Book Review: Affrilachia: Testimonies

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

An average oak tree is bigger around than two people, together, can reach.

That mighty tree starts out with an acorn the size of a nickel, ultimately growing to some eighty feet tall, with a canopy of a hundred feet or more across. And like the new book, “Affrilachia” by Chris Aluka Berry (with Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam), its roots spread wide and wider.

In 2016, “on a foggy Sunday morning in March,” Chris Aluka Berry visited the Mount Zion AME Zion Church in Cullowhee, North Carolina for the first time. The congregation was tiny; just a handful of people were there that day, but a pair of siblings stood out to him.

Ann Rogers and Mae Louise Allen lived on opposite sides of town, says Berry, and neither had a driver’s license. He surmised that Church was the only time the elderly sisters were together then, but their devotion to one another was clear.

As the service ended, he asked Ms. Allen if he could visit her again. Was she willing to talk about her life in the Appalachians, her parents, her town?

She was, and arrangements were made but before Barry could get back to Cullowhee, he learned that Ms. Allen had died. Saddened, he wondered how many stories are lost each day in mountain communities where African-Americans have lived for more than a century.

“I couldn’t make photographs of the past,” he says, “but I could document the people and places living now.”

In doing so, he also offers photographs that he collected from people he met in “Affrilachia,” in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee; at a rustic “camp” that was likely created by enslaved people, at churches, and in modest houses along highways. The people he interviewed recalled family tales and community stories of support, hardship, and home.

Says coauthor Kelly Elaine Navies, “These images shout without making a sound.”

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If it’s true what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words, then “Affrilachia,” as packed with photos as it is, it is worth a million.

With that in mind, there’s not a lot of narrative inside this book, just a few poems, a small number of very brief interviews, a handful of memories passed down, and some back-stories from author Chris Aluka Berry and his coauthors. The tales are interesting, but scant.

For most readers, though, that lack of narrative isn’t going to matter much. The photographs are the reason why you’d have this book.

Here, there are pictures of life as it was fifty years or a century ago, group photos, pictures taken of proud moments, worn pews, and happy children. Some of the modern pictures may make you wonder why they’re included, but they set a tone and tell a tale.

This is the kind of book you’ll take off the shelf, and notice something different every time you do. “Affrilachia” doesn’t contain a lot of words, but it’s a good choice when it’s time to branch out in your reading.