Parity Pipeline

Genre

Synopsis

While Tuskegee, AL is remembered in a number of historically significant ways, for me, it was the watering hole for my larger-than-life family. Every year, we’d return to my grandfather’s home, a once jammed-packed, 3-bedroom home where he raised 17 children. Today, it sits dilapidated, with water damage, mold, and hazards too dangerous to explore. SOUTHMONT DRIVE documents my family’s journey to reclaim this home, weaving together memories of his living descendants to examine a Black family’s plight in the South and determination to have a gathering space. Uncle Jarvis leads the charge to reclaim the home, auctioned off at a tax sale for only $800 to a white man. As he pursues the deed from many angles, his two sisters take us into Tuskegee, visiting the church where they grew up, down the road from the public school they witnessed desegregate. With the eldest children, we journey to Mobile, their original hometown. Present-day imagery contrasts the archival, with these once bustling Black neighborhoods now sitting desolate and abandoned. By Act II, Jarvis realizes this will be a more complex process than expected, and tries to get the house condemned. At the first reunion since Pop Lewis’ passing, the family holds discussion about their future, writing down ideal goals for the home & how to handle its possible rehabilitation. Throughout, SOUTHMONT captures those left behind, connecting the current blight to policy decisions destroying the progress of Black Alabamians. At the climactic moment, the family finds out if they'll be able to reclaim the home or not. If successful, this marks just the beginning of reclaiming a space that once held so much. Naturally, opinions will differ, but ultimately, the journey back in time–through Tuskegee & Mobile, and through our familial roots–brings the family closer. We reach a better understanding of who we are while also creating a longstanding archive, grounding ourselves in the stories of those who came before us.