Futures of the South
My latest rug looks at the TVA as I explore a history of Southern radicalism.
Before I moved to East Tennessee, I was afraid that I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to about labor organizing.
After 9 years in Philly, I had become used to getting ideas for my artwork from watching and taking part in labor action. Even more, labor was where I looked for feelings of hope when I started to fall into despair.
In Chattanooga, there were no historically unionized building trades or hospital workers. For years, I’d watched workers at the city’s Volkswagen assembly plant push to join the UAW, but every union vote failed. The local DSA chapter showed few signs of life.
As I adjusted to the void of worker organizing in my life, I resolved to keep an open mind about Chattanooga; and to look for inspiration in surprising places.
Last month, I checked out Hammer and Hoe from the local library. Reading about the history of Black sharecropper communists in Alabama felt like an appropriate backdrop for settling into the South. It’s a story of dismissal and condescension from many sides; often including white and educated progressives in the North. Still, Alabama communists sustained a fighting movement that was only strengthened by the culture, traditions, and spirituality of the Black working class. It was an inspiring read, one I would recommend to any leftist inside and out of the Southeastern US.
Chattanooga features prominently in Hammer and Hoe, mostly because it was once a hotbed for radical newspapers. At the library, I discovered a local publication called Labor World, with every issue from 1917 to 1985 archived on microfilm. According to Hammer and Hoe, another newspaper called The Southern Worker was also published here by Solomon Auerbach; who moved from Philadelphia to Chattanooga to start the paper in 1930.
I wonder what Auerbach thought of Chattanooga when he arrived here nearly a century before me.
In 2022, exploring this city feels like uncovering the ghost town of a socialist state. You can still find lingering artifacts from when the city used to flood so badly that the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Chickamauga dam to protect it. The city even raised the street level one story higher, leaving downtown basements with doors and windows that look out into nothing.
Shortly after I arrived in the city, my cousin Jacki took me on a hike up Raccoon mountain. I had never been there, even though I grew up one mountain over on Lookout. As we drove up the winding forest road, she pointed out strange forms of infrastructure that trailed up and down the gorge. Back in the early 2000’s, the TVA leveled the peak and created a hydroelectric reservoir, effectively transforming the mountain into a giant battery. Instead of wasting excess energy, the lake fills up with water, storing enough power to supply thousands of homes during a surge in demand.
There was an air of mystery around the TVA reservoir. I followed my feeling of curiosity and visited the site again on my own. I realized part of the mountain’s intrigue was that it felt completely foreign to witness an ambitious engineering project created to benefit the public. At some point, before I was even born, the US stopped building these kinds of monoliths for the good of society. As far back as I could remember, I’d only seen them spring up in the name of massive monopoly corporations.
Philadelphia’s skyline, for example, was dominated by dual Comcast skyscrapers, whose unreliable cable services stretch far over the land. I spent roughly half of my time living in the city watching the second tower slowly crane its way into the sky. Meanwhile, in its tax-abated shadow, public schools shuttered and swimming pools dried up.
In Chattanooga, instead of Comcast, we have EPB: a publicly owned, reasonably-priced electric utility with fiber optic internet they claim is the fastest in the world. I think that EPB’s shadow casts something different over this city: an innate understanding that some things, like electrical energy, are simply a social right. I don’t think most folks here would understand this as a socialist belief, or even register it as political. But it’s there, as subtle as the inscription on the inner wall of every TVA dam in the South: “built for the people.”
As I read more about the history of the TVA, I think about how the founding of this program—and other policies of the New Deal—marked the last time the US really invested in its own public sphere. It’s bleak to count the decades of austerity that have passed since then.
Honestly, It feels insane to be alive right now at all. Every day I drive a car and think about how carbon emissions are killing everything I love. I open Twitter and read statements from the most powerful people in the world about their lack of intention to do anything to save the planet.
I’ve been feeling afraid a lot. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s no future.
But, if I can paraphrase something Kim Stanley Robinson said in a great interview with Chapo Trap House or The Dig (can’t remember which), there IS a near future. Rather than deny it, or default to an assumption of apocalyptic nothingness, why not imagine the landscape we want, and start assembling the tools we’ll need to bring it into existence?
So, in this bleak hour, I just keep visiting the reservoir. I keep thinking about the TVA moving mountains within my lifetime. I think about poor Black Southerners organizing powerful collective action without knowing how to read or write. People in the South have already done the impossible. These are pictures from recent history; a roadmap of what has happened before and what can happen again.
The Spiritualists of Alabama used images of Biblical prophesy to bring forth a vision of racial and economic freedom. If you ask me to picture the future of the South, I also think of a promised land. I imagine something built for the people: a land of milk and honey.