9/11 - The Day After

The other night after writing late, I stopped out on my deck to watch the stars go by. It was a quiet night and the faraway sounds slowly vanished and faded away. Then I heard the strangest sound. It was the sound of silence. A waning gibbous moon had climbed up through the white oaks and maples that surround our house and and was casting dark leafy shadows upon the moon-bright deck. I was reminded of the old nights, long ago, back when I was a kid and my home town, Vicksburg, would close down at 9 p.m. and silence would cover the city. Up here in the mountains that night, the silence came from the absence of man-made noises. There was still the sound of cicadas out in the dark trees, frogs were glumping away, and a cricket seemed to have a lot of questions. From out over a farmer's field came the cry of a nightbird, a killdeer; a sound normally heard on the prairies, but it seemed at home then under that moon. There came back old feelings of days so far away that people today do not believe them. My kids and grandchildren laugh when I tell them we had to "kill time" back then, or sit and think over the day, or enjoy the smell of the evening air. What a rare moment that late night was, last Sunday night. What I could not possibly know at that time was that two days later, I would walk out on that same deck at 10:30 on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, after turning off my TV set. Then, it was even quieter on that normally work-a-day morning. Total silence lay across the land. Outside of New York City and Washington, D.C. people sat speechless, almost not breathing in front of their TV and the world outside was deathly quiet.

The next morning I photographed a subdued city. It was a very special opportunity to make pictures of a town on such a day. How many days have we seen take such a turn of history? Maybe four, in my lifetime, Pearl Harbor, JFK's death,the moon landing, and this. The pictures I framed up seemed to have an erie glow about them, like images made after a great battle. This was Franklin on the first day of the new world. Sugartown was closed, it had a big "open" sign on it but it was closed, an American flag with a big black bow at its top had been spread across the front. There were a lot of tourists in town. Everybody looked at each other, staring into each other's eyes with half parted lips, everybody seemed to want to say something but couldn't find any words. It was a sad, slow day with people moving around slowly and doing things mechanically. It seemed as if their souls and minds had gone off somewhere else and their bodies had been left in charge, and they didn't know what to do.

© John Womack, 2001. All Rights Reserved.