Lisa Tuttle
Fence
Several years ago, my Aunt Glassell (Agnes Scott Class of '47) loaned me the photo album of my great, great aunt Lucy Brown Beale, who lived in the Northern Neck of Virginia, northeast of Richmond. I have used several of the photographs from that album in works, and this piece at Agnes Scott is a continuation of that study. This one particular photograph shows a tall, thin African American woman, wearing a black derby-like hat that shades her eyes, standing in a cow pen behind a fence, her arm drawn up across her chest. She is wearing a skirt that almost looks like pants, and a large shirt-like blouse. She looks strong and mysterious to me, both fierce and vulnerable, and I was intrigued to understand her "story." She is not smiling; she is peering suspiciously from the shadows under the brim of that hat. Like many old photographs, there is no one around anymore who can tell you anything about the person pictured, so one must speculate their own. On one level, "Fence" is my attempt to think about what it must have been like to be that African American woman, in the still-rural South, in the early 1900's, after slavery, pre-Civil Rights. The era of lynchings and race riots. And what her relationship might be to me, after all of this time…What might be my own accountability, what is still unresolved…?
One hundred years ago, between September 22-24, 1906, white Atlantans, inflamed by political rhetoric and newspaper articles which reported that black men had assaulted a number of white women, roamed through downtown Atlanta, and then out to the African-American community of Brownsville, beating and harassing random black people on the street. At the end of the three days, some twenty-five black people and two white people were dead. Stories ran in the international press; the militia had to be called in to bring about order. Until a few years ago, I had never read any accounts of this historical event that is considered one of the most important events in shaping the city's history and its patterns of segregation and race relations. For too many of us, it is perhaps too easy not to think about this uncomfortable past and its continuing legacy. I so admire the efforts of STAR, Southern Truth and Reconciliation, and the Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riots for their efforts to try to heal this amnesia with truth.
"Fence" is not directly meant to be a didactic work about the 1906 Race Riots, but is a visual meditation about the continuing legacy of racial segregation, contested territory and violence in our contemporary lives…left open to the viewer to interpret the relationship between the images, and to follow an implied narrative.
As you look at the close-up of the woman’s face suspiciously glancing back across that fence, I ask you to read W.E.B. DuBois' poem, "A Litany of Atlanta" which voices the reaction of the outraged and the wronged. The final image on the right of the piece – the image of a seedling pushing through cement stairs – is offered both as an image of persistence of "histories we don’t want" despite our efforts to build over them, as well as a glimmer of hope and new growth.
