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.
Within the phenomenon of translation, two word worlds are forever locked in an embrace of argument and seduction. As though they are lovers locked in a train berth, embarked on a cross-continental journey. In this awkward, unfamiliar, clumsy space, sudden intimacies take place. For the native tongue, a second language requires a tongue touching...
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