Nunn and Company

E.F. Nunn & Co.

From the Shuqualak Series

 9 x 12in Oil On Canvas 

This painting sits at the heart of my family's story. E.F. Nunn & Co. was a real mercantile in Shuqualak, Mississippi — the building, facing the railroad tracks, was raised around 1870 as the plantation commissary before it became a grocery and dry goods store. By the time my maternal ancestors would have walked through its doors, it operated under the name of Major E.F. Nunn, who'd settled in the area in 1835, and the business he built stayed in operation well into the mid-twentieth century — long enough to have shaped generations of the families who depended on it, mine included.

I painted this on a Saturday — the day sharecropping families traditionally made their trip into town. For my great-grandmothers and the generations before them, a stop at a store like Nunn & Co. wasn't a simple errand. It was where debt lived. Sharecroppers were often locked into high-interest credit at stores exactly like this one, buying what they needed against a harvest that hadn't come in yet — a cycle that kept families tied to the land and to the ledger long after the work was done. I imagine my own people standing in that same dust, under that same sign, doing the math in their heads before they walked in.

The storm gathering overhead isn't incidental — it's the weight of that history pressing down. And the magnolias breaking into the frame are mine: a soft, living thing pushing up against all that brick and debt, the same way my family kept moving, kept growing, long after they left Shuqualak behind.