Storm Coming, 2020

Sunday morning. The bottom of my coffee cup is warm against my thigh as I sit on the dark blue rocker. Humidity is low enough to have barely fogged the screen on my laptop. Tinny music drifts from the windchimes as the tree frogs raise their song chaotically and in unison. The dog lies at my feet. Filigreed shadows flicker as the morning sun reaches through the crown of the water oak at the edge of the yard. The dog lifts her head, nostrils flaring to take in a scent. It is not too hot.

This is a front porch in the South, so it is dressed in a swing bed, a coffee table atop an aqua plastic rug, hanging ferns, and the requisite rocking chairs with bright cushions. It is a room always ready for company.

Someone is using a leaf blower. Far off a dog barks. One of our chickens is squawking in the backyard. A front door closes across the street, its knocker slapping back as punctuation.

A few American flags flutter limply. Every house has steps leading to the front door because storms flood this damp land. Sometimes people kayak down the street. There are “No Wake” signs posted on telephone poles. We live several miles from the water. It is rain that makes these floods.

A hurricane is churning up the Gulf. My anxiety has not yet peaked. It is a beautiful day.

Within walking distance, a few folks gather in the church sanctuary. They sing, muffled through their pandemic masks. I tried to join in via livestream but it felt flat. So I don’t bother. It seems that no one else on my block does either. My next-door neighbor, with his injured foot, walks slowly to the curb to stack up dead branches. He doesn’t want help. He pauses to reassure me or himself, “It’s just going to be a little rain; the winds will be less than 50 miles per hour”.

I answer, “I hope so. My husband keeps reminding me our house has stood here for more than a hundred years. Everything will be fine.”

He says, “That’s right,” knowing his house has stood here just as long, and he walks away.

Three houses down a woman with a ponytail is mowing the lawn preparing the grass for the storm. This is a thing. In the South, we always mow the lawn before a hurricane. It is a thing I don’t understand but it doesn’t matter; we don’t have a lawn anyway. We have invasive ground cover.

A few minutes later, the woman is using a weed cutter, vrmph, vrrrrrrrrrrmmmm, vrmph. The sounds before the storm.

I lived in Pensacola when Hurricane Ivan came ashore. No one cared about how their lawn looked then. Well, before the storm they did but after--if your house stood unharmed, you went to help somebody else pick up their soggy wedding photos from the front yard or started up a chainsaw to help remove the fallen tree or walked over to offer them a not-yet-warm beer to quench their thirst.

The frogs just shouted their “Amen.”

Then, without warning, everything is quiet. The leafblower is gone and the lawnmower. The chicken and the dog no longer call out. Even the shadows barely move but there is a freneticness to this silence.

Ivan and Katrina were storms I knew too intimately. A little more coffee and I will start my own preparations, packing up family photos, necessary documents, and sentimental treasures. I’ll fill up a jug and lidded pot with water. I’ll make extra ice for the freezer. I’ll secure anything that could become a projectile.

I do all this even for a small hurricane because I remember a fish in a baby grand piano, the National Guard with their assault rifles as cars lined up for whatever gas remained, a family I knew who swam from their kitchen to a neighbor’s house when the water got too high, thick vines of black slime crawling up the living room walls like a creature from a horror movie in my best friend’s house, the frozen hands of a grandfather clock, stairways without buildings, a man who walked me through each room in his house but all that remained was a brick slab, debris, and an unbroken porcelain soap dish painted with purple violets and gold around the edges.

As I remember all this, I rise to my feet and take down the ferns in their hanging baskets.

— © Karen Bullock, 2020

July 26, 2020 A Photo Not Taken

Rough-hewn and buffed smooth the table was made from the boards of a cabin where enslaved people once lived. This is what I was told and this is where I sat, my elbows resting without solace on this reminder of evil I cannot describe. Above my head, the chandelier dimly sparkled. I was drinking coffee when I heard the news that John Lewis was taking one last journey over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

I got chills when I heard it. How did I miss that this would be happening today? I wanted to be there with my camera and with Vincent. I remember the first time I drove up the slope, over the river, and saw the name on arching steel, the name of a senior officer in the Confederate Army, the name of one of the KKK. It was his name I saw as the weary city came into view. I had this feeling of history and the present becoming one. It was haunting and inspiring to think of the feet that had trod there, and I knew I was on holy ground.

When I went there with Vincent, a few years later, it was his first time, although he had lived in Alabama most of his life. I waited while he walked out there. It wasn’t a short walk and he was not well. The day was hot and bright. I photographed him from far off as he was photographing the bridge. I gave him his space on that holy ground, to own it. We do that for each other sometimes. I get the churches. He gets the front porches and, on this day, the bridge. The light was horrible, too contrasty, but it was being there that mattered.

And today I wanted to be there again, to photograph this moment of grief and loss and victory but not yet victory for the bridge still bears the name, at least for today, and we hear the voices crying, No Justice, No Peace, No Justice, No Peace, No Justice. And being human, we weep.

It is one of the few instances when I would willingly join the crowd, crowds now being a source of anxiety. I would tie my mask tight and shrug off that fear, caught in the current of something visceral and important, in the current of a man who was, at once, ordinary and regal.

I lose myself in these moments. Everything else disappears: time, schedules, things still to be done, calls to be made. The weight of this now here, tugging at my shoulders, moving me forward as I look through the lens and see the emotions on the face of a stranger but not quite a stranger, for we are here together in this roiling of feelings as we hear the whispers of those who have gone on before us and those who will come after us and their prayers lifting in one voice: Justice! Justice! Justice!

In my mind, I am here with Vincent, even though he said that he might not be able to go on road trips with me anymore because his being a black man and me being a white woman puts him at increased risk on southern back country roads, with the world being what is right now, again and still.

We have traveled along miles of red dirt, mud, and asphalt together, talking about life and race and photography as we go. Occasionally, I say something stupid. Other times I am self-deprecating. He tells me words have power, to be careful what I say, and I toss this back at him when he gets negative himself.

I know this day has deeper layers for him than it does for me,

I know. We would photograph this moment together in our own way, with our own eyes and our own history, in our own skin, and talk about it on the way home.

We would talk about what we saw: the crumpled red rose petals on the hot ground like puddles of blood, hoofprints, faces, remnants, banners; the tattered buildings that once had been fresh and sturdy; tears, the glossy black and red carriage wheel; the driver standing impossibly steady - holding his hat over his heart - while guiding the two matched horses over the slope and under that name, that name that maybe tomorrow or the day after will be painted over with the name of the man under the flag in the coffin, the man who marched, was beaten, was 40 times arrested, the man who changed history, who danced to ‘be happy’, the man whom today we remember; we remember, knowing for that new paint we can only hope as the crow still hovers near.

I do not know exactly what the photo will look like but it will unfold itself in me.

This is the photograph not taken, but deep down, there is no photo not taken. It is part of us now, the imagined image informs how we see and is as present as the photograph I did make today: a tree standing, with buoyant limbs outstretched in defiance, beside the railroad that has stories of its own to share.

*Inspired by a question from Aline Smithson based on Will Steacy’s ‘Photographs Not Taken’