Foxfire Ranch’s new podcast shares stories from Black-owned land in North Mississippi
by Noreen Ocampo
photographs by Megan Wolfe
Celebrating one month since its April launch to the public, We Are the Promised Land is a multimedia altar to Black land legacies in the Mississippi Hill Country.
This project is born of the collaboration and friendship between free feral—musician, writer, and alum of the University of Mississippi’s Southern Studies MA program—and Annette Hollowell—steward and manager of Foxfire Ranch, a Black-owned music and event venue in Waterford.
At the heart of this rich and impressively multimedia collaboration is the We Are the Promised Land podcast, which feral and Hollowell began in 2018. In the podcast, they delve into the histories of the Hollowell family, inviting listeners to walk with them along the eighty acres of land upon which Foxfire Ranch now operates. Many memories of Black land loss exist in Mississippi, but We Are the Promised Land offers another story. The podcast focuses instead on how the Hollowell family has kept their land for over a century, reaching back to the ancestors who made this reality possible and thinking forward to the next hundred years.
What listeners will notice from the very first moments spent with this podcast, I think, is the care of its making. From immersive b-roll that gently delivers you outside, to the precise poetry of feral’s storytelling, to the music and intricate sound design, We Are the Promised Land dances past the boundaries I previously associated with the podcast form. “Audio storytelling has this potential to be transportive without taking your attention away from the physical surroundings that you’re in,” explains feral, who also hosts the podcast. “It gets inscribed on your landscape.”
In addition to the podcast, this project includes poetry as well as visual offerings of photography and video. “I felt that we needed to see the Hollowells; we needed to see the land,” feral says. As a multimedia altar, We Are the Promised Land is inventive with the ways in which it unravels the themes of inheritance, lineage, and community across mediums—but it would be an oversight to say that this altar merely thinks outside the box. Rather, We Are the Promised Land builds deliberately on feral and Hollowell’s shared investment in using their altar practices to explore and cultivate connections with their ancestors.
Back in 2018, Hollowell and feral began to notice how others in their community were creating relationships with ancestors, too. “I don’t think it really matters what faith tradition you come from,” Hollowell says. “You start talking to an elder long enough, and you’re like, ‘Oh, the photos on my grandmother’s wall with all of these ancestors—that’s an altar.’” And so the questions became: “How do we already honor our ancestors? How do we already hold space to be still, to listen, to hear a voice that’s not our own, to be tapped in?”
We Are the Promised Land represents a spirit of collaboration that expands beyond feral, Hollowell, and the family members they bring into the fold. Looking to their networks, feral and Hollowell built a multitalented team that spans across disciplines: cultural worker Alleyha Dannett, historian Rhondalyn Peairs, photographers Jasmine B. Johnson and Jai Williams, sound designers muthi reed and Cedric Wilson, portrait artists Vitus Shell and Brad Bernard, and more. “We Are the Promised Land podcast started off with me and free,” Hollowell shares, “but then it was great to be able to tap Lightnin Malcolm, and Yella P and Cameron Kimbrough from Memphisippi Sounds, and be like, ‘Can you help us with some scoring? Can you lend us some tracks?’”
As for the secret to sustaining a creative project long-term, Hollowell cites their team’s commitment to working and being together in ways that maintain space for each other’s well-being, for compassion and genuine understanding. This approach echoes Foxfire Ranch’s dedication to radical hospitality. “I’m clear that this continues, and is sustained, because of a network of collaborators and friends and family and people that really f*ck with us,” Hollowell states.
We Are the Promised Land arrives with a reminder of the powerful work of understanding and sharing our stories, of storytelling’s capacity to clear our eyes and attune our ears. “I’m someone who solidly believes that our stories change the world,” Hollowell explains. “If we don’t tell our stories, then people assume so many things about the places that we’re from…places where only certain narratives get lifted up. And so we have to complicate that by being like, ‘And this, and this, and this.’” While We Are the Promised Land affirms that true understanding takes time, what lush ground it gives us to walk upon and listen to.
“I think our stories have a way of humanizing folks that get us past the politics of the moment, get us past these positions that people can really dig their heels in around, ‘cause you can’t tell somebody their story’s not their story,” says Hollowell. “Once you start to hear someone’s story, you develop some level of understanding or compassion… If you can listen, and you can sit, and you can be curious, then maybe we can go to a deeper level.”
The We Are the Promised Land team has currently released three of their six full-length podcast episodes, including Episode 0: The Voice, the Void; Episode 1: The Record; and Episode 2: Parent Material. New episodes are set to release during new and full moons and are available on all major podcast platforms. To experience the altar, enjoy audio extras, meet the team, and more, visit: www.wearethepromisedland.net/home.
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