Winky takes the .40 and checks to see if there’s one in the chamber, stepping behind the abandoned building where the teenagers often hang out. POP! POP! POP! He shoots three times into the air. The woman raking her yard with a child 100 feet away doesn’t pay him any mind. The other kids are startled and Brandon jumps up and hurries away saying, “Damn Winky, that was some dumb shit.” They stash the gun under the abandoned building and continue rolling blunts, waiting for the cops to show but knowing that they won’t. Winky tells the other kids they’ve “gotta be hard”, and as the oldest of the group at 27, they believe him. He was sent to prison at 14 for seven and a half years. How can anyone expect a young man to reintegrate into society as a productive citizen after that?
In a place like Baptist Town, Mississippi there are two paths you can take in life but the people I have encountered tread the line between the two, walking both in light and shadow. They are neither good nor evil, they are simply human. This is the beginning of a two-part examination of contemporary race and class disparities in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood.
Cut off on all sides by train tracks, Baptist Town is home to around 500 residents with an estimated 90 percent unemployment rate. These photographs, made between April and July 2010, are about the dichotomy between light and dark, sin and salvation in Baptist Town. They are about the inheritance of slavery and how it continues to impact generations of Americans. A place like Baptist Town should not exist in the post-racial society we like to believe we live in.
While we may live in a time where civil rights is taught in history classes, the legacies of racism in the South continue to impact people economically and culturally, in persistent and often pernicious ways. I want to focus our collective attention on this complicated inheritance by documenting Baptist Town for the remainder of 2010. In 2011, I will look at the affluent white neighborhood in Greenwood. These neighboring communities are separated by fear, distrust and a history of exploitation. By visually introducing neighbors to one another in an honest and intimate way, my goal is to foster understanding, dispel uncertainty and fear while bridging the gap between these two worlds.
