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These paintings are a part of my ongoing process of reclaiming my Louisiana roots. As a Southerner who has lived in Chicago since I was a teenager, I am well aware of the views that people in the North hold towards people in the South and vice versa. These views, on both sides, tend to be ham-fisted and inaccurate. Sometimes I feel I must cross a wide psychic gap when I travel from one to the other.
Seven years ago, several people at my church (Grace Episcopal Church, Chicago) decided to come together to educate ourselves about race and racism. We meet regularly to discuss how these issues affect our lives. I decided to take a close look at my own family’s history and involvement with racism and slavery. On both sides of my family, I am descended from people who owned plantations and enslaved other people.
In my mind, I carry strident, contradictory voices about this fact: that of the scornful, self-righteous Yankee and that of the prideful, defensive Southerner. Neither of these voices is accurate or helpful. They are voices of confusion, rooted in centuries of slavery, the struggle for abolition, and in the blood of the Civil War. These voices are alive and well in our culture today.
In 2005, I started delving into my father’s family history. My family owned a sugar plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana for most of the 19th century. I started researching the history of sugar in the Americas, and I visited the location where the plantation once stood. Sugar cane still grows on this land.
The landscape paintings in this show are based on photographs from my trips to St. James Parish. The images of the sugar kettles come from the beautiful, handmade iron cauldrons that were used to crystallize the juice from sugar cane. These creations are still abundant in the South Louisiana landscape.
These paintings are about my claiming my own history, claiming who I am, who my people are today and were in the past. They are also an exercise in engaging those loud voices in my head, the Yankee and the Southerner. I place myself at the crux of these two powerful crosscurrents so I can find the strength and flexibility to nurture a new point of view. I want to know and understand these voices, and ultimately I want to create the space for them to rest.
Slavery is a horrific part of our past. We don’t want to think about it. I’d rather not even write the word. I am not claiming to solve anything in these paintings, but I do know that they play a huge role in claiming my own integrity—facing what I’d rather not face in order to forge a path through it towards a more humane and complete understanding of United States history.