Aug. 25, 2022

Everywhere Radio: Xandr Brown

We talk with Xandr Brown, producer of the new exhibit “Free Hill: Renewal and Rememory,”  about the story of Free Hill, a community of free Black residents of Athens, Tennessee that was established before the 1840s and later demolished as part of urban renewal. Families that lived in the Free Hill area were displaced after phases of urban renewal, spearheaded by the City of Athens, which demolished their homes in the 60’s and 70’s to the benefit of Tennessee Wesleyan University. Through video, oral histories, and portraits, the exhibit “explores the relationship between place, personal memory, and identity as a way to challenge collective assumptions about democracy, freedom, and equality.” 

The exhibit is hosted by the Athens Area Council for the Arts (AACA) through December 12, 2022. An online multimedia version of the exhibit will be available soon at ruralassembly.org. Sign up for newsletters at www.ruralassembly.org/newsletters for more. 

Xandr Brown is currently a multimedia producer with the Center for Rural Strategies. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Rochester in upstate New York with a BA in History and Communications with a minor in Environmental Humanities. Before reporting for the Daily Yonder she previously reported with hyperlocal newsrooms in Flint, Michigan. While trained as a journalist, she aspires to continue to do community engaged, multimedia exhibits based in the intersection of oral history, ethnography, and documentary.

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Episode Transcript

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Hey, Xandr. 

Xandr Brown: 

Hi, Whitney. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

It’s so good to have you on Everywhere Radio. 

Xandr Brown: 

It’s nice to be here. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So again, full disclosure, Xandr, and I know one another. It’s really great that Xandr could decide she wanted to do this interview with me today. So the reason I wanted Xandr on Everywhere Radio with us was to be able to talk about this incredible project that she’s been working on for multiple months now that had its origin story on an Everywhere Radio episode when Xandr was behind the screen and listening in to a guest that I had, Cynthia McCowan from Athens, Tennessee. Cynthia is a neighbor of mine, and I was interviewing Cynthia about a piece of research that she’d been working on in Athens around the Free Hill community. And Xandr was listening in and I wondered, Xandr, if you wouldn’t mind telling that origin story of how you connected with Cynthia and how that sparked something for you and sparked this new project that you’ve embarked upon. 

Xandr Brown: 

I was listening in to the interview, as I do before I’m able to edit the podcast episode. And I think you and Cynthia were talking a lot about love labor or having a labor of love and living in community within discomfort and how you’re able to bridge those gaps and kindly disagreeing. And so I was nosy and I asked her to stay on so I could talk to her. And Cynthia and I were talking, and the work with the Free Hill community came up, and that really piqued my interest because I think that’s kind of a pretty holistic symbol of what it means to live in community while also living in that discomfort at the same time. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And the discomfort you’re talking about, I mean, I think it’s many things, but I’ve said before on this podcast that my hometown of Athens, we are a majority white community, and I think 8%, 9% of our population would be considered BIPOC. And Cynthia McCowan is a Black woman who is a member of the Black community here in Athens. And a lot of the research that she’s been doing is about tracing the roots of the Black community in Athens, and also bringing up conversations and stories within our community that do create some discomfort, and we’re not practiced at living with that. So that’s some of the background about what Cynthia and I were talking about, and I think your conversation with her turned into a two-hour or three-hour post interview discussion, is that right? 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah, we ended up talking for quite a while, and yeah, she’s been living over two decades in Athens, but she’s from Mississippi, so she carries a very specific pitch and tenor that is kind of a chaotic good, a chaotic good, and an agitation to the situation. Because the context in Athens is though it is southern, and yes, there was segregation and discrimination and slavery. There’s all that history there. There’s a quiet kind of stillness and acceptance, I guess, of what has happened between the two groups of people in which it’s goes unacknowledged and just very, I call it kind of sweet sick environment where we know that bad things happen, but they’re never talked about, they’re never spoken about, they’re never brought to the table or put within a context of what do we do about this? How do we talk about this? What happened between us? And I think being able to talk to Cynthia with her outside inside perspective was important, I guess, in getting the gears turning into wanting to speak to these folks more, being able to see what fire she was able to bring to the situation and awareness she was able to bring. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Just sticking with Cynthia and your conversation just a little bit longer, I’m wondering what was it about Cynthia that drew you in specifically, what is it about your story and your experience as a Black woman that made you want to engage more on that issue in that topic? 

Xandr Brown: 

Well, I mean, I’ve been working in nonprofit spaces for the majority of my career, and I have to say there’s a reason. Sometimes I like to stay behind the camera because I’m not good at towing that line in staying in community while also trying to bring attention to inherent just falsities and inconsistencies and contradictions and all those sorts of things. So when you and Cynthia were talking about love labor and staying community and being able to navigate those spaces with grace and with love at that point in time, that was something that attracted me because it is a skill that I’m working on. I am still working on and with grace and with love and how I approach being in spaces of discomfort where there are obvious issues at the table. So I went to Cynthia as almost in a mentor/mentee perspective, I’m like, “Hey, can you give me more insight?” 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

 Tell me more about your desire to find that balance. 

Xandr Brown: 

I am not a good pretender. I’m not good at putting on not facades, because sometimes facades are necessary, but kind of mapping onto situations where your kind of needing the dough, right? It’s like, “Oh, now is at the time, maybe another time would be better. Maybe we can work through these conflicts in a different way. Let’s rope in collaboration, all those kinds of things.” I feel things so strongly that it’s like a lightning rod sometimes, and that’s necessary because with lightning, you can’t avoid it. You see it, you feel it, the electricity is in the air, but then after the storm has passed, there is still work and conversation to be done. And I want to be fluid in all of those phases. I don’t just want to be a lightning rod. I want to also have a means and a way of massaging conversations and massaging conflict and diving deeper into it, giving more humanity to it, besides the Black and white, this is right, this is wrong.: 

Why would you do that? Why don’t we do that? You get what I’m saying? So I kind of feel like that’s why I balance it through. I feel like creating helps me do that. Being able to be a videographer or photographer or just a critical witness is necessary, I think, for me, in balancing out that energy that I feel. So that’s why I think I really lean hard into art and creativity and witnessing people’s humanity without judgment. Because as you lean into those nuanced themes of, “Hey, Athens, Tennessee, there’s a Black population, there’s a white population, clearly some wrong was done here that has not been rectified.” There’s only so far that you can get with that and pointing to the problem in the situation. And I think it’s a more beautiful and forgiving and graceful process to start giving symbol and aesthetic in meaning and intention to those feelings beyond just the right and the wrong of the situation. So hopefully that answers your question. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah, that was worth the… I’m so glad I asked that question. Thank you for that response. And turning to the creative pursuit, you’re about right now with Free Hill—if you go back and listen to the episode with Cynthia, you’ll hear, you would hear more about exactly what it is. But it is, it’s both a geography and in Athens, it’s a piece of land in Athens, but it was also a community of relationships, and it was started by Black Americans who were never enslaved. Is that part of the story as well? 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah. So it was a community started by, Cynthia could speak to this more as a place of free Blacks. So they were never enslaved, and they were able to have entrepreneurial pursuits. And as time would have it, there are still descendants of those folks that are still in an Athens today. But as time went on, there were certain legislative practices, like the Fair Housing Act of 1949, you have the Civil Rights Act of 1968, that time period in which it was identified as a blighted community. And that kind of language was used to push them out. Some went to the project, some ended up moving completely out of the area. But the home that they remember, the community that they remember in which they could be themselves, not be oppressed, not be constantly policed by whiteness, to have some sense of internal community outside of whiteness that was taken away from them. And there, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist anymore. What they know, what they knew to be Free Hill doesn’t exist anymore. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And it’s interesting because Athens, in some ways has memorialized this space with a single marker. It’s right across the street from our YMCA, and the projects are now on top of that land. And our YMCA is there, and our local college, Tennessee Wesleyan has acquired a bunch of that land as well. But we just have this single marker in a way to memorialize what happened to this community. And your pursuit through this exhibit that will ultimately end up at the Art Center here in Athens, is to go deeper into that story, shine a spotlight on some of those practices that allowed for the seizing raising of this community, and also featured these voices of these individuals who are now reckoning and trying to understand their memory of it. Is that a fair summary? 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah, you probably did a better job than I did… But yeah, it’s important to also to distress that the single marker is in this pursuit that they have in the pursuit of another marker that tells a fuller story, a more complete story of what exactly happened. That’s also, I think, kind of a cornerstone to some of the actionable steps that these folks want to take, and really making sure that Free Hill doesn’t just remain in name alone, but also in a full understanding of what happened. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah, that’s right. 

 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And so after you had this conversation with Cynthia, you had the opportunity to come to Athens and be with her in person and actually speak to some of these folks, and that out of that has grown a larger project that I mentioned, this exhibit. And I wonder if you could tell me a bit about what it was like to visit with these individuals. What did you hear in their voices as they told you, their story? I imagine they’re not a monolith of memory or opinion or experience of this, they’ve told you different pieces, yeah. 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah. No, coming down to Athens and meeting everybody, I mean, I have to say it was a little bumpy because I guess I wasn’t completely clear what my intentions were. I came fully strapped with my camera and recorder, and Cynthia was like, “Oh, I thought you just wanted to talk.” And I was like, “I do, but in long sequences and with media involved.” 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And on camera. 

Xandr Brown: 

On camera possibly. So in the rush of it all, I mean, I really have to give kudos to my grandparents here. Basically, was raised with my grandparents. And there are many times where I’ve had to sit through, I would say, seminars, full seminars of my grandfather telling me about his life. He grew up as a sharecropper in Alabama and listening to his proverbs and just the ways that he speaks and the way that he talks, and the meaning that he pulls through the world. So I had a full tolerance for listening to stories from older folk. And I think that I felt that deeply listening to many of the Free Hill residents. And so, yeah, I don’t know, its kind of just put me in that space again, and I just wanted to tag along and be there for the ride, wherever they wanted to walk, wherever they wanted to take me, that’s where we went. Their voices are not the same considering that some of these things happened to them when they were very young. There are certain things that people remember more than others. I think talking to Larry McMahan, who’s one of the residents at Free Hill, he was able to give perspective on what election season was within the Free Hill community, what happened. That would be one of the only times that white folks might come into their community was during election season and barter a vote for a beer or something like that, certain memories like that. Or Anna Sullivan talking about her grandma going to the grocery store and lying about the food that she needed because they wouldn’t give leftover food to just Black folks.It had to be maybe for an animal or for a dog, talking about that. And then people like Van, who had a completely different understanding his parents being pastors and having a level of detachment from the situation. I kind of want to reference this adage about being rule of the heart. I mean, after a certain point, when you have an experience, a sense of place that no longer exists, that’s kind of what it becomes in a way. These folks have not only become just Free Hill because who they are, but also Free Hill of the heart. So yeah, it was cool. It was amazing. It was a patchwork quilt that all kind of pointing to the same picture. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And that tell me the same, what is that same picture? It’s the sense of loss. I mean, there’s some latent grieving and reckoning. 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah, for sure. I think there’s a delayed rage, a delayed hurt, a delayed grieving. Because again, I want to kind of emphasize that when people think about Black Americans, the civil rights movement, segregation, discrimination, Jim Crow, it’s kind of always with this Black and White picture of MLK or Malcolm X, or the Freedom Writers or people sitting at the countertops. There are places in rural America where this very harmful dynamic of master slave, white and colored, separate but not equal, separate, and unequal, obviously in all ways was quietly taken in by people and quietly process and passively taken and adjusted a way of life. People still built ways of living within inequity and within inequality and looking people in the eye that have done you wrong on an institutional level. But from the day-to-day, hey, they’re buying my buckets of blackberries for how many cents per pound, and isn’t that nice? Or when Halloween time came, I remember we remember going to different houses and the white folks always gave us the best candy. And even though we couldn’t go to certain functions, or we couldn’t go certain places, there are times where we still play together as kids, but we don’t no longer relate to each other that way as adults. That kind of landscape where you were able to live alongside amicably with your oppressor, if there’s nobody from the outside telling you, hey, this thing that happened to you as a younger person, the way that this was taken from you, the way that you were addressed, the way that your parents were approached, the things that your grandparents, those were lies. And there was an ulterior motive for why that happened. If there was nobody telling you that at the time, and they repeatedly say that their parents really did their best to try to insulate them from anything that had to do with discrimination or whiteness, or trying to understand the inner workings of just prejudice. When they were in Free Hill, they were free. And what more is freedom at the time, if your children feel free. If your children feel free, then you are safe. That is the equivalent of that. And if nobody’s there to tell you how important that is in the first place, no doubt there’s nobody going to tell you how important it is that it was taken from you. So there’s definitely, in our conversations, kind of this cathartic session of people being able to say what was really on their heart and mind about, hey, now I’m realizing that was messed up, and I’m realizing eminent domain or realizing using the tool of urban renewal to take their memory from them, their sense of safety, because there’s different kinds of privileges, and I want to kind of obviously explore that more in my exhibit. But to be able to live as a Black person or a person of color without the constant awareness of whiteness and white people and what white people think about you and what white people want you to do and what white people have. 

And if white people have that and I don’t have that, then who am I being able to have those sequestered spaces? And those spaces still exist today, and people do their dime just to curate them and insulate them and to keep them close. It all falls to the sense of equality. And it comes to the question of what does it mean to be equal? It was Free Hill unequal was Free Hill blighted because Free Hill didn’t have what the outside world had. And so you end up moving into this conversation of how do instruments of democracy carry inherent themes of discrimination and prejudice and inequality at the same time? And watching them kind of work through that as they’re telling me all these things. Yeah, there’s definitely just a lot of contending with—it wasn’t fair. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So your exhibit opens here in Athens, November the 4th at the Art Center. So when that outside perspective that you have brought, and that Cynthia in some ways has brought to Athens, has resulted in a mining of this story of a renewed sense of remembrance and recognition that this happened to a community of people. And now we are having conversations about it, and your exhibit will be part of continuing to provide a container for these conversations and reckonings. So I wonder, would you tell me a little bit about how you’re anchoring this exhibit? How is it, because I know, this isn’t your story, this belongs to many different people. So you’re featuring parts of it and you’re spotlighting parts of it, but how are you anchoring it for Athens and for this community? 

Xandr Brown: 

How I’m anchoring it for Athens in this community? I think one of the most important parts, aside from the exhibit of itself is the panel. So having them there, having them present and having people be able to engage with them and having them be able to respond. And maybe certainly they might have thoughts about the exhibit itself, you know what I mean? And the components of it. Just being able to hear the subjects themselves. I just think that’s a lot of ways to do, obviously exhibitions and to do art, but to be able to give the perspective back to where it came from. So it will be kind of a resounding bell of what they’re calling for and what they’re trying to achieve and getting other people’s attention to the importance of their witnessing. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, I’m really excited and grateful that you’ve decided to bring your leadership, your artistic skills, and help us reveal the story more here locally. 

Xandr Brown: 

I want to emphasize to anybody listening that being a witness is an inherent part of being a human being. For this exhibition, I really want to give the vertebrae of the fact that being a witness is enough if being able to remember is enough. It is not the totality, but it matters. And it’s the heartbeat of everything that we hope to tell and extend to our children in our storytelling and what we want them to value and what we want generations to value, and how we want to challenge ourselves to become better human beings, a better human race. Larry McMahan had made the point, it is Free Hill is their history, but it’s not in the history books. And when you talk about an American democracy and the American push for equality, the American push for this, the American push for progress, there has to be a question in terms of for who? For whose history books for whose witness, who’s the historical witness, and who’s the subject of that witnessing? Does the subject then witness itself? Yes. And I think that this exhibition answers that question, is that you being the subject of your own witnessing and recognizing that and recognizing how important and powerful that is necessary and important, not only just for remembering terrible historical happenings or wonderful historical happenings, but also for accountability and for giving a real gut punch to the fight, not just for equality, but for equity. And I think that Free Hill is a story of a group of people that had their own equity where everybody was on equal standing, and they weren’t worried about so much the everyday structural issues of feeling unsafe or feeling judged and constantly under white scrutiny. That is an equity, and that was taken from them for the aesthetic of equality. And I want people to consider that and to ruminate on that and to really think about that. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thank you, Xandr. And thank you for helping reveal my neighbors more for me to you. 

Xandr Brown: 

They’re lovely, yeah. Lovely folks. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

So Xandr that at the end of every episode, I always ask my guests, what are you reading, watching, or listening to that is challenging you or giving you hope that you want to share with the rest of us? And I would definitely want to know what you’re reading or watching, you’re listening to? 

Xandr Brown: 

Yeah, I’m reading My Life in France by Julia Child. It’s her. Well, it was written by a family member, but biography and yeah, I didn’t expect to connect to the book as much as I do. And Julia Child, very unconventional woman, to say the least beautiful, unconventional soul. And it’s the tale about her and her husband when they were living abroad in France in the foreign service. And why actually has grown important to me to continue to read it. This exhibition is probably one of the most personally, professionally, spiritually, strenuous things I’ve ever done, probably so far. This continuous pressure that I put on myself, this kind of piecemeal work you’re working on one small portion, you can’t see it for the whole thing until I actually get there and put it together. I’m not going to be able to really see the full magic of what I’ve been doing, the video editing, the discussion, and I’m learning a lot of things on the fly. And Julia Child, she was not a cook. She talks about in the beginning, she was awful. Her husband would kindly decline and be like, “You know, tried babe, but this is bad.” And she persisted anyway because she fell in love with something. She connected with something, she fell in love. And not only did she fall in love, she fell in love with the process. And I think that’s what this book has been helping me realize is one how, because my own perfectionism and aversion, I have to process a fear of process that I have. But in order to get this exhibit done, I have to go through these phases. It’s necessary. I can only push forward. And when she talks about finishing her first cookbook, which that was years process. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Gosh, how many years did it take to write the Art of French cooking, right? 

Xandr Brown: 

I feel like it was like five, six years or something like that. It was a lot. But she was so in love with the process and in love with cooking and love with French ingredients and just being so detailed. And the art of persistence, I feel like is also the story of this book. And of just Julia Child in general, and also not taking life so seriously. I think she has a wonderful sense of humor. That’s what I’ve been reading, and it’s actually helping me connect with these things that are necessary for any work of art is just falling in love with the process, yeah. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I love that. Thank you. It’s one of my favorite books too. So November 4th is the opening of the exhibit at the Arts Center in Athens, Tennessee. But we’ll also through the Rural Assembly website make available some of the materials and content that you would see in person in Athens, yeah. Well, I’m grateful for you. Grateful you’re my colleague. Thank you for joining Everywhere Radio today. 

Xandr Brown: 

Thank you, Whitney for speaking with me. I appreciate it.