Transforming Space: Nature, Education, and Home in Charlotte Forten and William Wells Brown

Abstract

This chapter looks at Charlotte Forten’s journals and William W. Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) as indicating a post-Emancipation reconfiguration of literary space in African American writing that offered new ways for expressing environmental knowledge. One significant effect of this reconfiguration was that articulations of environmental knowledge shifted from “loopholes” like the slave narrative’s literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad into broader literary spaces of education and home. Forten uses a host of such spaces in her picturesque depictions of houses and schools to create an alternative discourse of nature as a multifaceted refuge and to condemn slavery and racism. Brown’s text is a subversive trickster narrative that expresses a post-Emancipation form of black agrarianism while negotiating the ambivalent relationship of African Americans to the South.

The slave narrative was not only formative for a postwar African American writing tradition in general but also decisively shaped the development of the environmental dimensions of this tradition. With respect to African American environmental knowledge, the genre established an enabling yet at the same time limiting point of departure, as it influenced where, when, and how such knowledge was expressed. The ways in which the slave narrative both opened up and simultaneously circumscribed the articulation of African American environmental knowledge for postwar writers becomes visible, for instance, with respect to literary space. On the one hand, the slave narrative had created the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad, which often functioned as a “loophole” for articulating environmental knowledge, establishing the roots of potentially empowering interpretations of wild environments. On the other hand, this literary other-space was embedded within a host of established literary topoi of a genre driven by an urge to hyper-separate the black body from the non-human. The antebellum slave narrative left its postwar literary heirs with a relatively fixed spatial matrix that included, for instance, the surveilled plantation, carceral landscapes of flight riddled with slave patrols, or the Southern household with its domesticated but inaccessible gardens—spaces that did not readily enable a direct articulation of environmental knowledge. In this sense, the genre left the tradition that emerged with a predestined “map” that largely determined where (not) to express environmental knowledge.

This simultaneously empowering and haunting literary “map” generated through slave testimony did not suddenly disappear with Emancipation, but persisted as a general spatial matrix characteristic of African American writing. One reason of this lies in the slave narrative’s general formative force on the African American literary tradition. As a genre that has often been identified as “the very foundation upon which most subsequent Afro-American fictional and nonfictional forms are based,” the slave narrative provided the starting point from which African American fiction, poetry, and drama developed (Gates, “Introduction” 5). It is no coincidence that texts considered pioneering African American fiction such as William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) or Frederick Douglass’s novella “The Heroic Slave” (1853) not only show a close formal and thematic affinity to the slave narrative, but were in fact written by formerly enslaved writers who had influentially contributed to the antebellum genre. Other parts of the literary tradition, too, such as African American poetry or drama, were rooted in anti-slavery rhetoric and imagery as they drew from a host of themes, tropes and styles first developed in the slave narrative.¹ Consequently, the genre remained a fundamental shaping force in the postwar decades in a variety of ways, as it fueled a tradition of African American writing that, as Reid-Pharr has pointed out, had always been marked by an “impressive amount of cross-fertilization between different genres” (140).

A second reason why the discourse of the slave narrative remained vital to postwar African American literature and environmental knowledge is the continued presence of the genre itself throughout Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction, and into the twentieth century. As William Andrews has demonstrated, we find a postwar “proliferation of slave narratives not only across the country but across class and gender lines that had restricted slave narratives before the war largely to male fugitives who fled the eastern and upper South to settle in New England” (Slave Narratives xi).² Even though what Andrews terms the “slave narrative after slavery” transformed into a more autonomous form of life writing that became the vehicle of a more nuanced social critique driven by the conviction that “something positive, something sustaining, could be gleaned from the past,” it was still largely replicating the old topographies of the antebellum slave narrative (“Reunion” 14). Postwar narratives of slavery ranging from those by Goings (1869), Frederick (1869), Williams (1873), Henry (1894), and Bruce (1895), to the most famous ones by William W. Brown (1880) and Frederick Douglass (1892), often retold their stories under the influence of established topoi, thereby tending to reproduce the literary “map”—and environmental knowledge—of their antebellum predecessors.

Yet, while it is important to note such continuities, there are at the same time profound changes in the ways in which the African American literary tradition came to articulate environmental knowledge in the decades following the Civil War. Black writers of this period engaged not only in “repetition” but also in “revision” of antebellum forms of African American environmental knowledge, and, in many cases, mobilized such knowledge to articulate their broader visions for a post-Emancipation America and African American literature. The remaining chapters of this book trace instances of such “repetition and revision” with a main focus on signifying revisions within the African American literary tradition, that is, on the ways in which, as Gates once suggested, “black writers read, repeated, imitated, and revised each other’s texts” (Monkey xxii). This is not to propose that African American literature stopped being marked by a fundamental double-voicedness in the postwar decades—signifying involved both African American and Euro-American traditions. As will be seen, writers increasingly (re)turned to (classical) Western literary models and modes, for instance by using the pastoral in new ways, or by appropriating the picturesque or the georgic to articulate environmental knowledge. In conjunction with such tendencies, however, what becomes particularly important for this period in terms of a history of African American environmental knowledge are internal signifying revisions, i.e. intertextual webs that developed within the African American tradition. Whereas writers of the antebellum period established the foundations of an African American environmental knowledge largely by signifying on dominant Euro-American traditions, writers of the postwar period increasingly engaged in transformations of foundational forms of African American environmental knowledge, even if this often involved simultaneously signifying on Western literary models and developing Euro-American discourses on race such as evolutionary thought or Spencerism. Thus, while continuing to use Euro-American traditions, postwar black writing further developed a distinct tradition of African American environmental knowledge by repeating its literary predecessors “with a signal difference” (Gates, Monkey 51), thereby seeking to formulate ideas for a post-Emancipation African America out of new (literary) relations to nature.

In terms of the three dimensions of African American environmental knowledge identified with respect to antebellum writing, a first major signifying revision pertains to the spatial. As I shall argue in this chapter, post-Emancipation African American environmental knowledge was often articulated, despite the lasting influence of the slave narrative’s “map,” in literary spaces that reflect two general themes of postwar African America: “home” and “education.” Both themes have been identified as central to African American literature and culture of the post-Civil War decades. With respect to the former, Tate, for instance, in her 1992 study Domestic Allegories of Political Desire on the role of the domestic novel for nineteenth-century black women writers, notes that such writers increasingly expressed notions of home by embracing “the tenets of the Victorian American society […], initially to demonstrate that they too were U.S. citizens and ultimately to counter persistent allegations of their inferiority” (67). In a similar vein, Byerman/Wallinger suggest that ‘home’ and “a strong black family was a theme that many male writers shared with women writers of the time” (183), and Carla Peterson stresses the various meanings home-building attained in postwar African American culture, claiming that

[f]or African Americans, emancipation meant the opportunity to create a local place that might truly become home. To do so they continued to rely on many of the same social institutions that had ensured their survival in the antebellum period in both the slave South and the free North: familial and domestic networks, the church, schools, community benevolent societies. But they also stepped onto new terrain opened up by Reconstruction legislation, hoping that the nation itself might become home. (Doers 197)

Thus, the idea of home arose as a central point of debate among African Americans after the Civil War, especially with respect to those who had been formerly enslaved and who were building on the (unfulfilled) promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule.” In writing of this period, the importance of home-building is reflected in the autobiographical part of the tradition as well as in magazines and novels, where a domestic sentimentalism became prevalent especially toward the close of the century, in what has been referred to as “the Black Women’s Era” (Byerman/Wallinger 193).³ In this way, home became more than just a general theme, as it led to the creation of new literary space that also offered new means and was employed to express environmental knowledge.

The second theme, education, is perhaps even more central to the postwar decades. Postwar concerns for black education must be understood in the larger context of the pivotal status the written word attained from the very inception of African American letters in the New World. Long before Douglass famously emphasized the importance of gaining literacy as a means of gaining freedom and humanity in his 1845 Narrative, education had been of vital importance to African American communities. One sign of what Stepto calls the “dual quest” for “freedom and literacy” (“Distrust” 301), and of African Americans’ longstanding high regard for education can be seen in the ways in which various formerly enslaved as well as Northern African Americans had begun opening schools in antebellum times. In fact, many of the writers of slave narratives discussed so far, such as Douglass and Bibb, or pamphleteers like Whipper and Easton, had initiated (or at least planned) their own education projects in the decades before the war.⁴ During and in the decade following emancipation, such individual ventures were complemented on a much larger scale by the founding of schools and colleges for African Americans,⁵ and by the rise of the “Freedmen’s School Movement” that sent Northern “schoolmarms” to the South, first under the supervision of the Union Army and, later, the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Such efforts fueled postwar African American literature’s ideology of “race uplift,” as education became a primary means of embracing what was usually referred to as the ‘progress of the race’ and was recognized as a potent tool of liberation. As Du Bois observed retrospectively in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the decades following the war saw how

a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power. […] It was the ideal of ‘book-learning’; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain-path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life. (13)

Thus, in the postwar “Black World,” the figure of the black “[t]eacher embodied the ideals of this people,—the strife for another and juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing” (57). At the same time, the figure of the black writer took up the themes of education and home and employed them in creating literary spaces that significantly shaped African American literary discourse in the postwar decades, whether in slave narratives, in the tutelary fiction by Harper, Hopkins, and writers of the “Black Women’s Era,” or in the didactic articles found in a growing number of African American periodicals.⁶

Turning to two authors of this period is particularly revealing with respect to how such new literary spaces of home and education affected the articulation of African American environmental knowledge. Bracketing almost two decades, Charlotte Forten’s Civil War writings (Journals; “Life on the Sea Islands” (1864)) and William Wells Brown’s last and traditionally least-studied book My Southern Home: Or, the South and its People (1880) are not just representative of some of the general developments in postwar African American literature. More importantly, they can improve our understanding of how the emergence of literary spaces of education and home entailed a spatial reconfiguration of African American environmental knowledge and how post-Emancipation African American literature began to articulate new self-conceptions through this knowledge.

Charlotte Forten: Education and Home through the “Refuge of Nature”

Charlotte Forten’s journals, the best-known part of her work, are in some ways exceptional texts. Apart from the fact that Forten’s is one of only a handful of nineteenth-century African American women’s diaries recovered so far, her writing is noteworthy, to begin with, for its intermediate position. The most important and most detailed part of Forten’s journals lies at the interstice between the antebellum and Reconstruction period, covering the years 1862 to 1864. Although her private records as a whole span almost forty years,⁷ I will primarily focus on this period, which details Forten’s participation in the Port Royal-Experiment on the North Carolina Sea Islands, and which is particularly illuminating with respect to transformations of African American environmental knowledge.

Beyond their intermediate position, the journals are also noteworthy because of Forten’s privileged social position. The granddaughter of James Forten, the wealthy Philadelphian sailmaker, and of mixed racial heritage, Charlotte Forten was a member of the group historian Joel Williamson has called “the mulatto elite” (cf. New People 77–88). Born in 1837 and growing up in her grandfather’s home on Lombard Street, a “mecca for abolitionists,” Forten came into contact with antislavery and feminist sentiments from the moment she could think; she was“[r]eared in an atmosphere of crusading zeal” in her birthplace and her second home, the Purvis family’s Byberry Farm outside Philadelphia (Billington 19, 12).⁸ Thus literally growing into the (Garrisonian) antislavery movement of the day, Forten enjoyed the rare privilege of a classical education. She learned French and German, well enough to work as a translator in the 1860s and 1870s, and gained a profound knowledge of the arts and the literary culture of her age—a fact that has prompted some scholars to wonder why “Forten […] did not become a more forceful racial activist” (Long 38).⁹ No matter in how far the critique that is sometimes voiced in this regard is justified or not, it is certainly true that Forten’s childhood was not one of severe material or educational want in a family that “no doubt took some of its cues from ‘mainstream’ middle-class society […]. Music, classical literature, gracious but tastefully modest entertaining, and liberal travel extended the horizons of all the Fortens” (Jones Lapsansky 12). In this respect, Forten’s experience was strikingly different from that of the majority of African Americans of her time, whether enslaved or not, on behalf of whom she came to agitate.

Her privileged position did not mean, however, that her life was unaffected by deep-seated troubles. Forten had never known her mother, who had died of tuberculosis when she was but three years old, and was sent to Salem, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen by a father from whom she became more and more estranged. The most aggravating and disheartening influence over her young life, however, seems to have been the cruel race prejudice she repeatedly laments in her journals from 1854 on, the year she moved in with the Remond family in Salem, Massachusetts, to avoid the segregated Philadelphian school system and attend Salem Normal School. In her first journal, Forten describes her social experience as an adolescent as follows:

I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have something to make us hate mankind. I have met girls in the schoolroom—they have been thoroughly kind and cordial to me,—perhaps the next day met them on the street—they feared to recognize me; these I can but regard now with scorn and contempt,—once I liked them, believing them incapable of such meanness. Others give the most distant recognition possible.—I, of course, acknowledge no such recognitions and they soon cease entirely. These are but trifles, certainly, to the great, public wrongs which we as a people are obliged to endure. But to those who experience them, these apparent trifles are most wearing and discouraging; even to the child’s mind they reveal volumes of deceit and heartlessness, and early teach a lesson of suspicion and distrust. (Journals 140)

Perhaps it was such constant “lessons of suspicion and distrust” that turned Forten into the introspective, overly self-critical character readers discover in the pages of her journal and as which she has often been perceived by scholars. Although some contemporaries such as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier describe her as a “young lady of exquisite refinement, quiet culture and ladylike and engaging manners and personal appearance,” her private voice most often bespeaks quite another disposition (qtd. Stevenson 32). She admits, for example, to have “mingled feelings of sorrow, shame and self-contempt,” or bemoans her insecurity in fulfilling the role of a sociable middle-class woman: “I do not know how to talk. Words always fail me when I want them most. The more I feel the more impossible it is for me to speak” (Journals 315, 433).

Such passages hint at one of the major functions of Forten’s journals, namely that of acting as a refuge from a harsh reality marked by soul-crushing racism. Forten at times explicitly emphasizes this function, for instance, when she burst out “To thee, alone, my journal, can I say with tears how very hard it is,” or addresses the leather-bound booklets in which she was writing as “ami inconnu” or “faithful friend, my comfortee!” (Journals 252, 362, 214, emphasis in original). At points, she seems to engage in ‘dialogues’ with her diary, e.g. when admitting, “[m]y conscience reproaches me for neglecting thee so long,” or naming her journal “dear A” (153, 362). Thus, several scholars have identified the creation of a refuge as the primary aim of Forten’s diary keeping. Braxton, for instance, reads the text as “a retreat from potentially shattering encounters with racism and a vehicle for the development of a black and female poetic identity, a place of restoration and self-healing” (85), Logan sees the journal as “a safe space” (33), and Peterson suggests that Forten “sought to construct a social space for herself in which she could work out definitions of self and the relationship of self to the larger community” (Doers 184).

Despite such observations, readings have tended to overlook the central role that depictions of non-human nature play in Forten’s creation of this refuge. A partial reason of this and of the general omission of an environmental dimension of Forten’s texts may be seen in the editorial history of the journals. Kept safe after Forten’s death in 1914 by her friend Anna Julia Cooper, who made typescripts of Forten’s handwritten records, the journals first made their way into the general public through the hands of historian Ray Allen Billington, who published The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten in 1953.¹⁰ Billington’s abridged edition of the journals spawned a rather one-sided scholarly discourse, as he had identified race as the single most important subject matter of Forten’s writing, and had made extensive editorial changes in accordance with this idea. In the introduction to the 1953 edition, Billington thus stated that “no other influence was so strong in shaping Charlotte Forten’s thoughts” as that of race prejudice, and that “her race was always uppermost to Charlotte Forten’s thoughts” (7, 8).

As true as this may be and as valuable as Billington’s book has been in first bringing attention to Forten, a variety of scholars have by now assessed this edition as a “mutilated text” (Braxton 84); Long goes as far as to suggest that it “hindered efforts to study Forten” (37). Accordingly, more recent scholarship has sought to overcome a one-sided perspective focused solely on race on the basis of an unabridged edition published by Brenda Stevenson in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Women Writers series (1988).¹¹ Even as this edition has become available, however, and although critics have by now dealt with various aspects of the text,¹² there is still a general omission of the environmental dimensions of Forten’s writings. One obvious reason of this lies in the decade-long unavailability of the complete text and in Billington’s far-reaching editorial changes in the first edition, which obscured the qualities that make Forten’s an environmentally oriented text. That the editor had chosen to delete precisely those passages that are significant from an ecocritical point of view, but which, according to Billington’s assessment, merely “describe the weather, family affairs, the landscape, and other matters of purely local interest,” is in itself telling, as it reveals how environmental issues were largely ignored during the recoveries of African American texts in the 1960s and 1970s (40). Other reasons for a general disregard of the environmental dimensions of Forten’s journals even after the appearance of Stevenson’s edition could be the fact that Forten has never been an overly studied author, and that she belongs to an intermediate period in African American literary history that has not attracted as much attention as, for instance, the antebellum period. Thus, even though more recent readings routinely refer to Forten’s appreciation of non-human nature, there is so far no in-depth environmentally oriented treatment of Forten’s journals from an African American studies or an ecocritical perspective.¹³

Depictions of non-human nature are, however, central to Forten’s journals, which, on the one hand, repeat certain antebellum forms of environmental knowledge, and, on the other hand, foreshadow postwar African American environmental knowledge. Reading the texts as part of a signifying tradition, as “repetition with a difference” (Gates), it is crucial to recognize, first, how Forten’s discourse constructs “Nature” as a multilayered refuge. If previous scholarship has generally read the journals as a “safe place” (Logan) or as a “retreat” (Braxton), depicting and relating to non-human non-discursive materialities can be identified as Forten’s primary means of acting out this retreat. Through her journals, she devised a spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical “refuge of nature.”

A spiritual “refuge of nature” is almost omnipresent, as descriptions of non-human environments populate virtually every page of the text. Admittedly, some of these appear to be what Billington once deemed trivial and negligible descriptions of “landscapes and the weather.” Others, however, express a deeper, more meaningful involvement of the non-human non-discursive material world, especially when Forten inscribes herself into environs presented as holding the power to restore her downcast spirit. Through a discourse of nature, the text envisions the non-human non-discursive material as a space of renewal, a space where Forten’s diary-self finds a spiritual connection to both this materiality and to itself. The following passage (left out in the Billington-edition) is exemplary of this pattern in Forten’s writing, as it recalls taking a

pleasant walk in the pastures with S.[arah Remond] and Mr. P.[utnam]—Looked in vain for the delicate yet brave Hepatica, but enjoyed perfectly the beauty of the hill, the moss-grown rocks,—the sky—the waters,—and the delicious songs of numberless little brooks, whose sparkling waters and picturesque windings gladden the eye, even as their music does the ear. Our walk was, indeed, a delightful one. Returned home, from the holy peace and beauty of Nature […]. (Journals 208, emphasis in original)

Forten celebrates this “holy peace and beauty of Nature,” experienced via the visual and auditory senses (“eye” and “ear”), throughout her journals. Capitalizing the word “Nature” in the above quote and in many other cases highlights the centrality of the concept to her creation of a refuge. From the first to the very last entry, Forten gives countless descriptions of “delightful walk[s]” (Journals 94), “rides” that were “perfectly beautiful,” or days “to be marked with a white stone” (245)—instances that let her feel touched by the “warmer love of dear Mother Nature” and “its soothing, and delightful power” (260, 72). In this respect, Forten’s writings read like the rambles of a romantic nature-lover who “could live out of doors,” and who was not just superficially viewing non-human environs as mere picturesque background but cultivated an amateur scientific interest in nature (210, emphasis in original). She apparently acquired considerable knowledge on flora and fauna, was interested in phenomena such as solar eclipses (cf. 61), and visited scientific institutions such as the Essex Institute (cf. 78). Thus, “Nature” becomes the conceptual thread that binds together the journals as retreat. It acts as a trigger of “peaceful, happy thoughts, sweet remembrances” that “gave me a feeling of perfect peace” (103, 114).

At the same time, Forten’s “refuge of Nature” has a strong aesthetic dimension, as the spiritual relief she finds in the non-human non-discursive material world is communicated through the artistic frameworks and values of her day. She was no doubt familiar with the aesthetics of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime, since she was not only an excessive reader in search of literary role models, but also literally grew into the Philadelphia and New England literary elites, which led to many first-hand encounters with a variety of the great (nature) writers and poets of her time. The influences of this impressive literary education and Forten’s creation of explicit links between an experience of nature and an endorsement of the arts become visible in the journals’ descriptions in two ways. Firstly, various moments depict the enjoyment of the arts while being immersed in the non-human natural world. Forten recalls, for instance, how, on a “pleasant walk” through “harmony grove,” Miss Shephard, a teacher she befriended in Salem, begins to “read several exquisite poems written by the sister of Mrs. Hemans,” or how she glories in listening to an orchestra while seated “among the trees” (Journals 83, 240). In such moments, experiencing what she describes as non-human nature and art literally merge.

Secondly, the aesthetic dimension of her “refuge of Nature” pertains to the ways in which Forten stylistically inscribes her literary preferences and artistic ideals into her depictions of the non-human material world. At times, she explicitly claims an essential connection between art and nature, for example, when commenting on the New England “pastures”: “I enjoyed the novelty of wandering over the hills, and ascending some of the highest of them had a fine view of the town and harbor. It seemed like a beautiful landscape; and I wished for the artist’s power or the poet’s still richer gift to immortalize it” (Journals 70). For Forten, encountering, grasping, and describing non-human non-discursive materialities as “Nature” is inextricably connected with aesthetic stances that she adopts from a handful of literary heroes whom she regarded as possessing that “poet’s still richer gift to immortalize” such materialities (70). Accordingly, she frequently employs her considerable literary expertise when offering her depictions. Upon seeing a “rocky island” on one of her carriage rides, for instance, Forten notes that “[i]t was just such an island as I imagined ‘Monte Christo’ must have been” (88); she praises literary characters such as the hero of Dinah Craik’s novel John Halifax as “‘Nature’s nobleman’ in every sense of the word” (211), and ponders admiringly over poetic descriptions of European nature by Clarke and Coleridge (cf. 188). Above such writers and literary figures stood, however, the poetic voices of Emerson and Whittier, both of whom Forten met face-to-face and deeply revered. While she admired Emerson from a distance as “one of the truest of Nature’s interpreters” and fantasized about taking a walk with him that “would be intensely yet silently delightful,” Whittier became a much closer, life-long acquaintance and patron with whom Forten did take long walks (279, emphasis in original). Apparently, she regarded Whittier as the epitome of a Romantic connection between art and natural environs. He was, to Forten, “the poet [who] was also a farmer,” and Whittier’s as well as Emerson’s celebrations of farming, country life, and nature, fuse into an aesthetic framework in Forten that is marked by a brand of descriptive language that merges the picturesque with the pastoral and, sometimes, the sublime (247). In this respect, Forten clearly endorsed dominant Euro-American environmental literary modes and models of her day.

That Forten’s writing moreover employs and repeats an African American environmental knowledge becomes visible when turning to her writing as creating an ethical “refuge of Nature.” For Forten, as for many black pamphleteers, depicting non-human nature also became a vehicle for articulating an abolitionist ethics and a means of criticizing race prejudice. An instance of this can be found in the early pages of the journals that describe the infamous court case of Anthony Burns, a fugitive from slavery who had run away from Virginia to Boston, was taken in by the authorities in 1854, and sent back into bondage under the Fugitive Slave Law. In her portrayal of the incident, Forten repeatedly employs a strategy of contrasting the freedom visible in non-human nature with the fugitive’s fate. In the entry of June 3, 1854, she writes:

A beautiful day. The sky is cloudless, the sun shines warm and bright, and a delicious breeze fans my cheek as I sit by the window writing. How strange it is that in a world so beautiful, there can be so much wickedness, on this delightful day, while many are enjoying themselves in their happy homes, not poor Burns, but millions beside are suffering in chains. (66)

Less than two weeks later, on June 16, 1854, Forten reiterates such sentiments in allegorical terms:

Another delightful morning; the sky is cloudless, the sun is shining brightly; and, as I sit by the window, studying, a robin redbreast perched on the large apple tree in the garden, warbles his morning salutation in my ear;—music far sweeter than the clearer tones of the Canary birds in their cages, for they are captives, while he is free! I would not keep even a bird in bondage. (71)

Non-human nature becomes an allegory of freedom. The robin redbreast representing a natural state of being is contrasted with an emblematic caged-in “bird in bondage” representing an unnatural one. Hence, at such points, writing “Nature” becomes a means of expressing and underwriting Forten’s conviction that slavery is not only morally false but also unnatural.

This strategy of employing “Nature” as the source of an ideal of freedom from which the corrupt morals of the nation’s slaveholding and racist practices have departed is repeatedly utilized in the journals, and perceivable in particular in Forten’s descriptions of the sea. When considering her portrayals of the Atlantic, presented as uniquely sublime in its grandeur, as “most strange and beautiful” yet giving “constant enjoyment,” one regularly encounters the idea of an ethos of freedom innate to non-human non-discursive materialities (Journals 386): “[M]any mingled feelings rose to my mind. But above all others was that of perfect happiness. For liberty, glorious, boundless liberty reigned there supreme!” (88). Here, “Nature” as a spiritual refuge that triggers a “perfect happiness” becomes at the same time an ethical refuge where the concept of a “glorious, boundless” liberty is rooted, and which fuels Forten’s arguments for abolition and against prejudice (88).

In this respect, Forten’s rhetorical strategy is much closer to the strategies of antebellum African American pamphleteers such as Whipper or Ruggles than to those of the fugitive slave narrative. This becomes apparent when contrasting her employment of the pastoral with the slave narrative’s strategic pastoralism. Due to her privileged social position, Forten was able to experience and portray “a delightful ride on the sea shore” in pastoral terms unmarked by the doubled (visual) perspective of the enslaved. She could pastoralize and describe “a steamboat […] gliding rapidly over the calm, and deep blue water of the bay, [which] seemed like a single white cloud in the azure sky” in ways that were denied formerly enslaved narrators like Douglass or Bibb in fugitive slave narratives (Forten, Journals 82–83). Moreover, the pastoral contrast between city and country runs, in Forten, decidedly in favor of the latter. For her, the city, Philadelphia in particular, is not a safe haven on the way to freedom that it was to Henry Box Brown or William and Ellen Craft, but the place where she and her kin were refused service in ice-cream parlors (cf. Journals 230). The countryside, by contrast, emerges as a place where pastoral renewal from the corrupt forces of the city might be found and picturesque communions with “Nature” be imagined. Thus, although constantly arguing on behalf of the fugitives from slavery, Forten’s journal writing does not engage the forms of environmental knowledge of the fugitive slave narrative. Rather, her spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical “refuge of nature” relies on strategies found in the pamphleteering tradition and on literary modes and models of mainstream American Romanticism. In this respect, her journals also attest to the diversity of African American social and environmental experiences in the mid-nineteenth century, and of a corresponding African American environmental literary tradition.

While Forten’s writings therefore in some respects echo antebellum traditions, they also prefigure emerging facets of postwar African American environmental knowledge, as they begin to articulate such knowledge through literary spaces of home and education. Forten does not simply repeat, but “repeats with a difference,” as her intermediate texts indicate a broader development. Rather than merely creating a spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical “refuge of Nature” that expresses a personal appreciation of non-human nature, which is important in its own right, the journals also foreshadow new forms of expressing African American environmental knowledge through the themes and literary spaces of education and home.

Both home and education are central themes of Forten’s journals. The idea of home is particularly pronounced in passages that articulate Forten’s personal longing for a family and in her negotiation of a gendered mid-nineteenth-century culture of home. The journals express, on the one hand, a sense of homelessness of an individual deprived of a mother’s love and a father’s care, which becomes visible, for instance, when Forten, watching her school peers “going home,” laments that this “made me feel rather home-sick […] as I cannot go to either of my homes” (144). On the other hand, Forten’s text often critically reflects on the values of what Barbara Welter has described as the “Cult of True Womanhood.” In this respect, her idea of what was supposedly a “good” home converges with her fondness of literature and her high regard for certain authors and literary role models. She takes carriage rides to gaze admiringly at the homes of New England authors or becomes absorbed in watching the engravings in The Homes of American Authors, a popular volume of the time that shows “the beautiful homes of Irving, Longfellow, Bryant, Hawthorne, Lowell, and many other distinguished writers and orators,” finding that “[t]he ‘Homes’ are all very beautiful, fit residence for their gifted inmates” (72). Thus participating in a mid-nineteenth-century discourse on domesticity, Forten often articulates a sense of duty and adherence to the “cardinal virtues” of womanhood—expressed here by her use of the term “inmates” instead of “inhabitants”—with respect to creating proper homes for African Americans.

Significantly, Forten’s idea of home-building involves not only the creation of appropriate interior spaces for the “angel in the house,” but also the exterior surroundings of such houses as parts of home. Accordingly, the journals give more than just an “insight into the expectations of the proper uses of time in […] [a middle class] antebellum Afro-American household,” as Jones Lapsansky suggests (3), as they often expand the idea of home beyond the household, thereby articulating environmental knowledge. The text presents Forten’s changing homes within the broader landscapes she encounters, for example, by extensively describing the long walks and rides as part of her experience of each new home, or by literally “opening up” the space of the domestic household to its surroundings—a move that is frequently symbolized by (self-)portrayals of the diarist writing next to opened windows. Moreover, the journals depict out-of-doors-work as an integral part of home-building. Forten relates, for instance, how she “adopted ‘Bloomer’ costume and ascended the highest cherry tree” to “[o]btain some fine fruit” (86), and embraces a gendered mid-nineteenth-century cult of flowers. To “beautify our homes” (68), flowers are gathered, taken care of, and given as presents (cf. e.g. 215–218, 221, 256–257), and act, thereby, as another facet of the general link between the house itself and its environs that is at the heart of Forten’s place-based idea of home. To her, home essentially means dwelling in a larger habitat and a specific locale.

The second theme, “education,” is equally important to Forten’s text. On the one hand, the diarist presents her own education as a process that is marked by strong ambitions as well as soul-crushing self-doubts. She reassesses her achievements from birthday to birthday and from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Day, expressing the hope that her “knowledge of my want of knowledge be to me a fresh incentive to more earnest, thoughtful action, more persevering study” (96, emphasis in original),” yet at the same time frequently laments her “unworthy self” (153). On the other hand, Forten expresses a strong will to educate others. After all best remembered today for her work as a teacher, we find educational ideas throughout her writings, especially in her poetry. In a poem composed for the 1856 graduation ceremony of Salem Normal School, for example, Forten demands of herself and her classmates to “toil unwearied./ With true hearts and purpose high” (Forten, “Poem” 23). Later, she repeats the same sentiments in her speech “The Two Voices” (1858), proposing her life’s “higher destiny” to be to educate and “live for others.” With this in mind, it was only logical that Forten began her education mission as the first black teacher in Epes Grammar School and Salem Normal School in the late 1850s, and went on to become the first Northern black woman to teach freedmen in the South (44).

The journals’ account of the latter teaching engagement, i.e. of Forten’s participation in the “Port Royal Experiment,” is the most famous part of her writing as well as the most revealing section of the journals regarding Forten’s environmental knowledge. The major aim of the “Port Royal Experiment,” initiated after the Union Army had seized the North Carolina Sea Islands in 1861 to cut off Confederate supply lines, was to “prove to a sceptical public that Negroes were worthy of freedom” (Jacoway xiii). In accordance with an order from Abraham Lincoln “to establish such schools, and to direct the tuition of such branches of learning as you in your judgment shall deem most eligible” (qtd. Royster 145), Edward L. Pierce, the superintending government agent of the project, began to call for educators, whose “teaching will by no means be confined to intellectual instruction. It will include all the more important and fundamental lessons of civilization—voluntary industry, self-reliance, frugality, forethought, honesty and truthfulness, cleanliness and order. With these will be combined intellectual, moral and religious instruction” (qtd. Goldstein 48). Charlotte Forten responded to this call in the late summer of 1862, sensing an opportunity to work towards her life-long mission of “changing the condition of my oppressed and suffering people” (Journals 67), and, with Whittier’s help, eventually made it to the islands on October 28, 1862, as the first black agent of the Port Royal Relief Association of Philadelphia. Her engagement in teaching the North Carolina contraband, which lasted for almost nineteen months interrupted only by a short absence for health reasons, has overwhelmingly been evaluated as a success story. The period that Forten herself referred to as “a strange wild dream” has been read as a moment when she “successfully fulfils her goal of becoming a visible activist” (Long 42), or as the story of a heroic “soldier in Canaan” and “Daughter of the Regiment” of Robert Gould Shaw’s black “Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers” (Cobb-Moore 143, 152).

Moreover, Forten’s account of her “strange wild dream” is revealing with respect to an articulation of environmental knowledge through spaces of education and home (390). Her educational work on the Sea Islands took place in a school founded by Laura Towne and Ellen Murray and based in a one-room Baptist Church.¹⁴ The official aim of this institution was, in accordance with Pierce’s scheme, to provide a broad education that sought to instill ‘civilization’ and that included such basic issues as “teach[ing] modern habits of sanitation and personal hygiene” (Goldstein 50). Beyond this official task, however, Forten pursued a more personal mission of giving “lessons meant to supplant memories of slavery with those of racial pride” that also included an idea of education as extending beyond the narrow confines of a classroom (51). This impulse becomes apparent from the very first portrayal of the schoolhouse, when she notes upon her arrival:

It [the freedmen’s school] is kept by Miss Murray and Miss Towne in the little Baptist Church, which is beautifully situated in a grove of live oaks. Never saw anything more beautiful than these trees. It is strange that we do not hear of them at the North. They are the first objects that attract one’s attention here. They are large, noble trees with small glossy green leaves. Their beauty consists in the long bearded moss with which every branch is heavily draped. This moss is singularly beautiful, and gives a solemn almost funeral aspect to the trees. (Journals 391)

In this passage, it is the surroundings, the situatedness of the schoolhouse in a specific non-human environment, which takes up most of the space. Not the church or its interiority lie at the center of attention, but the “oaks” first “attract attention.”

The convergence of representations of her educational efforts with depictions of non-human non-discursive materialities highlighted in this scene is characteristic of the journals’ account of the Port Royal experiment. Forten continuously describes her educational work as extending beyond the confines of a regular classroom, as she visits families living in the vicinity in the afternoons, takes walks with “the larger children […] into the woods in search of evergreens to decorate the church” and to have “a delightful ramble and get a quantity of greens,” or holds her lessons “out-of-doors—in the bright sunlight” (Journals 423, 436). In an entry dated January 12, 1863, she writes that working in this way “was delightful. Imagine our school room, dear A.—the soft brown earth for a carpet; blue sky for a ceiling, and for walls, the grand old oaks with their exquisite moss drapery. I enjoyed it very much. Even the children seemed to appreciate it, and were unusually quiet” (436–437). Thus, the text broadly inscribes Forten’s teaching activities into the Southern landscapes she encounters and which she often compares with those more familiar ones of New England. As she takes walks and carriage rides to schools or churches, and performs a considerable portion of her teaching outside, Forten’s educational mission spatially moves away from the Baptist church and a narrow curriculum, and becomes intertwined with the non-human natural environs of the Sea Islands.

This transformation of her “classroom” into a broader educational space that allows for the expression of environmental knowledge intersects with the notion of home. Generally, Forten’s efforts of building homes for the freedmen correspond with the idea of instilling “civilization” that is characteristic of the Port Royal experiment at large. They are in many ways expressions of mid-nineteenth century middle class values, whether we consider Forten’s embroidering of the freedmen’s quarters with flowers as symbols of domesticity (cf. e.g. 459–460), or the furnishing of her own “new home” in an abandoned plantation house by using “prints” and “roses” to make “home […] look homelike” (394). Additionally, however, the journals also convey a more fundamental sense of home, as Forten’s experience on the islands turns into an act of spiritual home-building. On the one hand, she finally gains an opportunity of finding “my highest happiness in doing my duty” in teaching; on the other hand, this tutelary activity enables an identification with non-human natural environs, which are thereby turned into a home (376). Both her home-building and education activities merge with expressing environmental knowledge in a process that helps turn the Sea Islands into a personal space and that becomes especially visible in those moments in which Forten reads herself into Southern non-human surroundings that act as sheltering sanctuaries. She depicts herself, for example, in bosky places where “the branches of the live oak formed a perfect ceiling overhead” (401), or envisions non-human materialities as her sacral refuge where “[t]he whole swamp looks wonderfully like some old cathedral, with monks cloaked and hooded, kneeling around it” (457). Literary space, created along the themes of home and education, becomes the locus where environmental knowledge, in Forten’s case most often in the sense of a “refuge of nature,” can be expressed.

Through this articulation of environmental knowledge, the journals also hint at a liberating transformative potential of such knowledge with respect to mid-nineteenth century gender roles and spheres. The Port Royal account in particular involves ideas of home and education that, by merging with an expression of environmental knowledge, emphasize the need for middle-class women to overcome the boundary between the “inside” and the “outside” of the house. In an inscription on the inside cover of the fourth diary, Forten becomes most explicit in this respect, when she notes that “[t]his is what the women of this country need—healthful and not too fatiguing outdoor work in which are blended the usefulness and beauty I have never seen in women” (qtd. Braxton 91). Expanding the private sphere of the house promoted through the cult of true womanhood via experiencing, relating to, and expressing a knowledge of non-human non-discursive material environments is seen as an appropriate liberating step to take for middle-class women. Thus, although Forten’s embrace of a cult of flowers may also be read as suggesting an incorporation of women into a confining space of a narrowly conceptualized home and as adhering to dominant ideas about “woman’s sphere,” her environmental knowledge also suggests a move out of the confined domestic space of the household that could lead to a more empowered position of an “angel beyond the house.”

Despite this potentially liberating effect of environmental knowledge with respect to mid-nineteenth century gender norms, it is also crucial to see how the public/private dichotomy central to such norms acted as a force that significantly shaped the articulation of environmental knowledge for an African American woman writer like Forten. In this regard, a comparison of the journals with the published accounts of Forten’s Civil War experience in the South, which consist of two letters from December 12 and 19, 1862, published in Garrison’s Liberator, and the 1864 article “Life on the Sea Islands,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, is revealing.¹⁵

The major difference between the private and the published accounts of her experience on the Sea Islands is that the latter are marked by the creation of a specific outsider position and voice that also significantly affects Forten’s expression of environmental knowledge. This is not to suggest that Forten’s position in her journals is not also marked by an in-between-ness due to her liminal status as highly educated, middle-class black woman. She was, after all, as Laura Towne, the headmistress of the school, describes in her own diary, “dat brown gal” to whom the freedmen only gradually opened up after hearing her play the piano, and apparently encountered racist sentiments from her white colleagues (qtd. Rose 161).¹⁶ Yet, her published texts, especially “Life on the Sea Islands,” display something more than the general racial in-between-ness of Forten’s diary-self, as they involve the creation of a public literary voice that celebrates and draws strength from consciously creating an outsider-position. Catering to her readership’s taste by celebrating abolitionist sentiments and her commitment to the Union, Forten, in her published accounts, strongly emphasizes her position as a philanthropic Northerner, who, as Peterson has pointed out, embraces “a cultivation of the ethnocentrically familiar” (Doers 193). Going public, Forten evidently realizes the importance of broadcasting the Port Royal experiment as a success. She emphasizes, for instance, that the freedmen are “certainly not the stupid, degraded people that many at the North believe them to be,” and concludes her Atlantic-essay by optimistically claiming that “[d]aily the long-oppressed people of these islands are demonstrating their capacity for improvement in learning and labor. What they have accomplished in one short year exceeds our utmost expectations” (“Interesting Letter” 295; “Life” 189).

Furthermore, Forten’s creation of an outsider-position through speaking with a “Union-voice” entails the adaptation of a particular gaze. By claiming that her Port Royal experience gives “an excellent opportunity here for observing the negroes,” she adopts a perspective that roots its truth-value in an in-between witnessing position and that is structurally reminiscent of the slave narrative’s rhetoric of visibility (“Interesting Letter” 295). Instead of speaking from an actual “insider”-position as was the case in the slave narrative, however, Forten exerts an intermediate gaze on the freedmen that shares similarities with a tourist gaze and that becomes formally visible through her changed use of pronouns in the published texts. Here, Forten endorses a communal “we/us” to signal her belonging to the middle-class schoolmarms and to distance herself from the contraband by referring to this group exclusively in the third person (“they/their”). Moreover, and this gives her public writing an ethnographic quality, she extensively describes the freedmen’s culture, especially their songs, from a detached perspective that simultaneously observes and exoticizes.¹⁷ Forten’s public literary persona therefore emerges as a distancing one with respect to the formerly enslaved population, a Northern, de-personalized ethnographic voice that meant, first and foremost, to be a part of the “educational missionaries,” to belong to that group of schoolmarms referred to as “us—strangers in that strange Southern land” (“Life” 181, my emphasis).

The dominant lens employed in her published texts to familiarize her Northern readership with this “strange Southern land” is the picturesque, an aesthetic mode that had developed by the time Forten was writing into what Hussey, in his classic study on the picturesque, identifies as a prevalent “nineteenth century’s mode of vision” (2).¹⁸ Although the picturesque is also involved in Forten’s articulation of environmental knowledge in her journals, which are ripe with picturesque imagery as they conceptualize her “refuge of Nature,” it takes a different shape in the published pieces. Especially in “Life on the Sea Islands,” which was introduced by Whittier to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly as “graceful and picturesque description” (“Life” 163), Forten’s use of the mode, due to her adoption of an outsider’s perspective, becomes both more formulaic and explicitly connected to a political stance. This shift in the picturesque significantly affects the articulation of environmental knowledge.

To clarify this difference between the published and private accounts, consider first the following passage, which exemplifies the kind of picturesque typically encountered in the journals:

The sweet songs of the birds awoke me. Nature is looking her loveliest on this ‘sweet and dewy morn.’ Went to the woods with the girls, in search of wild flowers. Found the sweetest violets and anemones, and a delicate little white, bell-shaped flower whose name I do not know. After a while, tired of looking for flowers, seated myself on a picturesque old stump, while my little cousins continued their search. Thoroughly enjoyed the sweet, pure air, the glorious clouds, the blossoming trees, the dewy grass, and the perfect stillness that reigned around me. (Journals 308, emphasis in original)

Here, the voice is a personal, private one of an individual’s contemplation and communion with non-human nature. The picturesque is primarily employed to the end of communicating a concept of “nature” as an intimately private space, that is, the mode becomes a means of creating an authentic confession of a nature-lover who conceptualizes and values the non-human non-discursive material highly as a spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical refuge. Similar descriptions, sometimes involving typical picturesque symbols like the elm-tree, are part and parcel of Forten’s journal writing, and are central to the text’s account of the Sea Islands experience as well, especially in those passages that describe Forten’s romantic walks with Seth Rogers, a physician and close friend she had already known prior to her time at Port Royal.

The depictions of non-human materialities in Forten’s published texts differ significantly from those in the journals, although they employ the same aesthetic mode of the picturesque. Consider, for instance, the following two passages, one from “Life on the Sea Islands,” the other from one of the letters sent to Garrison:

Then we entered a by-way leading to the plantation, where we found Cherokee rose in all its glory. The hedges were white with it; it canopied the trees, and hung from their branches its long sprays of snowy blossoms and dark, shiny leaves, forming perfect arches, and bowers which seemed fitting places for fairies to dwell in. How it gladdened our eyes and hearts! It was as if all the dark shadows that have so long hung over this Southern land had flitted away, and, in this garment of purest white, it shone forth transfigured, beautiful, forevermore. (“Life” 183)

Perhaps it may interest you to know how we have spent this day—Thanksgiving Day—here, in the sunny South. It has been truly a ‘rare’day—a day worthy of October. Cool, delicious air, golden, gladdening sunlight, deep-blue sky, with soft white clouds floating over it. (“Interesting Letter” 291)

In both quotes, Forten represents her experience of non-human non-discursive materialities through the mode of the picturesque. “Cherokee roses,” “snowy blossoms and dark, shiny leaves, forming perfect arches,” a “deep-blue sky” and “soft white clouds” are typical elements of what Bryan Wolf calls a picturesque “middle ground” between the Burkean categories of the “terror and limitlessness” of the sublime and the “closed perfection” of the beautiful (Wolf qtd. Pohl 147). Formally, however, a major difference to the journals becomes visible in Forten’s changed use of pronouns. The individualizing “I” of the journals is replaced by a communal “we” explicitly addressing a readership-“you” in the published accounts, which signals not only the general shift to the schoolmarms’ position, but also a move away from conveying an individual experience of non-human nature to a more generally representative, formulaic one. As Forten, shifting from private to public, depersonalizes her Port Royal experience to validate herself in the position of a quasi-ethnographic observer, that position in turn affects her articulation of environmental knowledge. Her use of the picturesque becomes both more formulaic and more political. The published texts employ the picturesque not to articulate an individual’s idea of nature as refuge but to inscribe a Northern perspective and ethos of freedom into a Southern landscape, where “all the dark shadows that have so long hung over this Southern land” have “flitted away” (“Life” 183). Forten becomes even more pronounced in turning the picturesque into a means for articulating a Northern political stance in the letter, when she claims that “the sunlight is warm and bright, and over all shines gloriously the blessed light of freedom, freedom forevermore” (“Interesting Letter” 295). The act of morally redeeming the South from the atrocities of human bondage that becomes a decisive factor in the published accounts is therefore also realized through an altered use of the picturesque. Read against each other, Forten’s texts demonstrate how the racialized and gendered social norms of mid-nineteenth century America interacted with the articulation of African American environmental knowledge. The act of expressing the relation of the human to its non-human material conditions is transformed as the private turns into the public voice of this black woman writer.

What appears problematic in this strategy, however, is the way in which Forten’s changed use of the picturesque becomes at the same time complicit in racially othering the freedmen. In “Life on the Sea Islands,” for example, Forten reports being

awakened by the cheerful voices of men and women, children and chickens, in the yard below. […] On every face there was a look of serenity and cheerfulness. My heart gave a great throb of happiness as I looked at them, and thought ‘They are free! so long down-trodden, so long crushed to the earth, but now in their old homes, forever free!’ And I thanked God that I had lived to see this day. (165)

What may seem at first glance to be another positively connoted, innocent moment that inscribes freedom into a now slavery-free Southern landscape through a picturesque frame is racially charged. Although in this passage, too, the picturesqueness of the scene is connected to an ethos of freedom given to the formerly enslaved, the freedmen at this point become objectified as parts of that scene. Even if this apparently happens in benevolent terms—and not in racist language as, for instance, in Laura Towne’s diaries—the portrayal is more problematic when read in the context of Forten’s general convergence of the picturesque with an exoticization of the freedmen in their “semi-barbaric splendor” that is characteristic of her published texts (179). The above quote, for example, not only enumerates black “men and women” and “children,” but simultaneously aligns them with “chickens,” thereby to some extent perpetuating a racist conflation of the black body with the non-human that also lay at the core of justifications of the peculiar institution. In a sense, the distance thus created between her and the freedmen is, of course, a necessary side effect of Forten’s urge to write herself into a valid observer position that had to involve a detached gaze on the observed human and non-human elements of a Southern landscape she encountered and sought to portray. Yet, it is crucial that the chasm thus opened up between Forten and the freedmen is also played out through a shift in her environmental knowledge that occurs when her voice moves from the private to the public. What becomes visible, then, is how the public/private dichotomy itself was involved in producing racialized positions that affected the articulation of environmental knowledge in the African American writing tradition. Reading Forten in this sense demonstrates how writing publically inevitably entailed normative pressures of a thoroughly racialized episteme, which could significantly shape the production of environmental knowledge.

Forten, even though a minor literary figure in many respects, is thus a particularly revealing case for an environmentally oriented reading of the African American writing tradition for at least two reasons. First, comparing her published and private texts draws attention to the ways in which raising voice in the private and/or the public sphere could affect articulations of environmental knowledge in the black literary tradition. In this sense, the texts hint at the ways in which the expression of environmental knowledge cannot be thought apart from other social norms, models, and categories. Forten’s texts are revealing some of the broader cultural interactions of African American environmental knowledge; they show that white privilege also included the privilege of a (seemingly) unmarked position for articulating environmental knowledge and that publically expressing environmental knowledge was by no means a neutral, but always also a politically charged act for African American writers.

Moreover, Forten’s writings, especially her journals, are important as a signifying revision of antebellum African American environmental knowledge. They attest to the presence of a range of diverse forms of environmental knowledge in nineteenth-century African America and draw attention to the ways in which writers began to “repeat” each other’s environmental knowledge “with a difference”—in Forten’s case in the sense of building on the pamphlet tradition, yet developing new literary space for expressing environmental knowledge. The journals hint at the manner in which literary space for expressing environmental knowledge began to transform in postwar African American writing through themes of education and home. Therefore, even if Forten’s writings are not representative in the way in which slave narratives by figures such as Douglass or Bibb might be, they are valuable for indicating some of the processes that began to shape a tradition of African American environmental knowledge in the decades following the Civil War.

William Wells Brown: Environmental Knowledge between Nostalgia and Critique

Another text that participates in such processes is William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home: Or, the South and its People (1880). Brown is, in many ways, an antipode to Forten. As a well-known antislavery orator and prolific professional writer, he was what Forten wished to be but never became. More significantly, Brown had been enslaved, had fled from bondage in 1834, and was in this respect a much more representative public figure than Forten in her more secluded, privileged position. In terms of their treatment in scholarship, too, Brown and Forten are on opposite ends. While Forten has attracted comparatively little attention until today, Brown has been recognized since the 1960s as a central figure of the nineteenth century and as a pioneer of African American literature and historiography.¹⁹ While the bulk of Brown scholarship today continues to focus on his novel Clotel (1853), more recent studies have considered a variety of aspects of Brown’s life such as temperance (Stewart (2011)), plagiarism (Sanborn (2012)), or his moving panorama (Costola (2012)), and other parts of Brown’s work including—finally more extensively—My Southern Home (Ernest (2008), Hooper (2009), Sinche (2012)).

Despite such differences between Forten and Brown, who met on several occasions in the 1850s, My Southern Home can be read as a negotiation of the same major themes found in Forten’s writings. While Brown’s last book is another instance that demonstrates how these themes of home and education came to shape the construction of literary space in ways that opened up new ways for postwar black writers to articulate environmental knowledge, My Southern Home is at the same time a political manifesto that lays out Brown’s vision for a post-Emancipation literary engagement with the slavery-past. Published by subscription from 1880 on,²⁰ My Southern Home emerged, as William Andrews notes, at

a transitional point in southern literary history—the early 1880s—when ‘the southern quest for literary authority’ (to use Lewis P. Simpson’s phrase) confronted major black and white writers with a common problem: how to authorize a brand of first-person narration largely alien to the southern literary tradition at a time when the South’s own authority, indeed, its very identity, lay very much in doubt. (“Problem of Authority” 3)

Responding to this moment of crisis, which saw the failure of Reconstruction and a strident resurgence in racism and racist violence, Brown forged a text that drew from both his personal experience of slavery, escape, and his work for a slave trader on the Missouri River, and from book-knowledge and trips he had taken into the South in the 1870s.²¹ Merging all of this into what his biographer Ezra Greenspan has called a “Janus-faced memoir that looked back to the antebellum plantation society and forward to the emergent postbellum, postplantation South” (Reader 384), Brown faced a challenging situation. With My Southern Home, he was not only writing against the vision of white new Southern writers such as George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, or Mary Boykin Chesnut, but also had to cope with an “audience of black and white readers […][that] had changed dramatically since the 1850s, when he had put slavery on trial in Clotel and The Escape” (Greenspan, Life 497).

It is crucial to note the generic hybridity and complexity through which Brown’s last book responds to these challenges. On the one hand, My Southern Home is part of what J. Saunders Redding once praised as Brown’s “more reasonable and most ambitious works” (25), namely the historiographic part of his oeuvre.²² In this respect, it stands in the immediate context of Brown’s historical studies The Black Man (1863), The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), and The Rising Son (1873), and has frequently been read as high point of his historiographic writing and as his ‘best’ work, “a fitting capstone to the literary monument he built for himself” (Andrews, “Introduction” 5). On the other hand, My Southern Home is also a “slave narrative after slavery”; it was, in fact, included as a typical example of the genre in Andrews’s compilation (2011). Brown’s text certainly falls into this category, as it extensively deals with the subject matter of slavery—roughly the first half of the book is set in the antebellum South—and “recycles” many scenes and plot elements from Brown’s own Narrative (1847) and other antebellum works.²³ Moreover, facets of the antebellum slave narrative’s rhetoric are highly visible at points, for instance in the “Preface” to My Southern Home, where Brown clarifies that “incidents were jotted down […] as they fell from the lips of the narrators, and in their own unadorned dialect,” thereby echoing the voice and role of an authenticating amanuensis.

Recognizing the palimpsestic nature of Brown’s text is important for deciphering the basic structure of his argument and, by extension, for tracing how My Southern Home expresses and employs an agrarian form of environmental knowledge through education and home. Brown’s use of environmental knowledge becomes visible not so much in concrete literary topoi and more in the book’s broader argumentative structure. That is, rather than on a diegetic level, through the construction of concrete, recurring literary spaces that function as spiritual refuge or expanded classrooms (as in Forten’s case), Brown’s environmental knowledge can be traced by considering his overall narrative strategy. To illustrate this strategy and Brown’s strategic representation of environmental knowledge, one has to consider the twofold structure of the text. While the first part of My Southern Home (chapters I.–XV.), set in the antebellum South has most often been taken by Brown’s contemporaries as well as subsequent generations of critics as nostalgic reminiscences, the second part (XVI.–XXIV.) contains Brown’s more explicit arguments as a political activist.

In the second part of the text, one finds Brown’s concrete suggestions concerning education and home, his explicit post-Emancipation vision for African Americans that lays out some of his ideas for changing the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans. Regarding the idea of home, for example, Brown becomes particularly outspoken in Chapter XX., when he argues that “[t]he moral and social degradation of the colored population of the Southern States, is attributable to two main causes, their mode of living, and their religion” (My Southern Home 188). With respect to “their mode of living” Brown identifies deficiencies in creating proper homes as one of the major flaws standing in the way of post-Reconstruction race progress. He diagnoses an “entire absence of a knowledge of the laws of physiology, amongst the colored inhabitants of the South [that] is proverbial. Their small unventilated houses, in poor streets and dark alleys, in cities and towns, and the poorly-built log huts in the country, are often not fit for horses” (189). Furthermore, Brown criticizes the hygienic situation and malnutrition, when he notes that “[n]o bathing conveniences whatever, and often not a wash dish about the house, is the rule,” and claims that “these people have no idea of cooking outside of hog, hominy, corn bread, and coffee” (189). Brown’s conclusion is therefore that “[l]ecturers of their own race, male and female, upon the laws of health, is the first move needed” (190), since, for him, an adequate home is not only the space where healthy black bodies must be produced, but also the source of industriousness and an upright morality.²⁴

Moreover, Brown’s suggestion of “lecturers of their own race” and his critique of “religion” hint at the ways in which education becomes an equally central concern in the second part of My Southern Home. Brown criticizes the preposterousness of many black clergymen, among whom he sees “the prevailing idea that outward demonstrations, such as shouting, the loud ‘amen,’ and the most boisterous noise in prayer” are more important than true piety, and claims that “[t]he only remedy for this great evil lies in an educated ministry” (193, 197). Additionally, he puts forward more general ideas about education, realizing that “[t]he education of the negro in the South is the most important matter that we have to deal with at present, and one that will claim precedence of all other questions for many years to come” (213). In chapter XXIV., for instance, Brown therefore proposes to install African American teachers across various educational institutions, since “all the white teachers in our colored public schools [and other institutions] feel themselves above their work” (215–216). Moreover, his aim is to establish “institutions […] in every large city” to save and protect “the colored young women of the cities and towns at the mercy of bad colored men, or worse white men” (218). Eventually, Brown thus arrives at a radical advice to the black population of the South, in case such measures of education and home-building fail. He suggests that “[t]he South is the black man’s home; yet if he cannot be protected in his rights he should leave,” and explicitly urges “Black men [to] emigrate” at the close of My Southern Home (245, 248).

At first glance, this concluding imperative seems to be a glaring contradiction of the book’s very title. Turning to the first part of My Southern Home to reconsider Brown’s take on home and education, however, helps to unravel this potential conflict. Note, first, that assessments of the text’s first part as nostalgic reminiscences are not without foundation. In fact, a nostalgic impulse of My Southern Home becomes visible from the very start. The book’s title and the first paragraphs set the stage in this respect, as a detached narrative voice—Sinche suggests a “racially indeterminate narrator” (83)—begins describing a Missouri plantation called “Poplar Farm.” The home of the Gaines family, this setting of the first, antebellum part of the book, is portrayed in soothingly picturesque terms:

Ten miles north of the city of St. Louis, in the State of Missouri, forty years ago, on a pleasant plain, sloping off toward a murmuring stream, stood a large frame-house, two stories high; in front was a beautiful lake, and, in the rear, an old orchard filled with apple, peach, pear, and plum trees, with boughs untrimmed, all bearing indifferent fruit. The mansion was surrounded with piazzas, covered with grape-vines, clematis, and passion flowers; the Pride of China mixed its oriental-looking foliage with the majestic magnolia, and the air was redolent with the fragrance of buds peeping out of every nook, and nodding upon you with a most unexpected welcome. (Brown, My Southern Home 1)

Complemented by an engraving on the left-hand side subtitled “Great House at Poplar Farm” that fittingly adds to the suaveness of the passage, there is not much that would hint at the traumatic experience that such a “welcoming” place would have meant for the enslaved who kept it running. This is a striking contrast, to be sure, to Brown’s antebellum work, for instance his Narrative (1847), where the main features of the Big House are “a bell, hung on the post near the house of the overseer” and where Brown “often laid and heard the crack of the whip, and the screams of the slave” (14, 15). My Southern Home, by contrast, creates a comforting historical distance from the Gaines plantation and the peculiar institution for its readership and for Brown himself (“forty years ago”) that enables him to emphasize “the lavish beauty and harmonious disorder of nature” that marked this place “in the sunny South” (1).

It is therefore not surprising that most of Brown’s contemporaries perceived his book as a nostalgic memoir by a former slave turned famous author. A review in the New York Times, for instance, described My Southern Home as the work of a “colored physician, who began life on a farm near St. Louis as a slave, [and] gossips very acceptably about the old days of coon hunts, negro jollifications, whippings, and trackings with blood-hounds, which form a staple of slave reminiscences” (qtd. Greenspan, Life 495). Other contemporary reviewers, too, read the book superficially as carrying an obvious idealizing message about the past, and as “the most graphic and racy work yet written on the South and its people” or as “a racy book, brim full of instruction, wit, and humor, which will be read with delight” (qtd. Andrews, “Introduction” 5). That the nostalgia of My Southern Home was so readily recognized and emphasized is understandable considering the cultural climate of the 1880s and the fact that Brown’s text provides ample ammunition for such interpretations. On the one hand, it was in vogue to reminisce about the olden times in general and the South in particular at a time that saw a “shift in the national mood toward a politics of reconciliation” and a corresponding “wave of popular nostalgia for romanticized images of life on the plantation before the Civil War” (Greenspan 494; Andrews, “Introduction” 7). On the other hand, Brown’s text lends itself well to such readings due to its humorous tone and its use of a cast of characters that must have seemed familiar to a broad audience. As Andrews summarizes, the figures populating My Southern Home include “a number of southern types—the indulgent master, the pompous preacher, the witty slave, the beautiful quadroon, the hypocritical slave trader, and others—along with some of the more picturesque elements of traditional southern local color, such as slave songs, corn-shucking verbal games, and hoodoo practices” (“Introduction” 8). Combine this with Brown’s at times overly reconciliatory gestures towards an old Southern aristocracy, and it is not difficult to see why contemporaries assessed My Southern Home the way they did. A former slave claiming in the 1880s that “there was considerable truth in the oft-repeated saying that the slave ‘was happy’” could hardly expect to be taken as anything other than compromisingly nostalgic (Brown, Home 91).

Readings that stop here nevertheless gravely misread Brown. The nostalgic, picturesque descriptions, often accompanied by equally nostalgic visual illustrations that seem to be striving for a mere simplifying harmony are only one side of Brown’s twofold strategy. The other side, a critique that undermines and ironizes the nostalgic impulse can be found in Brown’s enslaved characters’ trickster skills and their environmental knowledge.

In this respect, note, first, how the antebellum part of Brown’s work introduces the notion of slavery as a “school” through its seemingly nostalgic renditions of the old South. For Brown, this notion, first introduced into African American writing by Elizabeth Keckley and later prominently put forward by Booker T. Washington, primarily meant that enslaved African Americans gained an ability to engage effectively in tricksterism and power plays with whites. According to My Southern Home, “[s]lavery has had the effect of brightening the mental powers of the negro to a certain extent” and has produced in the enslaved a “[w]it with which to please his master, or to soften his anger when displeased” (28, 52). The enslaved became, in Brown’s view, a witty trickster who often used their skills to “get rid of punishment” and to mask their true intentions in power plays with the white master—a hypothesis that My Southern Brown seeks to substantiate through a variety of characters such as Cato, Pompey, Nancy, or the conjurer Dinkie (91).²⁵

While the centrality of such power plays has often been noted, for instance, by Andrews, who suggests that “the slaves profanely redefine the very language of authority” (“Problem of Authority” 12), it is important to see that Brown’s notion of a “school of slavery” not only involves trickster skills but also an articulation of the formerly enslaved population’s relation to Southern non-human natural environments. Brown’s tricksters express not only black verbal skills but also a place-based, agrarian form of environmental knowledge, the expression (but not acquiring) of which, a look at Brown’s earlier writings suggests, had been largely unavailable to himself in an antebellum context. This changes significantly with his hybrid trickster narrative, if we consider, for instance, the anecdote of a “Coon Hunt” (Home 8–11). This story of a city man’s mishap relates how one of the Gaines’ visitors, a Mr. Sarpee from St. Louis, who “had never seen anything of country life,” eagerly participates in a “coon hunt” with “Ike, Cato, and Sam; three of the most expert coon-hunters on the farm” (9). As the dogs pick up a scent, Sarpee, ignoring the enslaved’s warning (“polecat, polecat; get out de way” (9)), moves forward in an attempt to shoot his prey, which attacks him “in a manner that caused the young man to wish that he, too, had retreated with the boys” (9). Covered in “an odor he had never before inhaled” that forces him to sleep in the barn, the incident triggers “a hearty laugh” among the enslaved on the Gaines plantation (10). In fact, Brown’s narrator claims that “[n]o description of mine […] can give anything like a correct idea of the great merriment of the entire slave population on ‘Poplar Farm,’ caused by the ‘coon hunt’” (11).

Thus, the episode, as humorous and nostalgic as it may seem, also writes the enslaved into the position of skilled countrymen. Ike, Cato, and Sam are revealed as “experts” who work the Southern soils, thereby entering into their own relationships with the land, as the use of their vernacular suggests. If one reads the name of the “city man” Mr. Sarpee not as “sharp” but in the sense of “sapientia” (knowledge), the scene becomes recognizable as Brown’s juxtaposition of two forms of knowledge. A supposedly ‘civilized’ white man, who “did talk French to hissef when de ole coon peppered him,” is contrasted to and ridiculed by the knowledgeable black farmers and their vernacular. Sarpee’s ‘civilized’ knowledge is defeated by the agrarian environmental knowledge of the enslaved of the land; he escapes neither the attack nor the subsequent laughter that expresses a temporary unsettling of power relations and that “fitted the young man for a return home to the city” (11). Thus, even though formally disempowered, the enslaved depicted in Brown’s text gain a degree of agency through their environmental knowledge.

Another instance that demonstrates the ways in which such knowledge became involved in the enslaved’s tricksterism may be found in Chapter V. This chapter describes a series of events that unfolds after the Gaines return home from a trip to the North, “filled with new ideas which they were anxious to put into immediate execution” (46). One of their new acquisitions is a “plow, which was to take the place of the heavy, unwieldy one then in use,” but which turns out to be an utterly useless tool and is “broken beyond the possibility of repair” by the ones who actually have the skills and knowledge to run the place, the enslaved black farmers (46, 48). Another “new idea” concerns the making of “some new cheese” the Gaines had tasted at a Northern farmhouse (49). After Aunt Nancy, “the black mamma of the place,” purports her ability to fabricate such a product, a cheese-press is ordered and a process worth remembering begins under Nancy’s supervision (49, emphasis in original). First she demands a sheep to be killed as a “runnet,” then ‘discovers’ that, in fact, a calf was needed instead, which is slaughtered the next day. As this process triggers a good laugh among the enslaved, Nancy reveals her true scheme: “You niggers tink you knows a heap, but you don’t know as much as you tink. When de sheep is killed, I knows dat you niggers would git the meat to eat. I knows dat” (50). Her knowledge of obtaining produce off the land, of living within and off her material surroundings, becomes part of a power play with the Gaines. She effectively combines her skills to work with what the Southern land has to offer with a trickster knowledge that helps her secure an at least slightly better life for her fellow-enslaved. Thus, both incidents hint at the ways in which Brown’s enslaved characters, by becoming the true people of the land they worked, often entered into more complex power relations. What Brown demonstrates is not only how a certain amount of social power could be drawn from acquiring an environmental knowledge that coincided with a trickster’s wit, but ultimately also what bell hooks suggests in “Earthbound,” namely that “[w]e were indeed a people of the earth” (33).

This is not to suggest that Brown’s depictions of power plays that involved environmental knowledge omit the complicity of non-human non-discursive materialities in the trauma caused by the peculiar institution. He draws attention, for instance, to the hardships experienced during flights through a threatening wilderness, and gives one particular example at the beginning of My Southern Home that emblematically expresses how social relations under slavery were acted out by harnessing non-human nature as an oppressive tool (cf. 4–6). The episode describes how one of the Gaines’ visitors mistakes a young, fair-skinned enslaved individual named Billy—possibly modelled after Brown himself²⁶—as Dr. Gaines’ son. After the stranger departs, Billy is forced to undergo a procedure in which he “was seen pulling up grass in the garden, with bare head, neck and shoulders, while the rays of the burning sun appeared to melt the child” (5). This “roasting” of Billy, as Brown calls it, and the episode as a whole symbolize the ways in which non-human non-discursive materialities were made complicit in the suffering of the enslaved population and moreover emphasize the moral faults of those masters who fathered enslaved children. Despite the fact that the enslaved were holding a valuable environmental knowledge that could be empowering in some ways, Brown therefore also puts emphasis on the traumatic side that conflating the black body with the non-human entailed.

Brown’s overarching goal in describing an environmental knowledge gained under slavery, however, is to reconnect a postwar black population of the South with their “Southern Home.” The nostalgic but at the same time very nuanced picture Brown draws of the antebellum South and its social relations, customs, and superstitions, entails a celebration of the black farmer and his agrarian environmental knowledge, and seeks to recreate this section as the black man’s home. For Brown, black Southerners are powerful “hewers of wood, and drawers of water” (91); they are the people of the land, “the manual laborer[s] of that section” (246). It is their intimate agrarian environmental knowledge, first gained under slavery, that has transformed this section of the country into their home, and which, he suggests, they can and must live off after emancipation as well. Accordingly, the second part of Brown’s book has its most optimistic moments in the lengthy depictions of those who “sell their cotton or other produce,” and who “do their trading” and earn their living with the help of working the southern soils (167, cf. esp. chapter XVIII.). In this respect, Brown’s environmental knowledge, like Forten’s, is marked by a pastoral rather than an antipastoral impulse, insofar as it acknowledges value in the rural in opposition to the moral corruption of the city.

Against this background, the meaning of Brown’s statement on leaving or staying in the South that seems to be standing against the title of his book can be re-evaluated. If it is in any way possible for Southern African Americans to live their country life in this section, Brown suggests, this would be the preferable option. If not, he sees the only way to exert pressure against the backlash against Emancipation during post-Reconstruction in “starving” the South, since

[t]wo hundred years have demonstrated the fact that the negro is the manual laborer of that section, and without him agriculture will be at a stand-still.

The negro will for pay perform any service under heaven, no matter how repulsive or full of hardship, He will sing his old planation melodies and walk about the cotton fields in July and August, when the toughest white man seeks an awning. Heat is his element. He fears no malaria in the rice swamps, where a white man’s life is not worth sixpence.

Then, I say, leave the South and starve the whites into a realization of justice and common sense. Remember that tyrants never relinquish their grasp upon their victims until they are forced to. (Home 246–247)

Read against Brown’s celebration of an agrarian African American environmental knowledge in the first part of My Southern Home, Brown’s “black men, emigrate” (248) does therefore not necessarily contradict his idea of a “Southern Home” for himself and his brethren. The most significant part of his advice is, after all, that “[w]hether the blacks emigrate or not […][they should] keep away from the cities and towns. Go into the country. Go to work on farms” (247). He proposes that the environmental knowledge blacks have gained through the “school of slavery” is not only their most valuable starting capital through which they may strategically exert pressure on a re-ascending Southern white supremacist aristocracy, but also that which may provide African Americans with an identity even if they leave the South. Ultimately, Brown seeks to create a sense of home, a new relation to a traumatic rural space, by recovering a shared black history of environmental knowledge that can provide rootedness, mobility, and racial solidarity. Only by recovering a common history will there be a unified and empowering African American identity, will there be the cooperation that may “unite the race in their moral, social, intellectual, and physical improvements” (252, emphasis in original). It is, in Brown’s view, reclaiming a common Southern home and environmental knowledge that is vital to writing such a history and that can provide a basis for a post-Emancipation African America.

If Forten’s reconfiguration of literary space for expressing environmental knowledge works via creating specific literary topoi, Brown’s environmental knowledge is therefore primarily articulated and strategized through the historicizing interplay between the two parts of his book. Forten expresses environmental knowledge through diegetic literary space, by merging the spaces of the household and the classroom with picturesque portrayals of “nature” in order to articulate relations to non-human non-discursive materialities. Brown, on the other hand, rewrites an agrarian environmental knowledge as part of a historiography that is supposed to give African American Southerners a sense of home and thereby, a future. Both, however, are thereby representative of a significant transformation within postwar African American writing more generally, as they articulate their environmental knowledge through literary spaces of education and home. Their texts indicate a broader shift, as environmental knowledge finds expression not through a generic “loophole” like the Underground Railroad, but gains the potential to move to the center of attention, as its articulation converges with two prominent themes of postwar African America.