Sometimes I Wonder How We’ve Kept from Going Under: An Interview with Jayve Montgomery on Lake Black Town
Multidisciplinary artist Jayve Montgomery (who also makes music as Abstract Black) describes his project Lake Black Town as “a research composition project where the artist is deeply listening to the sonic air, soil, water, and plant data of these ‘drowned town’ sites to inform their resonant response to the call of history’s emptiness.” Last summer he shared this work in residence at Random Sample in Nashville, TN, where I was fortunate to attend, and be deeply moved by, his process and performance. Using technologies like a field recorder and Midi Sprout (a device that transmits the electric signals of plants, allowing you to listen to them), Montgomery created recordings that he then collaborated with live—layering instruments such as as a dulcimer and saxophone as well as his own voice, powerfully speaking and singing about the troubled waters of these sites and the troubled beliefs and systems that continue to erase Black lives today. Below is my interview with Montgomery about Lack Black Town, and you can watch a clip from one of his performances at Random Sample here.
Lou Turner: You mentioned that the idea for this project came on the heels of some thoughts you were exploring around listening across time, and also across lineage. When and how did those curiosities start to focus in on these bodies of water / drowned Black towns?
Jayve Montgomery: Let’s set a timeline. Epigenetics is essentially a study of inexplicable inheritance at the level of cell division, brought to us by advances in genetic studies. I probably heard about this idea of environmental experience being passed on genetically in the early 2010’s. The study has a convoluted history and plenty of skeptics, but I delineated from adhering to the empirical scientific method when I left a biochemistry major my sophomore year of college to become a poet/anthropologist. So when folks like myself—Black and bred by America—heard about epigenetics, a feeling of knowing the pain our DNA experiences over time was confirmed, obviously against the wishes of white dominance. It felt like an ignorance had been lifted or an acknowledgement of past harm caused was being prepared. America digressed.
Learning about drowned towns comes from a specific moment in time. On June 25, 2021 the commentator of the funny (yet not of laughter) side of America, Amber Ruffin, on her eponymous show had a running list of drowned towns endlessly scroll next to her head like buried news we should have heard about ages ago. “Episode #1.30” stood out to me when it came to me through the social media news sieve for Amber Ruffin’s “How Did We Get Here?” segment. Much of our lives as humans exist in this state of wondering how we got here, how the universe got here, like we are the discovery team for our mitochondrial DNA’s remembering—always having to retell our forgotten path to now. And much of our historical lives as Americans has been hidden from us. Being a person of conscience mind, I know that even the most inquisitive of us still have American secrets to uncover. Being an American outsider, as my mother is Jamaican, I can see that much of the story of America is hidden, especially for those who aren’t seeking truths. So when I find a clue about “how we got here,” I find it necessary to share, because so much of the myth of white supremacy depends on lies being passed from generation to generation, fully intact, like how the Wilmington Massacre was hidden for 100 years; or like how Columbus was just looking for spices without the backstory that I learned as an adult learning to be a teacher—the Spanish Inquisition hunted Muslims and Jews into exile and hiding. The very people importing the spices had fled or hid, because Christian persecution, but that doesn’t rhyme with 1492, so you learn about the lie later if you’re willing to listen.
The Deep Listening piece comes from studying sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the school year of 2003-04 and learning about Pauline Oliveros. But in the early months of 2022 I took part in a cohort of listeners for the Deep Listening Intensive I. It was a weekly online meeting with assignments in between. Diving into those ideas of listening in dreams, and through time, and through movement, really helped me settle into the idea that I come from—and moreover, that the sound I make—is because I come from the sound at the bottom of a trans-atlantic slave ship.
And while I was getting into the deep time of white supremacy induced trauma, I do not think my fellow cohort listeners were. I feel like the colored folk were wading through the weight of white supremacy, while our white-passing (because it is a mask) colleagues were listening in a very shallow way.
So enter Resmaa Menakem and his ideas of somatic abolition. These ideas, through segregated online seminars for folks of whiteness and folks of color hold a space for white folks (in their sessions) to deal with the trauma of having to become white and what it means to have to stifle one’s humanity to survive under the mythical regime. In the early fall of 2022 I took one of his seminars for several hours one day and it dawned on me that he had language I had never heard before; language that put folks of whiteness also as the victims of white dominance and white lies, and I don’t think a lot of folks of whiteness have heard that perspective or know what to do with the pain of having to remember that your ancestors deliberately shed their culture to become white, most often for safety.
Earlier in 2022 while immersed in the Deep Listening Intensive I, I wrote a graphic score titled “Nobody Knows The Trouble I Hear.” I was interested in sonic account of enslaved life when I went searching through the Works Progress Administration’s so-called “Slave Narratives.” A search for my main loves (bells and horns), led me to the narrative of Charley Williams who told his story at age 94 in 1937:
“Bells and horns! Bells for dis and horns for dat! All we knowed was go and come by de bells and horns!”
The piece takes Mr. Williams’ sonic experience on a plantation and turns it into a meditation on America. The piece calls for bell ringers holding triangles as a scorn to the textbook writers who would misnomer the trans-atlantic slave trade as the triangle trade, [a role that is] open for public volunteers and was populated by my friends of color and friends of whiteness—reconciliation from the ground up. With support from chatterbird, I was able to see the piece performed by myself, my brother in music Ben Lamar Gay, bassoonist Maya Stone and cellist Joshua Dent in Nashville outside at Centennial Park that June.
[We also performed it] in the cemetery of Africatown, which is a section of Mobile, AL where the last enslaved Africans were brought as captives on the Clotilda, a ship that Thomas Maher took to Africa illegally on a bet that he could get as many enslaved people as he wanted and no one could stop him, decades after the international slave trade was banned in 1808. He set the ship on fire in the bay of Mobile, drowning the ship until National Geographic imaging explorations found it in 2018. There at the cemetery, myself with bells and conch shell, Ben Lamar Gay with cornet and bells, Maya with her bassoon and Joshua with their cello, we played overlapping refrains of the two different versions (one major, one minor, read happy negro, sad negro) of the negro spiritual “Nobody Knows The Trouble I See,” while plant MIDI technology was sensing the land and being our synth accompaniment. So at the gravesites of the last slave ships captives of America, we let the land also sound. It was beautiful. Especially seeing as I lack the will to gather folks. This trip to Mobile also included a stop at Montgomery’s Legacy Museum created by the Equal Justice Initiative. On that museum visit, ideas of water and soil become engrained in my being. It is a must-visit for anyone welcoming a new America, a just America.
So, [when] the NEA grant came around and Celine Thackston [who provided grant writing services for the project] approached me for an idea, I had these ideas of land and water and interacting with those musically, but the nature of predicting the future is failure.
The resources on the history of drowned towns are so hidden that when I went to look for them, Amber Ruffin’s list was the most definitive I could find. I gathered those I felt I could manage to drive to and my old mobile recording studio public park interaction mind started to plan grand uncomfortable interactions.
I am really glad I went the only direction my creative compass would allow me to playfully travel.
LT: Did you come across any folks at the sites who were curious about your work and/or people who provided some historical context on site? (Or, if the work was always solitary, what was that headspace like?)
JM: When the grant period of 2024 started, we (a team Celine gathered that included a PR person) attempted to follow through on my last minute grant ambitions of going to locales with my collaborators, interacting with the site, sampling ourselves in the water and then presenting those recording at night to local audiences. In trying to force a witness, I panicked. Something about a press release made me too important, and then being so public made worry just a tiny bit that someone who didn’t want these stories told might show up. So I quickly squirmed out of any official announcements, opting for a more clandestine operation. Just me, the tech, the water, and the land. I also planned on doing web updates after each visit showing the raw materials. It was all too much to actually accomplish sensibly. So I stepped back and let the piece write itself.
I retreated from forcing these perfectly planned visits, in my idyllic tent with a soft mattress aiming a shotgun mic into the pre-dawn ether, to one of play and discovery and and depending on my life as an improvising sound artist. This retreat led me to myself, to play. In the interim I used the tech I had been afforded to gather from the grant money to get contact mics, hydrophones, a sampler, and a stereo resonator. So, in my regular performances I started using a quart sized wide mouth mason jar, then a half gallon metal bottle of water with a hydrophone, picking up the sound of me playing into the water via tube and sax mouthpiece and processing it live into granulated and resonant drones.
That first attempt at playing water in a mason jar was in Water Valley, Mississippi in February 2024 by the invite of Marlos E’van for a touching show of his visual art where his mother, grandmother and uncle (first generation to integrate Ole Miss) were in attendance; and on the way back to Nashville I was able to ride back on the Natchez Trace which can take you to the Devil’s Punch Bowl, another site of American atrocity on Black folks. You can also see Native mounds on the trace. I mark my sobriety by the Nashville drone held May 13, 2024, for which I played the resonant water for a circular breathing 30 minutes; the resonance showing me how emptiness can be amplified and sculpted into story.
Kentucky Lake was the only site where I experienced a museum (Golden Pond Visitor Center) that had images of the former towns. At other sites like Lake Lanier and Lake Marion, a street sign existed naming the former town, but for the most part I was alone—besides the occasional swimmer/fisher/boater—a solitude I liked quite a bit. At Lake Martin, former site of Kowaliga, AL, a town founded by formerly enslaved John Jackson Benson and which lasted for 35 years, I ran across a boat dealership worker who was curious as I pulled my gear out of the car, but I just told him I was fishing for some water sounds. I wasn’t in the field to blow minds. I was in the field to gather the data to blow minds.
My equipment is in two bags. I place some foam down and the set the laptop, audio interface, MIDI sprout, and stereo resonator atop. The recorder for the water and earth microphones rests in an open case. I get comfy and listen for the next two hours. I got the occasional “catch anything?” or “what’s your name?” from a wandering child, but for the most part these were outings of solitude where the next person is only exchanging a “hello” or a head nod and moving on. So, coming back to society with these sounds and mulling over their teachings holds the answer to your next question.
The solitary headspace is where I as artist live most of the time. At this age of mine, 45, it is a playfully serious space where I trust that all of the creative life experience to this point has been in service of this moment. So I have everything I need to fulfill the abstractblack manifesto—a foundation of improvised black being where black absorbs all, black emits all, like the universe. I just have to make sure I am in a state of flow, which is created by play, which is really just giving myself time to listen to myself, find myself, via asking the experimental questions I come to have.
LT: In the performance, you’re combining the recordings from these sites with present tense improvisation as well as spoken narration. Are the words improvised as well, or written, or a mix of both? What have you learned about language in this project?
JM: The words at one point in time (we mistakenly call the beginning) are improvised. If they serve a purpose, they stick around to be repeated. “Ameri-can, Ameri-cain’t” is a refrain I invented sometime in 2010/11 in a project we called Vermontgomery, with my buddy Ben Boye. I hadn’t planned on using it in this project until it emerged again in the moment, obviously coming from a decades-long common recognition of the American dilemma—to have so much exceptional power while failing at being exceptionally helpful to the least of us, citizens and residents alike.
The line “sometimes I wonder how we’ve kept from going under” is a line I started singing during the grant period of 2024 after having visited the Legacy Museum for the second time and just thinking while at work. And then it hit me that it is a line from “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five from 1982 that I have altered to speak to the experience of Black America after gaining knowledge of drowned towns and everything else we now know, like how the enslaved would drown themselves before becoming a victim of being tied to an anchor to be drowned by a slave ship captain, or how hydroelectric progress necessitates the drowning of powerless and Black communities. The first time I performed with the rain drops from Lake Norman, former site of Long Island Mill Village, I instantly started into asking the crowd if they were ready to flee their homes in the middle of the night while rain poured as a white mob roared. The sounds write the piece. Which is why I feel so grateful for having the humility to step out of the way of trying to force this work. I would rather fail to grant deadline society than dishonor the creative process of letting the work make itself, just like the universe makes itself.
What I have learned about language a long time ago is that it may be all we have and yet is not enough. In the interim I have learned that the way the sun brings us light is by creating sound waves that feedback on each other for 20,000 years before reaching the surface of the sun to then travel to us in 8 minutes 20 seconds. In other words, sound is how we get light. The more I feed the sounds back into themselves, the more light is revealed, the warmer the rooms get; the more exposed the lies of the choice to uphold the myths of white supremacy are. Asking a room of white folks “how white are you?!” or essentially “are you white enough to say yes to ‘coon’ hunting when the white mob comes to recruit you?!” is an important set of questions to start to get folks examining this apartheid identity so that they may dismantle it, themselves.
We live in an apartheid and just because we don’t use the word doesn’t mean we aren’t a living definition of the word. Words can be scary. Honesty can be scarier. A just America is worth a few uncomfy conversations.
LT: In a performance I saw, one line you repeated really stuck with me. Correct me, but I think it was something like: “You have to come through the water to get to the next America.” Can you say more about that line and what that act of facing the water can look like?
JM: The water represents the atlantic before w(h)estern life slaughtered the whales. The water represents the attempted burials of light done time and time again as the American atrocity is made an excuse for progress. The water represents all the stories we didn’t know and that need us to know them for what this place can be to emerge. The water represents sitting with the fact that cities like Nashville poured cement in swimming pools rather than have integrated swimming. The water represents the baptism of the trans-atlantic slave trade—we all need to feel it in order to heal as a society. The water represents the stories collected from the enslaved that inform the fact that, at its foundation, America is a plantation; and until we all can see that and stop it when it emerges, the Plantation Model of American Economics persists.
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