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

The essay reflects on faithful practices of remembrance performed by black women in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and in the current context of unprecedented disaster. Located within a Baptist church support group for mothers who have lost children to violence, the essay foregrounds rituals including congregation, prayer and fellowship, and the continuous marking of birthdays and death anniversaries that claim lost loved ones in the wake of social abandonment. Recalibrating social inquiry in an era of unprecedented disaster, the essay experiments with collage as an aesthetic and practice, drawing on the scholarly work of Clyde Woods and the artistic work of John Thomas Biggers to assert the authority of black women as summoners of life in a reinvigoration of the blues epistemology that aspires to political economic, social, and spiritual transformation in the fragmented world.