Call and Response: John Kelso and Kaitlin Williams

John Kelso. April 12, 2014. State Line Church in Muscadine, Clerburne County, Alabama.

Aunt Theresa had led the State Line Baptist choir as long as memory serves. Everyone said she’d been called to serve the Lord since the day she’d been born. She could warble a hymn before she could talk. She wasn’t much for books or reading, but she studied the good Lord’s songs with a hunger. Theresa channeled the holy spirt tangled in the lines, pressed into the space between treble clef and bass. She knew a little something about the piano and harpsichord too, but her heart was firm in its devotion to the sung verse. A godly woman of only 5 foot 3 her button down blouses were always carefully ironed, but never tucked into the waist of her blue jeans. She filled that 10 pew room with her heart. The depth of her voice commanded attention and she needn’t raise it. Daddy told me the years had stolen from her. It was time, that careless bandit, that had robbed her of the perfect pitch of her youth. And maybe the filtered camels she favored too. But even with the rocks in her throat it was something holy to hear her there, in that little white church, on the edge of the Alabama/Georgia state line.

Kaitlin Williams. Daphne, Alabama.

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: Kelly Culpepper and Meredith McCarroll

Kelly Culpepper. November 12, 2014. Madison County, North Carolina.

A truck tire parked on the potatoes we left undug.

Our 600-acre tobacco farm auctioned off in parcels when our parents divorced.

I learned that year to fall asleep by mentally retracing the path to the tobacco barn, the trail to the old cabin, the back way to the cattle. I committed every wall and window to memory.

Twenty-five years later, I’ve never been back.

Matt, my brother, wanted to find it and couldn’t. He drove around Panther Creek, he tried using Google Maps, he tried to get landmarks from Mom. She had forgotten and we had been too young to learn.

All these years that Matt was looking, I was closing my eyes tight. The farm for me was in the past, and I did not want it in the present.

Simple. Over.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” I say to my son, as we’ve stopped to look at a field of staked tobacco.

“But cigarettes are bad,” he responds.

My Aunt Lena could spit snuff across the room into a copper bowl, making the most satisfying of plinks. My Pa was only 69 when he died from emphysema. Summer was the red glow of cigarettes and hushed voices on my Granny and Pa’s dark front porch. I used to flush my Mom’s cigarettes down the toilet.

The week after Mom’s funeral, Matt and I found the paperwork from the auction. We could finally trace our way back to the farm.

New friends ask about where I’m from. I tell them about Max Patch, Cataloochee, Cruso. The skate park, and the breweries where the factories were. My ancestor abandoned on the Trail of Tears. My childhood in woods and creeks and drive in movies.

“I found the farm,” Matt says, calling me in to look at his computer. He has the documents from the sale spread across the table.

I wanted the farm to stay a Brigadoon. Preserved. Lost.

Instead, I lean over his screen.

What do I fear? Driveways where we kept bees. Carports where we planted the Three Sisters. Mailboxes on roads we made by walking.

Matt zooms in. The rutted gravel road has been named and paved. A couple of houses seem to have appeared. But mostly, it looks the same. We find our old house.

Matt seems satisfied. A piece of the puzzled past has been found. A set of our childhood—crafted, directed, and curated by our mom—can now be closed.

We can’t ask Mom how it felt for her that day at the auction of the farm. I forgot when she stopped smoking, and now she can’t remind me. Will I find the morels this year without her?

“You just hardly ever see this anymore,” I say, still sitting by the field.

“Yeah, because tobacco companies finally got into trouble.”

“I still think it’s pretty,” I say, and pull back onto the road.

Meredith McCarroll. Brunswick, Maine.

Call and Response: Justin Gellerson and Karen L. Cox

Justin Gellerson. November 17, 2014. Boomer Christian Academy, Boomer, Fayette County, West Virginia.

Until I was six years old, the Rock of Ages Baptist Church in Huntington, West Virginia, was where I cut my teeth on old time religion.

My clearest memories, though, are not of lessons learned, but of the ritual and performance I witnessed on a weekly basis. The women who shouted in the spirit of Jesus caused me to jump, even when I knew it was coming. The men who broke down in tears mesmerized me, and my eyes followed them as they walked down the aisle toward the sanctuary where the preacher beckoned them to give themselves to the Lord, while the choir sang “Just as I Am.”

The attendance board reminds me of that church, as it measures the ebb and flow of the church flock.

When my parents divorced there was nervous chatter about having a single woman as pretty as my mother still in attendance. So we left. Mom, my brother, and me. And in my little girl imagination, I saw that the following week’s attendance board registered three less souls.

Karen L. Cox. Charlotte, North Carolina.