Lauret Savoy's Blog, page 3

A Gift from Terry Tempest Williams

Last night Terry Tempest Williams gave me the honor of asking me to share her reading event with her. Terry is on tour with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks for this centennial of the National Park Service. With gracious generosity she introduced me, Trace, and our friendship to the audience attending the event, sponsored by the Odyssey Bookshop & Mount Holyoke College.  That Terry wanted words from Trace to join The Hour of Land was a gift beyond measure.   Thank you, dear friend!

I’m deeply grateful to her, to Joan Grenier of the Odyssey Bookshop, and to the friends, new and old, met last night–like Andy Friedland of Dartmouth College.  Truly serendipity!

 

 

Placing Washington, D.C., and Slavery

The openness and maturity of First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech last week at the DNC National Convention stand in stark contrast to ignorant dismissive responses by certain pundits. But the truth remains. The White House, United States Capitol, and the nation’s capital as Washington, District of Columbia, grew in a culture of slavery.  See my new National Parks Conservation Association piece for more of this story and how my father’s people were a part of it.

Red Rock Testimony Supports Bears Ears National Monument

It’s a great honor to be asked by editor Stephen Trimble & publisher Kirsten Johanna Allen to join three generations of voices speaking on behalf of Utah’s wild lands and against a dangerous congressional bill (the Public Lands Initiative) in RED ROCK TESTIMONY: THREE GENERATIONS OF WRITERS SPEAK ON BEHALF OF UTAH’S PUBLIC LANDS. TESTIMONY is going to members of Congress, to the White House, to federal agencies, to environmental & conservation organizations, to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, to Utah Diné Bikéyah, and more.

By viewing Utah’s public lands as isolated, unconnected pieces, whether wilderness areas or BLM oil-and-gas leases, one can easily miss the whole of the landscape, its ecological and geological integrity. Taken together the public lands of the plateau country—from the Grand Canyon to Dinosaur—offer not only unparalleled windows into Earth’s deep history but also fragile, dynamic ecosystems that remain largely intact.

The Utah Public Lands Initiative now threatens this integrity. Although touted as a “grand bargain,” the proposed legislation fails to balance development with conservation and outdoor recreation. The quality and health of these landscapes would be compromised, instead, by its passage. That this bill comes in the centennial year of the National Park Service makes the lack of mutual concession all the more glaring.

Recognizing interconnections, balance, and the significance of historical, cultural and natural elements are goals of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a remarkable partnership of the Navajo, Hopi, Uintah & Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni nations supported by many more tribal groups. The coalition has asked the president to designate the region between Canyonlands and the Navajo Nation as Bears Ears National Monument.

Steve and Kirsten took RED ROCK TESTIMONY to Washington, DC, last week, presenting it at a press conference held at The National Press Club on June 23rd. Kirsten noted some responses: “’We need words,’ Molly Ross told us as she looked through story after story. A national monuments specialist at the Department of the Interior, Molly was immediately drawn into Tim’s beautiful design, and understood instantly what she had in her hands. Steve and I got a similar response to your stories from other folks at Interior and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. . .”

A shortened version of their National Press Club press conference will be available soon. In the meantime, please take a look at www.torreyhouse.org and www.redrockstories.org for links and news.

Bay Area Book Festival

Have you ever been in a conversation with other people where words and ideas flowed easily among you, insight triggering insight?  This was the case with Faith Adiele, Elmaz Abinader, and me at our public event at the Bay Area Book Festival on Saturday. An exceptional panel on race, memory, history, and the American land that I keep replaying in my mind!

Huge thanks to Elmaz, Faith, the organizers of this grand book fest, including Cherilyn Parsons, Melissa Mytinger, Helena Brantley, Stephen Sparks of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and colleagues at Counterpoint Press.

Johnnie Burrell, executive producer of internationalmediatv.com, videotaped ours and other panels for the Bay Area Book Festival. It’s wonderful to see our conversation again! It was inspiring to share thoughts and words with Elmaz and Faith!

The Land Beyond Hate

Seven years old on a sun-bright June day, she stands by the curio shop’s postcard rack. In their move across the country, her family has visited many national parks — Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon — and at every stop, she runs first to the postcard rack.

Ten cents a card. She takes selected treasures to the cashier: Point Imperial at sunrise; goldening aspen groves; layered, dusk-lit canyon walls; brick-red river against brick-red rock. Each an image of light, texture, home.

The woman behind the counter tilts her head but greets a man approaching the register. She will help him. Marlboros. Then another customer. Postcards and questions about road conditions and nearby motor courts.

The girl stands quietly, her head at counter level. These people act as if she isn’t there. Through the display glass she examines polished stones and beaded place mats under sunlit dust. The room smells stale.

Only after all others have gone does the woman behind the counter extend her hand. Six cards, 60 cents. When the girl reaches up with three quarters the woman avoids the small hand to take the coins. Cash register clinks shut. The woman turns away.

The girl starts to ask but stops as the woman faces her. At 7, she doesn’t yet know contempt and runs far into the pinewoods behind the store. That night, with all her cards covering the motel bed, she wonders if each bright place is enough.

 

What can I say about this child and about a memory that remains sharp-edged after decades?

Then as now, I am the daughter of a woman with deep brown skin and dark eyes who married a fair-skinned man with blue-gray eyes. Yet as a little girl, I never knew race. Skin and eye color, hair color and texture, body height and shape varied greatly among relatives. Like the land, we appeared in many forms. That some differences held significance was beyond me. Instead I devised a theory that golden sunlight made me and deep blue sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.

Yet, as I grew, I learned other things, such as lessons in fifth-grade social studies:

Our textbook describes Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.
We read in class that Indians are savages who had to give up the land and their wasteful way of life for the sake of civilization. The book calls this part of Manifest Destiny. Confused again, I ask what made the “five civilized nations” civilized?

Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Am I civilized? Will I be a slave? The history taught in school wasn’t the history that made me, but I didn’t know this. Any language to voice who I was, any knowledge of how land and time touched my family, remained elusive.

Once we moved from California to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, I came to learn how “race” cut our lives. Black, Negro, nigger! came loud and hard after the 1968 riots. Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being “colored.” By the age of 8, I wondered if I should hate in return.

What I couldn’t grasp then was that twining roots from different continents could never be crammed into a single box. I descend from Africans who came in chains and Africans who may never have known bondage. From European colonists who tried to make a start in a world new to them, as well as from Native peoples who were displaced by those colonists from homelands that had defined their essential being.

As the 19th century ended, known family members had dwelled in rural Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, perhaps Oklahoma, and Montana ranchland along the Yellowstone River. They came to live in cities like Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But how they experienced the world or defined themselves in it remained unknown. Forced removal, slavery and Jim Crow were at odds with propertied privilege. My forebears likely navigated a tangled mélange of land relations: inclusion and exclusion, ownership and tenancy, investment and dispossession. Some ancestors knew land intimately as home, others worked it as enslaved laborers for its yield. What senses of belonging were possible when one couldn’t guarantee a life in place? Or when “freed” in a land where racialized thinking bounded such freedom?

But so much of my family’s past was obscured by silence — the silence of voices lost to history and of my own parents’ reluctance to tell me about generations that preceded us. These unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.

Yet one idea stood firm: Whether a river named Colorado or a canyon called Grand, the American land did not hate. The Western parks and monuments that I visited with my parents were far more than destinations for recreation or Kodak moments. To the child I was, they became refuges from a world that made little sense.

An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. What I can know of my ancestors’ lives or of this continent can’t be retrieved like old worn postcards stored in my desk drawer. My task is to uncover missing stories of the American landscape, of its past to present — and to give voice to those who, even in their apparent absence, still mark a very real presence. In my journeys to our national parklands and other places, I seek not only fragments of my own origins but traces of a still-unfolding history that touches us all.

Some Thoughts on History Following the Hokule’a First Nation Landing Ceremony

Following the ceremony welcoming the Hōkūleʻa and its crew from Hawai’i to Piscataway tribal homeland, I thought of ironies of history. The event took place on Piscataway tribal homeland in Piscataway Park. There the National Park Service works in partnership with the Accokeek Foundation, which runs the National Colonial Farm- Accokeek, Md. The farm serves as a living history museum depicting the lifeways “of typical tobacco farmers in the 1770s.” Directly across the Potomac River sits Mount Vernon, home to the first president, who held tobacco lands as well.

One part of the event that stood out for me was the beautiful exchanging of gifts, and ceremonial tobacco was given to the crew of the Hōkūleʻa by Piscataway peoples.

Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum: names given to two species of tobacco. Indigenous inhabitants of what would be called colonial Virginia and Maryland by English settlers grew N. rustica. But Jamestown colonists and the Virginia Company found, as one put it, that form of tobacco “poore and weake, and of a byting tast. . .”

Profit would be made by growing N. tabacum (by then grown in the Caribbean) on tidewater land taken from its Native inhabitants—thanks to experiments done by a young John Rolfe (yes, that John Rolfe) in the 1610s. By 1640, London alone imported nearly a million and a half pounds of Virginia tobacco a year. N. tabacum became the colonial Chesapeake’s cash crop.

The exchange of gifts, of ceremonial N. rustica, took place in front of a tobacco barn of the National Colonial Farm where examples of that commercial colonial crop, N. tabacum, hang to dry. Nearby stood a woman in period dress, an African American woman who is one of the colonial farm’s interpreters. She spoke of what it was like to work tobacco farms as a free and enslaved African in the 1770s.

Yes, ironies of history stand out here in the tidewater Potomac/Chesapeake lands, a place of convergences of many peoples, past to present. It is in these convergences that I search for my father’s family past.

Exceptional Experiences on Justice, Education, History, Race, & the American Land

May 3rd: The Three Circles Center (an international network for multicultural environmental education), with Running Grass and Barbara Elizabeth Bolles, hosted an incredible day in Portland of meeting and being in dialogue with environmental justice, social justice, and environmental education leaders from the EPA, the city, and ngos. The day ended with a reading from TRACE at the local independent bookstore Broadway Books run by the Book Broads!

May 4th: Corvallis, where The Spring Creek Project at OSU (with Charles Goodrich) and the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center hosted a TRACE event at the center. There I met news friends and old friends, including the writers John Daniel and Kathleen Dean Moore. (I owe a special note of thanks to John because he introduced me and my manuscript to Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press!)

I also explored Oregon forests, rivers, and volcanic landscapes. First, the Columbia River gorge and waterfalls like Multnomah Falls with Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliot Bay Bookstore. Then, with Fred Swanson at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Site, where I learned to read the history of a Cascades ecosystem. Finally on my own, winding through backcountry of lava flows and Douglas-Fir, hemlock, and cedar forests, I found my way to Mount Hood.

Now I’m back in Washington, DC, ready to work on the new writing project, which is a topic for another day!

A View from Point Sublime

We entered Grand Canyon National Park before sunrise, turning west onto the primitive road toward Point Sublime.

This was in those ancient days when a Coupe de Ville could negotiate the unpaved miles with just a few dents and scrapes. My father had driven through the Kaibab Plateau’s forest on Arizona Highway 67 from Jacob Lake, Momma up front with him. No other headlights cut the dark. I sat in the back seat with Cissie, my dozing 18-year-old cousin. Our Kodak Instamatic ready in my hands, cocked. For two hours or more we passed through shadows that in dawn’s cool arrival became aspen-edged meadows and stands of ponderosa pine. Up resistant limestone knolls, down around sinks and ravines. Up then down. Up then down. In time, through small breaks between trees, we could glimpse a distant level horizon sharpening in the glow of first light.

Decades have passed, nearly my entire life, since a seven-year-old stood with her family at a remote point on the North Rim. I hadn’t known what to expect at road’s end. The memory of what we found shapes me still.

Point Sublime sits at the tip of a long promontory that juts southward into the widest part of the canyon, a finger pointing from the forested Kaibab knuckle. It was named by Clarence Edward Dutton and other members of geological survey parties he led between 1875 and 1880. Dutton thought the view from the point was “the most sublime and awe-inspiring spectacle in the world.”

The year the Grand Canyon became a national park, in 1919, more than 44,000 people visited, most of them arriving by train to the South Rim. On the higher and more remote North Rim, those daring could try rough paths over limestone terrain to Cape Royal, Bright Angel Point, and Point Sublime.

The park now draws about five million visitors each year. The 17-mile route to Point Sublime remains primitive, and sane drivers tend not to risk low-clearance, two-wheel-drive vehicles on it. Sometimes the road is impassable. Still, the slow, bumpy way draws those who wish to see the canyon far from crowds and pavement, as my father wanted us to do those many years ago.

None of us had visited the canyon before that morning. We weren’t prepared. Neither were the men from Spain who, more than four hundred years earlier, ventured to the South Rim as part of an entrada in search of rumored gold. In 1540 García López de Cárdenas commanded a party of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s soldiers who sought a great and possibly navigable river they were told lay west and north of Hopi villages. Led by Native guides, these first Europeans to march up to the gorge’s edge and stare into its depths couldn’t imagine or measure its scale. Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera chronicled the expedition:

“They spent three days on this bank looking for a passage down to the river, which looked from above as if the water was six feet across, although the Indians said it was half a league wide. It was impossible to descend, for after these three days Captain Melgosa and one Juan Galeras and another companion, who were the three lightest and most agile men, made an attempt to go down at the least difficult place … They returned about four o’clock in the afternoon, not having succeeded in reaching the bottom on account of the great difficulties which they found, because what seemed to be easy from above was not so, but instead very hard and difficult. They said that they had been down about a third of the way and that the river seemed very large from the place which they reached, and that from what they saw they thought the Indians had given the width correctly. Those who stayed above had estimated that some huge rocks on the sides of cliffs seemed to be about as tall as a man, but those who went down swore that when they reached these rocks they were bigger than the great tower of Seville.”

The Spaniards knew lands of different proportions.

Writing more than three centuries later, Clarence Dutton understood how easily one could be tricked by first views from the rim. “As we contemplate these objects we find it quite impossible to realize their magnitude,” he wrote. “Not only are we deceived, but we are conscious that we are deceived, and yet we cannot conquer the deception.” “Dimensions,” he added, “mean nothing to the senses, and all that we are conscious of in this respect is a troubled sense of immensity.”

Point Sublime holds a prominent place in Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, the first detailed written account published by a fledgling U.S. Geological Survey in 1882. The work shows a science coming of age. For in the plateau and canyon country, aridity conspired with erosion to expose Earth’s anatomy. The land’s composition and structure lay bare. Though terrain was rugged and vast, equipment crude or lacking, these reconnaissances tried to sketch plausible models for land-shaping forces. Clarence Dutton gazed out from the North Rim at Point Sublime to describe the grand geologic ensemble: the great exposed slice of deep time in canyon walls, the work of uplift and erosion in creating the canyon itself. Dutton also brought his readers to the abyss’s edge to see with new eyes.

While residents of eastern landscapes might have spurned canyons and deserts as irredeemably barren, Dutton’s words and vision helped change the terms of perception. That is, for an audience acquainted with particular notions of the sublime and nature, an audience with the means, time, and inclination to tour.

What did my family bring to the edge and how did we see on that long-ago morning? I’ve wondered if the sublime can lie in both the dizzying encounter with such immensity and the reflective meaning drawn from it. Immanuel Kant’s sublime resided in the “power in us” that such an experience prompted to recognize a separateness from nature, a distance. To regard in the human mind an innate superiority over a natural world whose “might” could threaten flesh and bones but had no “dominion” over the humanity in the person. Yet, in Kant’s view, neither I nor my dark ancestors could ever reach the sublime, so debased were our origins.

We had little forewarning of where the Kaibab Plateau ended and limestone cliffs fell far away to inconceivable depth and distance. The suddenness stunned. No single camera frame could contain the expanse or play of light. Canyon walls that moments earlier descended into undefined darkness then glowed in great blocky detail. As shadows receded a thin sliver in the far inner gorge caught the rising sun, glinting—the Colorado River.

I felt no “troubled sense of immensity” but wonder—at the dance of light on rock, at ravens and white-throated swifts untethered from Earth, at a serenity unbroken.

A dear friend once said that to see the canyon even once “is never to be free of it” and to step into it “is to live that step the remainder of one’s days.” Yes. The view from Point Sublime illuminated a journey of and to perception, seeding my lifelong passion for Earth’s textures and antiquity. Though the North Rim was just one stopping place for my family on one of many journeys, still bright and defining in memory are those moments I stood on that edge, a small child with a Kodak Instamatic in hand.

“An Overseer Doing His Duty . . .”

Perhaps you’ve seen the image, too? It’s a watercolor of a man—a white man—standing on a tree stump with a long stick, smoking, one leg crossed over the other, as he watches two women of African ancestry wield hoes on land that they are clearing for planting. I’d seen this 1798 sketch by Benjamin Latrobe many times in school texts. But only now do I realize how close to home it hits.

Latrobe, a celebrated architect and engineer, is well known for his work on the Capitol building. Hired by President Jefferson in 1803 as “Surveyor of Public Buildings,” he also worked on the President’s House (later called the White House) as well as the Washington Navy Yard. But before this, and after emigrating from England in 1796, Latrobe lived in Virginia. One day he noted “an overseer doing his duty near Fredericksburg” and drew what he saw in his sketchbook.

There are many reasons why this matters. A personal one is that either of those two women could be my ancestor.

The Chesapeake region with its tidewater rivers, lowland coastal plain, and rocky Piedmont, is a place of convergences in the Atlantic world. Tribal peoples had long claimed the area as homeland. Yet colonists founded “an empire upon smoke” in the 1600s after discovering the marketability of tobacco. Enslaved Africans soon powered its cultivation as the export staple for Virginia and Maryland, two “outposts of the English economy.” This region also witnessed the longest presence and largest concentration of what historian Ira Berlin called “slaves without masters,” the rather “unfree” free African Americans.

I’ve recently learned that paternal forebears were part of Virginia’s tobacco history. What I know thus far is that ancestors lived along the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg since at least the mid 1700s, working the land. Rachel Mann, the (as yet) earliest known matriarch, appears in paper records as a bastard child, born free and bound out as a “poor orphan” in 1770. When Virginia law required certificates of freedom be registered and carried about on person, these “colored” Manns claimed free status by the testimony of some of the wealthiest plantation owners. One ancestor, Jenney Mann, is listed as a “mulatto” “tobacco stemmer.”

I’ve written elsewhere that to live in this country is to be marked by residues of its still unfolding history, residues of silence and displacement across generations. My new writing project, “On the River’s Back,” searches for these marks in the fragmentary history of an African American family of mixed European and Indigenous heritage. It also searches for marks in the tidewater and Piedmont landscapes.

The stories of these people and of this land are entangled with both the rise and fall of tobacco agriculture as well as the origin and growth of the capital city along the Potomac River, the next major river to the north of the Rappahannock.

This work builds on my last chapter in Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape.

I look forward to sharing more of the search with you.

[“An overseer doing his duty near Fredericksburg, Virginia.” Watercolor on paper by Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Sketchbooks held by the Maryland Historical Society.]

TRACE at the Providence Athenaeum

I give deep thanks to Christina Bevilacqua who planned and hosted my visit to The Providence Athenaeum on Friday evening (3/11). What a treat it was for me to present Trace: Memory, History, Race, & the American Landscape at the Athenaeum’s Salon.

The Salon began in 2006, and meets every Friday evening from 5 to 7pm in the fall, late winter, and spring. Each salon begins with half an hour of delicious food, fine drink, and mingling among the attendees — regulars, occasional participants, and new visitors. As Christina notes, one dynamic of the ideal salon is that it contains a mix of the familiar and the new.

It was a spectacular evening for me, with the warm welcome that TRACE received. And it was a thread of serendipity beginning with Christina’s walking into 192 Books in NYC, finding TRACE on a table, and picking it up because of the cover. The thread has led to a new friendship.

If you have a chance, please try to attend one of the salon events at The Providence Athenaeum. It’s a wonderful community!

[Athenaeum Salon art by Mary Brower]