Excerpt From ‘AFFRILACHIA: TESTIMONIES’

Chris Aluka Berry’s Affrilachia presents a visual history of the proud people of color who reside in this important cultural landscape.

Appalachia is a mostly mountainous region stretching over 13 states from Mississippi to New York. Although Black Americans have greatly influenced the landscape in this region, their stories are often undocumented because Appalachia is perceived as wholly white. Photographer and Curator Chris Aluka Berry gives voice to the broad spectrum of African Americans who have lived in the Appalachian region over the centuries in his new book Affrilachia: Testimonies—out this week from University Press of Kentucky.

His intimate and revealing photographs capture Arican Americans in various settings, from churches to homes, revival services, family gatherings and homegoing celebrations. Completing this comprehensive collection are powerful narratives from the people who inhabit these places and contributions from Appalachian writers Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam, whose poignant and powerful poems and essays offer historical perspective and broaden the book’s archival importance.

Read an excerpt from the “Introduction” below and get a sneak peek at some of the moving photography included in the book.

INTRODUCTION

by Kelly Elaine Navies

I first met photographer Chris Aluka Berry when I was invited to speak at the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School in July of 2021. Historian and educator Maia A. Surdam had reached out to me because of my oral history research and deep roots in the region. She asked me to talk about my work on my family’s history to the girls she was working with in the Part nership for Appalachian Girls’ Education (PAGE) program. In fact, she was not aware that my mother had actually briefly attended the Rosenwald School as a child in the late 1940s. Mama had vivid memories of learning to read in the all-Black one-room schoolhouse. She recalled a nurturing environment that helped foster a lifelong love of learning that eventually led her to receive advanced degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, many years later. My mother often told us stories of her childhood. I suspect she missed both the places and the people after our family settled in the California Bay Area. She was the eldest of nine children, and until my grandparents settled in Detroit when Mom was nine years old, the family moved around quite frequently. They lived for a time in Weaverville and Mars Hill, North Carolina, with my grandmother’s relatives; in Barbourville, Kentucky, with my grandfather’s relatives; and also in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where for a short time my grandfather found work in a wartime powder factory. Her evocative stories of North Carolina and Kentucky captured my curiosity and led me to “discover” our deep roots in Appalachia. While living in North Carolina as a young girl, my mother had the unforgettable experience of meeting her great-grandmother, a woman who had been born during the era of slavery and had lived for over one hundred years by the time my mama came along. Years later, she would tell me about this meeting, and her story eventually compelled me to return to the source looking for answers. When I began my journey back to my maternal roots in North Carolina, I had no idea that my people were Appalachian (although my grandmother’s use of the term “hillbilly” should have been a clue) or that there was anything particularly notable about that fact. But once I returned to the mountains and reconnected with our family there, I would hear over and over again the same comments and questions when recounting my sojourn: “There are Black people up there?” “I didn’t know there were any Black people in the mountains.” “I didn’t think they’d ever had slavery up there.” I was ever amazed at these comments, particularly from folks who lived in other regions of the South, in close proximity to the

mountains. My genealogical and historical journey revealed that Black people had been there for generations. I can trace family in the mountains of both North Carolina and Kentucky back to the late eighteenth century, where they lived and worked, some as enslaved, others as free people even before the era of emancipation—owning land, growing herbs, worshipping God, struggling, creating culture, building lives, and forging relationships with their white and Indigenous neighbors, even when those relationships were limited by the racial hierarchies and tensions of the region and country at large. Once I realized the lack of awareness surrounding the racial and cultural demography of the region, I committed myself to telling the stories of these people, my people. I listened deeply to their blues, and with my heart I responded with poetry. I learned as “Aunt Lu” states in my poem “Testimony: Walking with Aunt Lu” that they weren’t just talking, they were soul talkin’. When Chris approached me to collaborate with him on this book of photographs, I looked at his photos and recognized a curious and sensitive kindred spirit with an eye for capturing the essence of Black communities in Appalachia, or what we have come to come to call Affrilachia, a term coined by poet Frank X Walker back in the 1990s. The photograph of Mrs. Myra Ann Thomas wearing the stunning hat and polka dot dress first caught my eye. Her head is humbly bowed, yet emanates dignity, beauty, and strength. The image felt as if it were lifted from a very familiar place in my mind’s eye. I thought to myself, “He gets it,” and I agreed to write an introduction for this book. I was especially eager to see him document the rapidly changing Hillside community in Weaverville, North Carolina, where my family has lived for over a century and still lives today. In fact, I lived there briefly as a young single mother going through a painful divorce and was welcomed and nurtured by this tight-knit community where my daughter, now an adult, took her first steps. My mother’s first cousin Gearldine Ray had been my guide to the family history when I first began my journey over thirty years ago. She passed on stories about our family and the surrounding community and shared her own experiences growing up as a

 

Black woman in the region. It was she who first told me about Stephens-Lee High School, the segregated high school in Asheville, North Carolina, that served several counties and was known as “The Castle on the Hill” until it was demolished by the city leaders in the wake of desegregation. In her high school graduation photograph, seen on page 46, you bear witness to her determined visage, stand ing as tall as the mountainous landscape seems to demand. Sadly, Chris did not get to meet her before she passed away last year, but her spirit can be seen and felt in the portraits of the people and communities that he has carefully rendered. Faces etched with pride, abiding faith, love, and joy, despite often tremendous obstacles. Affrilachia lives. In dreams that linger in our consciousness the way the light bounces off of the trees in Pisgah National Forest, in the sacred ritual of churchgoing, in the intimate moments shared on porches, in the mystery and magic of children’s play. Wherever I go, I carry the rhythms and songs of the Blue Ridge with me. Ancestral tales passed on by my mama and cousin Gearldine course through my veins and sustain me every step of the way. I am told that my great-great- grandmother, the one born during slavery, had a way of shouting in church without making a sound. These images shout without making a sound. Open this book and join us as we travel to the heart of Affrilachia, “hear” the souls talkin’ from Rock Springs Camp Meeting and Bays Mountain, Tennessee, from Weaverville and Mars Hill, North Carolina, calling out through the eyes of Deacon Mance in Stephens County, Georgia. The people and communities captured in these pages shall never disappear. They belong to the ancient Appalachian mountain range, their voices forever singing in the wind, loud and clear, if only you will listen.

Berry, Chris Aluka. Affrilachia: Testimonies. pp. 47-48; Photographs: “Memorial Service”, “Myra”, “Cousins”. © 2024 Chris Aluka Berry. Used by permission of The University Press of Kentucky.