NO BASEMENTS IN NEW ORLEANS

Growing up in New Orleans and being raised by the white half of my family, my understanding of race always conflicted with the way I saw and understood myself. Code-switching came naturally before I fully understood that I was changing myself to be accepted. As an adult, I sympathize with my younger self because I now understand it was a means of survival in a society where social constructs like race define you.

I find myself, as a southern artist who no longer resides in the south, in a unique position to reflect on what it means to be in two places at once. In the essays she wrote on her own experience, Flannery O’Connor reflects on what it means to be a protestant writer in the Catholic South, stating, “What the Southern Catholic writer is apt to find, when he descends within his imagination, is not catholic life but the life of this region in which he is both naive and alien. He discovers that the imagination is not free, but bound.” 

My subjectivity as a biracial woman in the United States is bound to the land my ancestors worked, bled, loved, and lived on. Yet through my work, I will continue to push the bounds of their history beyond stories of suffering and into the complexity of a life deserving of a legacy that transcends tragedy.

“No Basements in New Orleans” draws on the writings of Katherine McKittrick and her book “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black sense of Place: Social & Cultural Geography” in which McKittrick examines how histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistance to white supremacy shape the complexities of Black geographies in the American South.  

Nottaway Plantation sits 10 minutes down the road from the town of St. Martinville, Louisiana where my mother's mother spent the first quarter of her life. On May 15th of this year, an electrical fire burned down most of Nottaway, leaving the structure in ruins. The charred remains of the largest antebellum plantation in the southern United States and the ornate plantation drawings in my aunt’s basement now hang side by side as a diptych, forever in conversation with one another.