Divided #7 – Day 30

We ended up being lucky with the car. A sensor in the engine and a particle filter had to be replaced. And all was done within half a day. It could have been way worse. But little did we know that our hopes that there would be no more car issues were premature…

It takes 2 hours to drive from Mobile to New Orleans. It took us 6 days. But that was not the car’s fault but due to our desire to cover the South well. We knew that Alabama and Mississippi were important states for our project, so instead of just driving straight over to New Orleans we made a 1000 miles detour, all the way up to the middle of Alabama, then over to Mississippi and from there along the river back to New Orleans. If we are lacking one thing on this journey it is time. But taking this extra time proved to be one of the best decisions we have made so far.

Workwise, these last few days have been the most intense but also the best period until now. We had some incredible encounters. For example with Willie Shears, a Baptist pastor in Marion, AL. We knew we wanted to get a portrait of a pastor in the South. So on Sunday we drove early in the morning to the town of Marion in central Alabama. The town was small, but there were lots of churches. We looked at all of them and decided on the Berean Baptist Church after seeing a Youtube video of its pastor. Pastor Shears was a bit surprised that people had come all the way from Switzerland to hear him, but he was fine with us filming him during service and taking a portrait afterwards. The pastor was a soft spoken, slightly introvert person, but when the service started he was a pure force of nature. He was preaching for nearly 2 hours and got himself in a trance like state. He was pure energy and there was no stopping him. We have never seen anything quite like it!

And then we met Frances K Wootruff Sr. and his wife Frances the next day. He was the commander of a camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization that among other things is known for defending the right to display Confederate symbols in public. It’s probably safe to say that members of the organization wouldn’t have been too sad, if the US civil war would have turned out differently. Needless to say that members of this organization are rather careful when it comes to giving interviews to complete strangers from Europe. Several attempts to get in touch with Mr. Wootruff had failed but since we managed to find out his address, we just showed up at his house. To our big surprise, it turned out that his wife was the former national vice president of the Daughters of the Confederacy, the female organization serving the same purpose as the SOCV. It took us a while to convince them to be part of our project but when they did, they even agreed to be photographed in their formal attire with the confederate flag. It was one of these portraits that you can’t plan on getting.

Only 2 days later we met Kristal, a 34 year old African-American woman who has all her life lived in Hollandale, a poor and small, run down town in the Mississippi delta. We had met Kristal once before, in 2008, for a project we did for Stern. We never have forgotten the level of poverty we had seen back then. A poverty you don’t associate with the United States. When we met Kristal the first time she had 3 kids. Now, when we met her again, she was the proud mother of 8 kids from 3 different fathers. She lived with the father of her last child and six children in a small messy house. Most of the day she was watching TV. But the most surprising thing was, that she seems to be genuinely happy. She lives in poverty in a small backwater town in Mississippi. But that is all she knows and having 8 kids and aspiring to make good people out of them gives her a lot of sense of purpose and pride.

And Elias enjoyed playing the whole day with the children.

After leaving Hollandale we were on our way to New Orleans. When we arrived there it felt like we had completed the first, probably the most difficult stage of this project.

PS: The next act in the car drama played out only 3 days after getting our car back from Mercedes Mobile, with the assurance that all was perfect now. It was for 3 days. Then the breaks started making loud screeching noises. So we had to go to another Mercedes garage (they not only all look the same, they also all smell the same and offer the same cheap snacks in the waiting area) this time in Tuscaloosa, where we learned that our front breaks were pretty much defunct. $900 dollars later we were on the road again.