The Panola House
"You are a Halsey."
This simple assertion, composed of 4 simple words, is the refrain of my father. It has rung through my adolescence and now young adult ears, and it immediately transports me to the small, rural town where my family comes from: Panola, Alabama. My father’s side of the family has a yearly tradition of traveling back to our hometown for the Fourth of July. All eight of my father’s siblings, along with their spouses and children, return to their home to remember their origins and instill them in the younger generation. The trailer, originally built with 3 rooms, housed several of my aunts and uncles through their childhood. Although a trailer, we tend to refer to it as the “Panola House”, or sometimes just “Home.” It definitely was not built to accommodate such a large family, and this fact becomes blaringly obvious when we are all there. The chaos of Sunday mornings in the Panola House is something we all regularly look back on with laughter; the trailer is packed to capacity as the aunts cook breakfast, the cousins eat and play obscure video games, and everyone rushes to take a shower first. In my memories, the trailer is always filled with laughter, cooking, blues music, and storytelling. The matriarch of our family, my Big Momma Annie Pearl Halsey, is always sat in the corner in her wheelchair, surrounded by her numerous children and grandchildren. It was within these moments that I learned the inherent value of memory for my family and broadly the Southern Black folk community.
Another house looms in the distance. It was not until 2020 that I took my first steps in the old Panola House. Time literally stood still. There were beds, papers, old jars of marmalade still in the house from when my aunts, uncles, Big Momma, and Granddaddy lived in there. When they moved to live in the new trailer, this is what they left. It was a moment of realizing that there was so much that I did not know about my family's history, especially concerning my Big Momma. In order to travel back through time, through the ancestral memory of my grandmother, I use this house as the entry point.