Artistic Genre: Embroidery
As I thought about my artistic piece, I realized that the essential question, “What are the costs and benefits of identifying and disidentifying with one’s ‘home’?” has been on my mind for many years as I have wrestled with conceptualizing my identity as a white Southern woman. Three generations of my family have lived their entire lives in Alabama, starting from the turn of the 20th century—less than forty years after the Civil War ended, sixty from the removal of Indigenous peoples from the land I now call my “home.” When I think about Alabama and the broader South as my home, I must equally confront the deep, long history of injustice and oppression that has made the South what it is today. Moreover, I come face to face with the reality that my family’s continued participation in oppression is the source of many of the aspects of my “home” that I, in a place of privilege, enjoyed. Similar to Esperanza’s stories about her home on Mango Street, I cannot speak about the South without talking about the goodness or without acknowledging the horror, and how both sides inform, define, and construct the other.
In my piece, I chose the medium of embroidery on a pillowcase because it is a mode of art that has been passed down in my family for generations. I regularly lay my head on pillowcases embroidered by my fun, artsy great-grandmother, a lady whom my mother misses dearly, yet also a woman whom my mother remembers calling an adult Black man, “boy.” Both individually and systemically, racism has been an heirloom of my family. In the center of my pillowcase, I sewed a web of letter beads bearing the initials of all the first names of people in my immediate family, my parents’ immediate families, and their parents’ parents. I wanted it to conjure the image of a family tree, showing that my sister and I are shaped by multiple levels of family, love, and ideology. When constructing the family tree, I intentionally placed my parents' initials on the border of the pillowcase to capture their role as connector, bridger, and, in some ways, most direct source of ideology, prejudice, and privilege for my sister and I.
Alongside our family names, I placed images of things that I both love and hold historical significance: okra and trees (I attempted a magnolia). Okra, especially fried from a local meat-n-three, is one of my favorite Southern foods, associated with the sweetness and warmth of family gatherings at Christmas. However, okra is not indigenous to the South; it was brought here by enslaved West Africans. They carried it, planted it, and even braided it into their children's hair as a connection to their home, a place that had been stolen. This is reason I am able to enjoy okra today; the food I enjoy at the kids' table is bound to the history of chattel slavery and the racism inherent in it. In a similar way, my love for massive, old trees is tied to my identity as a white person. I am able to enjoy trees because my first thought is how beautiful they are, while my Black neighbors, when they look at old Southern trees, carry the generational trauma of lynchings and racial terror. In this way, my identity and connection to home, even though subtle and unconscious, is inextricably tied to the continued history of oppression in the South. Therefore, when I consider the costs and benefits of identifying and disidentifying with my home, I must continually confront the ways in which I benefit from my home and seek to disrupt this cycle through engaging with the continued history of injustice of which I am part.
Equal Justice Initiative. (2020). Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror. https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/
The Friedman Sprout. (2019, Dec. 2). A southern staple born of violence: A brief history of okra. friedmansprout.com/2019/12/02/a-southern-staple-born-of-violence-a-brief-history-of-okra/#:~:text=While%20okra%20is%20grown%20widely,native%20to%20the%20United%20States.&text=Scientists%20believe%20the%20cultivation%20of,slave%20trade%20in%20the%201500s.
In my piece, I chose the medium of embroidery on a pillowcase because it is a mode of art that has been passed down in my family for generations. I regularly lay my head on pillowcases embroidered by my fun, artsy great-grandmother, a lady whom my mother misses dearly, yet also a woman whom my mother remembers calling an adult Black man, “boy.” Both individually and systemically, racism has been an heirloom of my family. In the center of my pillowcase, I sewed a web of letter beads bearing the initials of all the first names of people in my immediate family, my parents’ immediate families, and their parents’ parents. I wanted it to conjure the image of a family tree, showing that my sister and I are shaped by multiple levels of family, love, and ideology. When constructing the family tree, I intentionally placed my parents' initials on the border of the pillowcase to capture their role as connector, bridger, and, in some ways, most direct source of ideology, prejudice, and privilege for my sister and I.
Alongside our family names, I placed images of things that I both love and hold historical significance: okra and trees (I attempted a magnolia). Okra, especially fried from a local meat-n-three, is one of my favorite Southern foods, associated with the sweetness and warmth of family gatherings at Christmas. However, okra is not indigenous to the South; it was brought here by enslaved West Africans. They carried it, planted it, and even braided it into their children's hair as a connection to their home, a place that had been stolen. This is reason I am able to enjoy okra today; the food I enjoy at the kids' table is bound to the history of chattel slavery and the racism inherent in it. In a similar way, my love for massive, old trees is tied to my identity as a white person. I am able to enjoy trees because my first thought is how beautiful they are, while my Black neighbors, when they look at old Southern trees, carry the generational trauma of lynchings and racial terror. In this way, my identity and connection to home, even though subtle and unconscious, is inextricably tied to the continued history of oppression in the South. Therefore, when I consider the costs and benefits of identifying and disidentifying with my home, I must continually confront the ways in which I benefit from my home and seek to disrupt this cycle through engaging with the continued history of injustice of which I am part.
Equal Justice Initiative. (2020). Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror. https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/
The Friedman Sprout. (2019, Dec. 2). A southern staple born of violence: A brief history of okra. friedmansprout.com/2019/12/02/a-southern-staple-born-of-violence-a-brief-history-of-okra/#:~:text=While%20okra%20is%20grown%20widely,native%20to%20the%20United%20States.&text=Scientists%20believe%20the%20cultivation%20of,slave%20trade%20in%20the%201500s.
Photo used under Creative Commons from John Brighenti