Hueco is a short film detailing Black life in Waco from a variety of years using vignettes of factual history and imagination to exhume the lives of those hidden in libraries and reroot the Black and Indigenous perspective. In the words of Saidiya Hartman, “The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death – social and corporeal death – and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.” (Venus in Two Acts)

A few years ago my great grandmother shared a document with me which details an interview with my four time great grandmother, Sophia Bereal, who was born in 1821. She spent early years of her life enslaved and at some point on an Indian trail migrating South with her tribe and father who was an Indian chief. She eventually found her way to Waco and lived there for over eighty years. She lived to be 113 years old.

 

From the document ... “”I have raised thirty-nine children”, was a remark that started us greatly. Upon further questioning we found out that these had been illegitimate children, whom she raised up to one, and often twelve years. Then someone would adopt them, or she would get a position for them. She learned the profession of Midwife on the Indian Trail, and made a practice of it until recent years. This colored woman now lives with her grand-daughter, none of her children being alive today.”

 

Alongside her story, there are 14 others I read at Baylor’s Texas Collective Library of formerly enslaved Black people. In a slowly gentrifying place formerly lived in by the agrarian Indian tribe, the Hueco Indians, it is important to acknowledge and preserve the existence of the individuals who originally resided in the area. Though the purpose of the document was to uncover the hardships of formerly enslaved Black people in Waco, small moments of their day to day lives and personal histories shined through each story. These small glimpses left me with questions and a desire to understand what wasn’t documented by the white narrator.

 

When I think of life lived post-emancipation the images are usually terrifying and violent. If all we know of ourselves is terrifying violence and a constant fleeting joy, then what of everything else? What about our rage, the secrets hidden behind our faith in Christ, our love for pecans, and anything outside a depiction of life centered by a white narrator. “Such is the power of the photograph, of the image, that it can give back and take away, that it can bind.” bell hooks.

 

I am raising $50,000 to be able to appropriately tell a few of these stories. Funding will go to things such as equipment, labor, talent, food, costumes, travel and various other things necessary to support the work.