Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage - Couverture souple

Glave, Dianne

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1556527667 ISBN 13 : 9781556527661

Editeur : Chicago Review Press, 2010

Synopsis

Crossing the ocean on a slave ship, working the land under threat of violence, eluding racists in nighttime chases through moonless fields and woodlands, stumbling across a murder victim hanging from a tree--these are images associated with the African American experience of nature. Over the decades, many African Americans have come to accept that natural areas are dangerous. Unfamiliar with the culture's rich environmental heritage, people overlook the knowledge and skills required at every turn in black history: thriving in natural settings in ancestral African lands, using and discovering farming techniques to survive during slavery and Reconstruction, and navigating escape routes to freedom, all of which required remarkable outdoor talents and a level of expertise far beyond what's needed to hike or camp in a national forest or park.

In Rooted in the Earth, environmental historian Dianne D. Glave overturns the stereotype that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. In tracing the history of African Americans' relationship with the environment, emphasizing the unique preservation-conservation aspect of black environmentalism, and using her storytelling skills to re-create black naturalists of the past, Glave reclaims the African American heritage of the land. This book is a groundbreaking, important first step toward getting back into nature, not only for personal growth but for the future of the planet.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Dianne D. Glave teaches in the department of history at Morehouse College. She is the coeditor of To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Rooted in the Earth

Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage

By Dianne D. Glave

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2010 Dianne Glave
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55652-766-1

Contents

Preface, 
Introduction: PEOPLE AND CURRENTS, 
1 The Atlantic Ocean: CURRENTS OF LIFE AND DEATH, 
2 Topography: NAVIGATING THE SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE, 
3 Religion: SHOUTING IN THE WOODS, 
4 Resistance: REBELLION, SUSTENANCE, AND ESCAPE IN THE WILDERNESS, 
5 Preservation: BLENDING THE PRACTICAL AND THE PURIST, 
6 Conservation: AN AFRICAN LEGACY OF WORKING THE LAND, 
7 Children: DREAMING AND DANGER IN WOODS AND FIELDS, 
8 Nature Study: OBSERVING, CLASSIFYING, AND UTILIZING THE NATURAL WORLD, 
9 Women and Gardening: A PATCH OF HER OWN, 
10 Environmental Justice: FREE TO BREATHE, 
Conclusion: HERITAGE AND THE FUTURE, 
Acknowledgments, 
Resources, 
Notes, 
Further Reading, 
Photo Credits, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Atlantic Ocean

CURRENTS OF LIFE AND DEATH

The ocean is calm as an aged woman sitting in the shade of her wraparound porch, then fearsome as a man with a gun battling in the trenches at war, and later truculent as a two-year-old child writhing on the floor demanding she have her way. Zeus, a young black boy enslaved in Alabama, knows the idiosyncrasies and uncertainties of seafaring life. In 1771 Matthew Samford gave his brother, Captain Marshall Samford, the seven-year-old Zeus, to the heartache of Zeus's parents, Joseph and Lois. To these white men, Zeus was just another enslaved child sold off or given away as a gift, simply chattel.

The boy begins his travels as a personal servant twenty miles north of Mobile, boarding the merchant ship Pegasus. At first, Zeus's duties are limited to tending to the needs of Captain Samford, who requires constant attention, including grooming, cleaning, and feeding. As the boy grows older, his duties shift to those of chief cook. He is fortunate in that, before he was given away, he had sat in the kitchen with his mother and picked up cooking skills, duties most often confined to women on farms and plantations. Only men compose the ship's crew, so Zeus's cooking skills are welcomed as he supervises the chief steward and steward's assistant in the galley.

Blacks are often limited to cooking and cleaning on ships, but Zeus dreams of being one of the few blacks to captain his own ship, envisioning himself at the helm of a vessel cutting through the choppy waters of the Atlantic. He cooks in large pots over the stoves in the blistering galley in the Caribbean's tropical zone. Alternately, when the Pegasus sails through the cold, dark waters off the shores of England, he finds a bit of warmth by the stove. Thankfully the rolling waters do not trigger seasickness. Zeus stands on the deck in the worst weather with the wind driving rain into his chest. He sees spinner dolphins and humpback whales rising to the surface from the deep Caribbean waters and watches for hours the jumps, spins, flips, and turns of these sea creatures.

During his shore leaves in the Kingston harbor in Jamaica, Zeus wanders through the fishing shanties. The fishermen live on the edge of the harbor and walk quickly to their small boats, which are filled with nets and hooks. Wading on the beach, Zeus sees a two-foot parrot fish in the shoals, shallow sandbanks. Its mouth is white and black, and its upper body, from the dorsal and caudal fins down to the lateral line, is a brilliant blue; the remainder of the lower body to the pectoral and pelvic fins is yellow and red. Zeus also spends his downtime sleeping on the white sand, which is covered in seashells and skittering crabs. He sometimes finds extra work like caulking ships so he can earn money to purchase his freedom in the future.

* * *

For this one imagined tale there are many true maritime narratives by and histories of African Americans, such as that of Olaudah Equiano, who braved the Arctic, and Nancy Prince, a black woman who ventured to Russia and Jamaica. Other African American adventurers on the high seas include Harry Dean, James Forten, Paul Cuffee, John Jea, and William B. Gould. People of the African diaspora purposefully took to the Atlantic Ocean currents, including the North Equatorial and South Equatorial, on every manner of vessel from canoes to sloops, men-of-war, schooners, and whalers. According to the whims and desires of whites, others of the diaspora were also scattered across and tossed along the currents that drew ships to the Americas and Europe — all part of the Atlantic slave trade.

In Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, W. Jeffrey Bolster argues that for many seafaring blacks, the ocean represented livelihood, empowerment, and identity, not enslavement and victimization. "An image of manacled ancestors crammed together aboard slave ships has triumphed as the association of African Americans and the sea," writes Bolster. This image of African Americans as victims rather than survivors with power is much different from the reality of black sailors during the Civil War who, Bolster argues, "were central to African Americans' collective sense of self, economic survival, and freedom struggle — indeed central to the very creation of black America." The legacy of black sailors persisted beyond the Civil War to the present: African Americans have continued their seafaring as part of the modern United States Navy.

The Atlantic slave trade from the late sixteenth to the mid–nineteenth century spanned the Middle Passage and the Civil War, with its naval battles during the age of sail, and ushered in a nascent maritime globalization through commercial, whaling, and military seafaring. Africans on commercial passenger and merchant ships dramatically and irrevocably expanded the boundaries and meaning of environment as they pushed off from African shores and stepped onto landscapes that were new to them in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. Their travels on the Atlantic Ocean were complicated as they sought adventure, experienced oppression, and resisted subjugation.

Seafaring supported a global economic system of mercantilism based on silver and gold bullion in exchange for American and European goods. The labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans supported this economic system into the nineteenth century. From this labor, whites cultivated cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, and indigo that they traded to Europeans. These goods were transported by ships on which blacks were free or enslaved crew members. Black sailors worked in an exploitative and racist economic system in which whites profited at the expense of others.

Seafaring blacks were at times victimized, but they also aimed to control their destinies. For example, they served as cultural conduits, traveling the oceans and connecting blacks to one another on land. London was the economic center of the Atlantic slave trade and the hub for information carried by word of mouth and through objects gathered by black seafaring people. Blacks used the ocean as a low-tech Internet of sorts to carry foreign goods and news, including the latest on the abolition movement.

Long before the age of sail, ancient Africans paddled and rowed small and large canoes and navigated their own ships on the waters, many of the latter fitted with sails. Africans arrived by ship in Central and South America, predating the Spanish and Portuguese invasion of the Americas and the Caribbean.

In the early fourteenth century, Abubakari II, a ruler of Mali, conferred with and was influenced by scholars at the University of Timbuktu who argued the world was round, countering medieval European scientists and philosophers, many of whom supported the world-is-flat theory. Ivan Van Sertima in They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America says, "Water fascinated Abubakari the Second — spacious, mobile, brooding bodies of water. Water was like stored grain at Niani, for it took a full day for the servants to fill the royal jars in the river Kala and return with them to the palace." The fruit of Abubakari's oceanic fascination was a fleet set to sail on the Atlantic Ocean into the unknown. Abubakari's foray speaks to how people, including Africans, were bound by a desire to find and explore new places. The ocean was the means of transport that often took center stage, though voyagers faced danger and perhaps death.

Abubakari sent four hundred ships to the coast from Mali, located in the interior of West Africa, via the Senegal River. They sailed westward, crossing the Atlantic for the Americas. It was a formidable passage, worsened since the final destination was Brazil, at a distance of more than four thousand miles.

Imagine these ships tossing in the churning waves, the rain coming down from above, blinding the Africans manning the sails. The women and children huddled together in the hold against the storms. Keep in mind that, according to Van Sertima, African "men were more terrified of the sea than the vast, blinding plains of the Sahara" and "the Arabs called the ocean 'the green sea of darkness'" as the Africans ventured forward with nothing but the horizon and water stretching ahead and behind. One captain returned to Mali, frightened when the fleet was hit by a storm. The rest of the fleet might have survived and sailed farther, on to South America after braving the storm.

Such a setback did not dull the lure of the sea for Abubakari, who continued to gaze westward across the land of Mali to the Atlantic Ocean and the nameless places beyond. He organized a second fleet that he led himself, leaving his brother to rule Mali. As had been true of the last voyage, some of the ships were filled with cargo — enough food and water for shiploads of people on a long journey. Abubakari never returned to Mali, though griots still tell his story through oral traditions practiced today in Africa.

Both of Abubakari's fleets sailed the North Equatorial current, streams that flow clockwise, drawn by the earth's rotational pull, beginning in West Africa and ending in the Americas. Abubakari and the other sailors and passengers probably stepped onto the silvery white sands of Brazil. Some may have looked longingly back for a few moments at the azure blue water and the rough surf tinged white with foam, wondering about the rivers, fields, lakes, savannahs, and forests left behind in Africa. Ahead of them, though, was the edge of the vast Amazon basin. Who knows how many varieties of plants, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and insects lived in the forests before so many species were eradicated through the twenty-first century?

The climate was tropical, ninety degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest, with drenching rain that turned to high humidity at the end of a shower or storm. In the Amazon, depending on how deep the explorers ventured in, they most likely saw rainforests, savannahs, and the massive Amazon River with its many tributaries threading even farther and wider into lakes, swamps, and bogs. The length has been measured at approximately four thousand miles but has varied, since rivers shift over time. They would have encountered an astounding biodiversity in the forests — a high of seventy degrees Fahrenheit under the canopy — that included mangrove, fig, palm, mahogany, and Brazil-nut trees. In the freshwaters of the basin were crocodiles, tree frogs, stingrays, and dolphins. Parrots, macaws, and monkeys populated the trees. Jaguars and anteaters moved on the ground beneath the understory of the Amazon forests. Lizards, snakes, katydids, grasshoppers, butterflies, and moths moved from the trees to the ground and back again.

Back in Africa, the ancients made short forays, paddling in canoes gutted and carved out of trees for fishing, exploring, and simply traveling in order to trade from the shores. From the sixteenth century, the origins of the Atlantic slave trade, free Africans working as middlemen used canoes to transport to European ships the "goods" — their fellow Africans — destined for trade in the Americas. In small vessels, the Africans expertly braved the shallow waters and swelling waves that Europeans could not navigate with large ships. Many different ethnic groups, from the Mandinka to the Ashanti, were forced on a frightening and mysterious voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas under the tyrannical control of whites, including the Portuguese and the British.

An estimated twenty million Africans took countless one-way voyages via the Middle Passage, an arduous trip with health and environmental implications that severely rearranged and transformed their lives. Africans vomited because of the effects of the rolling ocean. They suffered — and many died from — the bloody flux, a gory diarrhea. The people were raped, contracting syphilis — at its worst, resulting in dementia and death — from the European sailors. As many as four hundred Africans were chained to one another, head to toe, in the hold of a ship in a suffocating space as high as a coffin and only as wide as a body length. Skittering and creeping about the closed, suffocating hold were vermin like roaches, lice, rats, and mice. Gruel was ladled out into grasping hands and stuffed into gaping mouths in the center of crazed, terrorized faces. The smell was a noxious jumble to the senses — rotted food, body odor, foul feces, ammonia-steeped urine, and congealed blood. The worst were the dead bodies decomposing in that organic stew for days before the whites removed them. Water was rationed and often ran out long before the ships landed in the Americas. Some of the few comforts, if madness had not taken over, were fresh ocean air, the spray of salt water, and glimpses from the deck of whales and dolphins breaking the surface of the water.

Some Africans documented their own Middle Passage journeys. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo came from a Senegambian family of Muslim clerics, all of whom were educated and literate in Arabic. Representing his father, Diallo met a British ship at the outlet of the Gambia River in West Africa to sell two enslaved Africans in 1730. Failing to make an exchange that benefited his father financially, Diallo moved on. Though admonished by his father not to do so, Diallo crossed the Gambia River — which served as a partition against the Mandingoes, an aggressive people — where he finally sold the Africans. Ultimately, Diallo himself, adorned in gold and defenseless, was an attractive target; he was captured and sold by the Mandingoes to the British, who were waiting where the Atlantic Ocean and the Gambia River met.

As a devout Muslim, Diallo prayed to God, or Allah, the requisite five times a day. His prayers may have also helped ease the emotional strain of being enslaved aboard the British ship Arabella —ironic since he had been selling enslaved people himself. Perhaps he prayed for protection from the crashing waves and churning waters surrounding the vessel. Thomas Bluett, an antislavery advocate and author of Diallo's memoir, traveled with Diallo, ensuring safe passage to England. Bluett wrote, "During the Voyage, he was very constant in his Devotions; which he never omitted, on any Pretense, notwithstanding we had exceeding bad Weather all the time we were at Sea."

Diallo landed in Maryland, an alien landscape, and quickly charmed the whites around him with his education and knowledge of trade. As a result, they allowed him to contact his father to request money to be freed. Bluett later describes how Diallo, upon entering the English Channel, sought to fix his surroundings firmly in his mind for future use as a bridge between African and English culture:

By his good Nature and Affability he gained the good Will of all the Sailors, who (not to mention other kind of Offices) all the way up the Channel fhewed him the Head Lands and remarkable Places; the Names of which Job wrote down carefully, together with the Accounts that were given him about them. His Reafon for doing, he told me, was, that if he met with any Englisfhman in his Country, he might by their Marks be able to convince him that he had been in England.

Diallo might have believed that having knowledge or experience in common with the Europeans would protect him from enslavement in future encounters. In 1734, Diallo landed where he had begun, in Africa, after sailing the reverse Middle Passage — an exception rather than the rule for the millions of Africans stolen from Africa — returning to his homeland and father.

Diallo calmly sought solace from God during his voyage, but Olaudah Equiano had a more mixed experience. Equiano was from Benin, also in West Africa, and was born in 1745. His memories of the Middle Passage from childhood were of being snatched and kidnapped from his home by other Africans and forced to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Equiano says, "One day, when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea."

Perhaps the fear of open water prevalent among contemporary African Americans has its origin in the Middle Passage, echoes of psychological terror and torture at the hands of whites. I remember when I worked at a university and a staff member was planning a trip for African American teens, to venture out by boat into the Louisiana marshes. He asked me to talk to a mother who refused to let her son out on the water. This was back in 2004 when many of the marshes were in such a state that it was like being out in open water in the Gulf of Mexico. My colleague became angry when I explained that I would not try to change the woman's mind because stories or phantoms of stories about seafaring terrors going back to the Middle Passage might have been handed down to her, causing her fear of open water.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rooted in the Earth by Dianne D. Glave. Copyright © 2010 Dianne Glave. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Chicago Review Press
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1556527667
• ISBN 13: 9781556527661
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible