Essays

PAPER TRAILS OF FREEDOM
Elliott Pinkney’s Works on Paper, 1970 - 1977
A Guest Essay in Five Movements
Paper Remains by Steven F. McClain

This essay is an independent editorial commission from the Elliott Pinkney Collection - written in response to Elliott Pinkney’s works on paper.

Black Retrospective, Cream Woven Paper, 1976, Elliott Pinkney Collection

Paper Remains

A Five-Movement Prose Suite

By Steven F. McClain

Fanfare - The Question

What survives when Black lives are reduced to paper?

That is a remarkable question. Why? Because it contains a paradox. Paper has been:

The instrument of oppression

The instrument of liberation

The instrument of remembrance

The same material. The same ink. The same fibers… Entire lives have turned on a single sheet of paper.

Every civilization leaves monuments. Black America often had to only leave paper. Paper has no ethics. It simply receives ink. People decide whether that ink becomes a bill of sale or a love letter. A lynching report, or a poem. Laws upholding segregation or the Civil Rights Act. A slave ledger, or a diploma. Paper doesn’t choose; WE do.

Not everything survives. Some things are simply unable to do so. A census cannot record laughter. A deed cannot record belonging. A bill of sale cannot record dignity. A death certificate cannot record a life just like a birth certificate cannot record a mother’s love. A slave Ledger cannot record a family dynamic. Paper is simultaneously powerful and heartbreakingly insufficient.

Yet, despite its inadequacy, generation after generation of Black Americans have insisted on writing on it anyway. We have continued writing letters, composing music, keeping journals, making art, preserving photographs, annotating hymnals, signing diplomas, printing newspapers, and creating archives. It’s an act of faith to believe that something essential can cross time… even if paper can never contain the entirety of a person.

Paper is the place where Black humanity has been repeatedly diminished, defended and dreamed into existence. Paper has been used against us. And sometimes it was the only thing saving us.

Before paper became history, it was a witness. It watched names become numbers. It watched families become inventory. It watched freedom be decided by a signature. It watched children become census entries. It watched lovers become marriage licenses. It watched musicians become footnotes in music programs. It watched the living become obituaries. Paper never spoke; yet it never stopped testifying.

Prelude - The Witness

Paper changes as it ages. White becomes cream. Cream becomes yellow. Edges soften. Ink feathers into fibers. A fold becomes geography. Sometimes the pressure of a long-vanished hand remains on the reverse: not the words themselves, but the force required to write them.

If you stand before an old document long enough, its physicality becomes impossible to ignore. Someone touched this. Someone held the pen. Someone folded the page while the ink was new and the world around it was different.

Paper is fragile. Water can destroy it. Fire can consume it. Ink fades. Fold a sheet often enough along the same crease it will eventually separate. Still, we ask paper to carry astonishing things: A name, a debt, a law, a boundary, a song… a life.

In the American archive, Black people appear everywhere on paper, and yet are not always permitted to appear whole. We are counted, priced, described, restricted. We’re defended, remembered, imagined. Sometimes a page preserves a name. Sometimes its structure helps erase one. Sometimes the same material that records a wound becomes the evidence by which another generation understands it. This is what makes paper such a difficult witness.

A witness can preserve evidence without preserving truth. It can tell us what someone thought was important enough to record. On the converse it also tells us what we can ignore and remain silent where it’s concerned. Elliott Pinkney’s work on paper asks us to confront that instability: Paper as archive, as image, as inheritance, as a surface upon which Black history can be received and remade. His pages belong to a much larger paper trail.
So, I keep returning to one question:

What survives when Black lives are reduced to paper?

Not life. Never the whole life. But sometimes enough remains to begin looking.

Movement I. Allemande - Paper Witnesses

In 1850, somewhere in Lincoln County, North Carolina, there lived a Black man approximately thirty-three years old. We know that much. We do not know from the census what his name was. The page does not ask.

The federal instructions for the 1850 slave schedule only required the slaveholder’s name and directed enumerators to substitute numbers for the names of the enslaved people. Beneath Bartlett Shipp’s name appears a thirty-three-year-old Black male. There is reason to believe that he may have been Wesley Shipp, but the record cannot prove it. That uncertainty matters.

Wesley had a name. His family did not need a census to know it. His wife knew how to call him; his children knew the sound that meant their father was being addressed. Perhaps there were nicknames, private forms of address, small variations in pronunciation that belonged only to the people closest to him.

We cannot recover them. We should not invent them. Their absence from the archive does not mean that they never existed. Wesley had a wife, Winnie. They had children. He had relationships whose daily language no government schedule thought necessary to preserve. None of that was absent from Wesley. It was absent from the form.

Two years later, another piece of paper named him. On April 10, 1852, a Lincoln County deed records Wesley Shipp, Winnie Abernathy Shipp, and five of their children in a transaction connected to Bartlett Shipp’s debts. At last, the paper gives us names; but it only names them because they are being sold. The census could afford Wesley’s anonymity. Commerce required specificity. That is one cruelty of the archive: sometimes the document that restores a person’s name is the same document that records a system denying him control over his own life.

The omission was not inevitable. In the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules, thousands of enslaved people were recorded by name as exceptions to the usual practice. One was a woman named Winnie in Hampshire County, Virginia. A decade later, a Free Black woman named Winneford Brown appears in the same area. They may have been the same woman; the evidence cannot make the identification certain. The exception tells us that the page had room for a name. Someone simply had to write it.

A census looks objective because the lines are straight and its columns are orderly. Yet every form contains a philosophy. Before anyone answers a question, someone has decided which questions deserve to be asked. The free schedule asked for names, occupations, birthplaces, literacy and property. The slave schedule asked for age, sex, color, fugitive status, manumission… and the name of the person claiming ownership. The erasure was built into the form. Paper did not erase Wesley. People did. Paper kept the evidence. We resent the page for what it refuses to tell us. We depend on it for what little we know.

Movement II. Courante - Paper Wounds

On April 10, 1852, Wesley Shipp had a price. So did his wife. So did their children. The Document preserving their names was not created because anyone feared they might be forgotten someday; it was “just business”.

A family enters the archive because somebody needs an accurate financial record. Ink does not scream. Columns do not grieve. A document can record the same of human beings with the same composure and regard as land, livestock, furniture, or tools.

The page remains calm. That calmness is part of the wound. Slavery did not merely exploit people; it accounted for them. Ledgers, inventories, deeds, advertisements, and bills of sale converted lives into quantities: how many, how old, how productive, how much. The books balanced while the world remained morally bankrupt.

One month after the Shipp deed, another piece of paper was issued in Virginia. The box that held it is small enough to disappear inside a man’s pocket: five inches long, a little more than three inches wide, handmade of tin… with a sliding lid. It is an intimate object. Not a courthouse ledger. Not a framed proclamation. It was a thing made to travel against the body.

Open the lid…

A folded certificate…

Close the lid…

Put it in a pocket…

Walk.

The paper goes where the man goes. Joseph Trammell made and carried that box to protect his Certificate of Freedom.

On May 10, 1852, the Loudon County Court issued his Certificate of Freedom to Trammell, who was about twenty-one. It described him closely enough to connect the living body presenting the paper to the legal record recognizing him as free.

The description gives bureaucracy what it requires: characteristics by which one body can be distinguished from another. But the tin box gives us something the certificate cannot. This document had to survive ordinary movement. A court record had become a personal possession- folded, carried… protected.

Imagine the encounter:

Paper…

Face...

Paper…

Body.

The question beneath the examination is grotesquely simple:

Does this man match the paper?

Joseph did not become free when someone read his certificate. He did not become less free when the lid slid shut. Yet the society which through he moved had created circumstances in which another person’s recognition of that freedom could depend upon a folded sheet of paper. The order is almost perverse. The certificate was made to describe Joseph. But in an encounter with “authority”, Joseph’s body could be required to prove the certificate true.

Somewhere in America in 1852, one document could record that a Black man could be sold while another could be necessary to establish a different Black man could not. The cage and the key were made of the same material. The wound outlived slavery. Its forms changed.

Beginning in 1935, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s City Survey translated neighborhoods into graded areas of mortgage security. Race, ethnicity, class, housing stock and neighborhood change entered the professional language of risk. The maps did not make the HOLC’s original refinancing decisions, but they reveal a broader appraisal culture learning to make racial judgement appear technical. Outline the neighborhood. Assign the grade. Color the map. Prejudice learns the vocabulary suitable for an office.

The slave ledger and the residential map are not equivalent. One belongs to human bondage; the other to a different history of discrimination. Placing them beside one another reveals a recurring question: Who possesses the authority to assign value? In the ledger, value attaches to a body. In the map, value is attached to a place inhabited by bodies. The vocabulary changes. The question of power does not.

Again, paper becomes a wound and evidence. A document made to administer a system survives long enough for another generation to ask questions its maker never intended to answer. Joseph’s certificate does that now. It no longer asks whether Joseph Trammell was free. It asks what kind of society could look at a free man standing before it and still demand:

SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS.

Movement III. Sarabande - Paper Remembers

Years ago, one of my early flute students gave me her old method books after graduating high school.

“Maybe someone else can use these,” she told me. “They really helped me a lot.”

Years later, in a search to find some new and challenging music for a new flute student, I finally opened one. Every page was marked. Some of the marks I recognized as the language of study. A breath placed where a phrase needed room. A fingering solving an awkward passage. An instruction about the interpretation. Teacher and student still occupied the page together even though the lesson itself was just a memory from a decade ago. On one page, in capital letters followed by six exclamation points-

DON’T BREAK THE PHRASE!!!!!!

I smiled. She must have written that on herself out of frustration for repeatedly breaking the phrase. I would have never yelled at her.

But it was the margins that held me. The handwriting wandered away from music Doodles… stray thoughts… notes about her life… something about her tomorrow. Things that had nothing to do with flute or music at all. Those marks belonged entirely to her. Someone else may have seen scratch paper. I saw evidence.

The book had been open often enough to become the nearest available place to think. Music had remained near enough to her daily life that the boundary between practice and everything else occasionally disappeared. The page recorded both the discipline of becoming a musician and the ordinary distraction of becoming a whole person.

Holding it years later, I could recognize pieces of my teaching without mistaking it for my own book.

Teaching is full of things we release before we know what becomes of them. A phrase. A Correction. A way of listening. We give them to students and eventually lose the right to know where they go.

I have not spoken to her in perhaps twenty- five years. I do not know if she continued playing in college, whether she still owns a flute, whether she has children who know their mother once played. The pages cannot answer. And I will not make them. They do show me the musician she was becoming. Fingerings. Breaths. Phrases. Doodles. A young life accumulating in the margins while she learned to make music. She gave me the books because she thought someone else might use them. She didn’t know that she was giving me an archive.

Institutions preserve what they consider significant. Families preserve what they consider beloved. Most paper was never meant for historical purposes. Most of it was meant for a Tuesday. The letter needed to reach someone. The recipe needed to make dinner. The method book needed to survive practice. History came later when the ordinary object outlived the ordinary moment for which it was created. Someone made a decision- Keep that… Power can create an archive. So can love.

Movement IV. Gavotte - Paper Dreams

Elliott Pinkney knew he was making an archive. During the 1970s, Pinkney’s murals turned schools, churches, arts centers, businesses, and neighborhood walls into surfaces for Black history, pride, labor, memory, and possibility. A wall can be monumental, public, and impossible to tuck into a drawer. It can insist on being encountered by people who never meant to enter a gallery.

But walls are vulnerable. They weather. Buildings change. Paint disappears. Pinkney made paper answer for the walls.

With support from the California Arts Council, he documented the Compton Mural Project in Murals in Compton, a booklet he designed and printed with a map, poetry and photographs by Willie Ford, Jr.

Watch what happens. A wall becomes an image. The Image becomes a photograph. The photograph enters a booklet. The booklet crosses time. What had been affixed to architecture becomes portable. What belongs to one street can travel to another. The work changes material in order to survive.

The mural could disappear. The paper could remember the wall. That act places Pinkney beside the family archivist… And somewhere different. The person labelling a photograph may preserve almost accidentally. My student did not intend her method book to become testimony about adolescence, practice, or the relationship between music and daily life. Pinkney’s book is deliberate. Look here. Remember this. This happened on these walls in this community among these people.

Paper is not merely what remains after history, but a way to carry history forward. Paper can do more than remember. Before the poem, there is paper. Before the score, there is paper. Before the drawing, the novel, the play, the protest sign there is the blank page. Nothing has happened yet. That makes the blank page different from the ledger, census, certificate, map, photograph, or method book. Those pages look backward.

In 1975, Pinkney made King, a color screen-print on cream wove paper. Six chained Black Male figures occupy the composition above Martin Luther King, Jr. Black, red and green hold bondage and liberation on the same sheet. That placement matters.

History has not been edited into a simple ascent from captivity to freedom. The chained bodies remain visible. King does not erase them. Liberation does not require amnesia. Instead, different historical times are made simultaneous.

The page lets memory confront aspiration without either surrendering. This is something that art can do that a census cannot. A census must classify, a ledger must value and a map must divide. Art can allow contradiction to remain unresolved. Bondage and liberation… memory and aspiration… grief and possibility… what happened and what might yet happen. All of these can occupy the same page.

I think again of the Shipp deed. Black bodies entering the composition according to commerce: named, grouped, transferred. The arrangement belongs to the people conducting the transaction.

Pinkney also places Black bodies together on paper, but the authority has reversed. Here, a Black artist determines the composition; he chooses the figures, their relationship, the history they carry, and the future can point toward. The surface is still paper. The hand has changed.

For generations, much of the paper surrounding Black life was authored from outside it. Someone else wrote the category, assessed the value, drew the boundary… described the body.

The relationship changes when the hand holding the pen belongs to the person who has previously been described. The subject becomes author. The documented becomes documentarian. The page is no longer merely receiving Black life as information. It receives:

Black Thought…

Black interpretation…

Black Imagination…

Black intellectual curiosity…

The artist selects what enters the frame. The poet determines where the line breaks. The composer decides when sound begins and when silence interrupts it. The Filmmaker determines what the camera sees. Form is decision. That matters when representation has often belonged to someone else.

To create is to say:

I will decide what deserves attention.

I will decide what occupies the center.

I will decide what remains outside the frame.

Make something.

Then someone must preserve it. Here the collector enters the paper trail. Collecting can become mere possession; history has taught us to distrust ownership. Stewardship asks a different question- What does it mean to hold something knowing that its life should extend beyond your possession of it?

Pinkney’s booklet preserves walls. A family preserves photographs. A teacher keeps a student’s marked up method book. A collector can become one more person responsible for carrying an object across part of its journey through time. The object changes hands; as does the responsibility. Every act of preservation contains an assumption about the future- someone who has not yet arrived will need this. That assumption is a form of faith. The blank page remembers that faith; and once the first mark is made, the future has already begun.

Untitled, Cream Woven Paper, Elliott Pinkney Collection (Date Unknown)

Movement V. Polonaise - Paper Testifies

The paper has survived. Now, someone has to look. A document can endure for centuries, but survival is not testimony. Testimony requires a listener. Someone must open the box… turn the photograph over… read the deed… study the map… perform the score… stand before the artwork… Look. Looking carries responsibility. We can make the dead say things they never said. We can turn uncertainty into certainty because certainty makes a cleaner story. We can mistake a surviving fragment for an entire life. Sometimes, the most truthful sentence an archive permits is

We do not know.

We do not know whether the unnamed thirty-three-year-old recorded beneath Bartlett Shipp’s name was Wesley. We do not know whether Winnie and Winneford Brown are the same woman. I do not know whether my former student still plays flute or not.

The missing pieces testify as well. Yet documents testify beyond their makers intentions. The deed intended to record property. We read a family. The slave schedule intended to count. We see the violence of unnamed people placed beneath named owners. Joseph’s certificate intended to establish his legal status. We see a society in which a free Black man could need paper to substantiate freedom. Pinkney’s booklet documented murals. Now, it also preserves traces of walls the present may no longer be able to see. Power leaves paper. Evidence remains. Love leaves paper too. Inheritance remains. Art leaves possibility.

The archive of the future is already being made. Someone is deciding whether to keep the photographs after the parent dies, someone is holding on to a funeral program that seems too ordinary to matter. Someone has an old recording full of voices whose names were never written down. Someone knows which woman is standing on the edge of the photograph and assumes everyone else knows too. Someone owns a piece of art and knows the artist’s story only because the seller told them. Someone has the family Bible. Someone still remembers… For now.

The danger is rarely that we intend to erase a life. More often, we assume there will be time to ask. There may not be.

Write the name on the back. Ask who is in the picture. Record the story. Document the work. Keep the program. Not because every scrap of paper is sacred, but because significance sometimes appears only after the person who could explain it is gone.

Show me your papers.

Keep that.

Make something.

Look.

We entered as viewers. We leave as witnesses. Witnesses inherit a question: What are we responsible for preserving now?

Coda - The Witness remains

Paper is fragile. We knew that before we began. Water can destroy it. Fire can consume it. Sunlight can fade its ink. Fold it enough times along the same crease and eventually it will surrender.

Human Beings are fragile too. Maybe that’s why we have entrusted so much of ourselves to something that can so easily disappear.

Somewhere tonight, a piece of paper rests inside a box. Maybe it bears a name. Perhaps only a number. It’s possible that someone has written in the margin. Maybe it contains a song that has not been played in fifty years. The hand that touched it may be gone. The voice may be gone. Still, the paper remains.

It cannot restore the person. It was never large enough to contain one. It cannot give us the laugh that the census forgot, the love the ledger could not value, the fear the certificate could not describe, or the sound that disappeared when the final note stopped vibrating in the room.

But sometimes it gives us a name. Sometimes a mark in the margin. Sometimes enough evidence to know that someone stood here before us and refused, however quietly, to disappear.

Perhaps that is all a witness can do.

Remain…

Wait…

Testify… when someone is finally willing to listen. Somewhere, another hand reaches into the box.

The paper unfolds.

A name is spoken.

The witness remains.

Steven F. McClain is a multi-hyphenated creative artist. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to Chicago to pursue his vocations of acting, writing and directing for film and television. Currently, he is a music educator within the Chicagoland area.
www.sfmcoaching.com
@sfm_music_coaching

© 2026 Steven F. McClain. Published by The LVMB Collective, from the Elliott Pinkney Collection. Image reproduction by permission only. Essay: No reproduction, republication, or distribution without the author’s and publisher’s prior written permission. For research, image licensing, and editorial inquiries, please contact.