Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones.

Start, Louisiana

just the sort of paper-thin night

sunset in Delhi, La.

all I learned was that gravity can be painful

Dequante McDowell talks about changes on Hell Street from Cabin 7 on Vimeo.

Nine hundred is small enough to sense a shift in population. When someone new touches down, the people of Delhi notice.

When we first got out of the car four years ago, two guys immediately pulled over. Rob and Talkhead wanted to know who we were.

The next year, I walked into a convenience center at the edge of town. A guy slid over just before the door closed.

"Where you from?"

"Oh, my whole family is from here," I said, chipper and trying to belong.

"No," he said, looking down at my boots, distressed by design, not work. "Where are you from?"

"Well, my mom grew up here. I grew up in West Monroe."

He shook his head.

"I live in Oregon," I finally said.

We've been stopped by cops twice -- once because they didn't recognize us and once because they remembered us from the year before.

And best of all, we've been stopped by people with stories to tell. Pam Sykes pulled her jeep over, mid-railroad tracks, to ask what we were doing in town. She hasn't been able to shake us since. And Dequante McDowell, the 19-year-old in today's video, flagged us down last April as we cruised Chatham Street.

Chatham isn't Hell Street anymore, he told us. It's What the Hell Street.

back down, down to the downtown, down to the lockdown

Aubree and I are headed back to Louisiana in a few weeks, so I'm putting together a few vignettes to hype up the trip. Here's one from last April. Chris, Erin and I met Archie Lee Harrell at his church on a rainy afternoon. Chris was still brainstorming score ideas, and he sat down and played one of his ideas.

Diary of a Misfit teaser: Chris Johnson works on developing the score from Cabin 7 on Vimeo.

your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescent smear

This is not how to start a fire with sticks

sugared and stretched and dazed on the unmown lawn

Delhi, La.

somewhere down the street before the light / turns green

Chatham Street in Delhi, LA

and it wasn't because I knew you or coveted your leathers

Epps, La.

Nothing moved fast, even the daylight was slow to fade

My cousin Chris is working on a score for the documentary. We spent the last week or so at a cabin in Delhi on the Poverty Point Reservoir.

Un de ces quatre, nous tomberons ensemble

On the way to Delhi, La. to work on our documentary, we stopped in Gibsland. Boots Hinton was five months old when his dad shot and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow a few miles away. Hinton's dad was a Dallas sheriff's deputy then. The youngest in the posse of deputies who chased the bank robbers.

Hinton lived his whole life in Texas until he retired seven years ago. Then he relocated to Gibsland, opened the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum and started hunting FBI files. He was playing solitaire in a room full of cigarette smoke when we met him.

Hell Street

Hell Street from Amorphous Films on Vimeo.

The street Roy Hudgins grew up on is called Chatham Street. But Delhi residents know it by another name. Check out this short video vignette featuring Delhi characters for a glimpse at Hell Street.

"A lot of unpleasant things went on up there," the late town historian Dorothy Bradley told us in 2010. "Rowdy. I don't mean they killed anybody. Well, maybe they did."

Diary of a Misfit

Who was Roy Hudgins? from Amorphous Films on Vimeo.

Nearly 10 years ago, I sat across a tiny wooden table from my grandmother. My grandmother fumbled with a pack of Virginia Slims. I touched my hand to my hair, which I had had cut into a close crop the week before. I had just graduated high school. We were not close.

"When I was a little girl, I lived across the street from a woman who dressed like a man," she said suddenly. "Her name was Roy."

Any TV show or book or history lesson would tell you Louisiana in the mid-1900s was not the kind of place where you would have wanted to be a woman living your life as a man. Even now, people there have a word for people like that: Hesheit. If you slur it just right, the phrase sounds like heshit, which is what people called the local cross-dresser in Monroe, Louisiana, where I went to junior high school. There, gender roles are specific: Women wear make-up and dresses, do womanly things. Men are masculine, given to hunting and sports-watching. If you are something in-between, people make fun of you. A heshit, they say, is not something God intended.

Delhi, just thirty miles east of Monroe, isn't much different. That's where my grandmother Louise grew up. But my grandma never felt that way. In 1952, Louise already knew something was different about Roy. He wasn't shaped like other males. His voice was a little higher.

But Louise was only 12 then. She knew nothing of the world. And when she first met Roy, what struck her was not his shape or his voice, but the banjo he held in his hand.

That day at the table, my grandma told me the first details in a story that I've spent a decade trying to unravel. At times, I've thought I'd never learn any real truths about Roy's life. But I'm closer.

Aubree Bernier-Clarke and I launched a Kickstarter today. We're hoping to raise $10,000 so we can go to Louisiana and Arkansas several times in the next year to finish the movie.

The video above is the first trailer we have released. Filmmaker Aaron Wong and musician Christopher Johnson also contributed.

If you feel like donating to the Kickstarter, here's the link: Diary of a Misfit: The Roy Hudgins Documentary Project.

Uptown, downtown, a thousand miles between us

The night before we left, we wound up going over to Freddy Joe McVay's house. He is the youngest of the McVays -- a clan of five kids who lived across the street and one house down from Roy. Freddy talked to us about watching people fight in the street (Chatham was nicknamed Hell Street back then) and about learning how to mow yards under Roy's tutelage. He also showed us his shoebox full of pictures.

After we interviewed him then packed all our gear up, I went back in to say goodbye. I noticed a pair of photos on the wall -- he and his wife, naked except for a Confederate flag wrapped around them. They were posed in an old washtub. A sign -- "still hitched" -- hung off the side.

"These are some racy photos y'all have up!" I said. Without a lick of embarrassment, he said, "Oh, we took those up in Arkansas!"

On my way to you, old county, hoping nothing's changed

Talking to Sean Purvis in front of his boyhood home really reminded me why I want to make this documentary. He talked to us about watching the older generations drink coffee and debate the Bible. He told me about the time Roy sold a song to the Judds but then couldn't find anyone to help him record it. Sean talked about Roy with such dumbstruck awe --- "Her poems were like something Edgar Allen Poe or Shakespeare did, and I was just blown away," he told me --- that I left our interview re-energized to tell this story. Sean talked about a Delhi that no longer exists. It's a town he worries no one will remember because no one has written it down, collected the memories. He was just a boy when Roy was already in his 60s. The people who really knew Roy have mostly passed.

Sean did remember one person who was a contemporary of Roy's. Miss Irby is at the nursing home still, he told me, so Aubree and I headed over there to meet her. She was a Jehovah's Witness who used to get into debates with the devoutly Christian Roy. By the time we met Miss Irby, though, she could barely form full sentences, let alone whole paragraphs. She couldn't stop touching me. She pet each one of my fingers, telling me how beautiful each one was. Then she kissed my hand and my neck before rubbing a snotty tissue over my hands. I kept thinking she was having a moment of clarity when I asked her about Roy. "He's up there, and ..." she'd say before trailing off. If she remembered Roy, she couldn't tell me. But when I stood to leave, she clung to me in the most sincere and sweet hug. Her smile was one of the widest I've seen.

Sometimes I feel like all the things I want to know about Roy are trapped -- in unfindable documents or in brains I can no longer access. But meeting people like Sean, who was so honest and simple in his love of the town that reared him, pushes me to keep searching.

rock me in the cradle in them old cotton fields back home

On Monday morning, we met Archie Lee Harrell, a man about my grandma's age who also grew up in a poor, sharecropping family. He owns a few acres behind his house now. He showed (and shared with) us the most delicious satsumas, kumquats, peppers, persimmons and pecans that he grew back there. He is a humble man, raised with four other kids by a single mother, and he remembers watching Roy sleep on a bag of cotton in the fields. All the sharecropper's kids did that, Archie said.

When Archie dies, he wants to be buried in his khakis. It's who he was, what he wore nearly every day of his life. People should be able to makes those kinds of choices for themselves, he told us, which is why he got into it with a preacher who told Roy to wear a dress. Roy left the church, and judging by the look in Archie's eyes when he told us the story, Archie never forgave the preacher.

We'll take the highway; I'll see you in between

I'm waiting in Little Rock, Arkansas, now to head home after a few whirlwind days in Delhi. I'll post later about the trip, the documentary and all the funny things my grandma said to me. But for now, I'll just share this moment that Aubree captured just before we hit the road this morning. My grandma let me video her making biscuits. Then we sat at her tiny table and talked about what I've learned over the past two years. More soon ---

I've been walking in the same way as I did

This time next week, I'll be in Delhi, La., working on my documentary, "Roy." My cousin Chris is joining the crew this go-around to work sound and to get some ideas for scoring the trailer (and if I have my way, the whole movie!). I started officially shooting for this two years ago over Christmas break. The movie is starting to take shape, though we still have a lot of unanswered questions. Look for a trailer and kickstarter page to go live after we return. In the meantime, follow our film page on Facebook -- http://www.facebook.com/amorphousfilms -- to see updates from the road.

Siren song of the South

About a month ago, I went down to Delhi, Louisiana, with my fellow filmmakers from Amorphous Films to work on my documentary. This trip was so much more productive than our trip last year. We're planning to head back down in September. Here are a few shots from interviews inside the Delhi Church of Christ and also on Hell Street, where my grandma grew up.










To see all the photos so far from the documentary, check out my Flickr album.

Online

I'm in Louisiana, working on the documentary about Roy Hudgins. We've set up a Facebook for the film. Please like it: Amorphous Films for updates, photos, etc.