Learning to be Better Allies and Partners

Ginger Geyer, Chlora’s Picnic Basket, 2006. Glazed porcelain.

The Neill-Cochran House Museum, in collaboration with Jennifer Cumberbatch (JR Cumberbatch Productions) is presenting a self-paced community tour for Juneteenth weekend that explores the intersectionality of black and white Austinites’ experiences in central west Austin from the city’s beginnings to today. This tour revisits the sites explored by the sold-out bus tour we offered this past February as a part of the If These Walls Could Talk project.

One of the components of the tour is an optional add-on box lunch, featuring fried chicken and two salads. We offered this lunch at “Oratory Sunday,” one of the performances from the project earlier this spring. For the bus tour, we had offered a sandwich box lunch, which was a bit easier to eat on the bus.  Both of the lunches, however, were inspired by the tradition of the shoebox lunch, which Jennifer Cumberbatch has described thus: “. . . the resilience and creativity of Black family members, church attendees and businesswomen was packed with love inside shoeboxes.  Their sumptuous feasts became a black traveler’s delight.  Sandwiches, hardboiled eggs, pound cake or sweet potato pie with a heap of fried chicken was the fare that nourished the body and the soul . . .  a traveler’s feast.”  Shoebox lunches were a form of resistance, a weapon against the racism exhibited in the context of Jim Crow. Packing a lunch was a way of rejecting racist exclusion. It represented resilience and anti-fragility, a way of saying "We will not bend, we will not break; instead, we will create."

The original draft of our promotional materials did not do a good job of contextualizing our lunch offering as a version of a shoebox lunch, and further complicated our communication by describing the option of lunch on our grounds as a “picnic.” We recognize that in this time of introspection and deep conversation about how we as Americans relate to one another and as we deal with painful racial typing that has been a part of systemic racism for centuries, we did not do a good job with our own message.  

One of the objects in If These Walls Could Talk is called Chlora’s Picnic Basket. That object in many ways is representative of the ongoing process of learning. When Ginger Geyer produced that installation, she was unaware that the term is viewed by many people as racially charged. Though the term is not racist in origin, the hard truth is that, after the Civil War, there is ample evidence that white Americans turned lynchings into public events and “picnicked” while black Americans were tortured and killed. (For more on this topic, we recommend this article.) In the context of If These Walls Could Talk, the picnic basket becomes a symbol of Chlora’s journey of discovery as she confronts the myriad ways systemic racism lurks beneath the surface of what might seem initially to be innocuous objects.

We had not intended to use the term “picnic” but the word made it in to our messaging and while we intended to remove all references to that term, we did not do so successfully. We have now made those changes, and we both apologize for what was truly an error, and hope that our mistake provides the opportunity to expand all of our knowledge about this painful period in our collective past.