Artist's Statement

by Abbie Reese

Since undertaking this project, I’ve been greeted with a range of responses – assumptions, expectations, and questions, lots of questions. It seems as if everyone perceives and approaches this project differently, from his or her own framework. As Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute so aptly put it recently, “Each one of us brings our own autobiography to the reading of any text and the viewing of any image.” I believe the questions about my intent to be valid, and so I’ve decided to outline my reasons for approaching this subject. My own autobiography of experiences and beliefs has shaped my interests, and influenced the creation of these written and audio texts, and images.

• • •

This multimedia narrative project evolved after one conversation and years of percolation.

As editor of iNK in 2002, I wrote a month-long series for Black History Month. Afterwards, then-Mayor James Gitz suggested that I gather oral histories of Freeport’s African-American History; he said, to my surprise, that this history had never been recorded, in print or otherwise. And then, one of the individuals I interviewed for the newspaper series, railroad worker and centenarian McKinley Davis, passed away. The immediacy of this project was clear, but I committed to volunteer for a year onboard the world’s largest non-governmental hospital ship in the country ranked last of 176 nations based on its Human Development Index.

When I returned to the States, I tried to bring that experience home. My photographs from Sierra Leone, “Faces of West Africa,” began traveling to various venues and I began speaking about the disparity I had seen between the natural resources of the country (diamonds) and the incredible poverty of the people (most live on less than $2 a day). I described the beauty and the desperation. African-American acquaintances told me the photographs impacted them in ways I hadn’t expected; I was surprised to hear that, for some, it was a new experience to see “themselves” – people who looked somewhat similar, but with markedly different lives – represented in artwork.

By then, several years had passed since my conversation with Jim Gitz. The history of Freeport’s African-American community still had not been recorded. (An Oral History Task Force had been convened in the summer of 2002, but it had stalled and then work stopped completely.) In 2006, I decided to undertake this oral history project and to incorporate the critical visual element – photography. This would bring my commitment to my local and global communities full circle from Freeport, Illinois to Freetown, Sierra Leone and back to Freeport, Illinois – highlighting through words, sounds and images stories that might otherwise be lost, if not documented and preserved. “Untold Stories: Freeport’s African-American History” was already on exhibit when I heard a young woman interviewed on NPR expressing words resonated with my motivation for this project. She said it is damaging not to hear one’s story told, not to see oneself reflected and validated.

• • •

As an artist and a storyteller, I am drawn to details. It is through the lens of the particulars that the consistencies and the contradictions – the uniqueness – of one person’s story are revealed. The power of that story translates when the lens zooms out, and the universality of one experience is understood and appreciated.

I look at my family. Each of my siblings inhabits a range of experiences: One was born and raised in Macedonia; others of us were born in the suburbs of Chicago and remember our parents being jolted with culture shock when we moved to a town of 1,600; the youngest only remembers life in that small town. He, the youngest, has fair hair and green eyes, and looks most like others in that community, a farming town of mostly German heritage. He had a different experience than the rest of us. He fits in better, visually, because of genetics but also because he grew up knowing the cultural patterns and expectations of that rural community.

Meanwhile I was once identified by a stranger one dark, snowy night when I was bundled with a hat, scarf and gloves so that only my eyes showed because I, in this woman’s words, “walk like a Reese.” No doubt, my family has its own distinct culture – its own quirks, idiosyncrasies, eccentricities. (And clearly there are worse fates than growing up a novelty in a Midwestern town.) But even if my four siblings and I knew the exact same environment and faced the exact same set of stimulus, we would have reacted differently. We have different temperaments. We have adopted different worldviews and embarked on different journeys that reflect our own value systems and goals, our expectations of ourselves and the world.

Just as none of my siblings can individually represent our family completely through their own singular narrative, the same holds true for a culture or a community: One person can offer a glimpse into his or her culture or community at a specific time and place, but we know that this picture is highly personal, and cannot be representative of every individuals’ experiences in that culture or community.

Arnetta McGee, one of six women and men featured in “Untold Stories: Freeport’s African-History,” acknowledges this dynamic, and the impact of her outlook on her experiences. From day one, she says, her parents explained that racism and prejudice exist, and that she would have to work twice as hard as her white peers to reach the same outcome. Arnetta McGee believes that – because of this awareness and her expectations of herself – she has contended with greater barriers than some of her African-American peers.

Arnetta McGee’s experiences are unique to her values, her temperament, her goals. She challenged the status quo and helped chart new territory in the 1960s as the second female African-American teacher in the Freeport School District.

The others featured in “Untold Stories” represent a range of experiences in a particular time and place, early- to mid-20th Century in Freeport, Illinois. Broomsy Salter was the first African-American to move across Freeport’s “color line” – IL Route 26 – in 1956. Prior, African-Americans had been restricted, typically and systematically, to buying, renting or leasing property on the East Side, which hosts a flood plain. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination based on a person’s race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry. Cynthia Carter’s great-grandmother started Freeport’s first African-American church in her home; white churchgoers had welcomed her family and neighbors, but Cynthia Carter says they wanted a church of their own. Lillian Taylor moved to Freeport because her father took a job on the railroad, work that brought many African-Americans to town. James Canada was taught by his parents that there is no difference between black and white, but he wanted to experience an all-African-American university; instead, he took a scholarship to a state school and still regrets not finishing his degree in business. Geraldean Jones, director of Amity Daycare and the namesake of the Jones-Farrar Early Learning Center, was the first African-American female to graduate from Highland Community College.

Each story is unique.

• • •

I entered this project aware that I was the Outsider. I am white. I did not grow up in Freeport. I was born into a different era than the people I interviewed. And yet I had engaged since I was a child with those who were “other than” myself. In the small farming community where we moved when I was little, my dad was the only physician, and my family was perceived as “the Jewish family.” Professionally, I interact daily with those who are “other than” myself. I interview seniors, children, men, attorneys, convicts, victims and those with another ethnic heritage or born in some other foreign land. Over time, I have found myself alternately distanced and accepted in unexpected places. In Sierra Leone, where I was very much the Outsider, I was welcomed and hailed as a native West African because my name happens to be a common West African name. That small likeness melted barriers and helped yield real connections. (My “story” was renamed with this acceptance; I was called Abibatu.)

Throughout history, this engagement between the Insider and the Outsider has played out on many stages throughout the eras. It seems we understand from childhood the power of stories, especially encounters between “people of difference.” We look to Greek mythology, even though we are not Greek, and to Shakespeare, although we do not live in the 16th or 17th Centuries, and we glean universal themes. We listen to specific tales – whether fact or fable – and we learn about human nature. We read history and we recognize our collective story. Curiosity leads to empathy, and the act of storytelling transforms social dynamics.

Today, Alessandro Portelli, the Italian professor known as the father of the oral history movement in Europe, continues his decades-long project about the lives of Kentucky coal miners. Clearly the Outsider, he explains that his differences are the very reason for his success: Locals inform him that he is ignorant, and they want to help him glean insights into their way of life. A colleague in New Orleans, a Cajun woman, embodies what can be the complicated nature of the Insider-Outsider relationship. She found herself first the Outsider growing up in California, where her family had relocated, and then the Outsider in New Orleans, home of her ancestors, when she moved there and attempted an oral history project about her own ethnic heritage. In both places, she was recognized as different, “the other.”

I started this project aware of the gaps between my own experiences and the experiences of those I interviewed and photographed – namely with regard to age, place and heritage. But each of the six individual narratives varies, from one to the next; none represents an era, a city or a culture. I entered into this project believing that the stories of aging African-Americans in Freeport should be collected and told (for this generation and the next), that engaging with those other than oneself can provide an opportunity for greater understanding and appreciation, and that looking at the past better equips us to move forward. With this project, I did not intend to be the voice of a culture, or to tell the story of a people; I wanted to provide a platform for a few to tell their own stories in their own words. Individual stories can carry universal themes. The particular can be transcendent. This project, while telling the stories of several people in a particular place and time, can be a prism into themes that address our fundamental alikeness and offer a glimpse into what it means to be human – to face obstacles, to challenge the existing order, and as Broomsy Salter says, to “stand up for what you know is right.”

The six men and women featured in “Untold Stories” graciously engaged with me in the Insider-Outsider paradigm. They gave me access into their lives. They shared their thoughts, beliefs and experiences that make their stories unique. They shared their life lessons, themes that we can all learn from: Courage in the face of obstacles; stubbornness for what one believes is right; and forgiveness.

For me, one story emerged as especially poignant. During WWII, Geraldean Jones became friends with a German POW working another shift in the laundry department at Camp Grant. She explains very simply her nuanced view and nonconformist friendship: “He was probably drafted just like our boys were. He was just saying kind things just to have a relationship with somebody on the other side of the world.” Their brief exchanges, his notes with pins and her gifts of chocolate, show how fascinating and complicated history is.

• • •

I have insisted that the stories in this project are distinct and cannot represent a culture, a city or an era, but that in some small way these stories can capture and reflect a slice of the community’s past, with individuals like Geraldean Jones and Broomsy Salter and Arnetta McGee bordering on the iconic and described as “institutions” in Freeport’s history.

One of my closest friends from childhood, Kim, married a native Freeporter. Like our country’s man of the hour, he is bi-racial and was raised by a single white woman. Kim has two little girls who share her fair skin. They share a “separate” heritage with their dad. Born into a different era, I wonder how they will contend with those interior questions of where they – and their individual stories – belong. I wonder if they will face any external societal pressures about where their narrative fits.

For Kim’s two little girls, I think that “Untold Stories” tells part of the story of their heritage. For Freeporters of all races and creeds, I think that these stories are part of their collective history. And beyond any category or distinction in class or gender or age, I think that these stories offer incredible insight into the universality of our experiences as human beings.

As John F. Kennedy iconically said, “What unites us is far greater than what divides us.”

To summarize Barack Obama, in his ubiquitous refrains of hope and change, who we have been is not who we have to be.

We are different. And we are the same. We grasp this more fully through the telling of our stories.

© 2008, Abbie Reese