Artist: Jerry Weems
Title: “Victims of Peonage and Vagrancy Laws”
The cover image for this project is entitled “Victims of Peonage and Vagrancy Laws” by the Los Angeles-based—but Southern-born and raised—artist Jerry Weems. Peonage, also called “debt slavery” or “debt servitude,” is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. Yet the Vagrancy Act of 1866, which became law shortly after the American Civil War ended in 1865, forced into employment, for terms of up to the three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless—and hence the hundreds of thousands of “African Americans” newly freed from slavery.
The law was formally in effect until 1904, but we know that peonage and the practices of vagrancy penalties lingered far longer, until the near present in the South. Hence the politics of those practices, along with the imagery of the skeletal tree with perpetually laboring Black bodies, speak to the title and theme of this project, Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racism. The features of the image map upon the features of the title, which are both cultural and pedagogical: a lesson to be taught and learned, a debt to be paid and recovered one way or another.
“Still hanging” references both the resilience of Black people in the face of slavery, institutionalized racism, and systemic oppression, as well as the fact that Black people continue to be literally and metaphorically lynched in the year 2020. We are forced to pay off a debt of history’s legacy of racism and resistance with our lives. The image’s visual transparency of the ground, with the mirroring limbs as roots, also figuratively signifies—at least for the authors of this project—the depth of servitude and slavery, as well as the souls lost in the middle passage of slave transport. The living, consistently cultivating the graves of the ancestors.