INTRODUCTION: THE NATURE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY Camille T. Dungy The first tree whose story I cared to discover grows through the filtration pumps at the edge of an abandoned swimming pool in a Lynchburg, Virginia, city park, In the late 1960s, a group of black children and community leaders staged a swim-in at this pool. Rather than desegregate this public facility, the city drained the water and replaced it with dirt. The space is now more lawn than pool. A gentle slope of lush grass reaches toward the deep end, and moss coats exposed walkways. A stately box elder grows through the retaining wall, roots ensnared in the pool’s filtration system. This is the final insult, No child, black or white, will ever swim in this pool again. Thanks to the tree’s tenacit its remarkable, beautiful, uncompromised growth, the mechanisms that ac- commodated this simple form of recreation have been destroyed. I discovered that pool and tree while adjusting to living in the South. Not a month into my tenure at a college in Lynchburg, I found myself walking with one of my new colleagues because we had both declined to drive the three- quarters ofa mile from our small brick-walled campus to the president's resi- dence for a reception for the poet laureate. Having just moved from Boston, | found I wasn’t walking nearly enough. I tried to take any opportunity I could to get outside and stretch my legs, but walking seemed to be frowned upon in this southern town. “It’s too hot,” one member of the faculty had said. “Don’t you want a ride to the reception? I’ve got air conditioning in my car,” offered another. The New American South is a byproduct of air conditioning. Its denizens returned or stayed once the brutal climate could be tamed. No lon- ger are residents dependent on open verandahs and tree-lined avenues to cool their homes. New subdii sions in the South are virtually indistinguishable from new subdivisions anywhere else in America, lots of lawns and few trees. Even as air conditioning has encouraged a reversal of the century-old patterns of northern migration, it has also continued the process of alienation from natural landscapes and environments. But the college that brought me to Virginia was in the old part of town, where the historical landscaping was well xixestablished. Streets were still tree-shaded and houses often nested in small, cooling groves. All those trees along the route overwhelmed me. I complained to my walking mate that, in addition to being frustrated by the lack of physi- cal exercise available to me in this little town, I found myself understimulated creatively: “In Boston, I could look out the window and see people, people, people. So many stories to discover.” I told her that when I first moved into my little house in Lynchburg, I thought there was nothing to see at all; “Now, I look out my window and see nothing but trees.” Then I discovered the tree in the pool and sought out the story behind it. Once I learned its history and its connection to the history of the town, I began to notice more and more moments of interactions between the human and nonhuman worlds, the Old and New South, and culturally and racially informed views of the natural world. Lynchburg had finally invested in new city pools because too many children, both black and white, were drowning in the city’s many creeks and streams. | took my walks along these streams and noticed the daily changes in their currents. Suck holes and eddies appeared where there had been nothing but placid water the day before. I observed these deep pools of water and kept my eyes open for water moccasins or any of Virginia’s three species of poisonous snakes. Although I never saw a single one, my attention was rewarded with beauty: blooming jack-in-the-pulpit nearly hidden on a heavily foliated embankment; a doe standing silent just off the trail, wise-eyed and protective of her fawn; beavers busy constructing a new dam. With the first autumn rains, their dam held fast. Their work meant my path was blocked by the flood. Diverted, I was unconcerned because in whichever direction I went there was plenty to see, plenty to learn, plenty to engage my creative attentions. I bought nature guides and learned to identify leafless trees in winter. I walked daily and charted the calendar by the cyclical progress of leaves and buds and blossoms. I fell for flowers. Noting the crowning of the crocus and the budding of the forsythia, I became aware of how they foretold the swift onset of spring, I started writing about the landscape where I lived, and I be- gan to pay more attention to what I remembered about the then-semi-rural Southern California landscape of my earlier years Separated by many years and a wide continent from the environment of my childhood, I remembered atime and place where I felt immensely comfortable moving in and through the natural world. Though I had distanced myself from the necessity of that communion, my time in Virginia allowed me to begin to remember the ways and the reasons why I had once felt so comfortable outside. As much as the xxtrees of the American South reminded me of a history steeped in often ar- bitrarily brutal and always dehumanizing racism, they also helped teach me how to make myself at home. This anthology of black writers writing about the natural world is rooted in trees—in lush leaves and flowering branches. My developing appreciation of trees correlates to what I hope can be accomplished through the creative and critical responses to the poems and essays that make up this collection. In the same way my personal journey with the pool and its tree led me from indifference to intrigued observation, to an engagement with the devastating realities of history, and finally into a space of renewed connection to the natu- ral world, the collective voice in this collection cycles through the spectrum of alignment with worlds beyond the human. This book, my own experi- ence, investigations of African American literary engagement with the natural world: branches from one tree. For years, poets and critics have called for a broader inclusiveness in con- versations about ecocriticism and ecopoetics, one that acknowledges other voices and a wider range of cultural and ethnic concerns. African Americans, specifically, are fundamental to the natural fabric of this nation but have been noticeably absent from tables of contents. To bring more voices into the con- versation about human interactions with the natural world, we must change the parameters of the conversation. The poems and essays collected here serve as an introduction to a new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans. The traditional context of the nature poem in the Western intellectual canon, spawned by the likes of Virgil and Theocritus and solidified by the Roman- tics and Transcendentalists, informs the prevailing views of the natural world as a place of positive collaboration, refuge, idyllic rural life, or wilderness. The poetry of African Americans only conforms to these traditions in limited ways. Many black writers simply do not look at their environment from the same perspective as Anglo-American writers who discourse with the natu- ral world. The pastoral as diversion, a construction of a culture that dreams, through landscape and animal life, of a certain luxury or innocence, is less prevalent. Rather, in a great deal of African American poetry we see poems written from the perspective of the workers of the field. Though these poems defy the pastoral conventions of Western poetry, are they not pastorals? The poems describe moss, rivers, trees, dirt, caves, dogs, fields: elements of an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death. xxi