T.H. Jefferson: The West as a Place of Identity Making

  • OREGON TRAIL : The made up and potential identities of passing, or reinventing oneself in the American West

    T.H. JEFFERSON : RACIAL AMBIGUITY AND ITERATIVE FREEDOMS WESTWARD

            INTENTION: 

    • Imagine the West as a place of identity formation, and of the constant potential to make oneself anew.

  • “[T.H. Jefferson] He began mapping the California Trail as soon as they set out, immediately putting his cartographic skills to good use. In Part I of the map, he explains that his work “represents the emigrant road from Independence, Mo., by the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains to California. The Author was one of a party of emigrants who traveled the road with waggons, in 1846. All the streams of water and springs upon the road are delineated, also daily distances, courses and camps, made by the party.”
  • Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson, “Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails 1841-1869” National Park Service, 2012.

When I came upon them, most were already exhausted, downtrodden with a mistaken sense of optimism. I had traveled farther, longer, and with a greater sense of reason to depart from. But secrets cannot be discussed if they wish to be forgotten, so allow me the space to not encounter the part of me. Correction, of who I was. There must be a severance to that legacy, to forge new ones, and to become attached to one’s true desire.

That is what I see here: 

  1. Open fields of dreams 
  2. Endless memories to fulfill 
  3. Freedom to be 

Had I stayed with Bill Russell on the wretched Pony Express might my association continue with me. And all that had been lost to this mission, this expedition could not be given so easily in vain. I cherish that movement, to evade. Concerns are large with the station of our status. I claim no brevity in saying this, but might I regard that the truest freedom is movement. To allow the Spirit to take us from one point to another. I travel with this Spirit. It has likely clung to me, as Ma would riddle us under the blanket of the dark night. Oh, it’s beauty! Had only the Earth learned of the richness of obsidian, of bounty of its darkness, and saw what the Spirit dreamt me to movement to see: the endless wonder of Black. Clearly, if I cannot be, I shall make due with documenting its path. 

I charted forward that which is consequential to the necessity of freedom: to know one’s path surely, but to have the ability to walk it. My beginnings will be speculated. A true entanglement set just loose to allow me the distance to claim who I could be. While unique a burdensome privilege offered to me, I must release myself from it, in order to become. I see truth as a varied reality. A distorted perspective that can be changed, misrepresented, altered, or arranged to the liking. Moreover, my cause for the stone, it is permanent. And as man makes claim to its dominion, I shall etch this truth into form. A useful measure to holding legacy. I transfer knowledge into object, and this technology: the road (not the map, not the survey, not the geographical– the road for feet, for bodies, for movement) becomes useable. I wish to share that with them. With all.  

You may claim to find me at some point. Who I really am. But, at that point it will be all the more useful to reclaim. To make me out to be something for you. But, consult me as I am. As you may have known me to know myself. I was son-slave, white-black, husband-servant, an assemblage of dualities that can only contradict once they manifest. Thank the Spirit for the road! With great joy, I protest I made points into lines, that made feet onto paths, and set forth a movement, not just as I knew, but for those movements to come to pass. The map is for the man. It is the Spirit making manifest access to freedom. To move from a place of undo assumption, of corporeal expectations, of dichotomies unassumed and naturalized: America. To a place which is unmade: California.