How does one market a hospitality space in a place with an uncomfortable history? I’ve often dealt with fear of the unknown, from those from the North when I present the ideas I’m sketching out to bring art and hospitality to the woods as a means of revitalizing the culture that I grew up with. There are a few barriers: the stupid Hollywood-laden encoding of rural spaces as unerringly white and violently racist; the embodied traumas of the South reinscribed on a Black body politic by the segmented, apartheid, racial cold-war structures hardwired into the architectonic plan of America’s large coast and lake cities in order to prevent cross-race labor solidarity.

Ruth Cowan, in More Work For Mother talks about how the central problem of America’s early colonial days is precisely the “labor problem” and how difficult it was to create a permanent, intergenerational servant class as one might see in a place like England or France. Thus, in order to advance a certain measure of productivity, the household labor of women becomes circumscribed by the capitalist project. Women of the “American dream” are forced to become drivers, caretakers, dishwashers, etc. in a means that would in early days be forms of labor shared by both women and men. Though, she blatantly glosses over the racial histories of housework by enslaved and exploited women of color, her key point — the enclosure of women’s labor by the agricultural, industrial, and service periods of our global market systems stands.

Slavery was a violent enclosure of labor accompanied by racism, a violence so insipid that it became a tradition. That tradition is alive and well everything from Jim Crow, to mass incarceration, to the de facto racial segregation of the New York City school system, to current Trumpian dogwhistles about reparations being an attempt to put money in the hands of Black people who the conservative-cum-neofascist camp of American politics bank on portraying as inherently criminal.

It may be a touch easier for a well-intentioned some in the North to ignore that this tradition of racial violence is weft into the fabric of American life, and displace the guilt of one’s own colonial relationship to flyover America onto stereotypes of ignorant, racist yokels. Maybe this is the mechanism of mind that I am attempting to come up against, as I plan this place I am trying to make — a place of joy, care, safety, sustenance, healing and rest.

This article helped guide me to the idea that if one is to sell time in such a space — and experience and time are the bread and butter of the hospitality industry — one must acknowledge place, pain and potential. There are various strategies that are enacted in Mongomery to this end, from the Equal Justice Initiatives work, to Dr. King’s home, to the place on the corner that sells “fett sow fries”.

That sense of legacy must be imbued into the architectonics of the place. I really enjoyed seeing the red clay soils that any self-respecting southerner would miss be reflected in a clay tile next to the river. As I’m doing this upcoming field research, I need to star thinking about the politics of care. I need to understand how can care be sustained to aid an ailing land. How can clever design clothe, house, and feed a people that made it on their own and have struggled to keep what they had because of the traditional racial violence in this country? And, can it be done as the world as we know it breaks down, burns, and renews itself from the wild ashes born of its own hubris.