{Photograph} by Emmeline Clein.
Apart from Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s greatest export. Throughout most of Louisiana, this city is extra well-known for the water than the girl. “Why are you going to the water bottle city?” the person sitting subsequent to me on the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Road.
I’m consuming at an oyster counter close to my grandfather’s former workplace. Not his favourite, the Black Pearl, the place he used to eat a dozen each day on his lunch breaks, grading each on a scale of 1–10 in his pocket book. He died initially of spring this 12 months, smack in the course of Carnival, the ambulance caught in parade site visitors for an hour. After I inform the person subsequent to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her home, he says he noticed her carry out earlier than she turned Britney Spears, when she was nonetheless Britney from Kentwood, at a live performance known as Louisiana Jukebox. She was there together with her mom, answering viewers questions after the present. A childhood good friend of my mom’s was there, too, and had by the way emailed me about it the evening earlier than. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so younger, however her “track was so sexual, and in particular person, she regarded just like the woman subsequent door who each man needs to devirginize.”
The following morning, the drive by means of St. John the Baptist Parish is generally swamp. Highways on thick stilts by means of the cypress glens; the lengthy, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two males fishing, smoking, laughing. When you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re totally on dry land, which implies Bible billboards and fast-food spots.
On the off-ramp into city, I see the water tower emblazoned with the Kentwood brand, acquainted from plastic bottles. I drive down the city’s predominant road, previous buildings with drooping awnings and wilting, cantilevered roofs, an deserted white brick construction that reads “Kentwood Glass” in light, sky-blue letters and a boarded-up bar known as Sip Some Daiquiris. I cease at a pink mild subsequent to This & That Pawn Store, throughout from a café known as The Cafe, which does seem like an correct moniker. It’s the one one on the town. I knew Kentwood can be small—the cottage trade of Britney documentaries all describe it as a sleepy city, and a denizen of a Britney message board I’ve browsed periodically for years returned from their very own journey right here solely to submit that the realm had a “southern gothic vibe” and be aware, appalled, that “there’s NO WALMART, MCDONALDS, or HOSPITALS.” A visiting reporter as soon as noticed that Britney was compelled to “journey an hour to buy at her nearest Abercrombie and Fitch.” I pull right into a spot on the Sonic for sustenance and Weight loss program Coke. Britney was repeatedly adopted right here and photographed and the ensuing photographs posted to gossip websites. I bear in mind scrolling the zoomed-in pictures of Britney and her sister fingering fries, avoiding the digital camera’s eye. Britney had one hand on the wheel, the opposite headed for her mouth. Thanksgiving 2010.
Keep in mind Britney begging us for an indication? She requested us to hit her in the identical track, and we would have taken her too actually. I ponder who she was serenading: God, an ex, or us, her future followers, styling ourselves saviors? When directing a Rolling Stone reporter to their dwelling in Kentwood in 1999, Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, informed him to “flip proper while you move the Burning Bush.” A neighbor had lit a hedge on hearth of their yard. On the time, Britney was sleeping in her mother and father’ mattress as a result of an ardent fan had not too long ago climbed by means of her bed room window. After her album went platinum, Britney went to the financial institution and took out $10,000 in $100 payments. At Christmastime, she drove down the city’s predominant drag, rolling the window down and handing out a whole bunch to everybody she noticed. Messy messiah or prodigal daughter? Buying and selling dwelling’s plastic water bottles for the pop of dom in a darkish membership, coming dwelling to carry out monetary miracles.
Burning bushes, Britney-flooded tabloids, baptism by Blackout album: all these indicators can really feel a bit heavy-handed right here within the bayou, the place I drive by a home on stilts sitting smack in the course of a lake, its roof painted yellow and emblazoned with the phrases JESUS HEALS THE HEARTBROKEN in blood-red letters. It’s arduous to carry on to rationality on a mean day, and that is the primary time I’ve been to Louisiana for something apart from a funeral or a marriage in months. Different messages I’ve acquired on this journey: JESUS HAS THE ANSWER, BAD BOYS MOW, TRUST YOUR GUT, FAUX PAS REPAIR HERE, APOCALYPSE WEAPONS AVAILABLE, IN JOY YOURSELF. I’ll—I’m on my option to a shrine.
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{Photograph} by Emmeline Clein.
On a residential road a number of blocks from The Cafe, the blinds are drawn on a one-story red-brick and yellow-wood dwelling, however Britney seduces from the window, staring wide-eyed from a poster pressed towards the glass. An indication on the door to the Kentwood Historic and Cultural Museum tells me to ring the bell, so I do. (There’s some confusion as a result of Britney is the centerpiece of what’s formally termed the Kentwood Historic and Cultural Museum. Therefore one irate Google evaluation: “I anticipated an exhibition of spears and arrowheads from early indigenous tribes. Think about my shock to journey 4000 kms and uncover this museum is a few feminine widespread music artist!!! Oh effectively … i purchased a lock of blonde hair as an alternative.”) A brunette girl in a hot-pink polo shirt solutions the door and asks me if I’m right here to see Britney.
The tour takes about twenty minutes and begins with Britney’s wings. The tour information, Britney historian, and museum proprietor is known as Fay, and he or she tells me these are the wings Britney wore onstage through the Femme Fatale tour in 2011, donated to the museum by her mother and father. They appear to be they have to be a minimum of six toes tall, a white feathered mass mounted on the bubblegum-pink partitions, pocked with cubic zirconia that catches the sunshine. Britney could be each femme fatale and angel, however traces of her literal physique stay right here on her wings. They’ve gone beige on the bridge, the place her again as soon as sweat underneath spotlights evening after evening. The following 4 rooms are stuffed with Britney’s belongings, Britney pictures and fan-made illustrations, tour gear, framed journal covers and platinum document awards and household portraits, restricted version Britney soda cans and Barbie dolls, life-size paperboard Britneys, native newspaper clippings, an indication that when stood on the sting of city saying Kentwood because the Residence of Britney Spears, and congratulatory notes from Kentwood officers. The ephemera appears infinite. As she recites the litany of Britney lore she’s been retelling for fourteen years, Fay’s voice bends towards boredom, however she swerves into tenderness at sure anecdotes. She tells tales of followers who arrive at her door like pilgrims, armed with indulgences, and current her with their taped-together poster boards and glitter-drenched collages, love-lined dioramas.
{Photograph} by Emmeline Clein.
Fay tells me that this museum is a collaboration between Britney’s household and her followers and is stuffed with donations from her mother and father and the devotees who go to, bearing items, in addition to those who can’t make it to Louisiana and mail of their choices. The museum’s centerpiece is a room inside a room, a glass wall defending it from the remainder of the home, from our sweaty fingertips and heady breath. It’s a reconstruction of Britney’s childhood bed room, the one immortalized in a 1999 David LaChapelle cowl shoot for Rolling Stone. It’s not a reproduction however a reconstruction, utilizing Britney’s unique belongings, all the way down to the uprooted carpeting from the room she spent her childhood in—all donated by her mother and father whereas she toured, rising up on the street. One of many pictures from the shoot is taped to the glass so her followers can encounter the uncanniness of the re-creation. I stare in at an angle, standing subsequent to a life-size cutout of the starlet with a milk mustache, posing for a Bought Milk? advert.
Within the picture taped to the glass, teenage Britney leans towards a white desk, showing ambushed by child dolls. They line the wall at her toes, sit above the desk hutch over her head, recline subsequent to her cocked hip. They put on Victorian clothes, beady black eyes aglow within the flash. Our adolescent idol is way much less lined up, in a white bra and boy shorts underwear, a shrunken cardigan open over her midriff, vivid white excessive heels on blue-gray carpet. The reporter referenced her “honeyed thighs” within the first sentence of this profile. She was seventeen, straddling adolescence, and wearing a schoolgirl uniform skirt. Her mother and father donated each merchandise of furnishings, stuffed animal, doll, and desk tchotchke within the {photograph} to the museum.
In her 2023 memoir The Girl in Me, Britney writes that these dolls within the {photograph}, now housed within the museum, have been her “prized possessions” as a woman. She remembers coming dwelling from a tour to seek out her child dolls kidnapped: “After I noticed the empty cabinets, I felt an amazing unhappiness.” She doesn’t point out the museum in her guide, and I ponder if she is aware of that on this former funeral dwelling turned mausoleum of one other type, her looted childhood lives on.
Jamie, Spears’s father, isn’t the “meanie” he’s made out to be, Fay says, and he or she’s recognized the Spears household for years, used to make the bows Britney wore in her hair. In a 2008 MTV documentary I rewatched final evening, filmed through the early days of Britney’s conservatorship, Jamie stands in his kitchen in a white tank prime, cooking his daughter breakfast. “Making my child some cheese grits, Southern woman’s breakfast of champions,” he says, stirring. Within the subsequent scene, he’s speaking with two different middle-aged males, and everybody agrees that nobody can communicate to Britney with out going by means of certainly one of them first. Famously—now infamously—Jamie had, simply earlier than this documentary’s filming, compelled Britney into the conservatorship that was overturned in 2021. He took her belongings out of her bed room, very like he ripped Britney herself out of girlhood and into the new highlight, the place she was compelled to develop up quick underneath our gazes, after which snatched her off the stage and shoved her right into a hospital room lit fluorescent, locking her in a conservatorship for over a decade. Fay’s insistence on his innocence, his good intentions, grasp within the stagnant air between us (additionally the AC is damaged). Britney’s stuffed animals sit in a neat row. A snow-white bear wears a child blue NSYNC T-shirt. The porcelain dolls glare at me. Fay feedback that she wants to wash—there’s a useless bug on the rug.
{Photograph} by Emmeline Clein.
Flip neglected of Britney’s bed room, and atop a show case, a yearbook is open to a full-page portrait of Britney and a boy, respectively voted most lovely and most good-looking of their highschool class. Britney’s title is spelled improper—two ts. Close to certainly one of her signed posters, there are two official-looking paperwork, decked out with authorities seals. One is a Tangipahoa Parish Council Proclamation declaring July 10, 1999, Britney Spears Day. The opposite is a fake-seeming army doc deeming Britney a patriotic participant in one thing known as Operation Southern Watch—which, I be taught later when a well-informed good friend reads a draft of this and directs me to Wikipedia, was an “an air-centric army operation carried out by the US Division of Protection from Summer time 1992 to Spring 2003” over southern Iraq. The character of Britney’s participation stays unclear.
Within the subsequent room, which is painted virtually the identical shade of fuchsia as Fay’s shirt, we come to the contributions from followers. A full quarter of the room is taken up by a reproduction of the live performance stage from Britney’s HBO particular, handmade by a fan named Randy, all the way down to the sunshine fixtures and spinning central platform, with a Britney doll standing heart stage. Fay seems the overhead lights, and the stage glows pink; plasticine Britney smiles, haloed by tiny bulbs. A set of Britney calendars are taped to a room divider, which stands subsequent to a wall lined in live performance merch, laminated VIP tickets, and a collage of pictures of Britney onstage. Fay tells me a younger fan despatched all this in and that his mom known as after he wouldn’t inform Fay why he was sending in his prized possessions to inform her that her son was dying of an inoperable mind tumor.
On this mausoleum of Britney’s misplaced innocence, there’s additionally the indeniable detritus of affection. These cramped rooms are overwhelmingly, disorientingly tender, held along with tape and yellowed live performance tickets and easy, true care. Each time I attempt to fly I fall / With out my wings I really feel so small, Britney sings. However her wings are right here, they usually’re big. They match her completely.
Virtually tearful and attempting to be surreptitious about it, I crouch to the bottom to research a big framed poster, which is roofed in disposable digital camera pictures of Kentwood eating places’ marquee shows from the weeks main as much as Britney’s departure for Los Angeles to develop into a Mouseketeer at age eleven. At Kentwood Donut Store, which will need to have had solely two T’s readily available: CONGRA ULATIONS BRITNEY. The then-manager of Sonic stands subsequent to their signal, which reads BRITNEY SONIC’S FAVORITE MOUSEKETEER. At Buddy’s Seafood: BRITNEY SPEARS DISNEY OR BUST. Subsequent to it is a craft challenge Britney herself made, a framed collage of her family and friends, pictures with captions drawn in crazy, meticulous marker cursive. BFF.
Leaving, I drive ten minutes out of city and cease outdoors the gated property Britney has owned since 1999, the 12 months of Louisiana Jukebox, “… Child One Extra Time,” and her Rolling Stone debut, posed like certainly one of her child dolls in her childhood bed room. In that 2008 documentary, she’s filmed within the studio recording songs for the album Blackout. Singing into the mic, she wears a beaded choker together with her two sons’ names on both aspect of a pendant and accuses us: You desire a piece of me. There’s a second throughout this recording session when she appears to be like immediately into the digital camera and wonders why she didn’t transfer again to Louisiana after she had kids. In my idling rental automotive, questioning whether or not anybody is dwelling in that massive McMansion on the hill, I hope she does some day and finds the phrase carved into the wrought iron of these gates, the title she gave this place: Serenity.
Emmeline Clein‘s debut assortment of essays, Useless Weight, is forthcoming from Knopf in February. Her chapbook Poisonous was printed by Choo Choo Press in 2022.
