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.

Shortly after the disaster, I contacted several Orleanians about how CDS could help. A couple of youngish theater folks, Nick Slie and Bruce France, whose company, Mondo Bizarro, was active in the AlternateRoots network, had jumped into the fray of post-Katrina documentation with a website, i10witness.org. We sent some audio gear down to assist them, and their efforts expanded to several hundred audio interviews which are shared on the site.

Our ongoing discussions led us to consider a mapping project somewhere in the city, and after some fundraising, and scheduling dances, we finally made our way to the Central City nieghborhood. In the Jim Crow era, the nieghborhood along Dryades Street, now Oretha Castle Haley, was the heart of the commercial community for the African American community. By the 80s the neighborhood had declined, and had become more associated with high crime and murder rate, but in the past decade many cultural organizations chose to locate there, and folks have seen the potential for resurrecting the community. Post-katrina, Central City’s high ground was particularly viewed as useful in the larger redevelopment plan, so the choice of building a community tour here seemed particularly appropriate.

Writer, performer and community leader John O’Neal

On March 19, Nick, Bruce, photographer Zack Smith, and videographer Rebecca Snedeker, and I accompanied a group of 10 local residents and people who had been doing community service after the storm in the area, in a stroll around the neighborhood to record stories about place. The initial results of our efforts was a series of seven stories posted in draft form on Storymapping.

Hearing the stories excited me about the possibilities of the direction of this work, and we plan to assist with the ongoing work of building this online and street level tour of Central City.

The invitation had come from Phyllis Faber, a publisher, biologist, and activist with the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, an organization that has been helping to keep West Marin a pastoral paradise, and a place for sustainable local food production, for several decades. She had asked if we could come out and do an interview with Sharon Doughty, a dairy farmer whose family had been involved in farming in Point Reyes for a hundred years.

We were joined by a new friend of CDS, Amir Terkel, who volunteered to assist with shooting some video of our planned interview. It turned into a wonderful tour of West Marin agricultural history, current issues, and future prospects. We created a film from the interview. (View Film)

What we learned from our talks with Phyllis and Sharon was that the struggle to sustain Marin Agriculture has its roots in the sixties when the county considered creating freeways across Marin and planning a town of 125,000 people at Tomales Bay. Environmentalists joined with ranchers to oppose the plans. A second crisis occurred with the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Point Reyes National Seashore as many ranchers faced the complete loss of their land. Lobbying efforts, including pleas from Sharon’s grandmother, led to a “lease back” arrangement with ranchers that made agriculture part of the ongoing sustainance of the Point Reyes peninsula.

Since the seventies concerns about sustaining water quality of Tomales Bay for fishing and oyster beds had forced water quality standards to be adopted that forced many ranchers out of business. As it turned out, the one’s that survived have slowly moved toward environmentally compatible practices, and for economic as well as environmental reasons, organic production.

Sharon’s courage and determination, having survived being widowed twice, and now facing a health struggle of her own, was a tremendous inspiration.

On my 45th birthday in 2002, I met Carroll at an event in the eastside of San Diego that was part of a project we had done with the Waitt Family Foundation and the Institute for the Future. Carroll was working on completing “The Dawn at My Back, Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing.” One thing led to another and she ended up presenting the work at the Digital Storytelling Festival that year, and generally blowing everyone away. Within a year she was winning an award at Sundance, and moving from her long time home in San Diego to a new job as a professor at the University of Central Florida.

Carroll’s interest in Digital Storytelling sustained our collaboration and Emily Paulos and I made a couple of trips to UCF, plans were hatched, and we had hoped to make a stab at creating a local project in Orlando’s African American community. As it worked out, Carroll, who was born and raised in Houston, was considering working in her hometown of Houston, about the time we were connecting with colleagues at the University of Houston. Dr. Bernard Robin, grad student Anne Rudnicki and others had been doing educational applications of digital storytelling for several years, and were interested in collaborating with CDS.

With a bit of luck, Carroll was able to make a connection with the UH College of Education through Bernard, and found herself over the summer of 2006 working on a mapping project with the Third Ward. The project initially was manifest as a class to create an installation at Project Row House, the renowned arts organization directed by Rick Lowe, but Carroll’s interest has since led her to build her own non-profit, The Dawn Project, which will be developing a number of projects to articulate the relationships between redevelopment, social memory, personal memory, and the visioning processes necessary to sustain and expand historic communities like the Third Ward.

In the Fall, we discussed using her efforts to create a prototype Storymapping project with residents of the Third Ward. As it happens, from 1978 to 1980, I had lived in Houston and one of my efforts was working with the SHAPE Center, an activist oriented community center. I started my work in theater there. So I knew the neighborhood, and had a sense of its history.

What I proposed to Carroll was a departure from our process in Digital Storytelling, what I called the Walking Story Circle. What I believed was that instead of people sharing the stories for the first time in a room, that everyone should hear the place stories in the place the stories described. My feeling was that we might accomplish two things, capture a recording of a story in the location (similar to Murmur) using audio and video recordings, and provide the group with a context for discussing the writing of a considered narrative as we would have in our normal workshops.

The results were promising. As we drove from site to site in the Third Ward, having people tell their stories with an audience helped some folks become animated about the issues and emotions connected to the story. For others, it was a bit more pressured than a one-on-one interview might have been. But for everyone, hearing the story and being present at the site, made them seem to connect more deeply to the meaning of the story, and the next day, when we held a story circle to discuss each story, people were tremendously engaged. The re-writes benefited from people’s encouragement, and we felt this made the written stories more powerful.

In any media process there is a blance between the clarity of the considered narratives, and spontaneity of the interview. Having the option to use either seemed appropriate. As we know from on-site radio, what you do not get with the written and recorded narration is the ambiance of the recordings on site, which helps the audience place themselves in the story. We considered using ambiance from each site captured during the original recording, but that seemed a bit odd.

We still have more to learn and discuss about this process, and we look forward to the other collaborators joining in the dialogue.

Kate had discovered our work and decided that a collaboration that brought Digital Storytelling to Ukiah could be built, she chased down some money from the Irvine Foundation, and we set about capturing stories in a series of workshops. Amy Hill, Emily Paulos, Erica Cooperrider, along with Kate and myself all played a role in leading these workshops.
Writing about place comes naturally to most people, but there were still issues about how people perceived a place story. For some, people stories and place stories were inseparable, and they immediately reflected on what happened at the place involving themselves and other characters, not necessarily reflecting upon what was unique about the setting or location that made the place itself the story. Others found a way to integrate their sense of the importance of events and characters, with the meaning of the place itself.

A diverse tapestry of narratives formed through the first two workshops, and then we had to devise a stage production. The main issue was both technical and dramaturgical. How do you show the stories with the live performer, and not have the actors dominated by the projections, and how do you pace and arrange a production, to give a sense of connection and dramatic development to an evening production. We settled on using multiple performance locations on the stage, with two production screens, one a bit more intimate than the other. We reduced some pieces to only a few images to slow down the visual overload. To keep the show moving forward we created an “Our Town” like narrator, local journalist Laura Hamburg, who introduced and interrelated the pieces. And we created interstitial images to carry the transitions, and fill the opposing screen with a consistent visual material

As I had remembered from my work with Dana Atchley’s Next Exit, we also had the problem of getting a performer in sync with a projected image. Through rehearsal, most actors found the rhythm of the piece, and could closely keep up with the advance of the video. We used “rear view mirrors” down stage so they could monitor this as well. But several of the performers just couldn’t get it down, so we had to create essentially powerpoint versions of their digital stories and have the stage manager speed up or slow down with the performers pace. I was surprised we didn’t have to do it more often, but rehearsals, even as few as we had, seemed to get people used to a natural cadence that coincided with the images.

I found one of the most powerful parts of the production was a pre-show slideshow that came out of a small commission of CDS Associate Rob Kershaw. He went around Ukiah and took photographs that were delightful in their insight into the little nooks and crannies of a small town.

When that production was completed in October of 2005, we then had a second task to expand the participation to a larger number of Mendocino counties, and to make a “touring production” for the county in the summer/fall of 2006. Another workshop was organized, and then we reduced the play to a one-woman show with Laura, this time as a waitress closing down a local diner. The waitress ends up explaining why she loves the county to an offstage friend using the digital stories as points in her argument. The production toured six different venues, and following the production their were story circles to have people from the audience share their own stories.

In both productions the principle viewpoint was about the importance of sustaining the unique character of a place, through these wonderful stories, in order to resist the homengenizing influences of industrial redevelopment, in terms of commercial, residential, civic, and agricultural identities.  This viewpoint actually served to galvanize more discussions about Smart Growth, and a deeper commitment to sustainable and thoughful planning in these communities, and in this way the project has amplified way beyond the audience of several hundred that were fortunate to see the productions.
It was all quite magical.

Where we go from here is to take the stories and map them, which we have done here on the Storymapping website, and then develop an expanded project to create a working story-capturing booth, a la Storycorps, and a local cel phone story tour, a la Murmur, which they are calling Hear Here.  We hope to see these projects emerge in 2007.

In 1995, when Dana Atchley and I were programming the first Digital Storytelling Festival, I insisted that we invite one person representing a non-digital perspective about storytelling. My choice was Jo Carson, a community artists, playwright and storyteller from Eastern Tennessee. Jo was the official cynic at this small gathering, and she came with a singular sense of resistance – mediated storytelling of any kind was to be looked on with great suspicion.

I remember when it came time to speak on the first morning up in the little Town Hall in Crested Butte, Jo rose and declared that all story was essentially about place. That without the grounding of real terrafirma, and lived human experience on top of it, story loses its meaning. Her caution was about de-contextualization. Healing stories uprooted from the soil that bred them could become culturally toxic in the hands of media peddlers. This had been a long, shared experience of Appalacian stories, their folk wisdom and humor turned into Hillybilly satire, their tragedy into pitying portrayals of meek and powerless victims.

Jo in working with local, mainly rural communities around the U.S. knew how damaging stereotypes could be, and conversely that is was enormously powerful and important to provide a local community with a way to tell their own story. She has helped dozens of communities to produce local plays to capture essential, complex and at times difficult tales about the meaning of their place.

In 2003-04, I lived with my family in a small town in Italy. I never really lived in a small town. To be frank, I was a stranger the whole time. Another language, another culture, I tried to find my way into the place, but I was so often just in my head. Outsider. Observer. But this feeling was telling to me. I paid attention to the feeling. I was never uncomfortable in that role.

While I was in Italy I had called my blog space, Texan-in-Exile.it. I hadn’t lived in Texas in nearly 30 years, but my exile status suited my temperament. Since I came back, I began to see that I have lived as a stranger, particularly since the death of my mother and brother, and the loss of the family home in Texas. Uprooted, a refugee, and living with a sense of distance from home as a permanent way of being.

So much of being in a place is knowing its secrets, how much the story of who said what to whom, of loves that had been lost, of old battles over trifling matters, or of simple connections that sustained, of the things and people that were as solid as the horizon, of how much had been survived and the pride that engendered in nearly everyone. Strangers can’t know these things. The knowing of the secrets is a gentle process of awareness, repeated intimacies, that come with being there.