Your Own Place

 

At what point in time does a place become your own? Is it when you finally finish paying off the mortgage and have the deed of trust in your hands? Is it when you realize you love it so much you will fight and die for it? Does it take living on it for a specific amount of time before you know it is yours? Is it when you've birthed children on it? Or buried a family member in it? Perhaps the better questions are: does a place ever become your own? Is it possible to ever really own land?

When I was documenting the construction of I-26, I had a conversation with Richard Dillingham, a seventh generation mountaineer who at the time was curator of the Rural Life Museum at Mars Hill College. Richard described to me his evolution on the subject of land ownership in the wake of so many people losing land to eminent domain for the new interstate highway. During an archeological dig prior to the road construction, Dillingham said, a 12,000 year old clovis spear point was discovered close to the land that had been in his family for 200 years. The realization that people had inhabited his family land for thousands of years put his own family's ownership of that same land in perspective for him. He began to understand we never really own anything – that we are mere stewards, charged with the responsible management of land entrusted to our care.

When my daughter was a child, I would often tell her bedtime stories of a young Native American girl who visited our land hundreds of years ago. I would talk about how that girl, and her family, had stayed for short periods of time hunting game and berries, and perhaps even hid from soldiers during the Great Removal. I spoke of how that girl, like my daughter, had played in the woods and creek, slept under the stars, and drunk water from our springs. It was a story based on the facts of pottery chards and broken arrow points found along our creek bottom after plowing. It's doubtful that Native girl of my imagination thought of this place as something she owned, as most Native peoples eschewed ownership of land. But I wonder if she thought of this place as hers. Did she, like my daughter, hide in the crevice of the big rock and find secret places in the woods? Did she come to feel at ease in our forest, even in the dark of night, and during the storms of summer? Did she have a sense of care for this place, knowing in turn that the place would care for her? And is this reciprocal nature of care and time the true measure of when a place becomes your own?

 

The Gift of Access

 

 

Throughout my career I've been invited to share the lives of many people. Sometimes those relationships have been brief – lasting long enough for a brief conversation or a photograph or two. Others have lasted a lifetime. I was asked recently why people would let me photograph or write about them in an intimate manner? Why would they let me into the day-to-day of their lives? Partly, this has to do with my ability to find common ground and gain trust with most people; not all. In the mountains people would say about me that “he's never known a stranger.” It's a trait I inherited from my Chicago-born father, and he from his. My children and siblings are much the same way. For me, given what I do, it's meant that people ultimately trust I will represent them, their families, and their communities in a way that's open, honest, and believable. But beyond “being natured that way,” as Dellie would have said, people have come into my life through the gift of access.

I was thinking about this last week as I wrote about Tanese – how did I get there? How could I have possibly found the Wilson family and been in the position to make that portrait of Tanese? It was through Jean Wynot who, with her husband Ralph, owned a dairy in a neighboring county. Jean was also a farm activist who regularly re-structured farm plans for farmers facing foreclosure, working through the same organization I freelanced with. One of the farm families Jean worked with was the Wilsons. She spoke with Tanese's father, Doug, about me and soon asked me to join her for a visit. I could never have gotten there on my own. It happens this way for most documentary-type photographers and writers. In almost all cases, someone – a mutual friend, an organization, a neighbor who “knows this guy” – brought us into these new worlds and made it possible for us to tell their stories.

We've all received help along our diverse life paths – access to a photo shoot, a student loan or government grant, land willed to us by our parents, a recommendation for a job, or an idea from a friend. Perhaps, it's simply the good roads and communication networks provided us that help us run our businesses or sell our products. It's rare, near impossible, for any of us to make it entirely by ourselves. For Doug Wilson, his gift was a prothesis and physical therapy that allowed him to continue farming with his family. Understanding, and accepting, our interdependency doesn't diminish our accomplishments. It doesn't say I didn't make my photographs or create my books. It doesn't say you didn't do the work to get that degree, or farm that land, or build that business. It doesn't mean “You didn't build that.” What it means is we recognize we've all had help along the way. And perhaps we would function better as a society if we remained humbled by and thankful for living in a place where help is available when each of us needs it.  

 

Tanese

I think often about Tanese Wilson. I met her about twenty-five years ago on a visit to her parent’s dairy in the small community of Waco, North Carolina. At that time Doug Wilson, Tanese’s father, was one of three remaining black dairymen in the state. It was a small farm, milking fewer than 100 cows, with adjoining fields for hay, corn for silage, and a large garden. It was a family operation and, more than most small farmers, Doug depended on his family for help. His wife had developed multiple sclerosis some years earlier that left her unable to do any of the hard work of farming and then Doug lost his left arm to the PTO shaft on his tractor. Tanese, though still in high school, became his right-hand person, getting up long before daylight to help Doug milk, going to school, and then going back to the barn long after dark for the evening milking. She spoke to me about wanting to join the service after high school so she could learn a trade and help provide for the family she wanted to have.  

She got pregnant her senior year. As determined as her father, she finished school and got a job as a secretary with a local business. After her child was born, the child’s father refused to provide any support and Tanese made it clear he would not see his child until he did. She continued living with her parents and went back to work, her mother and grandmother caring for her baby while she was on the job. One day, sitting behind her desk, surely with a photograph of her young daughter in front of her, he walked into the office, pulled out a handgun, and shot her. She died before the ambulance arrived.

I visited the Wilsons some months later. It had not been an easy time and it was difficult for Doug to talk about any of it. The man would be in jail for a long time, but Doug and Genevieve had had to fight his family for custody of the baby – a fight they won, but left them emotionally and financially drained. Despite all of this - his injury, his wife’s illness, his daughter’s death, their financial struggles – Doug remained humble, thankful for his granddaughter’s presence in their lives, and the memory she provided them of Tanese. 

Get Right

When I moved to Madison County in 1973, this barn and its attached sign were prominent on the Marshall Bypass. Heading west on Hwy. 25-70, it was impossible to not see the barn or get the message. I’m almost certain this is the first photograph I made in Madison County. 

I’ve never been able to find the negative and the only evidence of the image was an old, badly printed 6x8 print; and my memory of making the picture. The print was relatively easy to fix with the help of digital imaging and a great assistant. But the actual picture making - stopping on the road, getting out my camera and pressing the shutter - proved to be harder than I would have imagined.

I was concerned about making a photograph of someone’s private property, knowing the high value local people placed on their land and their land rights. I didn’t want to get shot, or yelled at, and it didn’t occur to me to find the owner and ask permission. I just knew I wanted, to the point of need, to have that image. So, one sleety day, after driving by the barn three or four times to make sure no one was there, I stopped and stole a shot, not without a certain amount of guilt.

It’s a ubiquitous message in the rural South, and maybe it’s because I live where I live that it seems more evident in mountain communities. In 1973, coming from the North and Midwest, it was not something I had ever seen before and this barn became a clear symbol of my move to a place I knew nothing about. There was something about the starkness and the fundamentalism of the sign, and the prominence of its display, that made me feel that by making a picture of it I would be signing onto the program, or at the very least, accepting the fact that demonstrative belief played a big role in the community.

The sign is long gone, as is the barn, although the message remains. I see it everywhere – tacked to trees, printed on plywood, black on white.It’s a good message – Get Right With God – and I now can comfortably translate it to mean simply being at peace with myself, and my personal notion of a higher power. Years ago, however, the message for me was fearful, demanding and narrow, with an unmistakable “or else” quality about it. It gave me pause – not only for my very soul, but for how that unbending dogma would cast a shadow over my life should I stay.