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Bezel is my digital portfolio. It gathers framing materials—work samples, photos, footage, and notes—around my five published works: I Don't Like the Blues (2020), We Travel (2020), We Dance (2021), Ghosts of Segregation (2024), and We Make (2025).
Bricks.
In 2021, while sorting my grandmother’s photo archive—more than 1,000 snapshots of our family’s history—I came across a small set from my father’s school days. Like all the children in Shannon, Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, he attended Siggers High School, the town’s Black school during segregation. The photographs—a postcard of the brick building constructed in the 1960s, a faculty portrait featuring principal Rev. E.L. Siggers, and a yearbook—became the starting point for a four-year oral history project.
With the help of State Representative Rickey Thompson and Shannon native Dexter Foster, I interviewed 24 alumni and gathered additional photographs and archival materials. Working with filmmakers Ethan Payne and D.J. Toliver, we filmed contemporary footage of narrators and the places central to their stories, including the school itself. The result is We Make, a short documentary about Black placemaking: a community that needed a school for its children and helped build one itself, using bricks from “the other school,” as Mr. A.B. told it.
To Meet The Challenge
The Vell Collection · 1960's
A selection of school-day photographs from the Siggers High School digital archive, showing students, faculty, the principal, and the school grounds.
Credits
Collaborators
Ethan Payne - Shot and Edited
D.J. Toliver - Additional Camera
Zaire Love - Project Coordinator
Oral History Narrators
Alexander Anderson
John Anderson
Gloria Cox
Gloria Dabbs
A.B. Dilworth
Bonnie Dilworth
Dexter Foster
Mary Gardner
Gloria Hodges
Archie Lee Ivy
Stella Ivy
Tommie Lee Ivy
Teenie King
Danny Lyles
Paul Lyles
Tom Henry Lyles
Bobbie Randle
Robert Smith
Rickey Thompson
Jack Trice
Oscar Trice
Wilma Trice
Nicholas Woods
Jacqueline Woods
Support
Mississippi Humanities Council
Center for the Study of Southern Culture
Project-Related Work
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