A Bird Sang (the Blues) to Me: Collage as Black Study

Praise is What I Do

“Our desire is to be here to help you get through this particular day. We know that this does not take away all the pain, but we want to be here to help you walk through it and to let you know that you’re not alone. So, we’re going to start off by singing this song… our praise and worship song, and after that we’re going to introduce ourselves.” –

Danielle bowed her head and began to sing. The other women present for the support group that evening joined in, already familiar with the words to the well-known gospel song, Praise is What I Do, that she had The choice was fitting given the grief they all experienced, and the singing created a safe space through lyrics and breath for the work ahead. Assembled in the community center across the street from the predominantly African American Baptist church where many of them worshipped, they tended to the close relationships they had with God and sought with each other. Yet their congregation also structured the continuous mourning and remembrance of lost loved ones, cultivating a sense of social and spiritual relatedness that enabled them to walk through the pain, on this “particular day” at least.

Danielle founded this group in the summer of 2005. Mourning the death of her eldest son, who had been tragically murdered on the streets of New Orleans some months prior, she reached out to other women like herself who had lost children to violence. She relied on her faith in God to walk through the pain of grief, but she often felt isolated and afraid, not sure if she could handle the intensity, especially on what she described as “difficult days” such as her son’s birthday or the anniversary of his death. On these recurring occasions, the support that the group provided was essential, even lifesaving.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast region, in the late summer of that same year, the support group temporarily disbanded. Yet the need for it only intensified in Katrina’s wake, as people grappled with loss in multiple forms. The state sponsored development of a "new" and "improved" New Orleans pulled back the curtain on long standing practices of social death and erasure within poor Black communities. Young Black men like Danielle’s son were disproportionately impacted, their lives cut short by both structural and interpersonal forms of violence including poverty, incarceration, disaster related deaths, and the cycles of killing and retaliation that bore out on the streets, much of it associated with drug trafficking. These were the “three-times dead,” the ones who were “dead to the world when they were alive, dead again when life left their physical bodies, and dead once more from the mourning the world forgot” (Carter 2019, 15). Reconvening in the extended wake of the storm, Danielle and the other women found ways to claim and continuously "raise" the dead. Each gathering, each song of praise and worship, thus countered the state’s denial of Black personhood by asserting social and spiritual relatedness—in life, after death, and in God’s eternal family, to which they all belonged.

On this day, the women gathered to mark the first-year anniversary of the death of a young man named Brian and to support his mother, Monica, who listened quietly as Danielle made her opening remarks. Acknowledging that the group could not fully relieve the pain that Monica was experiencing, Danielle made it clear that the purpose was to be with her, to ensure that she was not, and did not feel, alone. These women were uniquely positioned to offer this support as they understood first-hand what Monica was going through. Each of them would mark the birth and death anniversaries of their own loved one(s) in the days, weeks, and months ahead. These faithful practices of mourning and remembrance scaffolded Black life as it continued, despite the state’s pernicious designs.

I witnessed numerous support group gatherings during a period of anthropological fieldwork I conducted in New Orleans, in the years just after Hurricane Katrina (2007-2009). Coming to terms with the impact of the storm, including for my own family members who lost their home to flood and fire, I sought to understand the root cause of the destruction in Black communities like my own. While the extent of the devastation was all too apparent, its origins were more difficult to discern, given the overlap of violent histories of conquest and Black enslavement, plantation economies and forced labor, urban development alongside processes of environmental extraction and degradation, and the continued and disproportionate impact of structural and other forms of violence within marginalized

My research thus developed in two primary directions. I worked to identify a long-standing system of Black erasure, understanding social death (inequality, poverty, criminalization, incarceration) and physical death (disease, disaster related deaths, homicide) as concurrent realities. Yet I also traced how residents navigated, sought to change, and even transcend these Danielle and the other women in the support group were inspirational in this regard and the book I eventually authored, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City (2019), centers and celebrates their work. Situated more broadly within New Orleans’ diverse African American religious community, I followed clergy members as they preached sermons, led crime walks, held ceremonies and vigils, organized rallies, opened prayer circles, and directed evangelism. Yet I focused on the work of religious women like Danielle who mourned and honored the deceased, identifying a “restorative kinship” (188) that worked against the denial of Black personhood as well as the violent severing of social bonds, to heal and sustain families and communities. Setting these congregational practices within the legacies of social and spiritual awakening in Black Christianity, the book concludes with an opening; a call for the exploration and inhabiting of alternative modes of Black being and becoming—within, alongside, and beyond the persistent realities of vulnerability and violence in Black communities in these and future times.

Summoning Life

I reflect on this research, twenty years after Hurricane Katrina at the time of this writing, at a time of extreme social, political, and environmental instability in New Orleans, the United States, and the world. While not diminishing the devastating impact of that specific storm, the current era, as Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús frames, is one of “unprecedented disaster” (2024, 68). Disastrous events are thus rendered mundane; the targeted offshoots of larger forms of “structural violence and racio-colonial governance” (Bonilla 2020, 2), which have been operating in some locations for centuries. At the same time, the “crisis in crisis” (Masco 2017) makes cause and effect increasingly difficult to pinpoint, due to the simultaneous “amplification of public dangers through inaction” (Masco 2017, S66); the non-social “suspension of living” in the “uninterrupted operation of markets, information, networks, and other systems” (Crary 2013, 9); and the dampening of collective imagination in the post-truth, post-digital, and “mirrored” world (Cramer 2015, Klein 2023).

In this essay, therefore, I explore the ways in which restorative kinship and related modes of Black being, as exhibited by Danielle and the other women in the support group in New Orleans, might be more deeply understood as summoning practices in the context of persistent vulnerability and violence. While this seems like an important recasting of authority in these times, this calling forth of life, in and beyond the space of death, has been slow to realize as a mode of scholarly and personal inquiry. Indeed, the conventions of academic production have limited my own ability to fully comprehend summoning as a foundational and generative aspect of Black being and knowing in the world. I have been more directly guided by the losses that impacted my own family in the wake of the storm, including the death of my father in 2014 and the death of my older brother in 2019, as my book went to press. The ability to summon life, through remembrance, commemoration, or other supportive practice thus seems essential in the current context of recurrent loss.

To develop both theoretical and practical grounding for this framing, I draw from Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco’s introduction to their timely volume, Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements (2023). Looking beyond hierarchical determinations of state power and control, the authors shed light on a host of concurrent processes: “the intensifications of agency, the regimes of care and engagement, the temporal and spatial derangements that are not recognized traditionally as forms of sovereignty but that are, in fact, where most of us are living most of the time” (3-4).

Foregrounding affect as a useful lens for contemplating, witnessing, and sustaining the nonlinear, ephemeral and other ways that sovereignties exist and form (1), the authors argue that we need “new genres of investigation or care, of writing or visualizing… to engage living within the giant problem spaces otherwise known as economy, security, ecology, or politics” (3). Such experimentation necessitates an acceptance of failure, or at least a resolve to continue the work knowing that complex and interconnected problems, as the crises of the world now present themselves, might not be solved. Instead, the focus is on how people endure, how they “build meaningful connection in the midst of rebounding forms of trouble” (2), and cast beyond those conditions as well, in the care-full crafting of an “outlandish” new world (7). 

The envisioning of such a world is not meant to be overly redemptive (Dawney and Jellis 2024). Rather, its care-full crafting makes room for what Kevin Quashie describes as ordinary yet “beautiful work” (2021, 154), based on a broader conceptualization of Black aliveness that is an outright assumption of humanity in the world, rooted not in the security of being but in the openness of becoming (10). The task at hand, therefore, is to center and follow how people engage living, how they “manage that state of being (abject, captured, or fatigued, but also creatively attempt to create new worlds, or to move within violent orders of being)” (7). What summoning practices do they develop and depend on and what do these bring forth? What songs of praise and worship, what modes of fellowship and relatedness, enable Danielle, Monica, and the other women in the support group to “walk through” the pain?

My own exploration of the ordinary, beautiful work of summoning emerges through the aesthetic and practice of collage. This way of working is somewhat instinctive; during my undergraduate studies in art theory and practice, an instructor once commented that I did my best work at two in the morning, after I have ripped apart whatever I am working on and must find a way to salvage something out of what remains. I continue to be both frustrated and fascinated by this tension and what it generates, from trying to creatively make sense of the aftermath of loss, to exploring the layered dimensions of uncertain being in past, present, and future time. As Bettina Judd argues, such work can reveal how ideas are newly felt, shedding light on “the motivations, the will, and compulsion… the affective sedulity that compels [one] to create—and most importantly, the knowledge produced in the ‘delirium of a felt life’” (2023, 6, emphasis in original).

Collage is of course already deeply rooted in Black cultural and creative expression. Everyday acts of salvaging, piecing, rearranging, and adhering have long been central to the ways in which Black folks adorn and embellish, mediate between fragmentation and synthesis, and manage the “simultaneity of continuity and chaos” (Farebrother 2009; O’Meally 2022, 59; see also Alexander 2003, 188-189). Black collage can thus have an extra-sensory dimension, in the medium as well as the maker, comprising a “metaphysical ethos” (Powell 2023, 38) that is grounded in the interior “dream space” of African American creativity (Alexander 2004, 5) and that materializes in a variety of physical spaces, “especially in communal settings with a religious or spiritual function” (Powell 2023, 39). Such framings are generative, revealing the multiplicity of Blackness, as art historian and curator Valerie Cassel Oliver argues:

The rebuilding and reconstruction [of collage] render an endless range of possibilities that collectively reject ideas of a monolithic Blackness. Within the process of tearing and piecing, we witness the birth of new forms and images, new visual vernaculars that have ushered in a beautiful complexity… (2023, 82).

Such assertions form the curatorial pretext for a recent exhibit, Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, curated by Kathryn E. Delmez at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee (2023). The contributors, collagists and essayists alike, understand collage “as a medium that inherently accounts for—and anticipates—new permutations” of identity, culture, and form (Bateman 2023, 96). While these permutations are broadly about shifting modes of Black being-in-the-world, they also pertain to the (re)configuration of relatedness through the development of “mutual sovereign being” (Welcome 2023, 98-99). As anthropologist and collagist Leniqueca Welcome demonstrates, with attention to the deliberate slowness involved in making and viewing, collage creates a suspension of time and disbelief that allows for “the productive dissolution of dominating realities, disagreement, dissent, the birth of new solidarities, and the crafting of alternate futures” These ideas are exceedingly helpful for my own exploration of collage as a mode of Black being-in-the-fragmented-world.

Figure 1. Rebecca Louise Carter, Baby Dolls and Flowers, 2025. Photo transparency and paper collage, digitally scanned and rendered.

They enable a deeper understanding of the religious work of Danielle and the other women I encountered in New Orleans, who picked up the pieces and summoned life through daily rituals of remembrance and restorative kinship in the extended wake of loss. Yet the summoning capacity of collage also lies in what it makes possible as a method of Black study (Harney and Moten 2013, 5), as a fugitive, intellectual, and inherently creative inquiry that emerges in grief, is nurtured through connection across realms, and is sustained by the sharing of knowledge, so that others might also be supported as life proceeds.

Working with the remnants of fieldwork data, I sort through the bits and pieces of interview recordings, photographs, archival images, and other ephemera. The process allows me to consider as well as reconfigure relatedness, for example between figure and ground or within the conditions of death and transformation that mourners/second liners in New Orleans simultaneously inhabit (Figure 1). I am also drawn to specific encounters, where shifts in orientation or affect, as people navigate uncertainty in their daily lives and interactions, are evident. Cutting, tearing, arranging, and adhering, I interpret these encounters anew, experimenting with scale, time, opacity and other elements to zoom in, stay with, and be subsumed by congregational practices, the tactile edges of torn paper composing the scene while also serving as possible routes into being and knowing (Astacio 2021, 18). I see this work as collaborative, taking shape in both educational and community-based settings that support the development and teaching of techniques in ethnographic and documentary arts including storytelling, color and composition studies, drawing, painting, photography, digital compositing, film, and Committed to process as much, if not more, than product, I share my work as it develops, investing in both creative epistemological and ontological interventions to “question knowing processes” as well as “shift from notions of fixed identities towards a sense of continual becoming(s)” (Clarke 2024, 174).

Reinvigorating the Blues Epistemology

Yet summoning practices operate on multiple fronts, not just in terms of sustaining individual practitioners after specific events but also for what they provoke more broadly, the acts of resistance and collective mobilization they also call forth in a long legacy of Black social, spiritual, and oppositional movement. I owe this insight to the editors of this special 25th anniversary issue of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, which coincides with and centers the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The editors’ aims encompass the broad and interdisciplinary exploration of Katrina’s consequences, including the “temporalities of investment and divestment” that continue to shape the region’s recovery and development, and the political economic impacts of race and disaster more broadly.

Informed by a historical materialist approach, the issue is structured around several key themes including theorizations of racialization, capitalism, and governance; transformations in labor, education, housing, and carceral infrastructures; and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. However, the editors save important space for the study of social and political repair, including social movements, the mobilization of resources, and acts of remembrance and care. Contributors are encouraged to think creatively about genre and form, to “play with disciplinary boundaries, deviate from the traditional format of an academic article, and/or engage thoughtfully with artistic practice.”

The invitation prompted my rereading of Clyde Woods’s influential work (1998, 2017), on the organization of “state, scale, capital, racism, and markets” in the Lower Mississippi Delta (Gilmore 2017, xii). While Woods’s tracing of the development and power of the plantation bloc reveals how “African Americans in general, and African American women in particular” were positioned at the bottom of a social and political hierarchy, his illumination of an oppositional “blues bloc” demonstrates how poor and working class Blacks—“organic intellectuals” including blues musicians and other “summoners of life”—developed “a sense of collective self and a tectonic footing from which to oppose and dismantle the American intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic traditions constructed from the raw material of African American exploitation and denigration” (Woods 1998, 29, 17; Camp and Pulido 2017, xxiii). As Woods writes,

Born in a new era of censorship, suppression, and persecution, the blues conveyed the sorrow of the individual and collective tragedy that had befallen African Americans. It also operated to instill pride in a people facing daily denigration, as well as challenging folk wisdom, descriptions of life and labor, travelogues, hoodoo, and critiques of individuals and institutions. It is often forgotten that the blues are also defined by those songs, music, stories, jokes, dances, and other visual and physical practices that raise the spirit of the audience to unimaginable heights. The men and women who performed the blues were sociologists, reporters, counselors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summoners of life, love, laughter, and much, much, more

While Woods does not focus exclusively on Black women as blues performers, their presence on the cover of Woods’s first book, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (1998) (Figure 2), affirms their authority as summoners of life as well as the centrality of the blues epistemology they create through familial, spiritual, intellectual, and political engagements.

Figure 2. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta by Clyde Woods (1998), cover art by John Thomas Biggers (detail of “Family Unity,” 1974-1978, casein and acrylic on prepared plaster. 180 x 720 in., Student Life Center, Texas Southern University).

The cover artwork is by John Thomas Biggers, a prominent 20th century African American artist who “forged a career as an illustrator, draftsman, muralist, painter, sculptor, and lithographer during an era in which African American artists had almost no possibility of recognition” (Theisen 2006, 3). Known especially for his murals and for the teaching and mentorship he provided as founding chair and professor of art at Texas Southern University, Biggers used his talent to “describe[] the circumstances of the people in his world and to encourage them… to fight their inequitable conditions” (Theisen 2010, 13). Black women are featured prominently in many of his works, honoring their “deep spiritual beauty” and “enduring strength” (Short 1979, 137) in the sustaining of families and communities. The detail on the cover of Woods’s 1998 book, is from a sixty-foot mural by Biggers titled “Family Unity.” The women it depicts,

“…bear the weight of home and family on their shoulders. Within the shotgun house are the supper table and birthing bed, sustaining the family. One of the women carries a ladder on her back, holding two children, that evolves into a rocket-life form… To the right of the house are an anvil, wash pot and rub board… A tree beside the house supports a swing in which the spirits of the elders rest. In the sky above are representations of heavenly bodies, signifying, for Biggers, the forces of creation” (Thiesen 2010, 76).

Biggers’s work, and Woods’s featuring of it, affirm Black women as key performers of the blues epistemology, summoners of life who ‘shoulder the weight’ on any given day, from the height of plantation power in the Mississippi Delta, to contemporary social and political relations, and the continued crafting of new realities grounded in freedom and justice. The work simultaneously centers artistic practice as a key aspect of knowledge production and sharing, bridging between disunity and social repair. As George Lipsitz describes, drawing on the work of art historian Robert Farris Thompson (1995, 108), Biggers “made not only art, but in the Afro-diasporic world view, also medicine” (2018, 514-515). His murals, paintings, and other works are thus “entities designed to do meaningful work in the world, to heal and protect the community they depict” (515). Furthermore, such work exists as an “alternative archive, a repository of collective memory… ready to be deployed” (516). As Lipsitz describes, through a related conceptualization of “conjuring,”

[A]rtistic projects turn places of containment and confinement into venues for envisioning and enacting new kinds of physical and psychological mobility. They counter the harsh realities in impoverished communities by honoring the deceased through performances that figuratively bring them back to life, honor departed ancestors and summon their spirits, and offer resilient love as an antidote to social death (2018, 497).

I situate the summoning work of Black women in New Orleans, practitioners of resilient love in their own right, as both transformative and oppositional. Danielle and the other women in the support group picked up the pieces in the space of violence and death, forging relatedness, working to heal and repair their families, and advocating for social and political change. Yet this reinvigoration of the blues epistemology also inspires me to center collage as a particular artistic project and mode of Black study, a way to explore and deploy the knowledge cultivated by these women as they moved through the troubled world. In the remainder of this essay, I share examples of this experimentation. Pulling forward two encounters from my fieldwork in New Orleans, I demonstrate how collage as Black study operates as well as what it reveals for the navigation and hopeful transformation of a fragmented world.

Clouds

Clouds were a special feature in practices of remembrance and restorative kinship for many of the women in the support group. For example, Danielle frequently found herself looking up at the sky as she mourned her son’s passing. She would even look for his form, pointing out the shape of a head or an arm to her grandchildren and others. The practice confirmed his eternal resting place, “absent from the body but now present with the Lord,” as she often said. She drew additional inspiration from a religious pamphlet on the seasons that was put together by a fellow parishioner, sharing passages from the section entitled “Clouds” during support group gatherings and highlighting the connections she and the others sustained across earthly and heavenly realms.

Clouds became part of more formalized rituals too, especially the women’s marking of the birth and death anniversaries of lost loved ones. Danielle began this practice in response to her own experience of grief, especially on difficult days such as a birthday, holiday, or the anniversary of her son’s passing. As she told another member of the support group, at those times grief could be sudden and destabilizing: “You know at any moment when you want to do something and all of the sudden it hits you and you lose your composure?” she said. “And next thing you know it’s a different story.” It was thus essential for her, or anyone experiencing grief so profound, to be surrounded by people who understood and could help.

The women marked these occasions with prayer, fellowship, and testimony, recounting their own journeys of love, loss, and faith. A cake, in honor of the deceased, was presented to the mother or other bereaved family member and attendees sang and prayed before she blew out the candles. As they ate, they passed around photographs, the funeral program, and other keepsakes, piecing together memories and stories. After some time, Danielle would announce the closing ritual, a balloon release in honor of the deceased. Taking the balloons from the centerpiece on the table, the women went out to the parking lot. On Danielle’s count they released the balloons, watching solemnly as each one rose up, wafted in the air, and gradually faded from view. It was a moving enactment, of simultaneously holding and letting go of memory and physical form. When the last balloon had drifted out of sight, the women hugged their goodbyes and made their way to waiting cars, with promises to stay in touch until the next occasion.

These practices left a lasting impression, beyond what I could capture in the writing of my book. Revisiting field notes, interviews, photographs, and other materials, collage proved to be a useful medium and modality for continued analysis. Tearing and layering bits of paper to depict the unpredictable forms of the clouds in a New Orleans sky, for example, I began to understand more deeply Danielle’s experience, the all-encompassing quality of mourning, the way grief settles around you, and the moments of change that allow light, or another indication of clearing, to filter through (Figure 3). While I certainly had a sense of this ecology from my own observations, as well as from Danielle’s actions and words, the close study that collage afforded expanded my sensory register enough to appreciate, for example, what it was like for her to sit on the porch with her young grandson as the clouds and memories drifted by.

Figure 3. Rebecca Louise Carter, Cloud Study, 2025. Paper collage.

I began to understand, therefore, from a different vantage point, the climate within which vulnerability and violence persisted as life and remembrance proceeded (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Rebecca Louise Carter, I Used to Always Look Up at the Clouds, 2025. Paper and digital collage.

Collage also enabled a consideration of time, from the passing of a storm to the deliberate slowness of its depiction. Balloon releases, for example, were significant in part due to their recurrence and they functioned as a continuous assertion of relatedness over days, months, and years, as different birthdays and death anniversaries came around. The routine scaffolded grief, with each gathering providing as much for the bereaved as it did for the other women in the room, who gave support and received it in turn when their own difficult days came around. The frequency with which the women gathered was thus critical, and the rituals they performed gave an important rhythm to relational modes of remembrance.

The deliberate slowness of collage and the suspension of belief/disbelief it produces is further enhanced in the digital realm, where a scanned and animated collage permits the manipulation of multiple elements including scale, opacity, and time, to reveal how meaning takes shape, especially given rapidly changing conditions This fluidity of

Figure 5. Rebecca Louise Carter, I Used to Always Look Up at the Clouds, 2025. Animation still.

Remembrance stands out from formal commemorations of loss that are orchestrated by church and state alike, such as the yearly anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. While these occasions were important and meaningful to my interlocutors, they did not readily sustain social and spiritual relatedness beyond the day. The faithful anniversaries of Black women thus inspire a shift away from conventional understandings of commemoration, for example, moving beyond expectations of progress or healing based on the passage of time to the collapsing of time itself through the rhythms of mourning, relatedness, and care.

A Bird Sang to Me

“…maybe you need to go to the cemetery, or you need to do something, and maybe you need one of us to help. You can’t quite get it done or something. And if so, let us know. You know? In honor of yourself.” - Sister Anne

Monica arrived at the support group meeting, on the first-year anniversary of her son Brian’s death, accompanied by her close friend, Sister Anne. After the welcome and singing, Danielle opened the floor so that each person could introduce themselves. The testimonies they gave, about the faithful management of grief, set the stage for the support that would be offered to Monica that evening, to help her to “walk through” the pain, as Danielle had put it.

Once the room had settled, Danielle turned the program over to Sister Anne, who took out a self-help book on grief that she had brought to the session. “It’s kind of a book on the first anniversary of your loss,” she said. “And the first thing it says… that you do so that you can finish healing or begin to heal, wherever you are, is to honor yourself.” She turned to address Monica directly.

So, I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re here this evening is that we want to kind of emphasize to you… that this is a milestone here for you to honor yourself. You may not see a reason why, but it says in here that you made it a year. And that’s worth honoring you for! You made it an entire year, you know? Tough as it’s been... So, we want you to think today of yourself. That you deserve the honor today.

The others in the room agreed, sharing their own accounts of what they had witnessed in Monica’s healing and reassuring her of how far she had come.

“One of the things they suggest on here, as a way of honoring yourself, is that maybe you have something you need or want. They say then you need to tell us…” Sister Anne said. She paused to share with everyone that over the past year she had the sense that Monica had wanted to go to the cemetery, more often than she had been able to, to visit her son’s grave. Sister Anne wondered if perhaps she didn’t want to go by herself. “Let us know and we can go with you,” she encouraged. The suggestion gave Monica a useful starting point for mourning in good company, both within and outside of the church as she moved through the surrounding world.

To emphasize the point, Sister Anne shared a story, to make sure that Monica knew that she could rely on the group for whatever she needed. “I just want to say to you,” she began. “That nothing you want to do or suggest to us is going to sound ridiculous, you know?” As an example, she offered a story about her cousin, who had also recently lost her son to violence. Overcome by grief on a similarly difficult day, her cousin had gone out to the cemetery to sit by her son’s grave. “She just cried her eyes out,” Sister Anne said (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Rebecca Louise Carter, “A Bird Sang to Me,” 2025. Paper and digital collage.

And in the midst of it, she said a bird came and landed on the tombstone and began to sing. She said, and she stopped crying and was just looking at the bird. And so, the bird just sang and sang and sang. And she said she just stared at the bird. She said, and then the bird flew away.

Monica, and the other women around the table listened quietly, transfixed. “My, my,” Danielle said. “Wow, that’s awesome,” someone else added. “And she got on a call and went back to work,” Sister Anne continued. “She said, ‘Everybody said, “you back?”’ And she said, “Yeah, a bird sang to me!” A wave of laughter rolled across the room interspersed with “Amen!” “Hallejuah!” and other shouts of praise. “So look Monia,” Sister Anne concluded.

[W]hatever you got to do or want to tell me, it can’t be more than the bird sang to my cousin. So, you know, get it done. Get the job done. Heal yourself. Find the help you need, you know? If you got to go sit out there, and we go sit with you, or whatever you need to do. Just let us know.

With a collective sigh of relief, Monica and the others took in this information. Sister Anne’s story had brought them unimaginably close, not to grief but to the moment of its transformation through a shift in orientation produced by an encounter with a singing bird. I used collage to come even closer to this encounter, experimenting also with digital compositing and stop motion animation to shift perspective, temporality, and other elements. Locating the scene in the patchy and regenerative ecology of the swamp, I layered paper to illustrate the story, each scrap carrying information from another time and use. The process rendered the landscape itself as a container of memory or other data hub. I also sourced, printed, and collaged images of a songbird in various stages of flight, using photography and stop motion animation to bring the encounter to life (Figure 7). The process enabled me to step into the experience as directly as possible, so that I could witness more directly the summoning of life happening therein—the reconfiguration of relatedness, the shift from sorrow to joy, the non-linear transmission of knowledge.

Figure 7. Rebecca Louise Carter, “A Bird Sang to Me,” 2025. Animation still.

Through the use and co-opting of technology, such stories might travel far beyond New Orleans, inviting others to witness, learn from, and engage in the summoning of life. To support the broader reach of a collective aesthetic and social practice, I conceptualize the bits of paper that comprise a collage as small but significant pieces of data that become bytes of information when a collage is digitally scanned and shared; a powerful development and promotion of Black know-how in the post-truth and post-digital

Collage as Black Study

After Sister Anne finished her story, Danielle shifted the group’s attention to the balloon release, which would be the final ritual for the evening. She ushered Monica and the other women out to the parking lot. On Danielle’s count, the women let go of their balloons and watched them disappear with a lightness they did not seem to have before, a sense of comfort that came with the affirmation of one’s relations, along with gratitude for support on a difficult day. They would return the following week with more balloons and stories.

I am indebted to these women for welcoming me at these sessions. Not only did they demonstrate how Black women summoned life in the wake of loss, the interactions and the sharing of knowledge they offered was a great comfort as I dealt with losses of my own. I have thus come to appreciate how summoning practices also extend to the transmission and receipt of knowledge, representing a collective schooling on how to pick up the pieces, congregate in support, and affirm social and spiritual relatedness and the juncture of sorrow and joy. This teaching directs my ongoing consideration of collage as a mode of Black study, with all its material, political, social, and metaphysical dimensions. Such work requires time and resources and I have been fortunate to secure some of each, enabling a degree of freedom for experimentation within the academic and other institutional spaces that house and sponsor my professional activities.

Despite this forward trajectory, my engagement with existing scholarship remains essential, allowing me to locate contemporary summoning practices within the long legacy of Black social and political transformation in the Mississippi River Delta and elsewhere. As demonstrated by Clyde Woods’s articulation of the blues epistemology, summoning has multiple functions—in the case of the blues it “inform[s] both thought and action, critique and celebration” (20). Thus, Woods’s aim “to bridge the gap between the blues as a widely recognized aesthetic tradition and the blues as a theory of social and economic development and change” (20) remains vital for my framing of collage as Black study in an era of unprecedented disaster. By centering and following the social and spiritual work of Black women, I work to understand what summoning, as both inspiration and invocation, might provide for the current challenge of human being, the individual and collective pain of the world.

While the current crisis of complexity seems to diminish the returns of conventional problem-solving methods, the connection Woods maintains “between regional political economy, culture, and consciousness” (21) is an important refusal to separate resistance from everyday, creative acts of living. Such ordinary, beautiful work is neither well captured by conventional modes of study or commemoration, prompting a rethinking of “anniversaries” themselves, including the present 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and this 25th anniversary of Souls. What I hope I have shown, therefore, within a reinvigorated blues epistemology, is the potency of remembrance as an everyday practice, a continuous affirmation of relatedness. This “unhinging” of anniversaries frees them from their master narratives (Thomas and Masco 2023), so that daily transformations, like a bird singing (the blues) in the cemetery, can come to the fore.

My work thus continues as the skies clear to reveal new ways of being in the world. The close of this essay is thus also a point of departure—a call for the sustained critical and creative exploration of Black being and becoming, of knowing and making known. This provocation aligns with the re-envisioning of social inquiry through both the pain and the latent possibility of the world. Such work, however, requires collective effort and care as Woods asserts; a sustained Blues Renaissance as a system of explanation, the aesthetic expressions of popular consciousness realized as resistance, and the summoning of “life, love, laughter, and much, much more” (2018, 17) as we pick up the pieces and prepare for the storms ahead.