Blog Post

I recently bought a crumbling old house in a historically gay neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. I met my ex-lover in this house five years ago. At the time they lived with a coterie of other young people. They threw raucous queer parties and housed folks who didn't have anywhere else to go.

A few blocks down the street is another building. There, in 1971, a group of young men and women founded the Gay Alliance of the Roanoke Valley (GARV), the region's first gay liberation organization. This building is now a medical office. I come here once a year to see my endocrinologist. He prescribes spironolactone and estradiol to help my body transform into something approximating that of a woman.

The local neighborhood association puts up signs that read, "A Past with a Future." As I see it, the neighborhood's past is rich with gay history, and the future is my transitioning body and the pink, white, and blue flag I fly in the driveway.       

Queer history lives here. It's overlapping in the spaces of my neighborhood. It's in the bones of the buildings. Queer ghosts inhabit the walls. Archaeological troves are remnant in the yards. My dog June digs them up with her ready paws and pearl-white fangs. My gender transformation is hitched to the woodwork and to the water pipes of all the apartment buildings where I have lived. People have lived queerly in these spaces. I have bought a home that not only holds the past but makes space for the future—for my womanhood, my motherhood, and for the chosen family I will assemble underneath this roof. 

LGBTQ people have long known that our stories are not to be found in the so-called annals of history, and that we have to look in unexpected places to find our past. Lesbians in Roanoke in the 1980s devoted an entire issue of their newsletter, Skip Two Periods, to "Discovering Our Heritage." The writer, "B. F.," wrote about finding her heritage at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, in Jonathan Ned Katz's book Gay American History, through the National Women's History Project, and in the published letters shared among nineteenth-century women. She also suggested that lesbian history is found in our families. "Write to your grandmother and ask her about her grandmother," she pleaded. Indeed, queer history is present in the way my parents reacted when I first came out, as they referenced a family member who died of AIDS in 1989 and hinted that I might face a similar fate. We carry queer trauma in our bodies. All of us—straight, gay, cis, trans—live in a world shaped by the queer past.

We have the tools to probe this history on the local level. Since the 1970s, queer history projects have flourished across the United States. New archives are forged from the remains stowed away in activists' attics and closets. Oral history collections are assembled from the stories of our elders, talking about what it was like growing up as a trans person in Appalachia in the 1960s, for example. Doing queer history work provides us with the opportunity to bring LGBTQ people together across generations, to talk about what was and what can be, to find new meaning in the spaces of our lives.

Six years ago, I helped found the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a community history project that has since engaged hundreds of local people in the process of researching and interpreting queer pasts. This has involved creating a permanent archive in partnership with the local public library system, developing an oral history collection through interviews with our elders, leading monthly walking tours, unveiling digital exhibits, releasing podcasts, and working with local youth on interactive theater and zine-making workshops. This project is how I ended up spending time in this house; it's where I fell in love with a project member who lived here. It's how we know the geography of bars and cruising spaces that once littered the neighborhood, and the all-queer and all-trans houses that still stand. It's how I discovered my gender. Interviewing trans women about their lives, I realized this was also my story. So I came out into the spaces of the project, into the spaces of our city, into a new relationship with queer history. A past with a future.

Every October we celebrate LGBTQ History Month. To me, this month is a reminder that we are still fighting, especially here in the South, for students' right to learn basic LGBTQ history in the classroom. But beyond the metanarrative of what should be taught in school, there are thousands of local queer histories still waiting to be uncovered. This work takes all of us—students, elders, volunteers, professionals. Do you know when the first gay organization was founded in your community? Have you met your trans elders? The work of doing queer history has the power to transform lives. It has the power to give new meaning to the places we call home.

About the Author

Gregory Samantha Rosenthal is the author of Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

Excerpt

Georgetown, April 2017

It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn light. I was headed to a religious service at Georgetown University that would acknowledge the trauma of a massive slave sale in 1838, a deal that shored up the finances of the struggling college and sent more than two hundred men, women, and children into the cane fields of Louisiana. Most of the families torn apart in the sale could trace their lineage to White Marsh, one of the Jesuit-owned plantations located in Prince George's County, Maryland.

I had been researching the history of the White Marsh families for nearly a decade, uncovering the lawsuits they had brought against the Jesuits and other prominent Maryland slaveholders long before the 1838 sale. Some won their freedom. Others didn't—but each of their cases challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law. Together they counted among the most significant freedom suits in U.S. history. And there were hundreds of others. Yet their particular stories would lead me, like the Georgetown Jesuits, to reckon with what I did not know about my own family and its role in this story.

More than a hundred descendants, a dozen university officials, and a cluster of Jesuit priests assembled inside Healy Hall for the liturgy and slowly processed into an ornate, wood-paneled auditorium on the third floor. After the opening prayer Sandra Green Thomas rose to address the congregation. Thomas, a descendant of the Harris and Ware families and president of the GU272 Descendants Association, waited a long moment before speaking. "My people were humble," she began. "They provided for their families. They tried to protect their children as best they could from the cruelties of this world, but given what the world is and what people can be, they were not always as successful as they would have hoped." The anguish and fortitude of her ancestors echoed in the firmness of her tone. "Their pain was unparalleled," she observed. "Their pain is still here. It burns in the soul of every person of African descent in the United States. It lives in people, some of whom have no knowledge of its origins but cope with the ever-present longing and lack it causes."¹"Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope," Georgetown University, April 18, 2017. Notes and recording in possession of the author. A full recording is available at from Georgetown University at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO4Xsz36kTU, with Sandra Green Thomas's remarks beginning at minute 29:33. Several major research projects have come to the fore around the Georgetown history. First, the Georgetown Slavery Archive (slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu, herein abbreviated GSA) is a repository of archival materials related to the Maryland Jesuits and Georgetown University. Second, the Georgetown Memory Project (www.georgetownmemoryproject.org) is an independent nonprofit dedicated to researching, finding, and advocating for the descendants of the 272. The project released its database of descendants in May 2019 with American Ancestors by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (see the GU272 Descendants, 1785–2000 database, www.americanancestors.org/search/databasesearch/2756/gu272-descendants-1785-2000). Third, historian Sharon Leon has undertaken a highly significant digital history-based analysis of the families on the Jesuit plantations. See Sharon Leon, The Jesuit Plantation Project: An Examination of the Enslaved Persons Owned (and Sold) by the Maryland Province Jesuits, 1717–1838 (https://jesuitplantationproject.org). I have also followed closely the Universities Studying Slavery working group at the University of Virginia since 2014 (slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery) and other university reports, especially Stephen Mullen and Simon Newman, Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow, Report and Recommendations of the University of Glasgow History of Slavery Steering Committee (September 2018), and Princeton Seminary and Slavery: A Report of the Historical Audit Committee (slavery.ptsem.edu/full-report). Also see Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, reprint ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

I had met Thomas in New Orleans for the first time a few weeks before the ceremony. I had asked her then what slavery meant to her family, and she had said that slavery was quite simply one thing: theft. To understand American history required dealing with the fact that slavery was premised on a series of lies. The slaveholders, whether Jesuit priests or English tobacco planters, saw themselves differently, of course. We had talked about how they rationalized slavery on the basis of race, religion, law, science, and history and with myriad other prejudices, doctrines, sentiments, and myths.

Now, I wondered how Thomas would broach the lies that slaveholders told and the theft that slavery was. She turned to the heart of the matter, and to the Jesuits whose predecessors had enslaved her ancestors. "I know it is difficult to honestly look at yourself, the way you operate in the world, and your true motivations and priorities." Americans face an uncomfortable truth, she noted. History demanded "self-revelation" about the stories we accept without questioning, about the narratives we use without thinking. She offered forgiveness to the Jesuits, but she sought justice. Thomas spoke for all of the descendants who thirsted for an acknowledgment of their family's particular enslavement, and after she finished thunderous applause erupted in the room.

An expectant hush fell across the auditorium as the Reverend Tim Kesicki, a Jesuit priest and president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, rose to address the descendants. He wore a plain black business suit and Roman clerical collar. With an air of earnestness, he spoke slowly, like a pastor to his flock. The long shadow of enslavement, Kesicki said, "remains with us to this day, trapping us in an historic truth." The truth, he admitted, was that the Jesuits had "betrayed the very name of Jesus." Kesicki offered a sweeping apology, confessed the sin of enslavement, and sought "on bended knee" forgiveness for the Jesuits' entire participation in slavery.

But he did not kneel. The remarks, sincere and heartfelt as they were, seemed strangely inadequate. Kesicki wished to acknowledge the sins of the past but was unprepared to deal with the real trauma the Church had caused and offered no meaningful pathway forward. His apology and the request for forgiveness fell flat. Descendants turned their heads away.

In this uncomfortable moment, something more than a Jesuit failure came into view—Kesicki's words symbolized an American failure to deal with a hurtful history. He had not referred to a single descendant or ancestor by name; he had directed his apology to his "sisters and brothers." For hundreds of years the Jesuits had spoken to the enslaved families on similar occasions without addressing them individually, and here at Georgetown the particularity of their enslavement appeared again to be disregarded. Kesicki's apology, nonetheless, marked a subtle but decisive departure in the Jesuits' acknowledgment of their role in slavery. Even the most recent Jesuit histories had failed to fully acknowledge the Society of Jesus's complicity. Indeed, until Kesicki spoke, most attempts to come to terms with this history had downplayed the Jesuit slaveholders' actions: decisions explained, rationalized, and inspected, all pointing to something called "slavery" but not to the families they enslaved. The same vagueness could describe how Americans more generally regard slavery.²Robert Emmett Curran, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2012), 36–38. See also Edward F. Beckett, "Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 28, no. 5 (1996), which explains the Jesuits as paternalists: "To a certain extent, the plantation formed a kind of domestic parish to which slaves belonged" (11). Beckett concludes that Jesuits treated slaves "no worse than" other slaveholders, but following Curran, he emphasizes that the Jesuits encouraged slaves to gain skills. In the most recent and thorough review of Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland, Thomas Murphy, S.J., argues that the Jesuits understood themselves as paternalists and as superior, like all other enslavers in the early American republic. His account is the most balanced examination of the Jesuit role in slaveholding, yet his stance is similarly apologetic. As for their decision to sell supernumerary slaves, Murphy concludes that the Jesuits could not bring themselves to do so and instead sold the physically fit and "missed an opportunity to develop a morally strong case for making profits out of right motives." See Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 72.

But America's founding, like Georgetown University's, cannot be disentangled from its enslavement of particular families. Our national imagination still sees slavery as an aberration, a detour, from the true story of the country. Many Americans see enslaved people in history as faceless and nameless, victims of a long-ago system that has now disappeared. In such a situation, the nation needs to experience what we at the liturgy experienced: a confrontation, a reckoning, with real people, with real histories, with real families whose descendants live among us. Until such encounters happen more widely, Americans will continue to live in separate historical spheres of understanding, a condition that more than anything limits our ability to come to terms with the past. We cannot, of course, do anything to change what happened long ago, but we can change the way we understand what happened and what it means to us in the present.³A central aspect of the approach taken here is historical imagination. This asks readers to experience a world other than their own and to step outside of themselves into the characters in this history. Recent examples of narrative imagination include Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). Each is an inspiration in the form of its narrative and in its attention to re-creating the voices, situations, and daily experiences of people left out of the archive. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

About the Author

William G. Thomas III is the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is on the Southern Spaces editorial board, and was co-founder and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.

Blog Post

I can remember the first time I understood death. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, early in the mornings, my mother would visit one of her home care patients, an elderly man ("Mr. S") who lived alone around the corner from us. My mother runs a home health and hospice department with the local hospital, and for as long as I can recall, she has woven in and out of the lives of others, helping them heal in the comfort of their homes or easing their suffering as they died. Down in the Delta, the alluvial floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in northwest Mississippi, perennially listed as the poorest and most unhealthy region in the country, the need for healthcare providers like my mother remains unbounded. Chronic sickness and death saturate the landscape.

My mother would leave each morning to visit Mr. S. Usually she would wake my two siblings and me at 6:45, leave around 7:00 with makeup done but hot curlers still in her hair, return around 7:45, remove the curlers, mist her hair with her "Big Sexy Hair" spray, and drive us five minutes to school before heading to the office and further patients to visit and administrative duties to complete. While she was gone, we kids would take turns showering in our house's one shower, make our sack lunches (usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some version of potato chips), and be ready to leave when she got back home. On this particular morning, my mother did not come back home at 7:45. As an eleven-year-old, I first thought, "We're going to be late for school."

Only when my mother called home around 8:00 and told us we better walk that day did I understand that something had happened at Mr. S's house. I grabbed my little brother's hand as my older sister grabbed mine and we headed out.

When my mother got home that evening, I knew she had been crying. Mr. S was a special patient, one she had seen every morning for several years. That morning he had died. Slowly, the narrative unfolded: she had not been able to get him to come to his front door; she could see through the window into his living room where he lay on the floor; my mother broke a window and called the police once she entered the house; Mr. S had been dead for a while by the time she arrived. My mother called the coroner, filed the reports, notified the family; she did what end-of-life caretakers do. Absent from this narrative of events was the bond my mother had formed with this man of no relation who had shared his home with her each morning as she cared for him, who had given her youngest son a baby doll as a gift, who had shared with her in his old age the wisdom only time can teach. The ethic of care and mutual respect between them was a kind of love that had been ripped from my mother that morning, as quickly as it typically took her to remove the pins from her curlers before shuffling us off to school.

I first understood then that this is what death felt like: a sudden realization of the loss of love. Later, I would understand that no matter the type of love, no matter how each individual identified or how each relationship was defined, loss was always loss, though the grief that followed could take many forms. Loss and grief irrevocably altered the makeup of one's days. Furthermore, they affected everyone. My mother never returned to Mr. S's house, and the composition of our early mornings entered a new phase.

Sometimes I think we Mississippians have a special relationship with death because the ghosts of history haunt us, inform every decision we make, good or bad, and necessarily bring shame upon us again when we inevitably fail to do the right thing. Sometimes I think that on the national stage, Mississippi was, is, and perhaps always will be a failing, floundering actor. However, as one of its LGBTQ sons, I too have seen my state's goodness, personified most concretely in the pillar of my mother's selfless actions over the years—a woman who was born, raised, and perhaps will die in Mississippi—and in thinking about her from time to time in light of all that Mississippi has done and continues to do wrong, I have faith we can do better by all our citizens. There are things we can do right, changes Mississippians can make, changes which would make me more comfortable going home to see my mother without fear of being denied any form of service each of my straight siblings enjoys freely and takes for granted.

In January 2018, the US Supreme Court decided not to hear arguments against Mississippi's draconian 2016 Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, HB 1523, which allows businesses and providers to refuse service to LGBTQ individuals should such service violate "sincerely held religious beliefs." In refusing to hear the cases of Barber v. Bryant and Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, the Court allowed the law to go into effect (legally in force) and ensured that Jim Crow by another name again be the law of a state that, to paraphrase Nina Simone, everyone already knows about anyways.

On June 4, 2018, when the Court decided in favor of Colorado bakery Masterpiece Cakeshop, it set a dangerous precedent: LGBTQ discrimination and bigotry can be legislated and upheld, allowing laws like Mississippi's HB 1523 to remain on the books. At least for now. Given the shifted balance of the Supreme Court, it is my hope that in time my Mississippi will overturn HB 1523 on its own. The state's history offers little to support such hope.

The language of HB 1523 is clear, identifying three specific "religious beliefs or moral convictions" that merit special protection and codification by law:

• Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
• Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
• Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual's immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

Setting aside my own objections to such "beliefs," the language of the act violates federal law and enshrines into Mississippi law discriminatory practices with far reaching everyday implications. For example, medical and funeral providers have the legal right to deny care and service to LGBTQ individuals even as such a denial violates the Hippocratic Oath and similar ethical codes of conduct—likely resulting in civil litigation. In Mississippi, second-class citizenship remains under the aegis of special "religious liberty" measures for a bigoted few.

HB 1523 is an attack on LGBTQ individuals, and despite numerous legal challenges and actions by states and cities banning official publicly funded travel to Mississippi, the law remains in effect.¹The states banning publicly funded travel to Mississippi include California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington. Additionally, both Washington, DC, and select counties in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland, and Oregon issued travel bans. Cities including Baltimore, MD; Berkeley, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Dayton, OH; Honolulu, HI; Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Miami Beach, FL; New York City, NY; Oakland, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, ME; Providence, RI; Salt Lake City, UT; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; West Palm Beach, FL; and Wilton Manors, FL, have issued bans. Finally, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the European Union also issued warnings to travelers to both Mississippi and North Carolina (in the wake of North Carolina's similarly draconian Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act).

One ongoing test of HB 1523 continues to receive attention: Zawadski v. Brewer Funeral Services. In May 2017, Jack Zawadski (of Picayune, MS) sued Picayune Funeral Home for damages relating to breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation, and the intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit narrative is as follows: in May 2016, Jack lost his beloved partner of fifty-two years, Robert "Bob" Huskey. The couple met in California in 1965, chose to retire in 1997 in Mississippi, and when the Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality in 2015, married. By 2016, knowing that Huskey was dying from a heart condition, husband Zawadski and nephew John Gaspari organized funeral preparations. They selected Picayune Funeral Home largely because it was the only suitable cremation service within a ninety-mile radius of where the couple lived. Under the contract, the funeral home agreed to transport Huskey's body from the nursing home for cremation. The couple made plans for the transition from fifty-plus years of love and companionship. Upon Huskey's death, allegedly upon learning that Huskey's next-of-kin and husband was Zawadski, the funeral home reneged on its contractual obligations.

Unable to sue the funeral home for discrimination (Mississippi law does not protect LGBTQ subjects), and as HB 1523 actually now makes it easier to be discriminated against, Zawadski instead sued for breach of contract. HB 1523 will favorably factor into the funeral home's defense.

The Zawadski litigation is listed under the category "Other Lambda Legal Case-Related Materials" in a brief both the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Family Equality Council presented to the US Supreme Court in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. In it, the attorneys write:

Across America, LGBT people are subjected to pervasive discrimination. This discrimination often blindsides its targets, hitting without warning during the myriad transactions that make up daily life. As a result, many LGBT people live defensively, always on guard against the next humiliating, ostracizing incident. From casual shaming to harassment to outright refusals of service, the treatment visited upon this minority effectively subordinates to others' biases their freedom to live with equal dignity.

It's difficult to argue with this sketch of LGBTQ life, but in light of the Zawadski case in my home state, I cannot help but ponder "to live with equal dignity." What is at stake in overturning "religious freedom" laws is more than the "freedom" of LGBTQ individuals "to live with equal dignity," although few would deny the necessity of that fight. The right of LGBTQ individuals to die with equal dignity and receive equal medical access, treatment, and service in that process has also long motivated the activist movement especially during and since the height of the AIDS crisis. Zawadski v. Brewer Funeral Services brings to the fore the legal impulse and ethical imperative to protect our loved ones as they die, and to continue to do right by them after they have died even as we mourn their loss. A Mississippi law that protects a funeral home's decision not only to deny a gay man mortuary service for his late husband but also to renege on the contract already established once they learned of the couple's intimate status is shameful, unethical, and arguably unconstitutional.

I cannot imagine the humiliation Zawadski felt upon hearing this refusal and disavowal. While Brewer Funeral Services deny that they reversed the Zawadski contract for reasons of "sexual orientation," to my knowledge, they have not provided any other justification for their actions. The questions remain: how far can "religious freedom" be stretched, in Colorado, in Mississippi, and beyond? At what point does a person's legal protection to believe what he or she believes in the name of faith or religion become a legal sanction of bigotry?

When I think about Jack and Bob, about Bob's death and the humiliation Jack suffered in attempting to cremate his dead lover, I think about Mr. S. and what would have become of him had my mother not shown up that morning, had she decided not to continue caring for him for whatever reason, "religious," "moral," or otherwise. It was my mother's job, but more than that, it was her goodness that motivated her to care for a man she would grow to love and later mourn following his death for which she served as first responder.

It is with my first memory of death and with my reflections on Zawadski that I have come to understand how HB 1523 fails all Mississippians. I have always been proud to be from Mississippi, to have learned the lessons I learned growing up there, ones I sometimes wonder if I would have learned growing up elsewhere. But I also know that Mississippi, to invoke poet Natasha Trethewey, is a state that again makes "a crime of me" and others like me in its repudiation of our full equality before the law. "Religious liberty" laws are not really about religious liberty.

Regardless of what the judicial system decides in Zawadski and regardless of the fate of Mississippi's HB 1523, sixty percent of Americans believe religious-based denials of service are wrong. Case closed. In the lead up to the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the ACLU passed out canvassing signs that read, "It's not about the Cake." Similarly, the Zawadski case is not about the cremation. These are matters of love and death by which all citizens have the right to be equally protected.

In his 1967 pulp novel, A Lover Mourned, gay Mississippian Carl Corley writes, "It has been said that lovers can see forward as well as backward, can see into the past and into the future, wherever their lover is concerned."²Carl Corley, A Lover Mourned (San Diego, CA: Publishers Export Co., 1967), 117. In January 2018, the same month the Supreme Court chose not to hear arguments against Mississippi's HB 1523, Jack Zawadski passed away, reuniting with husband Bob Huskey, the man he first met in 1965. Zawadski did not live to know the result of his case against the humiliating treatment he received following his lover's death less than one-year prior. Yet, in his brief period of mourning, Zawadski never stopped fighting for the dignity and freedom the couple deserved. What was denied in life, we should grant in death. Lambda Legal continues the fight on behalf of Zawadski.

While it may be true that everyone knows about Mississippi and that we Mississippians live daily with our ghosts, it is also true that in our daily living and haunting, we should do right by our dead. All of them.

About the Author

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University and is a visiting assistant professor at Oxford College, Emory University. He is currently revising his first manuscript.

Southern Spaces, an open access, multimedia, peer-reviewed journal, invites innovative scholarship on regions, places, and cultures of the US South as well as their global connections. We encourage interdisciplinary submissions that emphasize spatial interpretation and utilize digital media.

Southern Spaces welcomes submissions that:

• critically and creatively examine real and imagined spaces and places
• make connections and comparisons between southern regions and/or locales and sites in the wider world
• use textual, visual media, archival, and ethnographic materials—including artistic expressions—to address questions of spatial justice

Currently Southern Spaces seeks submissions that engage with the geographies of:

• historical memory and memorialization
• economic inequality and everyday precarity
• political boundaries (redistricting, voter suppression)
• forced migration, slavery, and human trafficking
• racial violence, hate crimes
• LGBTQ+ perspectives, rights, and spaces
• demographic shifts in urban, suburban, and rural populations
• immigration, refugees, and citizenship
• incarceration, internment, and the carceral state
• public health, healthcare policy and access
• climate change and environmental history

Examples

Southern Spaces accepts submissions within seven genres of open access, multimedia scholarship:

• Articles are long-form, interpretive, or critical pieces that incorporate multimedia (including digital scholarship) and scholarly analysis to pose an original argument or research-based claim. All Southern Spaces articles undergo peer review.
• Reviews offer critical evaluations of recently published books, films, digital projects, music, events, and other art or scholarship related to the study of space and place.
• Interviews are filmed or transcribed conversations with scholars, authors, artists, or others working in areas related to the study of space and place in the US or global south.
• Photo and media essays are curated collections of original photography or other multimedia that perform critical scholarly analysis. While primarily photographic or media-based, these essays also include a writing component.
• Short videos are five to twenty-five minutes and utilize visual—as opposed to textual or rhetorical—techniques to advance a critical argument or an aesthetic perspective. Southern Spaces frequently publishes ethnographic, documentary, and lyric videos.
• Presentations include media associated with public scholarly presentations as well as audio or visual recordings of presenters. Such presentations include lectures, conference highlights, panels, and performances.
• Blog posts are shorter, less formal essays or announcements of interest to the critical study of space, place, and southernness.

The following pieces provide examples of the critical, interdisciplinary, and multimedia scholarship we seek:

• Busch, Andrew M. "Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas." Southern Spaces, August 19, 2015. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/crossing-over-sustainability-new-urbanism-and-gentrification-austin-texas.
• Conis, Elena. "DDT Disbelievers: Health and the New Economic Poisons in Georgia after World War II." Southern Spaces, October 28, 2016. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2016/ddt-disbelievers-health-and-new-economic-poisons-georgia-after-world-war-ii.
• Cooper, Brittney. "#SAYHERNAME: Towards a Gender Inclusive Movement for Black Lives." Southern Spaces, January 26, 2016. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2016/sayhername-towards-gender-inclusive-movement-black-lives.
• Flippen, Chenoa. "Diversity and Its Discontents: A Review of Behind the White Picket Fence." Southern Spaces, October 20, 2015. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/diversity-and-its-discontents-review-behind-white-picket-fence.
• Goldstein, Holly Markovitz. "St. Augustine's 'Slave Market': A Visual History." Southern Spaces, September 28, 2012. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2012/st-augustines-slave-market-visual-history.
• McClintock, Diana. "Gordon Parks at Atlanta's High Museum of Art." Southern Spaces, May 28, 2015. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/gordon-parks-atlantas-high-museum-art.
• Pooley, Karen. "Segregation's New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility." Southern Spaces, April 15, 2015. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/segregations-new-geography-atlanta-metro-region-race-and-declining-prospects-upward-mobility.
• Solomon, Eric. "Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida." Southern Spaces, August 11, 2016. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2016/queer-memory-loss-martyrs-and-memorialization-southern-florida.
• Suitts, Steve. "States' Rights Resurgent: The Attack on the Voting Rights Act." Southern Spaces, August 29, 2013. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/states-rights-resurgent-attack-voting-rights-act.
• West, E. James and Ann Pancake. "Closer to the Ground: A Conversation with Ann Pancake." Southern Spaces, May 30, 2017. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2017/closer-ground-conversation-ann-pancake.
• Yaeger, Patricia. "Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology." Southern Spaces, February 13, 2013. https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/beasts-southern-wild-and-dirty-ecology.

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Beneath

Beneath the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia US Supreme Court case is a very simple story: two people, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, loved each other and wanted to marry and raise their family in rural Caroline County, Virginia. In the 2016 cinematic dramatization, Loving, writer-director Jeff Nichols best exemplifies this simplicity neither through dramatic courtroom scenes nor in his scant exploration of iterations of the legal process needed to achieve legalization of interracial marriage in the Court's decision, but in quiet moments of private intimacy.

The film neither glorifies nor sanctifies. Nichols proceeds with care, illustrating the ways in which all intimacies are negotiated and far from simple. Midway through Loving, after living for some years in exile in Washington, DC, Mildred and Richard decide, in violation of state law, to move back to Virginia with their three young children. They find a farmhouse. It has no telephone or easy connection to the outside world. As the family drives up, Mildred's face beams as she sees her new home—glistening white in the sunlight, surrounded by wide-open space. Richard smiles at her happiness. Mildred's goal is simple, as she tells Richard in DC, a city antithetical to her way of life: "I won't raise my family here." She will raise their children in the rural environs of her home state and in secrecy if need be. Yet, in this scene, as Mildred's joy radiates in the face of actress Ruth Negga as captured by cinematographer Adam Stone, Richard turns and stares into the beyond, back down the road from which they came. While Mildred is intent on raising their children in a manner she sees fit, Richard's goal, as he tells her in one of the film's most emotional scenes, is different yet equally simple: "I can take care of you." In these brief, quiet moments, Mildred is at home; Richard is afraid.

Beneath the Lovings's story, then, are bedrock truths that all couples must negotiate: intimacy and protection in the present, and care and preparation for the future. Nichols crafts this narrative through images of the marriage bed, the laying of a home's foundation, and front porches looking out to an idyllic and unknown beyond. As I search Loving for the "beneath," I recall the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that reading for the beneath fosters narratives of "depth or hiddenness" calling out for "a drama of exposure."¹Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. Sedgwick's foundational contribution to the field of queer theory was her implicit understanding of the closet-structure and coming-out narrative and how they functioned. Sedgwick understood the closet as a "resilient and productive… structure of narrative" with a firm "hold on important forms of social meaning" both before and since the great gay liberationist movement "began" at Stonewall. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 67. Like other key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Sedgwick understood the "very specific crisis of definition" implicit in binary distinctions like gay/straight, homosexual/heterosexual, black/white, as well as how that crisis is often socially constructed, limiting the possibilities of non-normative subjectivities (72). Such distinctions create hierarchy and the implicit desire on the part of the majority for the minority to be exposed, excavated, and/or transcended. These realities necessitate giving voice. Yet, we can read silence and invisibility as power. Arguably, in Loving and Moonlight, what is unsaid, what is invisible, is represented as equal in power to what is said and shown. Reading for the beneath raises ethical questions: Why do we need to justify the loving of this particular couple as valid? For whom are the filmmakers making Loving and why are they placing this story of the past in our present? What are the stakes of excavating and exposing the Loving story now? In supplanting readings for the "beneath," Sedgwick calls for readings of the beside, in which "a number of elements may lie alongside one another… Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations"—such as loving or moonlighting.

I read Loving not as a film that exposes either the "Loving Story" to a wider audience or the quintessential nature of interracial loving, but as an imperative film which ask viewers to place themselves "beside" others in acts of creating, understanding, universalizing and identifying, legalizing, equalizing, and yes, loving. In so doing, I will read it alongside another 2016 film, Moonlight, to illustrate the power of both films in breaking expectations of narrative form and cultural understanding. Both films invite us to touch, to feel, the intimate lives of their characters in opposition to forces that define, prescribe, limit, and curtail.

Remember that the grand story of the Lovings—given the photojournalistic treatment by Grey Villet in Life magazine, the Lifetime television treatment with Richard Friedenberg's Mr. and Mrs. Loving (1996), the documentary treatment with Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story (2011), and now the Hollywood treatment—is only known to us, only "a drama of [continued] exposure," because Mildred first wrote a letter to the ACLU via Robert Kennedy in 1963 seeking legal assistance in moving her family from DC back home to Virginia. We know the Lovings because Mildred first engaged in a quiet, solitary act of letter writing. The Lovings were neither unique nor exemplary in their transgressive love. They were unique in their successful resistance to the laws that sought to define how and where they could love and live. And they were unique in asserting that beneath their love was something that could not be cast aside, exiled, closeted.

Beside

Beside each other, they sit in moonglow. Nichols's film opens: first shot Mildred Jeter, second Richard Loving, then both, equal visual weight. Mildred, black and Rappahannock, is pregnant; Richard, white, is the father. Crickets chirp in the background of the 1958 Virginia night. There is silence and joy. They are about to marry, to be parents; they look to the future. Despite Nichols's creative license in blurring the timeline their choice is simple: they will build a life together.

Loving challenges viewers because it is largely a meditative film telling this simple story, not a film of award-baiting fireworks or melodramatics. Nichols's goal in writing and directing was "to concentrate on the day-to-day lives of the Lovings" and "make a really slow, quiet film."²Joe Robberson, "Director Jeff Nichols talks 'Loving,' His relationship With the South & His Muse, Michael Shannon," Zimbio, November 7, 2016, http://www.zimbio.com/Zimbio+Exclusive+Interviews/articles/bqW7H-jZy09/Director+Jeff+Nichols+Talks+Loving+Relationship. The film's composition takes on equal weight to its script: not only what Loving says but also how it says it. Framing becomes central in cinematically portraying the Lovings. The camera eye presenting the narrative reveals an implicit resistance to bombastic inauthenticity. Nichols frames the Lovings via numerous shots of Richard's construction jobs—building home frames with 4x4s, laying foundations of cement blocks, insulating homes with the durable stacking of bricks and scraping of the mortar trowel—and Mildred's domestic work—washing dishes, ironing clothes, speaking on the telephone, buying groceries, running after her kids. Nichols elevates the quotidian tasks of the Lovings into profound meaning. The Lovings simply wanted to build a home together.

As a filmmaker, Nichols understands that in representing a true story that changed the US Constitution, Loving requires both adherence to the preexisting historical record and a multi-dimensional narrative framing of his central characters' lives.³Nichols, a native of Arkansas, has made four previous films: Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), Mud (2012), and Midnight Special (2016). All of these films are fiction. Loving is Nichols's first film to be rooted in fact. Nichols understands the stakes and proceeds with great care. Loving presents the moments of rupture well known to historians and legal scholars: the invasion of the Lovings's bedroom, their arrest, Mildred's five-day imprisonment, the abrupt judicial decision, and their exile from their home state. Like The Loving Story (2011) documentary before it—which divided its narrative into sections entitled the Crime, Exile, the Climate, the Court, Oral Arguments—Nichols's film presents the known facts with chronological precision. Richard and Mildred committed a crime; they broke the state's love law. A legal holdover from slavery and Jim Crow, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924⁴Virginia was not alone in enforcing such legal holdovers. By the time of the 1967 decision, fifteen other (mostly southern) states (Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Delaware) had similar anti-miscegenation laws on the books. While the Supreme Court's federal decision invalidated all of these state laws, it would take until 1998 and 2000 for South Carolina and Alabama, respectively, to amend their state constitutional language on miscegenation. made it illegal for men and women of different races to marry and live together. Initially, the Lovings accepted a deal to live outside Virginia for twenty-five years or risk re-arrest. In exile, they moved to DC. They grew homesick and disenchanted living in a space that was not their own. Mildred contacted the ACLU, which took on their case. They secretly moved back into Virginia but were discovered and re-arrested. Their case worked its way to the US Supreme Court, and in 1967, the Lovings won. All of this is in Nichols's film, yet he never lets the grandiosity of the circumstances supplant the simplicity of story. This is not The Loving Story; it is Loving.

The stakes for present-day viewers are not whether to understand Mildred and Richard Loving's marriage as equal and legal. That question is moot. The questions today are whether we can see their loving-struggle alongside other forms of loving we still debate, and whether we can accept the lives their loving created as lives equal to all others. For us, then, the Lovings serve as precedent.

"All Love is created equal" says the film's tagline. But Loving's imperative implicitly asks: Who does all include? What is love? When is the time? What do we mean by created? How equal, by what terms? These questions call forth the positionality of various loves alongside one another in cultural understanding and legal equality.

In two of Grey Villet's Life magazine images, Richard and Mildred stand or sit beside one another at their home. Perhaps the film's most powerful image is a similar moment of intimacy in which viewers are invited to sit alongside. It is an image used in the film's promotion: Mildred sits in Richard's lap, holding his head close to her chest. They sit at a kitchen table. An embrace. Silence. Yet, they are in exile in DC; this is not their kitchen table. This still frame invites you to the table alongside them. To dare disrupt this quiet scene. Dare to deny the fierce simplicity of their loving. Help bring them home.

Beneath

Beneath Loving is bedrock: textures of mortar and soil, dirt and desire, the need to build a home and be rooted. Beneath Barry Jenkins's Moonlight is an ocean: the need to be visible as something other than the expected or prescribed, to be seen as singular and more than a drop drowning in the multitude. Loving and Moonlight, released in the same year, are period pieces illustrating tensions between fixity and fluidity in journeys we must take to love ourselves so that we can engage in acts of loving others.

Beneath Moonlight is not the often-told, true-life story of the Lovings, but autobiographical traces of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and writer-director Barry Jenkins's upbringings in 1980s Miami.⁵Moze Halperin, "Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney Discusses the Piece that Inspired 'Moonlight,'" Flavorwire, October 21, 2016, http://flavorwire.com/592191/playwright-tarell-alvin-mccraney-discusses-the-piece-that-inspired-moonlight. Halperin writes, with "In the Moonlight, which McCraney set in his own home of Liberty City, Florida, the playwright tried to lay out some of his own biographical questions about growing up with a mother grappling with drug addiction, and growing up gay in a neighborhood sequestered by race and class, in a community where his own divergence from masculine norms led him to be classified as Other from a young age. Moonlight writer/director Barry Jenkins likewise grew up in Liberty City—and in the very same public housing unit as McCraney—Liberty Square, though they didn't know each other. His adaptation of McCraney's work combined their diverging and overlapping experiences, and projected them onto the story of a protagonist, who, through the convergence of time and society's all-too-often blanketing perceptions of black manhood, lives as a beautifully unchanging soul housed within three metamorphosed bodies." Moonlight, adapted from both McCraney's sketch In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and from life, is fiction. While the film's tagline may read, "This is the story of a lifetime," it is not the story of any one lifetime but a composite of the experiences of many young black "gay" men in the urban South. It burrows beneath while seeking to get beyond. It is not "based on a true story" in any distinct way but culled from the archives of the many men like protagonist Chiron who do not get represented on screen. Moonlight is simple and grand, specific and universal, drop and ocean. The most apt preposition for an exploration of Moonlight may not be "beneath" but "beyond." Moonlight asks to go beyond what we think we know about men, about being black, about being gay. It asks us to think beyond any singular identity and consider the intersections where black-gay-men struggle to exist in places such as Miami and Atlanta.

Jenkins structures Moonlight in a tripartite way, beginning with "Little" and ending with "Black," both nicknames for the character's actual name, "Chiron," the title for the middle section. Little-Chiron-Black. This structure invites side-by-side analysis around three moments of time in one man's life. Little-Chiron-Black function as islands of existence and snapshots of time representing the fragmentary nature of a man growing into himself and negotiating racial, gender, and sexual identities. Viewers encounter all three—Little-Chiron-Black/ Black-Gay-Man—distinctly but also connected across the intersectional, hyphenated breach.

Beyond

Beyond visible: the sound of ocean waves crashing before the fade-in is how Moonlight begins—with what cannot be seen or known but only heard and approached. Loving begins in fixity and stillness—crickets chirping in a calm, rural Virginia night. Moonlight begins in fluidity and chaos. We hear the non-diegetic crashing of waves and the diegetic "Every Nigger is a Star" playing on Juan's car radio as we fade-in to his meeting one of his drug-dealing employees. The camera spins like the eye of a hurricane or a whirlpool undercurrent, circling and weaving around the actors as director Barry Jenkins introduces 1980s Miami and the slow-drain effect of drug addiction and trafficking. We fall into Loving, into the front porch simplicity of a couple, a grand narrative before them. With Moonlight, we crash full force into a street life where "Every Nigger is [or aims to be] a Star."

So much of Moonlight is disassociation, disembodiment, and disorientation: sounds of waves, cracked glass underfoot, muffled moans, zippers descending, voices and whispers, continued movement, and abrupt shifts. The main character Little-Chiron-Black is never fixed, but constantly shifting and adapting. Each section in this man's life is built around a core set of characters who shape him and ultimately help him associate, embody, and orient so that we come to "know" this man not by virtue of his fixed being but by his continual becoming.

"Little" is structured around Juan, the first character we meet in Moonlight, stepping out of his bright blue car. As played by Mahershala Ali, Juan is not one-dimensional, neither villain nor hero. Yes, he deals drugs, but he also serves as mentor and caretaker for "Little," a lost boy whose mother is adrift on the crack-cocaine Juan sells. It is Juan who teaches Little to swim, who stares out across the Atlantic—back home—and tells Little that he was once called "Blue" as a boy in Cuba, but he no longer identifies with that name because "at some point you got to decide for yourself who you gonna be." Juan creates his morally ambiguous self, and it is from Juan that Little learns self-becoming.

As "Little" progresses, viewers come to know Little's sexuality even before he understands it. In the closing scene of this first snapshot in Chiron's life, Little asks Juan and his partner Teresa, who serves as a second mother, "What's a faggot?" The couple exchange knowing glances, and refuse to lie. They tell him that he will know if he's gay when he knows.

If "Little" reveals Chiron's first moment of self-awareness and recognition, "Chiron" is Little's adolescent hardening. "Chiron" centralizes Kevin, Little's childhood friend and first pubescent crush. "Chiron" shows a young man who lives in fantasies: wet dreams in which the sounds of waves and grunting lead him to find Kevin fucking a faceless woman beneath the south Florida palms. "Chiron," second snapshot in this story of a lifetime, is full of similar sex and frustration, daydream and risk, role-playing and reality.

"Chiron" begins with a science teacher discussing DNA in class, suggestive of the heteronormative idea of sex as procreation as well as the heightened sexual risk associated with certain methods of swapping DNA. As if to reify these passing suggestions, Jenkins returns the viewer, in the middle of the "Chiron" section of the film, to the same class, alongside the students, as the same teacher mentions a "lack of white blood cells" in his lesson plan. Said in passing, "a lack of white blood cells" serves as a potent phrase in the middle of a movie set in the early, death-sentencing years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in which gay sexuality and IV-drug behaviors were stigmatized, misunderstood, and pathologized. It is also a reminder of the startling disparity that people of color and drug addicts continue to face, measured in new HIV infection rates, access to care, and number of AIDS-related deaths in the United States.⁶"Lifetime Risk of HIV Diagnosis," CDC, February 23, 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2016/croi-press-release-risk.html; "CDC Fact Sheet: Today's HIV/AIDS Epidemic," August 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/factsheets/todaysepidemic-508.pdf; Claire Galofaro, "Appalachia Bracing for HIV," U.S. News & World Report, June 5, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2015/06/04/appalachia-gripped-by-hepatitis-c-epidemic-bracing-for-hiv. Is it any wonder that Chiron, a young man trying to decide who he is going to be, might be frightened of the sexual urges he feels for Kevin, of both the tenderness and hardening that he is told make him sick, soft, not "man" enough?

And yet, always beneath the surface of Chiron's confusion and self-discovery is Kevin, a young man who boasts of his sexual conquests and the size of his genitalia, who seems to better negotiate his sexual fluidity against the unforgiving, tough, adolescent, environment. Kevin is a consummate performer, adapting his personality and behavior to survive the only world he knows. Kevin recalls James Baldwin's confusion over the term "gay": "I didn't understand the necessity of all the role playing."⁷Richard Goldstein, "'Go the Way Your Blood Beats': An Interview with James Baldwin," In James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), 59. To be "gay," to own that identity especially at a certain point in time, one had to consistently play some version of a part—clone, closet case, down low, top, bottom, vers, masc, macho, fem, maricón, queen—in order to survive. One could not simply be "out"; one had to negotiate how one was out. Moonlight never explicitly labels or categorizes either Kevin or Chiron's sexuality; they just are. In the street life of 1980s urban black America, being out in whatever degree meant playing some part to reveal or conceal, make or mask. If one did not play a part, all that was left was a form of self-denial so internally violent, repressing, and damning that lashing out externally seemed a likely result.

It is Kevin who first nicknames Chiron "Black," giving him the role of a lifetime. Kevin knows playing a part is survival. He understands risk and danger associated with authenticity. Chiron does not understand the necessity of role-play or the inundation of danger he receives at school, in the streets, and at home. All Chiron understands are his urges, his emotions, and his desire to act upon them. Throughout most of "Chiron," he rejects Kevin calling him "Black." He is not yet ready to play the part.

All this changes after Kevin and Chiron meet on a beach, sitting side-by-side as they stare out into the ocean. Kevin is tough, his façade intact. Chiron tells him, "I cry so much sometimes I feel like I just turn to drops." Chiron is "soft," drowning in his own emotions. When Kevin comforts him, the two kiss. The only sexual act they engage in is the one of least risk: Kevin masturbates Chiron. As Kevin wipes Chiron's DNA in the sand, he marks this space, at the edge of the sea, as one of new life where each can stop playing a role and see each other clearly. It is a space of safety not unlike the calm front porch of Loving. They sit side-by-side, and the roles the world asks them to play fall away.

Such safety is illusory. The roles return in full force. Kevin must act a man and beat Chiron after the school bully pressures him to do so. During this first fight scene, as Kevin punches Chiron repeatedly, the camera again moves in chaotic circles, Jenkins illustrating the whirlpool undercurrent, the violent drain, of toxic masculinity. Days later, Chiron responds with a violent rage, beating the class bully who made Kevin prove his manhood in beating Chiron, the soft "faggot." Chiron becomes "Black." Even after Chiron's retaliation in which he plays the role of tough man, the counselor calls him a "boy." In hardening himself to be tough, to be "Black" in order to survive, Chiron is as lost as ever.

The "Black" section of the film begins in Atlanta where Chiron and his mother, Paula, have moved. Black is all muscle, physically imposing, leading a solitary life back on the streets. His mother has sobered up, choosing to live at the rehabilitation center. Yet, it is not Paula who haunts "Black," it is Juan. While mentor to Little, Juan also served as a dangerous model in propagating street life, drug-work, and moral ambiguity as a tough but necessary way of life for a black man. He may teach Little not to fold into himself, but he also provides Little a caricature to play. With "Black," we see a man adopting the teeth, headwear, car and dash ornament, and street lifestyle of his mentor. Yet, Black feels like a radical and a false departure—physically, emotionally—from both Little and Chiron. As the ghost of Juan hovers over "Black," Kevin suddenly resurfaces to offer a moment of startling grace, helping Chiron unmask and reveal "Black" to himself. With "Black," Chiron must learn to integrate the disparate influences of Juan and Kevin into some version of himself.

Little-Chiron is not Black, and it is Kevin who can perhaps best expose and save him from this false self. When Black drives down to Miami and shows up at Kevin's diner, Kevin cooks him dinner and plays "Hello Stranger" on the jukebox. Yes, they are strangers because time and place have divided them. But the meaning goes deeper: Black has taken on the role of stranger to himself; we hear the sound of ocean waves return. Kevin asks Black: "Who is you?"

Moonlight begins in darkness, with the sound of ocean water—currents, rhythms, and waves—before fading in to the narrative. It ends with two men, in a kitchen, pouring a glass of water, negotiating each other's past and the present they long to enact. It ends with two men bathing each other in a warm embrace. When Black tells Kevin, "no man has touched me since you," we come to understand Black's answer to Kevin's question. "Who is you?" I am yours, Black seems to say. As Kevin holds Black, we come to "know" and see the man Chiron apart from the roles he has played. The irony of Chiron's story of a lifetime is that it is no longer a "story" with characters—"Little," "Chiron," "Black"; black-gay-man—to create or perform. Illustrating Little-Chiron-Black's harnessing of the ocean's immense body of water into a single glass—his pulling in of desire and intersectional identity from the vast, diffuse, and invisible to the known, contained, and experienced—is the achievement of Barry Jenkins's film.

In colloquial terms, to moonlight is to pretend to be something you are not; moonlighting is role-playing. In the film's final frames, we see Little again, his back to us, staring out at the immense waters of the Atlantic. To paraphrase Kate Chopin, the voice of the sea is clam, it is sensuous. It invites you to wade into its waters and lose yourself in the invisible beyond.⁸Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co, 1899). At Moonlight's end, however, Little-Chiron-Black is awakened. In the final frame, Little does not walk into the waters, lost to us forever. He turns to the camera and stares directly and fiercely into its lens. He breaks the fourth wall, shattering the pretense of performance. He is present and visible. He is blue in the moonlight. He dares us not to see him and join him on this beach. The film fades to black.

Beside, the Breach

Searching for you in the hollow cage…

—Richie Hoffman, "Sea Interlude: Moonlight"⁹Richie Hoffman, "Sea Interlude: Moonlight," The Missouri Review, 34, no. 4 (2011): 93.

Beside ocean water, as waves break on the shore, Moonlight ends with a return to Little standing on a solitary beach. Awakened, he stands at the shore of a new becoming, no longer seeking to get beyond himself but to be within himself. The whirlpools have stilled. He stands calmly. As viewers, we are asked to look him in the eye, see him, to place ourselves alongside him. Actor Mahershala Ali, in accepting the SAG award for his performance as Juan, described Chiron as a persecuted man who was folding into himself. Our responsibility, Ali suggests, is to uplift him and tell him he matters. He invites us all to "do a better job of that."¹⁰Alex Abad-Santos, "Watch: Mahershala Ali's powerful SAG Awards speech on persecution and acceptance," Vox.com, January 29, 2017, http://www.vox.com/2017/1/29/14433536/mahershala-ali-2017-sag-award-speech-video. Journeys of empathy are not always easy, but as Baldwin once said, you cannot change what you will not face. As we face Little, we stand alongside. We enter his breach as we hear the rhythm of breaking waves. We do not look toward the horizon for a better beyond.

When McCraney, on whose work Moonlight is based, approached writing a play about Hurricane Katrina's devastating effects on New Orleans, he and his collaborators settled on the title The Breach. It begins, "It was water that woke us up that morning."¹¹Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton, The Breach. In Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, edited by Suzanne M. Trauth and Lisa S. Brenner (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 57.

Beneath Moonlight, the slow return of water and its rhythms upon the shore—fluidity constantly reshaping fixity—wake Chiron up to his true self. Like water splashed in the face of the deep-sleeper, the element of water snaps Chiron out of the fragmentary and traumatic breaches that seek to define him. At Moonlight's close, we join Little-Chiron-Black as he ceases folding into himself and begins to become whole.

In this review essay, I have framed my story deliberately, placing Loving and Moonlight beside each other, linked in more ways than the year of their release. Both films depict breaches—Loving's depiction of a breach of law, Moonlight's breach of time via its non-continual structure and motif of the sound of waves breaching on the shore. More important are the symbolic breaches each film forces us to ponder. Loving is a calm illustration of the fierce power of the action of breaking laws in order to live and love: what is loving? How do we love? Moonlight is a chaotic rumination on being broken, fragmented, traumatized, and the slow process of recovery. What is moonlighting? How do we all moonlight? Each film emplaces viewers alongside characters in the breach. Sutured into the narrative of Loving's calmness and Moonlight's chaos, we wade in these waters in which each lifetime has a story and all love is equal.

It is perhaps no accident that both Loving and Moonlight, which ponder never-simple questions of race and sexuality, take place in US southern spaces, spaces historically rife with such interrogations. It is also no accident that neither features stereotypical tropes of "southern" filmic narratives. Yes, Loving largely takes place in Virginia, and yes, there is the racist Sheriff and the biased state courts, but the "big white house" is not a centralized plantation but an isolated loving home. In one of the film's most haunting moments, we see a rope being tossed over a tree branch—evoking a murderous history. Nichols, however, immediately cuts to the Loving children who are using this rope for a tire-swing. In rural Virginia, poor whites and blacks often exist alongside one another instead of in opposition. Additionally, the subtext of race in Loving is not simply black and white. The film implicitly asks how can you tell someone with Native blood—whose very marriage license lists her as "Indian"¹²Arica L. Coleman, "What's Fact and Fiction in Jeff Nichols's Film about the Lovings," History News Network, November 14, 2016, historynewsnetwork.org/article/164415.—that she cannot live in this space?

Similarly, Moonlight takes place in south Florida and Atlanta, but the space is far from traditionally confined. Moonlight exists as spatially liminal: a film located somewhere along the US South—Circum-Caribbean—Black Atlantic continuum. Both Juan and Kevin, the two most important male figures in Chiron's journey, have roots elsewhere. Jenkins's use of the motif of water breaching signifies the larger perplexity of "rootedness" and fixity for all African Americans with ancestors forcibly brought to American shores. How can anyone find stasis out of a heritage of migration, movement, fluidity, and the breach that was the Middle Passage?

The power of Loving and Moonlight lies in their ability not to didactically excavate beneath or idealistically get beyond, but to emplace the viewers beside the characters within the breach. For Mildred and Richard Loving, that breach is the uprooting of home and the exile they endured. For Little-Chiron-Black, that breach is the brokenness of waves crashing into and continually shaping him to be someone other than who he knows and wants himself to be. Can we cross the empathetic breach to see ourselves shaped by deferred dreams and broken promises? Can we see ourselves, as Black comes to see himself, as a hollow shell moonlighting as a full self? Can we understand his awakening?

Both films implore moments of grace—where we sit alongside on a porch, fight alongside for fair and equal justice, hold one another when we are broken, see and witness the truth and significance of each other's lives. We enter the breach when we rupture our own understandings and prescribed identities.

Loving and Moonlight are linked still in more direct ways. Near the end of her life, Mildred Loving wrote in support of Massachusetts's legalization of same-sex marriage and to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia: "I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry… I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving are all about."¹³"Loving for All," Statement by Mildred Loving, June 12, 2007. In Grey Villet, Loving: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), 111.

The real-life examples of the Lovings and Loving helps us realize the stakes. Moonlight and Little-Chiron-Black help us understand the slippery nature of ethical imperatives to make lives and loves matter. How do we understand forms of loving—coexisting, cohabitating, desiring, fornicating, fucking, and polyamory, to name but a few—outside the moralizing imperative to move beyond individual bodies and pleasures to the more official, legal institution of marriage? The literal "beyond" of Loving v. Virginia is the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage.¹⁴Loving v. Virginia was cited as legal precedent for the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision in which the court saw "the history of marriage is one of continuity and change." See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf. Yet, the achievements of legal recognition of interracial and same-sex marriage, nearly fifty years apart, do not answer the question: how is marriage a moonlighting form of loving and an impoverished form of codifying our love alongside other loves?¹⁵Lynne Huffer, "The New Normal is Not Good Enough," The Huffington Post, February 2, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynne-huffer/the-new-normal-not-good-enough_b_1895309.html. How is marriage legalization an easy and impermanent solution to the ethical imperative to see other forms of love alongside one's own?

As Loving and Moonlight bravely enter our world, we ponder the questions they raise as new dangers emerge. The election of Donald Trump feels like an unnavigable breach for many of us, but as the saying goes, now is the time for artists to go to work. In 2015, Toni Morrison wrote of her response to Bush's 2004 re-election: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."¹⁶Toni Morrison, "No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear," The Nation, March 23, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear. Chauncey Devaga cites both Loving and Moonlight as "symbolic resistance in the age of Trump…. They offer a powerful counternarrative to the reactionary social and political forces that elected Donald Trump."¹⁷Chauncey Devega, "'Moonlight' and 'Loving': Film as symbolic resistance in the age of Trump," Salon, December 10, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/moonlight-and-loving-film-as-symbolic-resistance-in-the-age-of-trump/. Perhaps what both Moonlight and Loving reveal is that the most important part of speech in our country is the progressive tense "ing"—working, doing, creating, healing. We engage in acts of forming and becoming a more perfect union, whether that union is the result of a crossed breach of difference or sameness. No more moonlighting, no more pretending, we all benefit from loving. We the people must be our own becoming.

About the Author

Eric Solomon is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at Emory University. His dissertation project, Southernmost Currents: Liminal Narratives of Love in the Florida Straits, reads south Florida as a zone of confluence for various queer figures in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Presentation

About the Speaker

James W. Porter is the Meigs Distinguished Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia and a faculty member in School of Marine Programs, Water Resources and Conservation Ecology. Porter has worked extensively on coral reef ecology, especially the biology, ecology, and assessment of Floridian and Caribbean coral reefs. His research and expertise has brought him to testify before Congress five times on environmental concerns, most recently on the effects of global warming on coral reefs.

Blog Post

"Ashley's Sack" is among the most resonant and enigmatic artifacts on display in the newly opened Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Evidently a seed sack made of unbleached cotton fabric dating to the mid-nineteenth century, it measures about thirty-three by sixteen inches. Patched repeatedly, Ashley's Sack is stitched in three colors of cotton embroidery floss with the following ten lines of text, sewn on the lower third of the sack in 1921:

My great grandmother Rose

mother of Ashley gave her this sack when

she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina

it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls [sic] of

pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her

It be filled with my Love always

she never saw her again

Ashley is my grandmother

Ruth Middleton

1921

With no accounts of its history, Ashley's Sack surfaced at a flea market in Springfield, Tennessee in 2007. From 2009–2013 it was displayed at Middleton Place in South Carolina, where it had enormous emotional impact on thousands of visitors.¹Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 196–197. The sack is described in the epilogue of Williams's book, and has been discussed from time to time in media reports since the mid-2000s. Now on loan to the Smithsonian, it's likely to be viewed and pondered by millions in the coming years.

In this essay, I attempt to reconstruct the history of Ashley's Sack, from the time of slavery onwards, and explore its shifting meanings in different display venues. My reconstruction of the sack's history prior to 2007, while grounded in careful archival research, is necessarily conjectural at points, given the paucity of primary documentary evidence on the enslaved and free family lines in question. Although some of the "detective story" that follows is speculative, I suggest the project of tracing the sack is important for several reasons. It demonstrates that the narrative embroidered by "Ruth Middleton" is very likely to be accurate, or at least highly plausible. This undertaking helps us understand how, in the face of the terrible fragmentation of family solidarity caused by the domestic slave trade, family lineal memory and continuity endured across at least four generations. Finally, the 150-year history of the sack demonstrates how, in the face of structural forces that systematically alienated property from enslaved and liberated people of color, a single material object was inherited, preserved, and creatively transformed across time and space.

Tracing Rose and Ashley

If the embroidered text is correct, Ashley probably kept the gifted object throughout her life, in slavery and freedom, and presented it to her own child—likely a daughter. Ashley's child then must have passed the sack onto her (or his) daughter, the woman identified as Ruth Middleton. In 1921, Ruth Middleton made the decision to embroider the words passed down orally through the generations.

Who were these women?

The most likely candidates for "Rose" and "Ashley" appear among the enslaved people owned by wealthy Charleston merchant and planter, Robert Martin (c. 1790–1852), who was worth over $300,000 at his death in December 1852.²Robert Martin inventory for Charleston property, listing Rose, 358; Barnwell County property, listing Ashley, 366–367, Inventories, Appraisements and Sales, 1850–1853, Charleston, South Carolina, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Note that antebellum loose probate records from Charleston District did not survive the Civil War. According to surviving Charleston inventory records, his palatial household in Charleston at 16 Charlotte Street held seven slaves, among them a woman named Rose, valued at $700. The full listing reads:

Slave Cicero 1,000, slave Sophia 300, slave Jane 400

Slave Jack 800, slave Rose 700, slave David 800, old woman 100

Robert Martin's Barnwell County plantation, "Milberry Place" (which employed overseer Robert Harper), contained about 105 slaves in 1853, among them the following family group, with the attached monetary evaluations:

Toney 100 Winney 50 Mary 500 Emma 500

Ashley 300 Levy 250

[...]

Total: 1700

Toney and Winney are presumably elderly, given their low valuations and the practice in this particular inventory account of listing named slaves in family groupings from eldest to youngest. Perhaps Ashley is Toney and Winney's grandchild, and they were looking after her in the absence of Ashley's mother Rose.

Fourteen months after Robert Martin Sr.'s death, a newspaper announcement of a court-decreed sale of the property notes that his Milberry Place Plantation contained over 2,900 acres.³Charleston Courier (Charleston, SC), Feb. 6, 1854, 4. This property was located along the Savannah River about a hundred miles west of Charleston, in an area now known as "Milbury," an unincorporated part of southeastern Allendale County. The tract is about six miles southeast of the present-day town of Allendale.

The will of Robert Martin stipulates that his house on Charlotte Street, its furniture, and "house servants" will remain in the custody of his widow, Milberry Serena Martin (1808–1877), the apparent namesake of Milberry Place.⁴Copy of Robert Martin's will, Means Family Papers, Pinckney-Means Papers, South Carolina Historical Society. See also Robert Martin will transcript, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. As executrix, she was enjoined to dissolve his resources as quickly as possible in order to realize enough cash to provide an inheritance of $20,000 for each of his children. Soon after Robert Martin's death, the parties to the inheritance entered into a complex series of cases in the South Carolina Court of Equity, leading to court-decreed sales of many components of his voluminous and diverse estate.⁵Milbery S. Martin (Executrix of Robert Martin) v. James B. Campbell, Bill for Account and Relief, filed 9 January 1858, and papers, filed 18 April 1858; Miberry S. Martin v. Edward Petit, 2 July 1859–1861, March 1860, Court of Equity Records, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Mrs. Martin purchased the land of Milberry Plantation in early 1854 and allowed her son Robert Jr. to reside on it.⁶Loose genealogical papers pertaining to Robert Martin Sr. and descendants, Pinckney-Means Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society. For information on Robert Martin Jr. see also Chalmers. G. Davidson, The Last Foray: South Carolina planters of 1860, A Sociological Study (Columbia: Published for the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission by the University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 288. By 1860, 125 slaves were held here. It also appears that, in accordance with court decrees, several enslaved persons were sold to raise cash.⁷James Daniel Erwin will, 1852, Barnwell County, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. In September 1854, Robert Martin Jr. married Annie Eliza Erwin, whose father, James Daniel Erwin, had died two years earlier and bequeathed her twenty-three slaves, many of who were held on his Erwinton plantation, adjacent to Milberry Place. Perhaps some of the 125 slaves at Milberry in 1860 had come there from the Erwin bequest.

Evidently, most of the enslaved people at Milberry remained on the plantation through the Civil War until freedom came in the spring of 1865. Some newly freed people also stayed in the vicinity. For example, the man Scipio listed in the 1853 inventory of Robert Martin's Barnwell County "Milberry" estate is presumably the Scipio Martin, recorded in the 1870 census, residing in Bamberg township, about forty miles from Milberry. Similarly, it seems likely that Frances and Amanda in the 1853 inventory became Frances Martin (born 1843) and Amanda Martin (born 1845), both residing in nearby Barnwell town in the 1870 census.

These circumstances are consistent with the scenario outlined in Ruth Middleton's embroidery. Under the will of Robert Martin Sr., Rose and the other house slaves were kept in the Charleston household at 16 Charlotte Street to look after Mrs. Martin and her minor children. Enslaved people at Milberry Place in southwestern Barnwell County could be sold off at Mrs. Martin's discretion.

At this point, we encounter a significant gap in the chain of evidence. There is no specific record of an "Ashley" after the 1853 inventory. It is not clear when the sale of Ashley took place, or how Rose and Ashley might have had the described reunion before their separation. There is no listing in Charleston newspapers of a slave sale connected to Robert Martin's estate, although there are a number of notices for equity court-decreed sales of land and real estate associated with Martin's holdings.

If the sale took place in 1853, the year after Robert Martin Sr.'s death, and Ashley was, as the needlework states, nine years old, we can assume she was born around 1844. We do not know if Rose stayed on in Charleston, or survived until emancipation.

The 1870 census reports Robert Martin's widow Serena living in Charleston with her daughter "Nina" (Serena) and four African American house servants, all with the surname Franklin:

J Franklin age 35

John Franklin age 29

Sarah Franklin age 20

Robert Franklin age 18

The embroidered text records that Rose and Ashley never saw one another again, which suggests that Rose may have died prior to 1865, or was sold out of the area after 1853.

In sum, we do have a record of a Rose and Ashley owned by the same wealthy South Carolina planter and merchant, Robert Martin, at the time of his death in late 1852, held at properties over one hundred miles apart from one another. We have legal records indicating that Robert Martin's widow was enjoined by her late husband's will to retain Rose at the Charleston mansion, but that she was free to sell Ashley and other slaves from the Savannah River "Milberry" plantation, in southeastern Barnwell County, and that she, as executrix, was under urgent pressure to raise cash for the lawful heirs of her late husband. We do not have direct evidence, however, that Ashley was sold and separated from her mother in the manner described in the 1921 embroidery. All we can say is that the 1921 embroidered account—of a nine-year-old Ashley being sold away from her mother Rose—is consistent with the extant documentary record of Robert Martin's estate.

Tracing Ruth Middleton

Who was Ruth Middleton, the woman who appears to have embroidered Ashley's Sack in 1921? We can proceed both by process of elimination, ruling out less likely "candidates," and by positive evidence for one particular woman who bore the name Ruth Middleton. There are sixteen African American women across the nation in the 1920 US census named "Ruth Middleton." Two additional Ruth Middletons, who do not appear in the census, are documented in marriage and other records. Of these eighteen women, we can subtract those born after 1915 (presumably too young to embroider in 1921). We can probably also remove from consideration those women who, according to the census, could neither read nor write. Further, that the embroiderer specified that the events took place in "South Carolina" perhaps suggests that she was not residing there when doing the needlework.

Of the six remaining candidates, one, by far, appears most likely. Only she had clear family roots in South Carolina, resided outside of the state, was literate, and resided in a context in which she plausibly could have created the needlework in question.

This woman is not among the Ruth Middletons in the 1920 US census—for reasons that may be telling. In 1918, a young African American, born Ruth Jones in Columbia, South Carolina around 1903, married Arthur Middleton, born around 1899, also from South Carolina, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she evidently resided for the rest of her life. Arthur was born in Camden, Kershaw County, South Carolina, about twenty miles from Columbia, and was the child of Pink (Thompson) and Flander Middleton.⁸Flander Middleton, the father-in-law of Ruth Jones, was born in Sumter County, South Carolina, around 1863. The 1880 census records him residing in Providence, a town in Sumter County currently known as Dalzell, a few miles northeast of Sumter township, the county seat. Although Flander is not listed in the 1870 census, the census for that year does record a Dolly Middleton (born 1855) residing in the same neighborhood of Providence. Dolly also is listed, under the married name of Dawson, living adjacent to Flander Middleton in the 1880 census. In their marriage license application, Ruth claims to be born in 1897—that is to say, to have reached twenty-one, the legal age of consent. All other sources, however, indicate that she was fifteen or sixteen at the time of her marriage.

Ruth's parents, Austin and Rosa Jones, appear to have married around 1902 in Columbia, one year before her birth. Austin worked for a time as wagon driver; in 1910 he and Rosa both worked as servants at the University of South Carolina (in Columbia), and appear to have lived next door to the well-known white South Carolina historian Alexander Salley. Austin died in 1912 and Rosa in 1916, leaving Ruth an orphan.⁹Letters of Administration, Richland County, South Carolina, Probate Court. Record of Admissions, Vol. 6, 114–15; Record of Deaths, 44–5, South Carolina State Mental Hospital. Certificate of Death no. 35328, Rosa Jones; South Carolina Department of History and Archives. Ruth's father, Austin Jones, died in May 1912. Ruth's mother Rosa Jones was admitted on 26 June 1916 to the South Carolina State Mental Hospital and died there three days later.

It is possible that Ruth came up to Philadelphia with Arthur Middleton, or that they met there. In her marriage application, Ruth lists her occupation as "housework" and her address as 501 Woodside Terrace.¹⁰County of Philadelphia, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Marriage license application (25 June 1918), Arthur Middleton and Ruth Jones. This was the elegant Italianate home of chemical engineer and factory owner Edward Linch and his wife Mabel, an organist who performed in the most prominent circles of Philadelphia white society.

Employed as a domestic worker in this household, Ruth must have observed the ins and outs of Philadelphia society, and perhaps took up needlework during this time. It is not clear how long Ruth remained in the Linch family's employ. She gave birth to a baby girl, Dorothy Helen Middleton, in January 1919, six months after her marriage to Arthur.

There is no record that Ruth and Arthur ever lived together. Soon after their wedding, Arthur was inducted into the US Army and served overseas in World War I until mid-1919.¹¹Army separation application #272507 (22 November 1919), Arthur Middleton. In the 1920 census he is living apart from his wife as a lodger in Philadelphia. He later resided in Brooklyn, New York, near his elder sister Helen and his mother, who eventually moved to Brooklyn from South Carolina. Ruth appears to have kept up connections with Arthur's family: a 1928 notice in the Philadelphia Tribune reports that Ruth entertained Arthur's elder sister Helen Middleton Hadley of New York for Thanksgiving.

It would therefore appear that in 1921, the year that Ashley's Sack was embroidered, Ruth Jones Middleton was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old single mother living in Philadelphia.

Ruth Jones Middleton's later life remains somewhat of an enigma. I have found no traces of her from 1919 through 1924. In 1925, she resides in a lodging house in South Philadelphia. In the 1930 census she is listed as a live-in "waitress" in the elegant home of well-to-do white photographer, Samuel J. Caster, adjacent to Bryn Mawr College in Lower Merion, a main line suburb of Philadelphia. Eleven-year-old Dorothy Helen is not listed as living with her.¹²Suggestively, the only black "Dorothy Middleton" appearing anywhere in the 1930 US census is an eleven-year-old girl residing in the home of George and Maggie Lynch in Mount Hope, Fayette County, West Virginia, listed as their "niece." I do not know if this African American couple, the "Lynches," had any connection to the white Linch family who employed Ruth in 1918, in Philadelphia.

From around 1928 onwards, Ruth appears to have reinvented herself. She is mentioned regularly in the "Smart Set" and "High Society" pages of the Philadelphia Tribune, the leading African American newspaper of the region, hosting bridge and cocktail parties and wearing elegant couture.¹³References to Mrs. Ruth Jones Middleton in the "Woman's Page," "Society at a Glance," "Smart Set," "Younger Set," and other columns of the Philadelphia Tribune (Philadelphia, PA), Dec. 8, 1928, 6; July 24, 1929, 4; Aug.13, 1931, 4; Feb. 18, 1932, 5; Sept. 8, 1932, 5; Dec. 21, 1933, 6; Feb. 3, 1938, 6; Feb. 17, 1938, 6; March 3, 1938, 5; April 7, 1938, 6; Dec. 13, 1939, 9; Jan. 4, 1940, 8; Jan. 18, 1940, 8; Feb. 18, 1940, 9; March 17, 1940, 18. There are no known newspaper obituaries after her death in 1942. Ruth's daughter Dorothy Helen Middleton appears several times as a member of fashionable dance clubs and, in the late 1930s around age twenty, authored the Philadelphia Tribune's "Smart Set" society column at least twice.

In February 1940, the Tribune reported, "attractive South Philadelphia matron, Mrs. Ruth Middleton will be confirmed next month at St Simons Church." The Episcopal Chapel of Saint Simon the Cyrenian, at 1401 22nd Street, was a socially prominent African American church. Ruth's confirmation marked her transition to the more "respectable" ranks of black Philadelphia society. Also in 1940, Ruth is listed as a lodger in downtown Philadelphia with her daughter, Dorothy Helen Middleton. The census reports that Ruth is Dorothy's "sister"; it seems plausible that Ruth intentionally misstated their relationship to obscure the fact that she had given birth at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

The 1940 church confirmation notices are the last mention in the press of Ruth Jones Middleton, who may, by this point, already have developed the illness that would take her life. She died in January 1942 of tuberculosis, after six months in Philadelphia's Douglass Memorial Hospital.¹⁴County of Philadelphia, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Certificate of Death No. 9389, Ruth Middleton. Her daughter Dorothy Helen could only afford thirty dollars for an unmarked grave in Mount Lawn cemetery in Sharon Hills, outside the city.¹⁵In 1942, Dorothy Helen Middleton purchased two burial plots—one for her mother and one for herself—at Mount Lawn in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Mount Lawn cemetery records indicate that she never used the second plot; it is not known where she was buried after her death in 1988. Perhaps Ruth had a wealthy patron during her life to support her society lifestyle; if so, no resources for her funeral expenses were available after her death.

Ruth's daughter Dorothy lived until 1988, taking the name Dorothy Page at some point, perhaps because of marriage. At the time of her death, she resided in the north Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote. It's not clear whether Dorothy Helen Middleton Page (who evidently died in a nursing home) retained Ashley's Sack during her life, or how it made its way to the flea market for the 2007 sale.

Ruth Jones Middleton's Ancestry

What of the parentage and ancestry of Ruth Jones Middleton? Can we link her to Rose, to Ashley, or to Robert Martin's Milberry Place plantation of Barnwell County, South Carolina?

As of this writing, there is no direct documentary proof that Ruth Jones Middleton's family came from Milberry Place Plantation, where the "Ashley" owned by Robert Martin resided in the early 1850s. However, there is strong circumstantial evidence linking Ruth's mother and maternal grandparents to this specific region of South Carolina.

As mentioned above, Ruth is recorded in the 1910 census for Columbia, South Carolina, as the seven-year-old child of Austin Jones (born in 1878) and Rosa Jones (born in 1879), both employed as servants of the University of South Carolina. We may speculate that perhaps the name of Ruth's mother, "Rosa," honors an earlier woman in the family history named "Rose."

In her 1918 marriage license application, Ruth lists her mother's maiden name as "Rosa Clifton." The 1870 census, the first census to record the names of all recently emancipated African Americans, records about sixty African Americans named Clifton in the state of South Carolina. The only white slave owning Cliftons in antebellum South Carolina were concentrated in Chester County; many black Cliftons lived in Chester County and its environs in the 1870s.

The census records a single black Clifton family in Columbia, South Carolina, and a cluster of black Clifton families between Columbia and the Savannah River—in the Barnwell County townships of Barnwell, Blackville, Bamberg and Diamond Hill, and in the adjacent Orangeburg communities of Amelia and Goodlands. Nearly all of these Clifton families reside within a fifty-mile radius of Robert Martin's Milberry Place Plantation, where Ashley was clearly enslaved in 1852. Numerous African Americans with the surname "Martin," whose first names correspond with those listed in the 1853 Robert Martin estate inventory at Milberry, are scattered through this same geography. It's likely that Rosa Clifton Jones and her daughter Ruth Jones Middleton had roots in this extended family network.

How do we know this? The mother of Ruth Jones Middleton, "Rosa Clifton," born around 1880, is listed in the 1900 census as living in Columbia, employed as a chambermaid. She is listed as the "sister in law" of a Wesley Perry, married to a Hattie Perry (born around 1873) who is presumably Rosa's sister (with the maiden name of Clifton). The 1880 census records a "Hattie Clifton" (born around 1874) in the Goodlands township of Orangeburg County, adjacent to Springfield, about forty miles south of Columbia. Her parents are listed as William Clifton (born around 1841) and Sarah Clifton (born around 1849).

To be sure, it would be ideal if we had clear evidence that this woman "Sarah" bore the earlier name of "Ashley," or that Rosa Clifton's grandmother bore the name Rose. In the lack of such evidence, all we can currently conjecture is that Rosa Clifton's parents probably resided in the same geographical region within which many former slaves from Milberry lived.

In short, although the lines of descent are unclear, it is highly plausible that Rosa Clifton Jones, the mother of Ruth Jones Middleton, had family roots among the once-enslaved people of the Robert Martin plantation, who, after emancipation, spread out into Barnwell, Orangeburg, and Richland Counties. Future research may provide more definitive evidence that Rosa Clifton Jones was in fact mothered by the "Ashley" listed in the Robert Martin estate.

The Sack Since 2007

To return to recent history, in February 2007 a white woman (who wishes to remain anonymous) discovered and purchased Ashley's Sack for twenty dollars from a white man at an open-air flea market in Springfield, Tennessee. She first explored selling it through eBay and a New York auction house, but after dreaming of the little girl Ashley and developing a close connection over the telephone with a Middleton Place senior staff member, she decided to transfer it to the Middleton Place historic house museum near Charleston.¹⁶"Slave child torn from mom filled sack with love" Spartanburg Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC) April 16, 2007, C1, C3.

When Middleton Place Foundation acquired Ashley's Sack, it had already taken steps towards incorporating the slavery narrative into its interpretive mission. Indeed, one of the reasons the donor was so willing to present it to the Middleton Place was its demonstrated commitment to engage with mass enslavement and its legacy: Around 2005, Middleton installed a permanent exhibition on slavery in one of its outbuildings, known as Eliza's House, listing the names of about 2,600 enslaved people associated with the plantation.

Since Eliza's House lacked environmental control and security, Ashley's Sack wasn't installed there. Instead, Ashley's Sack was displayed within the historic house museum. It was initially exhibited in the upstairs library, near facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence (signed by Arthur Middleton) and South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession (signed, among others, by Arthur Middleton's descendant William). The Middleton Place leadership hoped that Ashley's Sack's placement would productively complicate the interpretation of these documents, highlighting the paradoxes embedded in American conceptions of liberty and equality. Later, the object was moved downstairs to the front hall, to a specially constructed case with other items more definitively linked to slavery at Middleton Place, including a slave badge and buttons worn by enslaved workers.

Middleton Place staff recall that Ashley's Sack posed interpretive challenges for many of the more veteran volunteer guides, who were more familiar with storylines emphasizing the accomplishments and refinement of the white Middletons. Some felt uncomfortable with direct discussions of slavery; others were overwhelmed by the emotional responses catalyzed by the object, which brought tears to many visitors' eyes. Some volunteer guides complained that the sack, and the powerful reactions it engendered, distracted from the core mission of the tour: to highlight the wealth, political leadership, and cosmopolitanism of the white Middletons.

Whatever reservations some volunteers might harbor about Ashley's Sack, the object is treasured by professional staff at Middleton Place. A large reproduction is included in the Foundation's commemorative book.¹⁷Charles Duell, Middleton Place: A Phoenix Still Rising. Middleton Place Foundation. (Charleston: Middleton Place Foundation, 2013), 57. Mary Edna Sullivan, Middleton's curator, brought it in January 2011 to the Winter Antiques Show in New York's Park Avenue Armory, where it attracted deep interest and emotional responses from hundreds of visitors.

From the time they acquired Ashley's Sack, curatorial and interpretive staff harbored the hope that it would prove to have a historical connection with Middleton Place families, black or white. Noting that the sack was discovered near Nashville, Tennessee, where some white Middletons had settled after the Civil War, they conjectured that the object might have travelled with them.¹⁸Although Ruth had no apparent lineal connection to the Middleton slaves, there is some circumstantial evidence that her father-in-law, Flander Middleton, born around 1863 during the Civil War in Sumter County, South Carolina, may have been descended from persons enslaved by the Middletons of Middleton Place. A possible link is through the Middleton heir, Eliza Carolina Middleton Huger (1824–1919), daughter of Isabella Joanne Middleton, born in 1780 at Middleton Place, the daughter of Arthur Middleton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Eliza Smith's son, William Mason Smith, records in an 1863 letter that he transferred his slave "Philander" and Philander's family (including a newborn child) to their Sumter County plantation, following Harriet Tubman's Combahee Raid. It is possible that the Middleton name was being maintained by the enslaved family of Philander, and a child named Philander was later known as "Flander." (I am indebted to Dottie Stone, Middleton Place historian, for this suggested connection between Flander Middleton and the Middletons of Middleton Place.) It is certainly intriguing in this light that Ruth's husband was named "Arthur Middleton," the same name as the illustrious Middleton Place patriarch.

In any event, a Middleton staff member brought Ashley's Sack to the May 2009 "Save America's Treasures" event in Charleston hosted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), as the Museum searched for significant, previously unknown works of African American material culture. Smithsonian curators were deeply moved by the object; after negotiations, Middleton agreed to lend it to the Smithsonian on a year-to-year basis.

At the NMAAHC, which opened in September 2016, Ashley's Sack is exhibited directly next to a case holding an "auction block" and near a large installation evoking bales of piled cotton, entitled "King Cotton." These elements, the curators explain, evoke the enormous financial wealth generated by the slavery system. In contrast, Ashley's Sack evokes the intangible "human cost" of slavery, emphasizing a specific family story of tragedy and endurance across generations. Adjacent text describes the tragedy of family members being torn away from one another. A soundscape loop presents a range of first person commentaries, including WPA oral histories, about slave sales.

In its new location, the sack is hung entirely vertically, with the full front surface of the cloth visible, so that the text begins about three feet off the floor. Museum patrons must crouch low to read it.

Perhaps, in time, the NMAAHC will develop a more interactive and accessible installation strategy, including an enlarged reproduction of the text, allowing visitors to contemplate Ruth Middleton's complex, ambiguous narrative and to enter more directly into this complex historical trajectory. As my students and I have contemplated Ashley's Sack, it seems that the object calls out for a hands-on presentation. Perhaps visitors from around the world might write letters to Rose or Ashley, emulating Ruth's own commitment to the power of the written word to confront time's passage. Perhaps such letters could constitute an evolving installation. Alternately, visitors might ponder what they would do if faced with Rose's predicament. My colleague Jay Ball suggests asking what three gifts might visitors choose for a loved one they would never meet again. As at the adjacent Vietnam Veterans Memorial, one could imagine this exhibition space becoming a pilgrimage destination, where visitors leave objects, photographs, heirlooms, and works of art to achieve a reunion across race and difference, creating a new space of collective homecoming.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jane Aldrich, Toni Carrier, Simon Lewis, and the Low Country Africana collective for guidance in this research. (Low Country Africana's ambitious partnership with fold3.com and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History has made many significant slavery-era documents searchable and accessible.) Special thanks to Laura Booth and the Philadelphia chapter of African American Genealogical and Historical Society; Mary Skinner-Jones of AME Bethel, Columbia, SC; Steve Tuttle and his colleagues at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; Rev. John A. Middleton (New Light Beulah Baptist Church, Hopkins, South Carolina); Rev. Betsey Ivey (Saint Simon the Cyrenian Episcopal Church in Philadelphia); Peter Moak (Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania Archives); Mount Lawn and Eden cemeteries, Delaware County, PA; Rev. Tiffany Knowlin (Wesley United Methodist Church, Columbia, SC); Mary Elliot and Nancy Bercaw at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; and, Tracey Todd, Mary Edna Sullivan, Jeff Neale and Charles Duell, of Middleton Place. Research was also conducted at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the South Carolinia Library of the University of South Carolina, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Charleston County Public Library, and courthouses in Barnwell and Richland counties, South Carolina. I have also benefited from the many insights of Jessica Hope Amason, Ellen Avitts, Jay Ball, Randall Burkett, Nic Butler, Keith Champagne, Bobby Cummings, Lynn Linnemeier, Negara Kudumu, Wyatt MacGaffey, Jonathan Prude, Richard Reid, Ellen Schattschneider, Rosalind Shaw, Terrance Weik, Avis Williams, and my students in the Museum Studies program at Central Washington University. Finally, thanks to the Southern Spaces team for their attentive reading and editorial work.

Comments and reflections on this post, and on the meaning and significance of Ashley's Sack, may be shared at: http://culturalenvironments.blogspot.com/2016/10/origins-of-ashleys-sack.html

About the Author

Mark Auslander is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Central Washington University, where he directs the university's Museum of Culture and Environment. He is the author of The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). He writes a regular blog on his ethnographic, museum, and cultural studies interests, "Cultural Environments."

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting…

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando¹Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1956), 78.

Sankofa: go back to fetch it. The implied subject is the imperative "you," as in "you go back to fetch it." It is June 23, 2016: just ten days after a gunman killed forty-nine people at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, Florida. You sit in the Kashi Atlanta Urban Ashram, surrounded by panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt during a Pride month viewing and dialogue. Although it has travelled, you know the quilt is now housed in a non-descript building in Midtown Atlanta. You have been there. You know the quilt's weight (fifty four tons), and you have held in your hands the letters written to accompany panel submissions. Such lightweight papers, yellowed and ragged, describe the memories of loved ones and the processes of sewing quilt panels. As you sit viewing the panels, you fixate on a pink flamingo in front of a setting (or rising) sun: Gay Men's Chorus South Florida. Even as the program begins, as queer activists discuss the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in our community (Atlanta and the Southeast, specifically) and the quilt's significance as a memorial practice, you fixate on the pink flamingo—always standing, stationary, frozen in its tight stiches—to your left.

You read the names on the panel (stitched in the sand and sky), mouthing them in silence. You follow the flamingo.

The Florida turnpike—the long interstate toll-road that extends the peninsula—resembles a chain of islands. Every few miles, you can pull your vehicle into the center where convenience stations and fast food restaurants await you. These eight archipelagic service stations float in the road's middle, serving as places of respite along the 264-mile expanse. It is as though you are riding the currents at a controlled seventy miles per hour, pulling your car into port when needed. The road begins south of Gainesville, travels through Orlando and Port St. Lucie, passes the Everglades and the ghost town of Flamingo, before reaching Miami. Just south of Miami, the toll road ends, but the road continues, leaving the mainland in a series of bridges that extend to your destination, Key West, the southernmost point in the continental US. Your trip from Atlanta is fourteen hours. You leave at midnight. You arrive in Key West at 4:00 pm. You are tired.

You have come to Key West for "gay spring break," an island-week specifically designed for gay people in a sea of straight decadence along much of Florida's shores. You think it will be a memorable experience, unique to you and your community. You come seeking communion and fellowship; you arrive, greeted with a new understanding of the word family. The philosophy of Key West since 2000 has been "One Human Family," in which all are equal and all resist narratives that seek to divide or impose "artificial limitations" on who we can be.

You arrive and park. You are told you will not be able to move your car until you leave the island; walking or biking are the preferred methods of transit. You check in to your bungalow and walk down Duval Street, the main thoroughfare. You see Aqua Nightclub and Bourbon St. Pub, Graffiti men's boutique, and other spaces catering to you and yours. You make a note to go to Aqua's drag show later. As you keep going, you encounter Sloppy Joe's and the copious tourists who seek knick-knacks and bric-a-brac from street vendors along areas surrounding Mallory Square. Yes, you see many college-aged spring breakers, gay, straight, and everything in between. You pass by the famous La Concha Hotel and the Cuban San Carlos Institute. You have a conversation with the doorman in Spanish; he tells you where to get the best sandwich. You walk back to your bungalow; people smile at you and comment on your huaraches, your straw hat: your carefully planned island wardrobe. You seem to fit in here. More than abstract appreciation, you experience Key West's "One Human Family" philosophy in action.

The next day you awake in your bungalow, refreshed. You walk across the mile-wide island. You stop at Hemingway's House and the Gay and Lesbian Visitor's Center, which hosts a Tennessee Williams in Key West exhibit. You pose next to a cardboard cutout of the famous playwright. You venture to 1431 Duncan Street, once home to Williams and his partner Frank Merlo. Now privately owned, you can only see it from the outside. You imagine the brief peace of their shared domestic partnership in that home.²For more on Merlo and Williams, see John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014). You leave Duncan Street, turn left on White Street, and walk until you reach the ocean at the White Street Pier.

Here, beneath your feet, is the Key West AIDS Memorial, the only municipal AIDS Memorial in the United States. Here, engraved on shiny Zimbabwe granite, are hundreds of names. You have come to this pier seeking this place, seeking what Heather Love calls an "emotional rescue," a version of the perilous, unstable, "queer impulse," a longing "to forge communities between the living and the dead."³See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 31. You read the names; you are aware you cannot save them, but you yearn nonetheless to say their names, to be in that space of memory, to know their stories. You know better than to think all of them were gay or queer self-identified, that a virus, a syndrome, does not discriminate. Yet, you also know the frayed and often misremembered history of AIDS stigma.⁴For more on AIDS and memory, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Castiglia and Reed identify (amnesiac) patterns of "de-generation" and "unremembering" in American (queer) culture since the 1980s.

Leaving the memorial, you encounter an unexpected juxtaposition. Directly to the right of the pier, at Higgs Beach, is the African Cemetery, where some 294 African men, women, and children are buried. Over a thousand Africans were brought illegally (after the abolition of the slave trade in 1808) on three American-owned ships (Wildfire, William, and Bogota) bound for Cuba; the US Navy intercepted the ships and brought the men, women and children to Key West, where nearly three hundred of them would die awaiting their fate. You browse the plaza and plaques, learning about Adinkra symbols and the philosophy of Sankofa, aware of the history of slavery at the foundation of American democracy.⁵See Adrian Sainz, "African Slaves Found Peace in Key West," ABC News, February 6, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=119106&page=1. Uncanny, you think, how memories inhabit the same space, palimpsests of loss beneath the shifting sands at your feet and the white-capped waters beneath the pier's pillars. You stand on the island's southeastern shore overlooking the Florida Straits; a Westerner looking East from the "southernmost," you think how intricately tangled all of our histories are. You look down; the Sankofa bird looks up at you as she reaches behind her to retrieve what she has lost.

That night, you return to the present. You enter Aqua, and there, in the blue lights cascading around the room, you bathe in the fellowship of family. A Celine Dion impersonator infuses the room with the "Power of Love." Subversive, camp, queer, you think, as the drag performer lip-syncs the words, "I'm your lady and you are my man." Slippery, you think, the categories in which we place others and ourselves.

You know the popular narrative of Key West—its open philosophy and strident tourist rhetoric—somewhat muddies the history of the many marginal peoples who gave birth to the island-city and its modern philosophy. Over the years it has attracted political radicals and people persecuted on the basis of race, ethnicity, political beliefs, nationality, gender performance, and sexuality. John Dos Passos, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, Terrence McNally, James Merrill and partner David Jackson, John Hersey, Carson McCullers, Françoise Sagan: this is just a brief list of artists (in addition to its most famous residents Hemingway and Williams) who lived in or visited the island-city.

Yet you know Key West is not paradise; just as queer lives have found its borders to be an island-enclave—a sanctuary—it has also served as a microcosmic representation of the pain and loss queer people have experienced in the American mainland-mainstream. Tennessee Williams owned his only home here with his partner, but he also suffered a very public beating leaving a popular gay disco called "the Monster" on the island. As you walk past the colorful buoy designating the southernmost point of the continental US, ninety miles from Cuba, you think of the many Cuban gays (machos, maricones, pájaros) and dissidents who landed in Key West during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, reaching some version of freedom. Yet many of them would die in disproportionate numbers on the island during the peak years of the AIDS epidemic. You need look no further than the many Hispanic names—names like Hernandez, Lopez, Acevedo, Perez, Rodriguez, and Rubino—carved in granite at the foot of the ironically named White Street Pier to witness such a haunting reality. To borrow from one of the island's mottos, Key West may be "far from normal," but it is also only "close to perfect."

Soon, you will leave Key West; you will travel northward from the southernmost point; you will remember Anita Bryant and her Dade County "Save Our Children" campaign; you will remember the Johns Committee and the Lavender Scare. You will remember those who struggled for your own less-contested visibility; you will realize that Florida's past represents the conundrum queer people once faced in this country: attempt to connect to the mainland-mainstream and risk misunderstanding and persecution or live island-existences somewhere "close-to-perfect, far-from-normal." You will travel back through Orlando along the archipelagic turnpike—the meandering road of memory. As you sit in Atlanta two years later, you remember passing through Orlando; your pulse quickens.

After your trip, you will learn that Key West was not always called Key West, that when it was settled by the Spanish, legend has it conquistador Ponce de León first named the archipelago Los Mártires—the Martyrs—because, according to one version of events, upon approach the islands looked like suffering men, knees bowed, humbled, in pain, "dying."⁶Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda writes, "dicense los martires porque an padesido muchos ohbres y tanbien porque ai unas peñas salidas debajo de la mar que dende lejos paresen hombres que estan padesiendo" (192). ["They are called the Martyrs because many men have perished [there], and also because there are bare rocks projecting from beneath the sea that appear from afar to be men who are dying" (199)]. See "The Captivity of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, 1649–1566" in Discovering Florida: First-Contact Narratives from Spanish Expeditions along the Lower Gulf Coast. Edited and translated by John E. Worth (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

You will learn that the etymology of the word martyr includes more than those who die in service of faith. It is a word of witness, and as a derivative of the Sanskrit "smri," a word "to bear in mind, remember." Witness. Remembrance. As you drive past Orlando, you will not yet know Pulse and the forty-nine lives yet to be lost to a gunman's madness, but one day you will learn that pulse's etymology includes "drive." As you drive, you remember; as you remember, you drive.

At one place in time in Florida the bravery of queer lives that inhabit spaces at the center of town—places like Pulse, sandwiched between an auto-tinting business and a Dunkin' Donuts—would have seemed radical to you, in fierce need of protection. Yet you have become accustomed to thinking your spaces are safe even in the middle of town. Pulse will remind you that no place is safe when a gunman's mind is adrift, lost, deeply troubled. You know the "gay agenda" is and has always been survival; safety is illusory. Pulse will remind you that Latin night at the gay bar still provokes rage; that violence—real and imagined—still targets specific identities. In this age of contested post-identities, you will again be reminded of the need to physically claim a space of your own, to own your pulse in a world where some seek (and will always seek) to cut it short.

*

I begin with a remembered journey through south Florida—a journey that may be my own—but that vitally includes you: my readers, my listeners, and co-travellers. We must be engaged in continual acts of remembering. Memory is a seamstress, and she stitches us all together. When I began this blog post, I thought I would dwell primarily on these sites of memory in Key West and the possibility they create for the living to connect with those who have gone before. Orlando and Pulse have made all of us think anew, and the writing of this post reflects this shift in perspective.

For the Pulse gunman also attacked our memories. In all of the continuing coverage of the tragedy in Orlando, it is important to remember that Pulse Nightclub was more than just a sacred space of queer fellowship, entertainment, and desire. Like the Key West AIDS Memorial and the African Cemetery at Higgs Beach, Pulse was founded as a living, dynamic memorial honoring the dead. Owner Barbara Poma, on the club's website and in interviews after the tragedy, discussed the loss of her brother John to AIDS in 1991 and his presence in her decision to open Pulse. In remembering him and honoring the life he lived, Poma established Pulse in 2004, named "for John's heartbeat" and a place where "he is kept alive in the eyes of his friends and family."⁷See Katie Mettler, "Orlando's club Pulse owes its name and spirit to 'loving brother' who died from AIDS," The Washington Post, June 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/13/more-than-just-another-gay-club-pulse-was-founded-in-her-brothers-memory-and-named-for-his-beating-heart/; Anna Codrea-Rado, "The Little Known Story of Pulse, an Orlando Nightclub Founded on Love," Thump, June 13, 2016, https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/pulse-orlando-nightclub-history-feature. Pulse, then, has always served to connect queer communities across the living-dead ontological divide. In rebuilding Pulse, we rebuild the vital solidarity that queer spaces engender and foster simultaneously in times of dance and revelry and in times of loss and remembrance.

Pulse is and has always been about family: those who live and those who've gone before. One family, one pulse: from Barbara and her brother John to all of the victims of the massacre:

Stanley Almodovar III

Amanda Alvear

Oscar A Aracena-Montero

Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala

Antonio Davon Brown

Darryl Roman Burt II

Angel L. Candelario-Padro

Juan Chevez-Martinez

Luis Daniel Conde

Cory James Connell

Tevin Eugene Crosby

Deonka Deidra Drayton

Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez

Leroy Valentin Fernandez

Mercedez Marisol Flores

Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz

Juan Ramon Guerrero

Paul Terrell Henry

Frank Hernandez

Miguel Angel Honorato

Javier Jorge-Reyes

Jason Benjamin Josaphat

Eddie Jamoldroy Justice

Anthony Luis Laureanodisla

Christopher Andrew Leinonen

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

Brenda Lee Marquez McCool

Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez

Kimberly Morris

Akyra Monet Murray

Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo

Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera

Joel Rayon Paniagua

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez

Enrique L. Rios, Jr.

Jean C. Nives Rodriguez

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz

Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan

Edward Sotomayor Jr.

Shane Evan Tomlinson

Martin Benitez Torres

Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega

Juan P. Rivera Velazquez

Luis S. Vielma

Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez

Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon

Jerald Arthur Wright

"All memorials participate in the act of naming," and we have and will say their names.⁸See Sturken, 186. In doing the work of remembering, we say their names; we go back and fetch them from the bullets that sought to define their lives.

"Events of tragic consequences demand memorials," Marita Sturken writes.⁹Ibid, 183. How will we continue to memorialize what is now the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001, and the deadliest hate crime against LGBTQ people? How will Pulse be remembered? Will we create quilt panels, carve names in granite, erect plazas to commemorate loss? It is still too soon to determine answers. On the one hand, written memorials, testimonials, and manifestos continue to permeate the blogosphere. Since June 12, makeshift memorials have continued to grow at the Pulse site. On July 31, 2016, the Instagram of the One Pulse Foundation mistakenly reported that the owners of Pulse would reopen the club as a memorial site; a day later, August 1, a spokesperson clarified that Pulse's reopening, in whatever form, would include a memorial "of some kind."¹⁰See Paul Brinkmann, "Pulse Owner Says No Re-Opening Planned Yet," August 1, 2016, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/os-pulse-reopening-statement-20160801-story.html?ghj. A memorial "of some kind" would allow some young queer man or woman to pilgrimage to the site, engage in acts of emotional rescue, and remember that there are some who do not love you as you are and may cause you harm for being you. In our current political climate, such a lesson seems urgent. Remember, however, Pulse has always been a memorial, and the gay bar—with its music and lights, its dancing and revelry, its owners and patrons—has always been a place where young and old queer men and women of all backgrounds can find family and, perhaps, rescue.

*

I follow the pink flamingo, jolted back to the present by the music of a Lambda Legal video playing on the screen before me. As my trip of remembering comes to a close—surrounded by men and women who have lived through tragedy and pain, heartache and joy, dancers from the dance and radical queers acting up—I am reminded that "loss"—in body or in mind—"is not lost."¹¹See Michael Moon, "Memorial Rags." In Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Edited by George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 239.

We will survive. And yet the grief, the anger, returns in waves. In a world post-Pulse, "For many, anger has replaced grief. Is anger a form of mourning?"¹²See Sturken, 201. How can we use our emotions in acts of remembering and in processes of memorialization? In doing so, how will we honor the lives lost? I admit I do not have the answers, but as our history has taught us, they are questions we will continue to ask.

Sankofa: go back to fetch it.

I return to the pink flamingo. In Matthew Dickman's poem "Grief," a purple gorilla visits the speaker and plays a card game, separating names in piles designated life and death. Dickman writes, "When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla/ you must count yourself lucky… how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other."¹³Matthew Dickman, "Grief," The New Yorker, May 5, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/05/grief-6

My purple gorilla was a pink flamingo—standing with its weight on one leg before a setting/rising sun—reminding me how careless it seems that the suns of so many have set while mine will rise again.

My childhood family vacations included mandatory excursions to museums, libraries, and historical sites. To ensure that my little brother and I "enjoyed" cultural experiences of all stripes, we toured the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King Jr.'s grave at the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Boston Children's Museum. Much to my parent's dismay, I was much more interested in playing outside with friends, drawing superheroes, and tormenting my little brother than in appreciating educational tourism.

Today, as a doctoral student in Emory University's Institute for the Liberal Arts, I research contemporary science fiction and fantasy, focusing on the literary and visual cultures of Afrofuturism. My research takes me into the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library where I read the late twentieth century writings of Octavia Butler, Steven Barnes, and Samuel R. Delany alongside the visual images of early 20th century artists, like Aaron Douglas.

Exploring connections across genres and time periods, as well as class and color lines, I look for imagined black futures in archival holdings. In addition to my research, I work as an assistant curator for the African American Collections in the Rose library, creating programs that connect undergraduates to Emory's archives. My twelve-year-old self would marvel at this transformation: somewhere between grade school and graduate study, I learned to appreciate smelly old books, discolored newspapers, and indecipherable manuscripts. I blame my parents—after all, they planted the seed that is now blossoming into full-blown archive fever.

My scholarly interests and newfound archival passions come together in the monthly LiFT art salons that bring young Atlantans into local museums and historic sites. On November 22nd 2015, LiFT hosted the #DareToBe event at the Hammonds House Museum, a nineteenth-century home that has served as one of Atlanta's premiere institutions of black art since 1988. The #DareToBe event targeted Atlanta University Center (AUC) students, hoping to encourage a substantive dialogue in one Atlanta neighborhood.

The AUC is a collective of Historically Black Colleges and Universities that include Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University. While these institutions share West End real estate, close proximity does not necessarily imply longstanding relations between current AUC students and their host neighborhood. On the contrary. During my time as a Morehouse undergraduate, I stayed primarily on campus and rarely connected with the West End or the Atlanta metro region. By hosting #DareToBe at the Hammonds House Museum, LiFT encouraged AUC students to get off campus and to understand themselves within broader networks.

LiFT team members collaborated with two Spelman professors to plan, promote, and stage the gathering. Professor of drama and renowned playwright and dance instructor Aku Kadogo joined forces with Glee Club director Dr. Kevin Johnson to design the fall 2015 "Collaborative Arts" seminar that culminated in LiFT's #DareToBe event. For her final project, each student created a project to perform or feature at the Hammonds House gathering. This creative activity stretched many students beyond their comfort zones, asking them to be artists and creators.

#DareToBe was staged in each room of the Hammonds House, inviting the Spelman students to consider the home's architecture as an active participant in their creative process. With students singing, dancing, and acting across the building's footprint, the museum transformed into a living, breathing art studio. In total, there were four performances: "Mathematical Proof" featured a spoken word performance accompanied by piano and backup vocals. "Chorepoem" cast four Spelman women in an interactive performance celebrating black womanhood. "Karrah 4 Prez" envisioned a black female presidential candidate in a one-act scene. The final performance, "#Daretobe Anthem", brought the entire class together to perform an original song.

For Professor Kadogo, the event extended one Spelman classroom beyond the campus gates:

Connecting our Spelman College students with the historic Hammonds House proved to be an invaluable experience. The Spelman students participated in networking, decision-making, and performance creation. As part of our process, we visited the Hammonds House and toured the entire museum, deciding along with LiFT curator Shady Patterson and event coordinator Miriam Denard where each performance might best be stationed to facilitate a "walking tour" performance event.

Working in collaboration with LiFT, the students gained encouragement and inspiration, realizing that they were creating something that other people wanted to experience.¹Aku Kadogo, phone interview with author, March 10th, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia. Transcription by author.

The students' performances generated an energized talk-back with the crowd. During the question and answer session, attendees engaged the students as artists, probing them about their creative process and performance experiences. Many students shared that the LiFT event prompted their first visit to the Hammonds House, signaling to them the importance of historic institutions in their neighborhood and beyond. Event attendees shared similar stories about a lack of familiarity with local museums and cultural institutions.

LiFT Art Salon measures success by the relationships it builds between people, institutions, and their histories, specifically between those spaces that narrate black history and Atlanta's young African American population. I know first-hand that nurturing these relationships takes the time and investment of an engaged community of elders, scholars, and teachers. The LiFT team learned a valuable lesson at #DareToBe. In order to make museums and archives accessible to a new generation, we need to build hands-on, interactive experiences that invite young Atlantans to actively engage the city's diverse centers and institutions. At our monthly gatherings, LiFT attempts to demonstrate to a new constituency that cultural institutions are not merely repositories. Instead, as I am reminded each time I comb the archives or plan a LiFT event , these sites serve as creative commons for those who dare to enter and be.

Presentation

Question & Answer Session

About the Speaker

Dr. Brittney Cooper is assistant professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She received her PhD in American Studies from the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. Dr. Cooper is co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017). She is author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, February 2018).  Her work explores Black women's intellectual history, Black feminist thought, and race and gender politics in hip hop and popular culture.