An enduring challenge is how to depict the past in a modern piece of art. For a writer, they can fully shift a scene—setting a story where and whenever they choose, placing those details which ground the characters at the dawn of time or its grey end.1 A painter can trounce even the best-financed movie, showing a city as she sees it in her head, utterly unbound by the difficulty of sewing period clothing or xeroxing fliers for bands long gone.
Money Road, Leflore County, SX-70 (2020)
But the photographer has to deal with what’s in the dirt today. It is harder to cheat time. For my friend Ashleigh Coleman, a core story is the growth and change of her family through the years. While there is a timeless texture to her photographs, they are grounded in the real world.
In the art of Jack Deese, I can feel what he calls the “[p]erpetual effort to attach meaning to this thing that is very impossible to comprehend,” specifically with modern-day Georgia. I often feel like some of Jack’s photos could only be taken today, which imbues them with a special vitality.
But I try to do something a little differently.
Yalobusha River, Leflore County, Miss, Polaroid SX-70 (2021)
I am in the business of time travel. Not always but often I want to transport you to a place which either doesn’t exist now or never existed at all. Not always but often my work secretly has implied capitals or articles—not just a representation, but Truth. I’m trying to weave you a cheat code to the past, or at least to a place which feels realer than now.
Holmes County, Mississippi, Polaroid 600 (2021)
(I need to quit saying cheat when I mean trick. The former implies deception in order to gain advantage; the latter can be fun, entertaining, even desired).
Which brings us to Robert Johnson. How am I supposed to depict this long-gone artist, who passed away a decade before my parents were born—and made music glowingly popular almost a century ago which can sound as strange and haunting as the “Seikilos Epitaph” to modern ears?
Do you know they say that when he played “Come on in My Kitchen,” it was so beautiful, it was so everything, people would cry? When was the last time you cried at a song? How do you say I love you to a ghost? How do you make a photograph of saying I love you to a ghost?
Leflore County, around Morgan City, SX-70 (2021)
We don’t even really know where he’s buried, if he’s even buried, to the point people just started putting up graves to honor him. So what do you think. Does the graveyard by this little church feel right? Does this feel like a place a legend would be buried? Does it code right? This is what I’ll call possibility number one. Let’s zoom in.
Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that just so geometrically precise, doesn’t the orderliness of it feel comforting? (Same day, same camera, different film.) But doesn’t the black and white just cement it, that this is real. He’s most definitely here.
Just don’t look too close at that cornerstone. Don’t look at when this church was actually (re)built, because it’ll spoil the illusion. Because this structure, that looks so old, so classic—this wasn’t there 90 years ago.
And also, doesn’t his death certificate says he’s buried at Zion Church (“in a homemade coffin furnished by the county”)?2 This church is called Mount Zion. So maybe let’s keep going.
Leflore County, around Quito, more or less, SX-70 (2021)
Or does this do it. Doesn’t it feel like he should be buried next to a building like this? This is by possibility number two. Didn’t it seem like you used to see more old sheds and barns like this, covered in corrugated tin? But that building, I remind you, probably wasn’t even standing in ‘38. If it was, the metal was gleaming new, not rusted. Maybe this is just a trick.
Accidental double exposure of the church at possibility number two, SX-70 (2021)
Casting aside number one and number two, now some people think the grave might be under a big pecan tree by the Little Tallahatchie, off Money Road, just right outside Greenwood. This is possibility number three. And on an overcast day, here is that old pecan tree:
Little Zion Church, Leflore County, Polaroid 600 (2021)
I just—I mean, was the tree always that big? I don’t know a lot about trees, find myself googling how old can pecan trees get, and how fast do pecan trees grow, because what did it look like that day in 1938, when they hand-dug the grave, placed within it the homemade coffin furnished by the county? If the grave is under the big old pecan tree, is that tree even still there?
Little Zion Church sign (now replaced), SX-70 (2020)
And I know you noticed this wasn’t Zion Church either, but Little Zion. But that’s not what the death certificate said. But couldn’t there be mistakes in that too? Did the person who wrote in “Zion Church” on the death certificate get their Zions mixed up sometimes, like how I do? And don’t the names of places change over time? Especially change over the course of a century.
Let’s say I told you “my Nana taught Sunday school at Sandusky Baptist for over 55 years, and my parents got married there in 1973,” both of which are true things. So you go search and end up at a place named “Sandusky Baptist” right by the old Sandusky School in Alabama. This would have to be the place, you’d think.
But that’s the second church location; my parents were married down the street, at the old church, and the congregation moved many years ago. In twenty years maybe nobody but me and my sister will remember they even moved. You’d be more or less within a few miles of what you were looking for, but at a completely different place.
While we don’t know where Robert Johnson was buried, we’re quite sure we know where he was born—at his parents’ home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. His father was a well thought of carpenter in Copiah County, and the address at the time was recorded. But houses and addresses, like churches and graves, sometimes shift. When they cut Mississippi into quarters with interstates 55 and 20, the house was moved from Damascus Road to Miller Road. In 2008, some folks paid to have the house moved to downtown Hazlehurst in the hopes of making a tourist attraction.
A wall of what might be the Damascus Road house, SX-70 (2020)
I suppose it will not shock you that people aren’t really sure anymore if they moved the right house.3
SO PERHAPS I have knelt in tribute upon the grave of Robert Johnson, and perhaps I have placed my hand upon the wall of the home in which he was born.
Or perhaps I have not.
Perhaps the real question is: have I sought to do so.4 And have I tried—with flash, with color, with shape, with story, and maybe with a little misdirection—have I tried to show y’all what it all felt like.
Wait, you start to say, as I mash the green “publish” button, don’t you have photos of the graves? And you were awful vague on where all this was—do you have addresses for where all this is?
And my answer is, of course I do.
AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram, where there’s many other photographs not actually from years past, but maybe, and you can see more time travel at McCartyPolaroids.
I read a poem this morning by Catherine Pierce which startled me like a door slamming at midnight. From her “Fable for the Finals Days,” where Earth dies from an asteroid strike: “as the whole earth softened / into fur and dirt and crumbling, / as lichens grew gently over / law firms, as mothers turned / to bones and then loam[.]”
If you don’t have a copy of Robert Johnson’s death certificate, what are you even doing with your life? (Or at least reproductions of it nestled within scholarly articles).
And that this house is itself a bit lost, having now no address at all, nor marker or sign.
I’m not even sure where we think “the past” comes from, or what I believe it to be. It’s too reductive to imagine just juke joints and cotton gins, when we know Muddy Waters had in his record collection in Stovall the brassy, sophisticated big band jazz of Jay McShann and his Orchestra, when there were rumors that Robert Johnson himself might’ve already gone electric by the time he died. These weren’t knights in armor; they are much closer to astronauts.
That’s a good read. Lots to think about.
And now that I can comment, I can also say thank you-- for your support and encouragement and for spurring us all on to make work!