Change is a Place: Black Landscapes

This essay was originally published as 'Change is a Place: Black Landscapes' in Issue 4 of New Suns: Unearthing Common Ground, February 2022. You can read the full article here.

When was the last time you went home?

I currently live in Saint Paul, Minnesota but it is hard to think of the city, or really anywhere outside of the places my mother and grandmother lived, as home. Home is a thousand miles, a two-and-a-half hour flight, or a 17-hour drive south and east. Home is different spatial reality. Home is a different belonging. Home is an altogether other Black landscape.

I grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, it is my home and it is a place that my practice as an artist begins. For most, it is not a place they know, or, know as intimately as it’s neighbor Birmingham. I have known Fairfield my whole life, as did my mother. I knew this place so intimately that I didn’t realize some of the very obvious ways it had been planned, as a city, as a place, as a landscape. Fairfield, Alabama, as I know it, was incorporated in 1919 making it just over one hundred years old when the city declared bankruptcy in 2020. A hundred year city. A two-generation city. In relation to Fairfield, I realized that a place that had seemed so permanent, that had given my identity as a Black-southerner such fixity, was in fact temporary. The visualization of Southern Black life that is so often materialized alongside crop capitalism — cotton, indigo, rice, tobacco, sugar — are not necessarily where this place begins. The geologic life of this place, the close proximity of iron ore, coal, and limestone, gave it birth.

I am interested in this temporary territory. The short life it has had, the ways that it has been physically transformed, have left deep and dramatic scars in the landscape. The place that I am from is a meticulously planned city, but to navigate it feels like you are following a massive design mistake. Fairfield, was/is a model-city for US Steel Corporation. There is in fact a US Steel headquarters that is a familiar fixture on one of the hilltops, up the street from my grandparents church. Street after street that dead-into short and tall evergreens, disguise a form of container. A planned container. A color-line. A model-city that modeled a form of spatial segregation, concealed by inconspicuous hedges, and forests. As a child, I noticed the trees, and their accompanying dead-ends but didn’t think about the intention behind them. As an adult, I wonder how growing up in this sort of complex of ecological apartheid shaped my relationship to trees, my sense of “green space.”

I suppose Fairfield is a green space, but I want to claim it also as a Black place, not separate from a very literal form of environmental racism but also not wholly defined by it either. I think about my always changing relationship to this always changing place and am thankful for how it has pushed me to think about Black Southern identities as dynamic rather than static. Something I have always understood is that our grandparents were Southerners. I understood that I had cousins, aunties and uncles who lived in places like New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angles, but I understood also that my grandparents had remained in the South. I knew they had come to Fairfield, from Mississippi but my understanding about the South, our South, was that the Black landscape somehow always remained in place. I believed they were in place, and that they had always been in place. What I realize now is that they made place. All of my elders were from elsewhere and they collectively produced this town, a composition of Black landscapes, from Meridian to Philadelphia, Mississippi, from Warm Springs, Georgia and Indian Springs, Alabama. I grew up in a town of migrants, changelings. They didn’t go north to the ready-made places that welcomed other parts of my family, they made something else. They made place from change, and perhaps that idea is rooted deeper than those trees.