Shelter in a Literary Forest

Owólabi Aboyade

A Darker Wilderness
Edited by Erin Sharkey
Milkweed Editions 2023, 312 pages, $20 paper.

“This God who made the sun, who brings us light from above, who rouses the sea, and who makes the storm rumble will direct our hands, and give us help. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears. Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.” —Dutty Boukman, Haitian revolutionary and Voudon spiritual leader

ONE OF MY best friends is from Kalamazoo, a western Michigan city not far from the powerful Lake Michigan. The city of Kalamazoo boasts how it is a regional center of the pharmaceutical industry that has grown around biking, hiking, golfing, kayaking and other outdoor recreations. My buddy’s family enjoys at least one major group trip annually with uncles, cousins and family friends, often also hosting other smaller summer outings.

My buddy took me camping for the first time in my life when we were roommates in our twenties. I had a great time on our outing cooking over a dancing fire, getting sand in between my toes, bonding with the majestic Great Lake. I came back refreshed and asked my father a few weeks later, “Dad, how come you never took us camping?”

In response, my father turned my question on its head, “Why would I sleep on the ground for pretend when I had to do it for real?”

My father is from the Mississippi Delta, from a family that was employed as sharecroppers and domestics to benefit rich Southern whites. Growing up, he missed months of school at a time to work the fields alongside his parents and other community members to help bring money into the home, getting paid by the bag.

Just this year, I learned from my older sister that his father, my namesake, possessed an exquisite skill for helping folk escape the cotton plantation. This is my grandfather we are talking about, at the turn of the 20th century, not an Ancestor of the 1800s or 1700s.

Ever since he retired from the State of Michigan, my father has been an avid gardener in Detroit. He keeps a backyard garden. He also cultivates a lot the block over from his house, where I grew up. Even as age slows him down, and it is sometimes painful for him to bend and grasp to weed, he still takes care of fruit trees, grows hot peppers and makes his own hot sauce.

Black Nature Inheritance

From reading A Darker Wilderness, a rich and evocative anthology edited by Erin Sharkey, I came to realize that these are some of the Black Nature stories that I’ve inherited. Our nature stories are deeper, richer stories of surviving and navigating this society of whiteness that simultaneously enjoy a recreational connection to nature while building a culture based upon possessing, subordinating, and exploiting.

This collection of essays explores Black relationships to the natural world. For many white and privileged people, nature is a place to go and escape the pressures of capitalistic work. For us, experiences with nature are usually still mediated by the dominance of the United States of America.

Just because we don’t have the same relationship to recreation and land ownership doesn’t mean that we don’t have relationships to nature that are restorative, ecstatic and also communal. Don’t we all know of the groundskeepers who know and love the land better than the American family who only owns it on paper?

Our nature stories are deeper, richer stories of surviving and navigating a society of whiteness that can simultaneously enjoy a recreational connection to nature while enjoying the spoils of a culture based upon possessing, subordinating, and exploiting.

I used to somewhat regularly attend an annual music festival held on a family farm in northern Michigan. Hundreds of people would gather, camp, drink, smoke, dance and frolic to amazing independent music.

Families settling in. A village of volunteers collaborating and communicating. Restaurants would offer tasty treats and dozens of Michigan artisans and entrepreneurs would set up tents to vend their handmade goods.

Attending this festival at least five or six times, I recognized the privilege of land ownership. In Detroit, most of our outdoor gatherings were held on public land, where we were under the observant jurisdiction of local and state police. It is rare for us to have the freedom to stretch out and do what the hell we want to do the way festival goers did here on so-called privately owned land.

I had a good time there, but often, in the back of my mind, felt “surrounded” by white people. It was difficult, perhaps impossible, for me to relax fully in this outdoor setting. I’d count on my hands the number of people of color I’d see in a weekend.

Once I had to run 50 yards and shout away a group of white boys who were “squaring up” on my 10-year-old son while they were off playing together. Out here on this beautiful farmland, in the midst of nature and amazing music, I still had to “keep my head on swivel” attuned to possible dangers and vulnerabilities to my loved ones. This, too, is my Nature story.

Observing with Care

A Darker Wilderness reminds us that we have always nurtured a great capacity to seek nature. These American limitations never stop us completely. In the Introduction, Sharkey describes teaching nature writing inside a Minnesota prison:

“The writers moved through their days on a schedule imposed by a crackling voice over a loudspeaker, but they also watched birds gliding freely past the windows; industrious yellowjackets throwing their bodies against the glass; and a flock of mallards who navigated puddles in the yard, ignoring the guards watching from their towers.”

Sharkey’s “An Urban Farmer’s Almanac” is my favorite essay in the anthology. It is a beautifully detailed story of observation of an east coast urban farm. She reflects on Benjamin Banneker’s 1795 almanac, rich with astronomical observations and conclusions that would be useful to farmers and anyone whose life was dependent upon the rhythms of natural cycles.

Sharkey admits that today’s urban farmer often learns more about the sky from an app than from direct observation. Still, today’s urban farmer must read the vibes, study the patterns of her people as attentively as she studies the weather and the plants growing in her care:

“A Doritos bag tumbleweed rolls, end over end. The shiny flag holds tight a wooden paint stir stick that marks where the Black Krim heirloom tomatoes end and the black cherry heirlooms begin. Wrapped around the row marker is a weave, ratty black hair ripped violently in a tussle, the woman’s face Vaselined and her earrings handed to a friend. The catalpa tree hurls her long spear-shaped seedpods toward the warm earth, ambitious and ill-prepared for childbirth. Most of her babies won’t live.”

Defiance in the Rain

In “An Aspect of Freedom,” Ama Codjoe reflects on a photograph found in the archives of the Southern Courier captioned “Young woman standing in the rain during a civil rights demonstration in Greensboro, Alabama.”

In the 1965 photo, a teenager braves the rain and a horde of police throwing noxious gas grenades into the St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Young people had mobilized that day to protest the murder of four little girls at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church by white supremacists with 15 sticks of dynamite.

These protesting kids fled inside the AME Church after the police began spraying them with chemicals to disperse them. The girl in the picture has left the relative safety of the church, in the photo her face covered by rain; outside the photograph’s framing, she faces the police. She clasps her shoes in her right hand and walks fiercely towards the camera, her mouth open as if exclaiming or maybe, “Singing and Shouting and Praying. She wants freedom.”

Codjoe doesn’t know the young woman’s name or if she still walks and prays with the living 60 years later — only that she was about the same age that day as the four little girls, now Ancestors. She knows what she knows about that day because of an article in the Southern Courier. Good thing Codjoe also checked the archives because that photo was never printed in the newspaper.

Good thing she dug deeper than what was published, or we wouldn’t get to connect with this vibrant Black embodiment of courage in the pouring rain. We wouldn’t know this story about how nature helps us connect with “an aspect of freedom” that this country cannot give us and cannot take away from us.

In “This Land is My Land,” Sean Hill tells a story of Austin Dabney, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who was awarded emancipation from his enslavement and an allotment of land by the U.S. Government in recognition of his service and bravery in fighting the British colonialists.

Hill complements Dabney’s story with more recent reflections at the intersection of land ownership and Black military service. He tells readers about his uncle, a Vietnam vet who “loves being in the woods and intimately knows the land he hunts. He enlisted in the army because he wanted some say in what happened to him in determining his fate.”

It was his service in Vietnam’s tropical forests and river valleys that honed his deep respect for and awareness of the outdoors. He fiercely taught his nephew Sean his way of walking the land, quietly with deep attention.

Military service and service to the government more broadly has been one avenue that has provided African-Americans with opportunities, travel, personal transformation, relationship to the land and sometimes even land ownership. Hill notes that in every era these benefits may be restricted or impeded by what is allowed or disallowed to Black people.

This meditation on land is mirrored later in the collection by Naima Penniman’s “Concentric Memory,” which begins with two sisters nurtured by the forest as children. It ends with their purchasing land and founding two organizations that embody lineages of Haitian freedom fighters and maroons who fled plantations into the forest to create autonomous communities that could serve as bases to attack those who would enslave and commodify us.

SoulFire Farm and WILDSEED Community Farm and Healing Village have hosted rites of passage, recipe exchanges, creek clay pottery, planting medicine and soulful playlists. “We are practicing ways of living that rely less and less on extractive and harmful systems.”

Necessity of Culture

Some of the more political among my leftist readers may still be wondering what all this has to do with the United States today. Donald Trump has just been elected again and threatens with his appointments to dismantle major institutions and bring various types of intolerance into public policy.  I ask in response, “What kind of culture is necessary in this new Trump era?”

For many of us, Making America Great Again betrays a culture’s yearning back to a time when the USA felt free to use force and violence without obstacle, and call that its national strength and prosperity. I would respond to those politically minded individuals that we need a culture that is rich with attention: caring, history, and nature.

A Darker Wilderness reminds us that we have nurtured such cultures for centuries on this land regardless of our legal status. The anthology recommends that we check the archives, the images, words and ideas left behind by those who survived those “Great American times.” It recommends we check the archives for its absences, that we sit in silence with that which was never published and those of us who were misrecorded, all the names that have been lost to us.

Sean Hill cites some writings that were influential for him to understand his relationship with nature in the context of urban life. He was mentored by Terrel Dixon at the University of Houston while he lived in that sweaty metropolis built upon a drained swamp. The first writing he names is bell hooks’ “Touching the Earth.” In 1996, she envisioned Black environmentalism as a necessary reclamation:

“Unmindful of our history of living harmoniously on the land, many contemporary black folks see no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns. Recalling the legacy of our ancestors who knew that the way we regard land and nature will determine the level of our self-regard, black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy where we connect our well-being to the well-being of the earth.”

Replenishing People and the Land

The essays in A Darker Wilderness reflect upon and riff off archival objects. They are acts of recalling, of putting our current contexts in the light of what has gone before us.

They are acts of acknowledging that this country, as soon as it laid its profit-grubbing hands upon us centuries ago, inhibited our acts of remembrance, marking us in official records as cargo: Negro boy and woman [insert physical description] while citizens were named and encouraged to form Historical Societies to record their passage on ships and towns and villages of origins. As Codjoe illustrates, sometimes there’s only the sun and the rain to witness our grief. So don’t let anyone tell you that we don’t know nature.

Ronald L Greer III wrote his essay “Magic Alley” in a series of emails that had to be mediated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Sharkey points out that it was impossible to contact him directly and introduces his essay with a plea for prison abolition.

In a time when many are anxious for the future, Greer reminds us to engage with those who know survival deep in their roots. Like all the essayists of A Darker Wilderness, Greer smuggles his respect for nature and the elders who taught him out of the confinements the United States of America has placed him in. In all likelihood we will have to rely on informal networks of care and connection as Trump’s austerity shapes the institutional landscape of the empire.

A Darker Wilderness is a literary forest fecund with such communities that we form with each other, our ancestors, the wild overburdened waters, the lands (public, private, and secret), and the myriad creatures endangered by the society that dominates this earth.

May Greer’s “Magic Alley” show us the protective alchemy of connecting deeply with each other and with the natural world that blooms around us.

Let’s end with his words from the Detroit soil that grows unruly outrageous plants which stretch out towards the sun, sheltering wild beasts and small creatures while probing for weaknesses in man-made structures:

“But in this story, in this world, my grandfather exists and burns brightly, always being reborn from the ashes.  He survived and overcame everything between the Great Depression and the crack era, from rural Mississippi to inner-city Michigan, and it awes me to believe that a regular human could endure half of that: he was magical. And when the world and people around him were withering away or growing into some monstrosity, he used vegetable gardens to replenish the people as well as the land.”

January-February 2025, ATC 234