UNTITLED BLACKNESS
When cleaning out my family home after my mother’s death, I found 236 letters written between my parents from 1961 to 1965. Of the letters, 218 were written by my mother from Charleston, South Carolina and 18 letters were written by my father from the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, four years before their marriage in July 1965.
In UNTITLED BLACKNESS, by placing the letters in chronological order and plotting them for content, I will try to make visible my father’s life from the ages of 20-25, formative years in any life. William Ford moved North to find a job, start technical school and lay the foundation for the life he and my mother would lead in Brooklyn, NY when she joined him after graduating college. Spanning some of the most turbulent years in American history at a time when the migration of Black Americans out of the South was in full swing, the life he led during that time is a mystery to me. I wonder about the life he wanted to live compared to the life he had. I wonder if he was happy, what his dreams were and if, by moving to New York City from Charleston, he discovered himself anew.
I believe my father exists in between these pages; his voice lingers in negative space and can be heard in and between the letters written to and by him. It strikes me that these letters have something to reveal about love and the roles we play in our relationships. These letters are living examples of how these roles influence who and what we are to each other and to ourselves. UNTITLED BLACKNESS will illustrate how familial relationships break, are repaired and restored after personal/civic/political loss. Mapping my fathers’ experience within and around these letters will, I hope, lead to a new understanding of him and perhaps myself.
In my film STRONG ISLAND (2017) my father is a character but barely so, and by his design. He left little of himself behind to be discovered: his wallet, photos and little else. I discovered the letters when sorting through my mother’s belongings.
That house, in a once thriving working and middle class Black neighborhood in Long Island, NY, the first and only home my parents owned, went into foreclosure in 2013 and was sold at auction in June 2016. The 295K sale price was a fortune compared to the 18K original purchase price 1972. M&T Bank was the benefactor of this auction, and my family became yet another American Black family with negative generational wealth.
Economists have coined the term “transformative assets” to refer to a financial inheritance that could significantly alter the course of a life. My inheritance from my parents was material, not monetary, and was no less transformative. My mother accumulated everything: stories, letters, clothing, newspapers, magazines and thousands of photographs and left it for me to sort through. Unlike my father, she made herself and her life easy to find. UNTITLED BLACKNESS is my attempt to decipher and claim the pieces of my father contained in these letters and in doing so claim the inheritance he left me.
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