a realization of the conditions of blackness can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance” (2015, 8). Like makeshifting and shapeshifting, Browne conceptualizes a theory—dark sousveillance—which uncovers the tactics people use to render themselves out of sight, and that “plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being” (2015, 21). Makeshifting demonstrates how black people use and transform objects to render themselves visible, to construct, sometimes, alternate ways and aesthetics of being.
Like Browne’s work, “The House that Black Built” is concerned with matter—black matter and black materiality—and with the idea that blackness is malleable matter, that we shift and adjust and make and remake and unmake in order to fit within this world. Since African Americans arrived in this county, we have had to makeshift, shapeshift, render ourselves visible and out of sight. It is no coincidence that the 2013 activist movement, Black Lives Matter, which protests violence and systemic racism against black people, includes the word “matter” in its title. And it is precisely this word—“matter”—that causes the movement to constantly be taken out of context. To say that black lives matter is not to say that black lives matter more than white lives, or any other life. To say that black lives matter is not about black lives mattering as much as it is about black lives being composed of matter; in other words, to say that black lives matter is to say that black people are here and have substance and are whole and human and have a right to life, just like everyone else.
In addition to content, my contribution to the fields of African American and Southern Studies is also in form and style. Throughout this dissertation, I have blended narrative and storytelling with theory and visual art, and I have structured this dissertation—from “The Processional,” where I introduce my interviewees, to “The Crossroads” where I tell what they did in life, to the “Interment,” where I reflect on the passing of my grandmother—in the style of a black funeral service in the American South, to both honor and reflect black cultural traditions and the contributions of the women in the rural South who have shaped my world. As a scholar of black life, it is important for me to incorporate aspects of black life in culture not just in what I write, but also in how I write.
“The House that Black Built” offers a foundation for a set of new inquiries. If “it is in the fashioning of the material world that human beings come to know themselves” (Marx 1975, 329), then what can objects do for the study of black life? What can makeshifting do for the study of blackness in America, but particularly in the American South? And finally, what can storytelling do for the interdisciplinary study of African American life and culture in the American South?
That Land, The Crossroads, & “The House that Black Built”
“The House that Black Built” is a metaphor for the experiences and struggles of black Americans globally, but particularly those in the rural American South, who had to make a way, or respond creatively and materially to oppressive forces. The House that Black Built holds stories of black folks who knew struggle and who knew joy, who engaged in small acts of claiming and reclamation, for freedom, fulfillment, and equality. These stories are recorded in the land at the Crossroads, through the shared memories of the black women who makeshifted,
and who knew that to innovate was to live in hope. Their choices were made in community, and made possible by community, and through their creative resistance and resilient creativity, the black women at the Crossroads altered their circumstances, remade their worlds, and made themselves whole.
At the Crossroads, folks say God will make a way.
Recessional
Come and go to that land Come and go to that land Come and go to that land
Where I’m bound Where I’m bound
APPENDIX: MAMIE BARNES’ FINAL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT59
Interviewee: Mamie Barnes Interviewer: Kimber Thomas Date: July 2017
Length: 55:27
START OF INTERVIEW
KIMBER THOMAS: This is Kimber Thomas. I’m at 3145 Fisher Ferry Road with Ms. Mamie Barnes. OK. You can start out by telling me where you were born and what your childhood was like.
MAMIE BARNES: I was born in Hinds County, to Lottie Clark and Ernest Clarke, and from there, I can remember as I started school…no, I didn’t, I wasn’t old enough to go to school. But we lived in a little old house. It was on that Cayuga Road; a two-bedroom house. It was a one bedroom and a kitchen. So mama had to use the kitchen for the outside, like, when she raised corn, she had to put the corn in the kitchen. And then later she got a little chicken house built and we had chickens. And she would put the peanuts, the popcorn, everything she raised, she would hang it up out in the chicken house. And finally, it become fall and it snowed and the chickens was out there, it was snowing in the daytime and all the chicken got fastened up under the snow. And they had to stay in there two or three days ‘till the snow was gone. So when the snow melted, the chicken came out, they was alright. So, when time come to farm, we had go to
the field. I was little but I was just out there, my sister and brother, they would have to knocked the stalks down for the farming next year. And they would do that and then when planting time come, mama ‘nem would plant cotton, plant corn. We would—they would go hoe the corn, then they’d go hoe the cotton. And that’s the way we had to gather the corn for meal, for cornbread, and make the garden for all the vegetables. And pick the cotton on the end of the year. And well when school time came, I was six years old. And then mama was working for a white lady. She was named Ms. Helen Brown. Then I didn’t have nobody to keep me so I had to go to school. It was about—let’s see—it was about six miles, I know—I might’ve been more than that—where we had to walk to school every day. My sister, she would carry the dinner bucket and my