Various fragments from my ongoing body of work exploring ghosts in the soul of the American South, especially those that inhabit the land where I was raised in Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina. Battlefields and beauty and bigotry, and a great many cemeteries. The pained terrain of my mother’s family, who arrived Charleston harbor in 1670 and saw it all.
Much of this recent work undertaken through a National Endowment for the Arts residency fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I worked at the Lynchburg Old City Cemetery. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the town of Lynchburg was founded by a family of planters named Lynch – the terms “lynching,” “lynch law,” and “lynch mob” all derive from their name and legacy. The Lynchburg Old City Cemetery was founded in 1806 and is the burial site for more than 15,000 people of African descent, both enslaved and free: nearly 70% of those buried there are children under twelve, and women. From 1806 and 1895, the City Cemetery was the only burial ground open to African Americans in Lynchburg. It is now the oldest continually-operated public cemetery in Virginia.
It took straight white people being shot in Tucson before folks begin to say it's gone too far. For nearly everybody else, endemic hate behavior in Arizona has been a basic fact of life and death. When I lived in Tucson and worked on the Tohono O'Odham Nation, I worked in government- and NGO-run...
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