Back Porch

Abstract

Back Porch Marcie Cohen Ferris "I am perfectly able to care for myself," my ninety-seven-year-old mother, Huddy, says to me with a deep sigh. I hear the frustration and anger in her voice. This daily encounter occurs when I cross her threshold of intervention, having suggested a nice walk one too many times, or reminded her to eat or drink something more substantial. My endless suggestions, constant reminding, tidying, and scheduling feel like a thousand cuts to her ability and agency. "Stop snooping in my refrigerator," she says. "Why don't you go home to your dog and husband?" Before I leave, I note a visit from an occupational therapist who will assess the safety and accessibility of her apartment. "I don't like people poking around my home," she responds. Keri Watson's discussion of Eudora Welty's ca. 1940 photographic portraits of Charlie Paul, the "village pet," reminds me how much my mother—regardless of her good health, clear mind, and independence—desires the freedom, autonomy, and mobility Paul had his entire life, despite his cognitive disability. Rather than an institution for the "feebleminded," Paul's "community of care" was the small town of Rodney, Mississippi, where he was born and raised, and genially led tourists through its cemetery and church. In 2023, my mother lives not far from my husband and me in a planned community for older adults. We're grateful for the support and care it provides, but a century ago, my mother would have lived with us as she neared her one hundredth year. In her senior community I witness the "absent presence" of disability that Watson describes, "something that is both apparent and ignored," evident in the many walkers, canes, hearing aids, caregivers, silences, missing partners, and repetitive stories that fill the hallways and dining room. In Robert Newsome's beautiful remembrance of artist Patrick Dean, he shares the exuberant figural line drawings Dean created after his ALS diagnosis. The drawings vividly express the power and complexity of motion and movement—a common exercise that becomes miraculous in its ghostlike absence. I see that same recognition in my mother's longing for past decades marked by her nonstop pace, confident stride, and everyday moments spent with her husband, my beloved father, Jerry.1 This issue's essays opened my eyes to the politics, economics, rhetorics, and systemic racism that has long controlled, irreparably maimed, and, in many experiences, destroyed the lives of disabled southerners. In state-run carceral medical institutions like the Virginia State Penitentiary and Central State Hospital, Shelby Pumphrey reveals how sterilization and other [End Page 100] forms of medical "care" were used to discipline African American male patients and prisoners, guided by the "racial improvement" theory of early twentieth-century eugenics and white supremacy. These narratives were embedded in the region's complex and evolving geographies and histories of the early twentieth century, from families like R. Larkin Taylor-Parker's, who kept disabled relatives secret, fearing their "bloodlines" would be seen as tainted, to the disabled white and Black southern roots musicians of the post-Reconstruction South that Simon Buck examines. Buck explores how these artists' identities were defined by their experience of limb loss and the spectacle and performance of that physical absence. Adria L. Imada uncovers the disability narratives of activism, joy, and resistance at Carville, Louisiana's carceral facility for the treatment of Hansen's disease, where residents—many from Hawai'i's Kalaupapa detention hospital—were controlled by quarantine laws until the 1940s. Today, the contemporary Krip-Hop movement founded by Leroy F. Moore Jr., here in conversation with our talented guest editor Charles L. Hughes, celebrates the music of disabled hip-hop artists to increase awareness in the industry and across national music and arts platforms. These voices each speak of shared disability-informed silences, waiting, grief, acceptance, and the possibility of cure, yet also the daily rituals that remain—"the pot of greens," as described by poet Camisha L. Jones, and "the push on in spite of." These works led me to an inevitable inventory of my own ableness. There is the disability landscape of my family history—the narratives...