Tag: remembrance

This Too…

Outside the window of my writing desk, across the field in the distance, sits a standing grove of trees. Not long ago it was beautifully surrounded by a sloping grassy hill rolling down into a field that stretched out bearing alternate crops of corn and soybeans. Now the grove sits alone, the field practically leveled. Exposed compacted red clay lays ready for more concrete and asphalt of the impending neighborhood being constructed. For years I’ve enjoyed looking out across that field. Even hiking up to the sacred feeling space sometimes. Sometimes the dog was with me. Sometimes it was just me. But curiously, it never felt like just me.

Once everything was cleared, the grove of trees was left standing. I wondered why. Uncle Joe, the family’s approaching centenarian and patriarch of this land said there was a graveyard up there. At least it was when he was a boy. I found it interesting because as many times as I’d been up on that hill, I never saw a graveyard. He said it was there but had never seen any burials there in his life time. We are talking about nearly an entire century here. Spurred on by my curiosity, I set out to explore the grove again minus the beautiful rising slope of thick grass on which we had fantasized of building our house. The area was cordoned off with an orange netted fence that both the dog and I easily hopped over. Finally on the northwest side, in the thick of the grove, I saw the first tombstone. It stretched out prone among the trees, lying there like a sleeping behemoth. There there were others. Some in pristine condition, others cracked and being swallowed up by earth but present as a reminder of lives once lived.

I could make out a name or two. Wondered who they were. Where had they lived? What did they do? Had they left some mark that impacted the now? Who were their descendants? All I could physically see were stones. The cold hard monuments stood in contrast to the warmth of lives once lived. What had been their concerns, their worries, their fears, or challenges. None of that mattered to them now. As I stood there, mortality tapped upon my intellect and took me forward a hundred years or so and there it was; someone looking upon the markers of those of us present now and asking some of those same questions.

Suddenly I had a shift in perspective. This too shall pass has become a common bumper sticker proverb. However, its profundity is no less relevant. What are we doing with the time we’ve been granted her on this plain? Are we using precious energy and limited time on things that won’t matter in the long run..or short? How much time do we waste on worry and fretting; time that could be invested in living while we yet live? All of those material things that we slave for and give life to will belong to someone else in a hundred years or so. We will be just a memory. Where are you planting those seeds that will continue to birth the power of your living beyond your lifetime? What legacy are you building by living in all the corners of this thing call life?

One day soon. That grove of trees will be surrounded by the voices of children playing, crying laughing, heading to and from school. It will be surrounded by people making love, more children, marrying, divorcing, working, and buying. Some could even call it living the American dream and then… that too shall pass. All we have is the now. It belongs to us in the present. Let us go all out and do what we can and will with want we have with the most precious gift of all because one day, we’ll have to give it all back.

More Than a Portrait

It was more than an honor to play a part in the resurrection of Jefferson Davis Jackson’s image and legacy. From the very first mention of this project, I sensed it was more than an artistic endeavor — it was a cosmic assignment, a sacred agreement between the seen and unseen, calling forth the spirit of a great man long buried beneath the weight of history’s silence. For 66 years beginning in the late 1800s, Jefferson Davis Jackson worked on the University of Alabama campus beginning at the tender age of 11 years old. Many of those years he labored alongside Dr. Eugene A. Smith, a professor and geologist invested in finding the natural resources that could be used to develop industry in the state following the ravages of the civil war. Jefferson Davis Jackson, a man devoted to life, wore many hats on campus and abroad. From custodial, to maintenance, to traveling by horse and buggy with Dr. Smith across the entirety of Alabama excavating and documenting the natural resources and history of the state.  From home to church, to work, he was all in. He worked in the very building, Smith Hall, where Autherine Lucy, the University of Alabama’s first Black student took classes. Was he there the day a shotgun blast blew a permanent scar to the outside of Smith Hall, or the day an Alabama governor made a diabolical declaration.  Somewhere along the way the name and legacy of J. D. Jackson were covered over by time, ignorance, and the order of the day. 

One day I received an email from a young woman working in the Museum of Natural science at the University of Alabama. It’s Alabama’s oldest natural science museum. I could feel the excitement through her appeal.  She had found a trail leading to the greatness of a Black man Named Jefferson Davis Jackson. She wanted me to do a red clay portrait of him. “I knew I had to contact you.” she said. “I knew you were the only one who could do this justice.”  Soon we spoke by phone and, feeling the tug of ancestral beckoning through my busy schedule, I agreed to do the portrait. I needed to walk the areas he walked, see the spaces he inhabited, speak to relatives, and gather earth from his walked pathways. Why did he start working at the university at age 11? How did he lose his eye? We scheduled a trip to Tuscaloosa and the journey began.

The process itself is ritual. I gathered red clay from the very soil of the campus of the University of Alabama. This time under the click of cameras and the gaze of assistants. The sacred ground is alive with memory, connecting my work to the land and its complex, often untold, narratives. The red clay, stained with the life-blood of our ancestors, holds within it both trauma and triumph — the iron-rich soil echoing the iron in human blood, linking us inextricably to those who came before. In its crimson grains, I feel the pulse of generations. Mother Earth knows their names. The clay is a portal, a living map. To this I added water from the nearby Warrior River. Water represents spirit. The river is a witness, a keeper of stories, a carrier of forgotten songs. Its waters hold the essence of what was lost and what still lingers. As clay and water met paper, each touch was more than technique. It was an invocation. The act of placing clay upon the surface became a merging of worlds, a thin place where past, present, and future blurred. I never work alone. Sometimes I feel like the ancestors are leaning in, guiding my hands, speaking through the vibration of the red earth. In this work Jefferson Davis Jackson was not just being rendered, but reawakened, his light called forth through the elements of earth and water, through the breath of spirit and artistic calling. 

The portrait is a vessel — a bridge between dust and flesh, blood and starlight, past and future. The red clay tethers this work to this southern landscape and to the heavens. It affirms what we already know deep in our bones: that our stories cannot be erased. They may sleep beneath the soil, but they rise again through us, with us radiant and undeniable. In this artwork, Jackson stands not as a rendering or shadow of the past but as a resurrected star in the firmament of Black excellence, human nobility, a beacon for those yet to come. From his devotion to the university and his community to his baritone voice in the church choir, he was a man among men. This is not simply a painting—it is a ceremony. A cosmic reckoning. A testimony inscribed in earth and water, blood and memory. It is a conjuring, a return, a restoration. With hands deep in sacred soil, I summon legacy back into the light, returning one of our own to his rightful place among the honored. Let this work stand not only as tribute but as threshold. A portal. A vow. To this end—and this radiant beginning—there is more to come…