Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

I-26 Corridor of Change

ROB AMBERG AND SAM GRAY (1998)

In 1994 the State of North Carolina began construction of an eight-mile section of road in northeastern Madison County that would forge an interstate highway link (I-26) between the Ohio Valley and the South Atlantic coastal region. (The last mile was completed in August 2003.) Sam Gray and Rob Amberg documented the construction of this stretch of highway through the mountains of North Carolina. For the remote Appalachian communities in its path, I-26 brought about dramatic changes at great personal and cultural cost. Amberg and Gray, both long-time residents of the region, collected and sorted the evidence of cultural dislocation and upheaval.


PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Rob Amberg





POETRY

I-26 and the Will of God
From the poem by Sam Gray

From Name to Number

The first signs that a highway is to be pushed through
The walnut heart of the Unakas
Are felled trees and orange numbers painted over the land.
All along the track of eminent domain
Folks are told to cut their trees and leave.
They are offered money for their land and their memories,
And a deadline for leaving.
They can appeal to courts of law
And of the forty-nine families moved out
For Interstate 26, four do just that.
These, maybe did, maybe didn’t, get a larger slice of cash,
But in no case will they be let to stay.
Eminent domain is never less than imminent,
Never shy of dominion.

So they go back home, and like their neighbors,
Sell the timber on their land and begin
The search for some other place to live.
“Where will I find water like this?” one man says
His eyes bright—wide as he remembers the spring up the holler, water
So pure it can quench any thirst.
Months before the big dozers,
Trucks and loaders
Arrive to chew on this mountain
The logging trucks are hauling the forest away.
The trees, whose task was to cast shadows,
Were there for centuries standing in the sun
Which, now, for we who climb Walnut Mountain,
Is high and warm so
We peel our outer shirts and look as we walk
For a spot in cool shade to rest.

The numbers seem drawn into the spaces
Left by the deep tree shadows.
Their job is to quantify all that the shadows protected
So their smell and their voice are different.
The numbers smell like the singed edge of the future and
Their voice speaks
Coded information about grand demolitions,
Satisfying rearrangements:
This hill goes here,
That holler goes there,
Blow over yonder to smithereens.
Burn this.
Bury that.
The shadows smelled of transmutation and spoke of nothing much at all; they
Were just openings into no sound within the mind.

It was in burial and disinterment
The numbers began to speak to the rest of us.
South of Walnut Mountain
In the watershed of the Ivy,
A church and three cemeteries lie in the path of Interstate 26.
The dead, like the living, must move.
Little Ivy Baptist Church has to be razed and rebuilt
About a mile to the east
Alongside its relocated graveyard.
Headmarker stones have to be numbered and moved, so too
Footstones [#5], Sisterstone [#7],
Fatherstone [#9], Motherstone [#21].
The coffins are dug out, numbered,
Raised up by a truck-mounted crane.
The screech of its cable offers a voice
To the voiceless within.
The older the grave, the less the coffin.
The oldest graves hold only bones or just dark carbon dirt.
Boxed, Numbered, Registered, Hauled away,
Re-buried in new ground and a new dispensation
While relations knelt on the dusty ground with eyes averted.

It was amidst these difficult doings that the notion of the
Will of God turned up.
Like dark soil behind the plow. Preacher Eugene C. of Little Ivy Baptist
Had to go into the Will of God when he spoke of the removals.
Someone nailed up a hand-lettered sign in the churchyard. It read:
Know where you tread is sacred ground—
This church—a monument to God—
This cemetery the sacred burial ground for those who built it.
What God put together—no man should destory [sic].
This was when I remembered a document collected years ago
Called the Roadbuilders Association Prayer. It begins:
O Almighty God, who has given us this earth
And has appointed men to have domination over it;
Who has commanded us to make straight the highways,
To lift up the valleys and to make mountains low,
We ask thy blessing upon these men who do just that. . . .
Later, by the Will of God and Winter, when
All the trees except the sacred beech
Cast down leaves and
The dead were snug in their new eternal places,
The numbers flew from the eyelids of the dead,
From their dark houses and out the stone gates with their names,
Flew back up Sprinkle Creek,
And Buckner Gap, scattered themselves
Over every available surface along the highway right-of-way:
On junked cars, barns, implements, and boulders.
They bounced off the great arch of the GPS and were written on bags of dirt,
Stacked in a corner of the mobile field office, spray-painted on trees and
Stumps, on the ground itself; on neatly sawed stakes and makeshift stobs, tied
With stretches of pink plastic marking tape fluttering prayerfully
In the December wind.





banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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