6 March 2014

Southern Snow

Last semester I went with a friend to the King Biscuit Blues festival which is an annual blues and arts festival in the town of Helena, Arkansas in the Arkansas Delta.

This was not my first time in the Delta, nor my first time seeing cotton fields, but this was the first time that I had decided to pull over and take photos of the cotton. There is something so hauntingly beautiful about cotton fields that stretch as far as the eye can see across the Delta horizon. This soft, white, fluffy commodity appears so harmless but we cannot forget that it has such a painful past. It was important to me as a Southern Studies graduate student to think about the history of cotton in this region.

Even though I want to appreciate the beauty of this landscape, I must remember what so many people endured on this land as part of an unjust and inhumane system.

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Near to Helena, AR October 2013

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