Mr. Wade discusses his role as a community leader in the McKenzie Court
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Reflections on the H.O.M.E. Project
Tuscaloosa Housing Authority
From April 4-10, I was joined by Carroll Blue and Jennifer LaFontaine to carry out a Storymapping residency with former residents of the McKenzie Court projects in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The project, Hear Our Memories in our Environment, or H.O.M.E., was part of CDS joint efforts with Carroll Blue’s the Dawn Project to map personal stories connected to the profound changes that occurred within African American neighborhoods in the last forty years.
The residency evolved out of discussions with Dr. Heather Pleasants at the University of Alabama School of Education, and Debbie Esslinger of the Tuscaloosa Housing Authority. The project was supported by funding from the Neighborhood Networks program of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department.
To prepare for the residency, CDS and THA engaged a local part-time project coordinator, Laura Ware, who carried out outreach and logistics planning for two months before and during the residency.
Our original intention was to join with a group of residents to wander through the site where the housing units had been recently razed. The THA is replacing the 1950s built units with new units and the majority of former residents will return to the village in the coming years. Our goal was 20 stories, 10 in the form of video, and 10 in the form of audio. The implementation is to include a DVD, a storymapping web site, a podcast tour through the neighborhood, and 20 individual cell phone stories.
The residents involved ranged in age from mid-fifties to mid-eighties. As the weekend arrived, the weather turned stormy, as well as an initial journey through the former site suggested that taking the residents around the community and filming all the stories against essentially an empty lot, might not prove fruitful. Our rain alternative was the community gym, and so we set up shop in the gym to begin the interviews. Once we had the first 10 interviews, and had established a frame and backdrop for the stories, it seemed inconsistent in the remaining days to return to the idea of the walking story circle was abandoned.
We had a small group of volunteers from the University of Alabama and Stillman College. During the residency, they assisted CDS staff in cutting the 15-30 minute interviews to 3 minute or less edits to be used as part of the tour. The interviews focused on specific memories about various aspects of life within the historical community. Many of the stories took us back to the original establishment of McKenzie, and the extraordinarily powerful sense of community that was created by residents over the four generations that have called it home.
What Defines Community
In story after story, the residents provided consistent commentary on the meaning of community within this African American enclave. Connection, shared responsibility, commitment, hopes and resiliency were evident in the narratives and the dominant emotional tenor of our exchanges. Their comments were broad reflections of the democratic leveling that was an unintended consequence of the segregated housing patterns throughout the US, but particularly dominant in the South.
Several storytellers recounted how 1950s and early 60s McKenzie Court had working people with both blue collar and white collar jobs or aspirations. There relative impoverishment was greatly mitigated by their sense of opportunity and relative security. It seems inconceivable to us that single mothers could raise families of 4-8 children and feel that their children were being appropriately parented. And while some is explained by the relative cost of rent and necessities as a proportion of monthly income, most was explained by the sense of communal purpose and shared responsibility. The most often repeated quote of the week was that no single mother raised a child in McKenzie Court, McKenzie Court raised all of the children.
There was also a powerful sense that the semi-rural nature of McKenzie Court, surrounded for many years by fields and open spaces, made the exploration of the world more safe, and the lifestyles more fundamentally healthy for children. We were obviously taking a skewed sample of many of McKenzie’s most successful long-term residents, and some stories raised aspects of lives that were much more oppressive, the general agreement seemd to be that this was a high functioning community, one that lead many of its youth to successful lives.
Recognizing the Loss
The shadow over their recounting was the fact that the success of the early decades of this community were not sustained, and all of these historical homes were razed to the ground. The too familiar sense that the exit of the most talented and successful, the relative continued impoverishment of those remaining, the lack of essential education and support for the youth, the emergence of drug dependency and violence, all of the known factors of inner city degradation, manifest at McKenzie. While the new construction offers a glimmer of hope and regeneration, no one pretended that new construction was in itself key to a new community resilience. Broader needs still needed to be met across the board.
What was particularly striking was the health crisis. Men were few not only because of family issues, but because of the epidemic levels of heart disease and other chronic illness. I was struck dumb by the number of folks who mentioned brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins who failed to reach their fiftieth birthday. This had become so normalized that the tragic dimension, and profound inequity, of this crisis was not mentioned. Men simply did not live that long in this world. And of course many woman were lost as well, and many of the survivors, male and female, faced chronic illnesses of all sorts.
There were expressions of grief around the decision to raze all but a small part of the original housing estate - of course people mourned the loss of their birthplaces and family homes. But the weight of the loss was balanced with a desire for progress in the new community. Most of the storytellers believed that with the continued and deepened commitment of community leadership to helping the youth to survive, thrive and excel, to supporting the parents to sustain basic economic development, and to support the elders with quality health care, there was a reason for hope.
We obviously hope our small contribution to sustaining the memory of McKenzie Court will aid in this process. The work will continue with post-production of the stories over the coming months and the plans for ongoing workshops with the community lead by local community members. In the early fall, THA plans to hold a community celebration to recognize the storytellers and to launch the tours.