The South is Not Black & White
by Monique Verdin for South Summit 2021
The South I know best stretches from the bottomland hardwood forests, to the marshes, to the crystal quartz barrier islands found across the coastal territories of the Gulf of Mexico’s northern rim, from Houma, Louisiana to Pensacola, Florida. I’ve been thinking a lot about all the stories that I don’t know; discovering the meanings of names of places I have driven by hundreds of times; learning that these names, these places, Pascagoula, Biloxi, Mobile, are more than the names of places, they are names of forgotten Peoples and of Rivers that feed estuaries, connecting the lands and freshwaters to the sea. The older I get the more I appreciate that I have been so blessed to be born, bred, and fed, in spirit and body, by the salt and fresh waters of these biodiverse in-between lands.
The Mississippi River Delta is the place I call home. My wild garden grows on my grandmother’s land just south of Bvlbancha’s sinking colonial city, New Orleans. Bvlbancha, “place of many tongues” or “place of many languages,” is the name the Chata (Choctaw) called this lower delta territory, long before the French claimed and rebranded our sacred site of trade. It wasn’t until the 300-year celebration of the colonial “founding” of the city of New Orleans, back in 2018, that I first learned this word. BVLBANCHA! A name this place is still living up to. In 2019, before Covid19 shut the world down, the city welcomed close to 20 million visitors. Maybe too many visitors in my honest opinion; but that fact is evidence that this place has been and continues to be a meeting point where ideas and cultures and goods are exchanged and experienced.
I, like most people of the United States Gulfcoast, am of mixed descent. My father’s bloodlines are tied to the Houma Nation and the cheniere ridges at the ends of the bayous in the Yakni Chitto, the “big country” between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers. My mother’s ancestors were some of the first French colonizers who sailed into the swamp with the Company of John Law back in the early 1700’s; other maternal ancestors emigrated from Santo Domingue (Haiti) at the turn of the century during the Revolution. As I acknowledge the histories flowing through my DNA, a complicated mélange of colonizer and colonized, I’ve been challenged to reassess my understanding of the complexities of place and Peoples, forcing me to recognize how relations to past and present intersect with future potentials and prayers.
The South is in the process of healing from the scars of silenced stories and too many southern narratives oversimplified to be boiled down to simple black and white dichotomies.
Southern histories, written by the hands of white supremacy, have been bound within public school books, to be cited as fact; allowing Hollywood to perpetrate Antebellum fantasies, Civil War revelry, Reconstruction’s reckoning, and the reigns of terror, muting memories, erasing truth and reimagining traditions.
The South, especially the United States Gulf South, is not a black and white story; it’s technicolor reflecting off a crystal, making rainbows that shimmer in emerald green-blue waves, bouncing light from the sky to sea. Migration, resistance, liberation, solidarity, mixed identities, and survival are the themes embedded in the lived experience of southern stories that continue to inspire me; stories I wish were witnessed more in modern storytelling mediums.
All rivers and oceans lead to Bvlbancha and Gulf Coast ports; ports of call where migrations, fueled by curiosity and conquest, willed by desires for a better life or forced upon through enslavement, where ancestors of the South found a sense of refuge in the wetlands and on the high grounds where the wildflowers grow for the sake of survival; destined to find a way, destination unknown.
Southern stories are like wild River delta systems, always in a state of unpredictable and constant change, connecting and intersecting and birthing blurred lines of rich and vibrant interface zones where the magic of life cycles are stewarded. Like Rivers and deltaic systems, these stories have been and continue to be reshaped and defined by the waters, cultural practices, politics, and the consequences of environmental manipulations and extractive legacies. Southern stories are haunted by an undeniable storm cloud, ever-present and looming in the distance, to remind that color lines, class/caste systems, climate change, and corporate colonialism are alive and well and ready to unleash a deluge of disaster at any time; but disaster does not define us, how we choose to respond does.
There is a need in modern southern media for more context and space for multidimensional and multiracial histories, her stories and their stories and perspectives that can connect the past and present to systemic situations. Plantation mentalities and colonial occupation have left behind legacies and historical scars, leaving us to find the places we call home red-lined within the so-called “Sacrifice Zone,” where multinational corporations set up toxic operations, promising jobs and receiving tremendous tax incentives, in turn making shareholders richer while polluting our communities. We deserve better. The South deserves better.
The South is long overdue for a Truth and Reconciliation process that may never come, but I think southern stories can help spark decolonized conversations to shine light on the kaleidoscope of knowing found in the multiplicities of truths.
Ever since the Civil War, folx have been forced to accept black or white identities denying the complexities of diversity; but the colonial experiment seeded along the northern Gulf Coast continues to support multicultural collisions, inducing adaptations, evolutions, and assimilations.
I hope that I soon will be able to say, “Did you see that incredible series about the Seminole resistance in the Swamps of South Georgia and Florida? What did you think about that documentary about the Underground Railroad sailing out of the Port of Pensacola? Have you seen that film about the Free Woman of Color who was a business owner navigating life in Bvlbancha during the times before and after the Louisiana Purchase? What about that futuristic animation about symbiotic existence and regenerative technologies and abundant life along the Gulf Coast in the year 2222?”; And I look forward to knowing all the other silenced southern stories, just waiting to be told.
ABOUT MONIQUE VERDIN: Monique Verdin is an interdisciplinary storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a member of the Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, working to envision just economies, vibrant communities, and sustainable ecologies. She is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2021. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
