Nostalgia and Invisible Racism

Nostalgia and Invisible Racism

The title of this exhibit weaves three threads of thought. On one thread I was thinking about invisibility and race. I read, and copied onto handmade paper the text of the novel ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, about the many ways a black man can be rendered invisible in society.  Another thread was about racism invisible to the ones who hold it.  They either deny that it exists in them or really don’t see it.  The third thread was about nostalgia, the kind that looks back on pleasant memories while overlooking brutal history and racial injustice.  Nostalgia in the white South is a feature that is familiar to me.

I look back fondly on family dinner table arguments.  I valued our ability to talk about issues of the time even though they contained sentences like “society is not ready for integrated swimming pools yet”.  I could disagree without feeling the kind of despair and outrage that I feel today over yet another black body shot or incarcerated. Can the one be implicated in the other?  Does nostalgia contain an abeyance of responsibility?

I look back to memories like watching heavy rain through dark green trees surrounding my grandmother's screened porch in Atlanta. In a drawer somewhere is a letter proudly describing a long ago cousin who rode with the Red Shirts and how he raced on horseback to vote in three different polling places to help install Wade Hampton as governor of South Carolina in 1876.  Both of my parents were born and brought up in South Carolina. My great grandmother’s sisters sewed for the Red Shirts.  I grew up with these stories.

The work of this exhibit uses paper I made from the pulp of my grandmother’s journals.  The text of ‘Invisible Man’ pushes its way into this paper toward an undulating water stain. On the opposite wall more papers hang from a tatted thread. They are weighted with small scrolls bearing texts of South Carolina slave narratives. The wistful beauty of the paper bears scars barely hinted.  Much hangs in the balance.

detail, from chapter 4

Artist Statement, as mounted in the exhibit.

The soil of South Carolina has a place in my soul. To make peace with the South and my whiteness I have dug into layers of sentimentality tilled into the garden of family stories. Nostalgia can be dangerous. The sentimentality of the “Lost Cause” blurred the brutal foundations of the Southern economy. I think of a great great-grandfather who farmed the soil of the old South. I think about the soils of land and property, ownership of land and ownership of human beings. I conflate the words ‘soil’ and ‘soul’ in a reflection of the tangle of affections and cruelties embedded in the heritage of the American South. My emotional landscape with regard to my family’s legacy is fraught with contradictions just as America’s landscape is fraught with injustices. Healing will require tilling through thick layers of white nostalgic sentiments and turning under ingrained crops of racial animus. We must explore the present character of racist thinking before we can grow new crops and new possibilities.

‘INVISIBLE MAN’ Series

Text from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" is written to the edge of a water stain on paper made from a southern matriarch's pulped journals

The Southern heritage is mine.  The journal shreds in the paper are my grandmother's.  The inherited repercussions of slavery and racism belong to America as a whole.  .

"Uncle Mad"  detail

The note, in my grandmother's handwriting, reads:

From the left Ann, Libby, Kitty Lewis, "Uncle Mad",  Billy & Robert Lewis.

In the back of Uncle Mad is our cook's (Clara Johnson) brother Tom (I think) who helped in the garden.

We were listening as Uncle Mad (age ?) played the accordion and told us about being born a slave & who were the kind masters and who were not.

'Prayers and Debts'

The little hanging scrolls each represent one of the 285 slave narratives collected in South Carolina during the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project in the late 1930’s.