This is an unbound portfolio printed using polymer plates on the vandercook press, in Providence, Rhode Island. The portfolio was created as a supplement for fungible commodities, a series of three multimedia installations

Mitchell, Kelly Taylor

English

Rhode Island School of Design

                     For Pop Pop,  Millard Claude Mitchell   with warmest thanks to  my cohort at The Rhode Island School of Design          fungible commodities                               Abstract    This is an unbound portfolio printed using polymer plates on the vandercook press, in Providence, Rhode Island. The portfolio was created as a supplement for fungible commodities, a series of three multimedia installations.   Themes  Excavation / Veiling / Oral History / Authorship / Place Making / Home / Constructing Identity    Contents  Tar / Rope / Earth / Crisco / Beeswax / Logs of The Great Dismal Swamp / Rushes of The Great Dismal Swamp / Cotton / Abaca / Milkweed / Water of The Great Dismal Swamp / Pots / Pans / Collected Vessels / Oral History / North Carolina Peanuts /  MCM Family Archive                     Introduction    Fungibility is defined as something that can be exchanged for something else of the same kind.  The following poetry, short stories, and oral histories are reflections, interpretations and inspirations for a body of work which acts a labyrinth for mapping my journey of racially constructed landscapes throughout time. In this body of work, I exhibit tactile materials (rope / earth / water) and emotive sensorial qualities (tar / swamp / pans / slides) as a trigger for historical, self, and collective reflection in the context of African American histories—whether they be told, untold, experienced, erased, lost or buried.  This body of work centers, what are often, internalized contradictions. These contradictions manifest conceptually as: home vs. trap, beauty vs. grotesque, trauma vs. joy, and generosity vs. withholding.   Emotive sensorial qualities  Tar / Swamp / Pans / Slides  Tar An old factory on a Sunday / recognition of labor  Their kitchen after smoking meats / sustaining family   Property usurped / Our landscape being burned away  Their body tarred and tortured / hate crime   Pans Kicking the tin can / past time / nourishment prioritized Kitchen hustle   “supper time” / Conjuring congeniality  A sentimental collision    Swamp  nature’s pheromones,    sodden milkweed Their gaseous emissions rotten eggs /A sulfuric haze Our fertile damp Earth / arable land   Slides Recalling moments / collective memory  The workings of machinery / breathing machinery / choices click,  click,  click material histories / Nan’s card table   A sampling of oral histories and anecdotes unknown  Peanuts Every summer he would travel to his favorite place, Garysburg, Northampton County, North Carolina.  A small town with dirt roads and familiar faces. It was home to his family farm, Mitchell Place. He had twelve brothers and sisters, the women slept in the house, while the men slept in the barn adjacent the livestock. They farmed peanuts. Among other things.  He was born in May, 1928. He became a learned man in a one room schoolhouse. He left Garysburg. He went to college. He met his wife. He went to Korea. He became a Father. He became a Civil Rights activist. He became an aerospace engineer. He went back every summer to his favorite place, Mitchell Place. He would return from his journey three shades darker and incandescently happy, burlap bag in-hand full of Northampton County peanuts. He would boast of his bounty. A man averse to the domestic, he would turn the peanuts into peanut butter and the peanut butter into cookies.  He proclaimed culinary mastery.  He insisted you enjoy the fruits of his labor.  I hated peanut butter cookies, but disliked disappointment more, I imbibed. He died. I reflected with his wife on our favorite memories. I spoke of the peanuts. She spoke of the fallacy. She revealed the rouse, she was the arbiter of the peanut butter and the adjudicator of the cookies. He was a propagator of self-fulfilling falsities that sated a sweet tooth, in the hopes of making his favorite place, our favorite place, Mitchell Place.      Earthen Floors The planter and his family would live in the big house, the site’s nucleus.  Behind the big house was a work yard consisting of various outbuildings, with earthen floors, much like the living quarters of the enslaved. Plantation architecture acted as a scaffolding for racially motivated hierarchies to urgently permeate the layout, function, floor plan, and landscaping of the plantation as ‘home’. When the big house did not encompass the kitchen, it was found amongst the outbuildings in the yard. Here the enslaved cook must sustain the life of the “master” through their forced and exploited labor and, on occasion, be made unwillingly implicit in the institution by sustaining the lives of other enslaved people by way of the products of their enslavement. The kitchen, various outbuildings, and living quarters of the enslaved provided less surveilled spaces to promote place making and attempts at agency. Enslaved individuals would often dig holes in the earthen floors that grounded these domestic, labor-intensive, and violent spaces. The act of excavating the earth to hide valuables can be interpreted as a reclamation and redefinition of ‘home’ and ‘history’, a display of desire for control, and a searching for self-definition.      Swamp John W. Mitchell was born in 1848, just 15 years before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. John W. had a brother named Bill and oral accounts tell us that as slaves, they escaped and swam across the Roanoke River near Jackson, North Carolina, around the area called "The Occoneechee Neck." During their escape, Bill was shot in the stomach and almost died.  The quick-thinking John W. rescued his brother and went into hiding until he could nurse his brother back to health. Coming up with a sure way to elude captivity, John W. took Bill to the Northampton County section of The Great Dismal Swamp where they traveled deeper into the swamp and where many other escaped slaves lived. The swamp provided a safe haven for many runaways who hired themselves out as log cutters and shingle makers to free blacks in the surrounding area. John W. just may have lived and worked along with and among a group of swamp dwellers called marooners who survived in one of nature's most unpleasant environments. While nursing Bill's wound, or sometime later, John W. met and married a beautiful widow, half indigenous and half white and whose name is lost to us. This "Lassiter" woman was from Bertie or Hertford County, North Carolina. What we do know is that she had a very young daughter named Louisa and who became John W.'s new step-daughter. There John nursed Bill back to health. William "Bill" Mitchell, later married Delia whose surname is lost to us. The family pronounces Delia's name as "Dealy." Bill and Delia had seven children: Mattie, Charlie Robert, Georgia (Mitchell) Grant, Nora, Alice (Mitchell) Kee, Evie and William (Bill) Mitchell, Jr.” AfterBill recovered, they all traveled back to Northampton County where oral accounts tell us that John W. lived on the plantation belonging to General Matt Ransom, a confederate soldier who lived in Jackson, NC. While still a young man, John W.'s wife died and he was left with the child, Louisa.     Oral accounts proclaim her to be an only child. In order to keep her from being abused by the master or sold to another plantation, John W. took the child and "went to live in the woods" until she was old enough to be presented as his second wife. It is said that they may have returned to the Dismal Swamp (probably until the end of slavery when they were free to live a parse existence).   Source: mitchellplace.org     Preface Trying to imbibe in histories unknown, untold, usurped. Depictions of tragedy require recognition of transcendence.  Let’s not conflate reconstructed remembrance with a negation of joy, of tenderness, of pride, of reclamation. Me? My family? My we? More than underserved. More than spoken for. More than used, abused, dehumanized, economized and commodified.  A bedrock. A cornerstone. A foundation for futures. A beacon. A new imaginary. A sweat through struggle that is sweeter than every rose-colored anything. No skin served me better. No hand held me tighter. No song lifted me higher. No voice gifted me such wisdom. No touch gave me more life. Than my me, my family, my we.   Hole in My Pocket  I have this hole,   Dug in my pocket.  My Great Great  Great  Great Grandmother put it there.  If she really dug it…  But why do we care so much about ownership,  Don’t we want to be free?  Can something be both empty and full?  Can’t anything mean Love.  Of value and without explanation I don’t know what dwells here--but it is a home  Of John: A Story in 13 Pockets  1. The dismantling of slavery will not equal emancipation.  2. John and his brother swim across the Roanoke River around The Occoneechee Neck and find healing for all manner of wounds in The Great Dismal Swamp 15 years before ‘emancipation’.  3. When even what you find empowering is already fractured.  4. They travel where no white man will enter. Amongst kinfolk they fortify futures.  5. Colonial inclinations return them to General Ransom’s plantation in Jackson, North Carolina.  6. .You cannot make a home in the master’s house. 7. Inherited imaginations permeate personhood and thwart autonomy. Tragedy ensues, they return to the Swamp.  8. Slavery defines the space of the free. January 1863 John is allotted forty acres and a mule; no one asks him to define reparations.  9. On the day of his death his wife Louisa is kicked off of their property.  10. Blackness and femaleness is everything but a claim.  11. They have fourteen children: John Drew, Charlie Robert, Henderson, William ‘Willie’, Edward, Ellen, Rebecca, Martha John, Missouri, Roxanna, Willie Mae, Cora, Louisa Lucille ‘Cindy’.  12. Charlie Robert marries Amie Wych they live and farm in Garysburg, North Carolina, sixty-four miles from The Great Dismal Swamp. They have twelve children: Bertha, Ellis, Leroy, Robert Willis, Mary Ellen, Walter Lewis, Louise,  Raymond, Millard Claude, Joseph Wilson, James Elign and John Arthur.  13. An identity bequeathed.  Second Sight You are no longer whole... Do you wonder what they’re searching for?  There is a nuclear fission And then what? When they look to you.  Will they keep watching? Will they intervene? Will someone shout?  Enough!  There is a nuclear fission  You are no longer whole… Do you wonder what they’re searching for? When they look to you. Will they keep watching? Will they intervene? Will someone shout?  Enough!  And then what?  You are no longer whole…  There is a nuclear fission Do you wonder what they’re searching for?  Will they keep watching? Will they intervene? Will someone shout?  Enough!  And then what?   When they look to you.  For Those Who Hear It Too As Performed by Those Imagined in Collective Refrain Dreaming someone else’s subconscious  Remembering  The other Song A sentimental trespassing. Who Taught me Every word ? Every interlude ? Every key change that moves song through melody and memory ?  Can Something S - I - N - G - U - L - A - R Be truly shared?  Please,  Demarcate the Boundaries Of  The Universal.  Remembering  The Other  Song? The one I know so well  And Not at all  Remembering The Other Song ? The one  With Faceless Singers Clearly defined Remembering  The Other  Song ? The one That Catalyzes Cadence  And Guides gait  Remembering  The Other Song And  Kin Who Hear It Too  16-Gallon Wash Tub My head still  Echoes with The reverberation of aluminum from the 16-gallon wash tub. That fell From the sky of the same silver color On to my head And through My eyes, And nose, And mouth,  And throat, Coming to rest in the pit of my sore shallow stomach. The echo vibrates And pulses like waves. Waves that come and go like the tide,  But ebb with no moon And flow with no current.  Unbothered by the laws of nature or man. An unpredictable parasite has laid temporary claim  To this vessel. I am dizzied and shaken.  How did I never look up,  At that silver sky And spare myself  The cacophony.  Note to Self  To me, you are Love — Pure delight-- A golden hour sunshine all-day-long  That sets pink And makes even its wake irresistible.  Warm, like summer stones.   Sweet, like powdered pastry.    Astute, porous pine. To me, you are Love.    Repeat. 

Fungible commodities

https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&amp;context=masterstheses

Fungible commodities

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