Front Porch

Abstract

Front Porch Tom Rankin Click for larger view View full resolution Illustrations by Phil Blank. [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Dinner in the motel room with Maggie Lee Sayre, Danville, Kentucky, 1995. Photographs by Tom Rankin. A SOUTHERN CULTURES ISSUE on the Sonic South is especially welcome in this moment, so necessary as we continue to listen for what is hidden within the culture and history of the region. And while we listen for these rhythms, the muffled and shuttered sounds that deserve amplification, we also strive to locate the silences. Sonic boom–level thanks go to Regina N. Bradley for her amazing vision and for gathering this medley of contributors on essential ideas of the American South. In thinking of the sonic, I begin with ideas of listening. So much of what is calling to us in the South remains yet unheard, unacknowledged in any full and understandable way. Not because these stories, places, lives, and truths are inaudible, but because of a collective turn away from their sounds. When I think—and talk—about the fundamental methods of documenting oral histories, life stories, and personal memory, I land early on ideas of sympathetic listening, on the wonders of letting the teller and the story wander and emerge in its own delicate and distinct way. Embracing the nonlinear nature of recall, memory, and life is where meaning often rests, where we find yet unheard revelation. We discover indispensible new truths in the pauses and gaps, between the static and the unsaid. Leaning closer to a speaker on a radio or phone to hear more clearly through the scrambled fuzzy connection—a sonic friction that exists in the moment and later in memory—makes what we understood all the more consequential because of the effort to hear. To understand [End Page 2] the sonic South requires moving our ears—and with that all our senses—a bit closer to the source, to the ground, to more fully comprehend the resonant truths. Some years ago, I did documentary fieldwork along the Tennessee River, working for the Tennessee Department of Conservation. I was photographing and interviewing commercial fishermen and others who make their living from the river, trying to better understand and document the intersections of the natural river world and the residents who lived there. During that time, I was lucky to meet Maggie Lee Sayre, then a resident in a nearby nursing home who had grown up on a houseboat on the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers. Born deaf, she had become a photographer as a child and continued to photograph her family life on their houseboat as they made their living catching fish, residing on the boat her father built. Maggie Lee Sayre's deafness and her life among mostly hearing people who didn't know sign language defined her photographic vision. In our first meeting she brought out her photographs. As she turned page after page of her carefully edited and sequenced photo albums, it became powerfully clear that she was sharing her pictorial life story, a visual narrative seasoned with caring descriptions and the mystery of meaning inherent in the best of stories. Because initially I had no experience with sign language, Maggie and I communicated through handwritten notes, gestures, and of course the photographs themselves. We collaborated on a book of her photographs that was published in 1995, taking the title from the way Maggie signed her name the first time she wrote me—Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life. We traveled together to promote the book at bookstores, schools, and on television and radio. As Maggie and I drove around the South, I always booked connecting motel rooms. I wanted to make sure that if she needed something while we were staying overnight she could easily find me; and I also wanted the reassurance that a joining room provided that I could check on her, make sure all was just fine. Maggie only wanted fried fish for dinner, preferably catfish, a special treat that nursing home food didn't provide. Our pattern was that we would check into our motel and get settled, and I would go look...