Call and Response: Lauren Pond and Emilee Hackney

Lauren Pond. May 27, 2014. A winding road leads to the doorway of the Mountaintop Church of Jesus Our Lord, Savior, and Christ in Richlands, Tazewell County, Virginia.

Tongues

We began to whisper the name, quiet and mournful, pleading, like a chant. Something about the air felt heavier as the sound swelled and filled the room.

Jesus heard us calling, and he came.

Come forward, the pastor said. All at once, all around me, people rose from their seats and moved slowly to the front of the church. Jesus kept falling out of our mouths, louder now. I was moving too – legs and lips – but I didn’t feel either. Everything was numb but my heart, burning like a bonfire in my chest. I couldn’t feel my head. I couldn’t think.

The sound was growing. It was frantic shouting and long, painful wails. It was trembling arms raised in the air, quivering knees. It was bodies wracked with sobs, face-first on the carpet. It was spinning and dancing and rolling and falling, surrounding me, me standing eyes closed and frozen in a circle of noise and movement and Jesus.

He was sucking the air from my lungs, and that’s when I knew something was about to happen. The heaviness was unbearable.

A man’s hand closed down on my forehead, hard. “Speak,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.

I did.

At first it was mostly vowels, pouring out of my mouth louder than I knew I was capable of. My tongue started twisting and forming words, holy words. Sounds spewed out, sounds I’d never heard, and I couldn’t comprehend them. It was as if they came from deep inside me and not my mouth. It was like a vomit. My chest was painfully full of it, and I couldn’t stop.

“The Holy Spirit hears you!” cried another voice near me. The chaos continued to swirl. I tried to open my eyes but my mouth, or the words falling out of my mouth, wouldn’t let me. There was a soft thud beside me where someone, wailing for Jesus, fell to the ground.

The hand was back on my forehead again. I was speaking – shouting – so loud and hard that a trickle of sweat ran down the center of my lower back, and I’d started feeling lightheaded. But the words kept me upright, rooted to the floor as firmly as a tree trunk, even as the voices got louder and the air got heavier and the hand gripped harder against my head.

The man’s tongues joined in with mine, and then I became aware of more all around me. None were alike, not even similar, but they complemented each other, rose and filled the room together like intertwining strands. For the briefest moment, the heaviness cleared, and I felt a strange sort of lightness and clarity, like none of this was really real.

But then I felt the hand again, and then, nothing.

I was falling backwards forever onto the dark plush carpet.

I never felt myself land.

Emilee Hackney. Tazewell County, Virginia.

Call and Response is a photo-literary exploration devoted to the relationship between photographs and words. Using photographs from the Looking at Appalachia project, writers are encouraged to respond narratively to a single image in 1,000 words or less. We hope to use this platform to expand our community and encourage collaboration between photographers and writers. Learn more about how to submit here.

Call and Response: George Etheredge and Kaitlin Williams

George Etheredge. April 22, 2015. Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina.

It wasn’t that the Buick was forgotten. Jimmy had put it there, drove it in the lot with the sort of half-hearted intention of things more wanted than needed.; a project for him and Jerryl when the heat of summer subsided. A September lay-away before the county fair and after the kids were out of their hair, back on the bus to school in Buncombe.

Jesse wouldn’t mind them fooling around the yard then. The days would slow and the leaves would begin to turn on the mountain. But then fall shifted to winter and Mamaw had gotten that cough that just wouldn’t shake and Jerryl found work in town and Jimmy just kept on drinking. The days dwindled into snow and before long the lot was filled with it and it would just be easier to wait for spring than drag it into the garage and pull out the heater.

Well March came and went and Jimmy was just too damn tired what with Jesse in a mood. Besides the cold lingered that year, even in April there were patches of ice in the yard, hemmed in the shadows. But when the lightning bugs emerged in those warm June nights Jimmy couldn’t think much of working. The beer was cold and the radio was just right and Jesse was looking something beautiful in that dress.

And so the seasons did pass and the kids grew tall and one or two left for the city. Jerryl met another gal then another then another. He couldn’t keep a woman, but he could hold down a job. Something Jimmy always envied. Jesse got plump. Jimmy got plumper. The lot turned wild and the confederate daisies cozied up to the rusting chrome bumper. Whenever Jimmy was asked about the old Buick in the yard out front he’d say he was just waiting for the heat of summer to subside.

Kaitlin Williams. Daphne, Alabama.

Call and Response: Alan Pittman and Mary Ann Bragg

Alan Pittman. March 22, 2014. A portrait of Jesus hangs near the bell-tower rope in one of the classrooms at Valley Grove Methodist Church, Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia.

As I page through all the photographs for West Virginia I stop at one with the sort of sunlight I know. The sheers are in a living room that I know, and the white wood chair is my white wood chair. I know that picture of Jesus in a robe. The benevolence of holding a lamb. He stands among sheep that crowd and follow him. I know the elements of this photograph, and I know the symmetry. I’m drawn to them. But it is the hanging cord that makes me shudder. It’s a rope for a church bell, soft and unfrayed with a trim tassel, but honestly it is awful in its off-centeredness and the way it ends in the top third of the photograph. The rope lacks a symmetrical twin. Its darkness interrupts the light from the windows. I think of it as malevolent. It immediately takes me to what must be in the back of my mind. A hanging. A hanging of some kind, either self-inflicted or as I write it just now a hanging inflicted by someone else. But the rope is quite slender. It could not cause that much damage to another person. Surely. A female, though. It could have hung a slender female. The tensions in this photograph are many. The benevolence matched with the suggestion of malevolence, and the symmetry matched with the sole dissymmetry of the rope. What I know to be true is matched with what is unknown. There is anxiety. I struggle with what I know compared to what I want to be.

Mary Ann Bragg. Provincetown, Massachusetts.