Rotan Switch by Lisa McCord

Public Story

Rotan Switch

Copyright Lisa McCord 2024

Updated Jan 2014

Topics African American, Agriculture, Arkansas, Children, Christianity, Cotton, Faith, Family, Farm, Industry, Joy, Minority, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi River, Osceola, Photography, Racism, Rural, South, Tenant Farming

ROTAN SWITCH – Artist Statement

I began documenting life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in 1979 when I was twenty-one years old. Although my grandfather started out as a sharecropper, by the time I was born he had become well-known in the Mississippi Delta as a farm owner in the community of Rotan, Arkansas. I developed close relationships with the people who worked on the farm. They would welcome me into their homes, and I would hang out at the juke joints and honky-tonks where they would go to relax after a hard week of work. We’d share fried chicken and black-eyed peas. We’d sing “Sweet Jesus Carry Me Home” at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church.

After forty years, I have come to realize that all of my photographs taken here are explorations of home. I have lived in many countries across the world, but my idea of home remains firmly rooted in the Arkansas land and people. Over time I have documented the families here- mine and others-across six generations. For me, these images and recorded interviews are tender reminders of people and places I love.

I realize that these photographs are complicated when seen in the context of the social and economic structures of the rural South. Although these subjects are family to me, as a white photographer and the granddaughter of a farm owner, my photographs of the Black community implicate my own role in reinforcing these power structures. These systemic oppressions are deeply troubling. My hope is to celebrate and honor this community I love and grew up with in the Mississippi Delta.

Rotan Switch takes its name from the community’s central landmark - the railroad switch where the farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Arkansas Delta. Though the railroad switch hasn’t been used to transport cotton in many years, still it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. This series acknowledges the history of my rural home, one that we must shed light on in order to move into a more just future.

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