Tom Hendrix is 82 years old and for the last 30 years or so he has been building a wall.  A dry stone wall we would call it.

Here is a section of the wall.  Tom started building this wall to honour his Great Great Gradmother a Yuchi woman named Te-lah-nay, or Woman with the Dancing Eyes.  She was one of several thousand Yuchi forcibly transported from their ancestral lands in northern Alabama across to Oklahoma.  But Te-lah-nay found the rivers in Oklahoma did not sing to her like the Tennessee River; so she walked back.  I've bought Tom's book about the journey but not yet had time to look at it in depth. 

The walls, there are actually two of them, are an extraordinary achievement.  The section above, representing the journey of her forcible removal, is the shorter of the two.  The driveway to his house divides the two walls.  The return journey is much longer and snakier.  Well she had to hide out a lot and avoid the white folk, Tom told me, so its a much longer journey.

Every stone was collected by Tom in one of, I think he said four, pick-ups he has owned.   Then moved in one of half a dozen wheelbarrows, then placed by hand.  I cannot remember the tonnage of stone the man has shifted over the years but it is an impressive figure.

It is now considered one of the top 10 pieces of landscape art in the USA.  Not that Tom conceived it as a work of art, it just became one.  He wanted to make a memorial and a rememberance; as his book is titled, 'If The Legends Fade'... 



Here is a section from the return journey wall.  These 'faces' are uncarved, just natural stones Tom has found.  They are placed here facing west to ward off evil.  Bad things come from the west, like tornadoes, Tom tells me.



He learnt the story of Teh-lay-nay from his Grandmother but also a contemporary of Teh-Lah-Nay, a Preacher and Teacher, was so impressed by her journey that he sat down with her, over a period of a couple of years, and wrote an account.

So we have both an oral tradition and contemporay documentation.

And a wall.

There are no signs for it.  Only the word of other people will tell you about it.  In my case I happened to stop off at the Wayne County Welcome Centre, needing a coffee break as I travelled the Natchez Trace Parkway.  More, perhaps about that road later.  At the Welcome Centre they suggested I visit the wall if I had the time.

I did and I am grateful.  I knew buying a wooden flute was something I needed to do, back in Washington DC, after I left mine behind in the UK.  Here it just felt right and natural to play within the circles of the wall; to the birds and the trees and the rivers.

Its a sunny Alabama morning, the washing I did yesterday late afternoon is just about dry.  So its off on the road again.  Via a quick visit to the W.C. Handy museum.  He was born here in Florence.  WC is considered one of, if not the, Father of the Blues.