“It’s not much, I know,” he said, apologizing after he’d led her up the narrow staircase.

“It’s all right.” Mira observed the surroundings. The apartment was small and mostly empty of furniture. Wood-paneled walls were reminiscent of a seventies-era aesthetic. The shag carpet came out in some of the corners and she could see bits of floorboard underneath. A well-worn sofa sagged in the living room. Bookcases lined the walls, all filled with black authors, a lot of whom she recognized but some she didn’t. An oak table sat in the breakfast nook. In the kitchen an efficiency burner stove was next to a utility sink, which, he said, was the reason he rented the place. Down a narrow hall Mira saw his bed, unmade, with a sheet balled up near the headboard.

“You’re taking photos again.” Mira noticed the collection of images plastered on one of the living room walls. Photographs covered over the white paint, lining almost every inch of the wall. Mira had to go slow to view them all, wanting to see all of what he’d done.

Jesse had progressed to mixed media. His work involved juxtaposing slave narratives taken from the Works Progress Administration, or the WPA, with contemporary portraiture, specifically photos of Kipsen’s black residents, contrasting his images with the written quotes from the once-lost stories. The WPA slave narratives were oral histories from ex-slaves conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration, both of which were New Deal initiatives to help provide jobs for the unemployed during the Great Depression. Few of these accounts were tape-recorded; instead they were written reconstructions from the WPA interviewers who’d relied on their own memories and field notes. Because of this, the narratives reflected the bias of the interviewers, often depicting the slaves as content and docile, as well as the plantations they had lived on as idyllic. In the 1970s, thousands of other slave narratives were discovered, which depicted the harsh and cruel treatment by the slave owners. It turned out that the state FWP officials chose to bury these narratives rather than forward them on to the Library of Congress.

Jesse’s face lit up when he told her this, and in hearing him talk about his work she saw the boy from her childhood, with his camera and photo books, now grown up. “I have some of the audio recordings of the narratives too,” he said. “The ones that have been digitized and are available online, but I don’t like listening to them. I wish I could hear the actual tapes because the voices sound like ghosts of the original audio. I’m reminded that I’m listening to a hollow reproduction, a shell of the original.”