Michelle Holmes lives in Birmingham Alabama, where she is the Vice President of Content at Alabama Media Group.
Whitman Alabama
As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk,I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest
in the briers hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also,
I have paus'd to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and
joyfully singing.
And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang for was
not there only,
Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,
But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.
- Walt Whitman, STARTING FROM PAUMANOK.
The first time I met Jennifer Crandall, we were in a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by mustachioed baristas and 20-year-old startup founders; neither of us had given more than a passing thought in our lives to the deep red, deep south state of Alabama.
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| Jennifer Crandall at work |
And yet, less than six months later, we’d both be living there – me running a media company, Jennifer falling in love with the voices and the people and the songs tumbling from the briars and the sidewalks and the farmhouses and the underpasses in the place still called the Heart of Dixie.
A year after that, “Whitman, Alabama” would be in full swing, and I would stand beside her in a paupers graveyard, or on a coal boat, watching as she coaxed forth a 21st century Song of Myself from the southern ethers.
As a woman born in Ethiopia to a white American man and a Chinese woman from Vietnam, a lesbian raised in Pakistan, Haiti and Bangladesh, Crandall often has struggled to express her own self to others. And thus, her life’s mission – to introduce people to one another across labels and across time and space and the boundaries of assumed identity, beyond birthplace, beyond politics and education and sexual orientation – has become a hallmark of her professional life, most notably as the creator of the Washington Post’s acclaimed OnBeing series. My question “So what will you make here ... in Birmingham, Alabama?” was met with her singular vision – conjuring forth Whitman’s 1855 Song of Myself in 52 episodes from hundreds of regular people across the state of Alabama.
And so I said yes, and so she began, in what was intended to be a one-year project. Looking back, it was an absurdly ambitious plan, so big that neither of us could see the enormity of it, as though we’d encountered an elephant’s knee and hadn’t bothered to keep looking up.
Because the labels and methods that we as journalists seek do not apply here, we created the first Artist-in-Residence program in an American newsroom to offer the freedom she needed to bend form and convention, and she set out with her video camera, bringing back something I can best describe in Whitman’s own words – a “gift occult” tumbling from the lips of the people of Alabama, transmitting a charge of democracy and universal joy, a barbaric yawp that vibrates from the screen.
Joined on location at times by the talented video journalists and filmmakers Bob Miller and Pierre Kattar, through much of this project, she’s going it alone: She’s director, and filmmaker, editor and scene shooter, color corrector and sound designer. Her work is slow and painstaking with deft attention to pacing and rhythm, and the interplay of light and shadow.
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| Brandon Sullivan, who read for the project |
Sometimes there’s time to plan, and her subjects recite take after take, until their throats are numb, navigating through the unfamiliar words of a 19th century poet, and she edits the pieces with precision, piecing through reads and pauses, of moments where there’s a spark that ignites from the reader to the viewer, seeking not fluency but aliveness, a light that comes through her subjects’ eyes as if she were midwifing the work into the world, again.
Sometimes, unplanned filming sessions emerge from chance meetings – a few short stumble-be-damned takes, like verse 43 with Anthony Williams, changing a tire beside a busy highway, enroute to Montgomery, swearing under his breath as he recites with trucks roaring past:
“Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten'd, atheistical, I know every one of you …”Sometimes, there’s convincing and explaining – like the readings in a drug court or in a doctor’s office with a patient; sometimes it’s as fast and magic as a lightening bug, filming literally upside down in the air.
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| Jennifer with Billy Wayne, who read for the project |
Often, I can’t understand the unfamiliar words, written in another time and place (“Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist,”) but I feel the charge of it as it rushes over me and I stare into the eyes of a young hotel maid near-fainting in the heat of a southern summer and I know something I did not know I knew before.
Because this is not news, and had no beginning and no ending, we struggled to know how or when to release it and who or where the audience would be. Days after the 2016 presidential election, however, it was clear – ready or not, this work belonged to this time, as we Americans struggled to see ourselves in one another across the growing chasm. Week by week, we are rolling out these short films to the world, building a library of shared, lived experience as we go.
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| The Creative Minds Dance Crew, members of which read for the project |
We hope you too, will experience this as yourself. As no one other than you. It is the only right way.
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All images used are courtesy of WhitmanAlabama. All the video readings for the project can be found here.