My ongoing project, When Morning Comes, explores daily life in the Mississippi Delta. In the summer of 2009 I began travelingthe village streets and farm roads of the Delta on my bicycle.I needed to breathe after troubled times and the people that I met, the very landscape itself, became midwives, mythmakers, and prophets. I found strength and humility there that summer. And over the years my trips have grown to become more about returning to this place than once running away from my own.
A simple beauty resides here. I feel it in the fecund fields where memories of the blood and sweat of generations now stir amidst the roar of combines. I hear it issued from lips in lessons of divinity. And I see it in their eyes.
While ever evolving, this project reflects the lives of the Coffey family in the small village of Duncan, with whom I mostly reside. And it has grown to encompass the communities around them, like Mound Bayou, the state’s first completely African American settlement.
This is a celebration of the resilience that I witness in these places.
