Down in the Delta Series
Quito Plantation, Morgan City, Mississippi, 2021
Charlot’ s project, Down in the Delta, is a visual archive of Roosevelt Davenport( b. 1937), a former sharecropper, and his family, who worked on and now own land on the Quito Plantation in Morgan City, Mississippi where their ancestors were enslaved. In these photographs, Charlot reveals a diasporic thread— from the plantations of Mississippi to the Lakous in Haiti to the enclaves of Little Haiti, Miami— Black communities transform places of pain into sites of permanence.
Echoes of the Enslaved The abandoned quarters of the enslaved stand in quiet decay— weathered wood, broken doors, and barren trees bearing witness to histories not yet laid to rest. The Mississippi Delta, once the epicenter of forced labor, now holds both its ghosts and its heirs. This land carries the weight of survival, the unspoken stories of those who labored under oppression. Yet, just beyond these walls, a new generation moves freely, shaping a different future.
Children of the Fields In fields where their ancestors once toiled, children run, their playfulness rising like a counterpoint to the land’ s brutal history. Their bodies stretch long against the earth. In contrast to the silence of the past, their movement embodies reclamation— a reminder that joy, too, is an inheritance. The Mississippi Delta remains haunted by its contradictions, but here, in the dust-kissed air, there is proof that life persists.
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