The Homeplace is comfort. The place you can go back to no matter how many years have passed. It will always hold something familiar something safe.
The Homeplace is comfort. The place you can go back to no matter how many years have passed. It will always hold something familiar something safe.
The sky passes in blurs, fleeting and fast moments. It began as I stood looking through a machine of glass and mirrors trying in an instant to capture all that was. I now feel the blur of lives that have left and I have lost. I am left with those static moments. Wishing those moments would move and bring me back to all that was.
I am strapped down and can’t move. I know I have something running through my veins, as the pain is less. The florescent lights overhead are all that I can see. They blur as I am wheeled quickly through the halls. I am the patient that they make way for. The captain of the medevac is still pushing me. Numbers are called out, stats of heart rate and blood pressure. What is my name? What is my birthday? Do I remember what happened? I feel the tears run down my cheeks. I don’t. I know my daughter is alive and safe. I know that the medevac team was like the cavalry coming to take me out of the small ill equipped and scary hospital that I was in. I have always been afraid of helicopters, today in my morphine haze I have never been so grateful to have been in one.
I am wheeled through the University of Kentucky's hospital in Lexington. I am brought into yet another emergency room I can still only look up. I see the eyes that are Derek’s, the same eyes his daddy had. He strokes my hair that is matted and covered in dried blood. His warm coal colored hand holds my cold pasty white one. The nurse says, “Only relatives are allowed in here how are you two related?†I hear the smile in Derek’s voice, “ It’s a long storyâ€.
My project is a tribute to the residents of these hamlets, a salute to the elders who learned of slavery at their grandparent’s knees and endured the Jim Crow south. Who lived ‘separate but equal’ and saw the decades of milestones and their impacts, including desegregation, social segregation, and ultimately the election of Barack Obama. The residents did much more than endure and survive negative circumstances; they rose above them and thrived.
I feel Derek squeeze my hand, I breath shallow and painful breaths, but I breath. I realize that I am not done yet, that I am back home to The Homeplace and I am rewarded yet again.
After 16 years this project is still far from over, this selection of recent work is more about death and rebirth. These days I find myself going to more funerals then baptisms, but even in death those who have passed request being brought back home, buried on that Homeplace soil.