LAY US DOWN

On March 3rd of this year in our hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, my family celebrated Grandma’s 100th birthday. She could not remember 99. Two weeks later, a federal court allowed 1,000 Jackson children diagnosed with lead poisoning to sue the city for decades of negligence in providing clean water to its citizens.

This project is a convergence of these two timelines, tracing the traditional quest my family will embark on to bury my grandmother in the Mississippi Delta amidst a humanitarian crisis born from traditions of environmental racism.

These images form a meditation on adherence and mortality in a place where adherence might represent an act in opposition to one’s own wellbeing; like the Southern traditions my grandmother practiced that I too have been socialized to hold close; that inevitably laid the foundations for health risks her children and their children must now contend with daily.

Lay Us Down exists in its current form as a handmade, casebound book with embossed cover containing 40 images on 96 pages.