Until today, Booker T. Washington remains one of the most controversial figures in African American history. Although widely celebrated in his own time as an educator and as the new national “Negro leader” succeeding Frederick Douglass, Washington did not attract much scholarly attention until he was re-introduced into the critical canon in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of scholars such as August Meier and Louis Harlan.Footnote 1 Since then, Washington has been received as a more complex figure. He has been the subject of various studies, and has gained a prominent status in scholarship and in the American public mind, especially over the past decade, as some have drawn comparisons between Washington and 44th President of the United States Barack Obama. Throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, Washington and his work have been both praised and excoriated. From the criticisms that had been waged against his education policies during his lifetime—most famously in the controversy with W.E.B. Du Bois—up until today, he has, in the words of his most recent biographer, kept “returning to haunt some and inspire others” (Smock 14). Washington has been “hero as well as villain” (4), as some have lauded him as extraordinarily skilled educator and “builder of a civilization” (Scott and Stowe), while others have chastised him, politically, as an “accommodator” instrumental in establishing Jim Crow, and, literarily, as a “buffoonish teller of ‘darky stories’ to condescending whites” (Moses xiv).

Over the past two decades, a growing ecocritical discourse on Booker T. Washington attests to the potential and viability of linking African American studies with environmentally oriented literary criticism, as “rethink[ing] Washington’s politics from an ecological perspective, we find a figure more dynamic than the sycophantic boogeyman he became to the radical Du Bois” (Claborn 19). Thus, beyond the still continuing general debate over his political and historical legacy, Washington is more and more being recognized as an environmental writer, and is, as I argue in this chapter, significant in the context of African American literary environmental knowledge. Apart from a handful of (earlier) readings of Washington as pastoralist one finds, by now, a growing number of ecocritical treatments, for example those by Hicks (2006), Grabovac (2015), and Claborn (2018).Footnote 2 Both Hicks and Grabovac turn to Up from Slavery (1901) to propose Washington’s inclusion in the ecocritical canon. While the former identifies him as a representative of “an early twentieth-century ecocriticism of color” (Hicks 203), the latter reads Washington more broadly in the context of the environmental humanities, suggesting that his “denigration of the liberal arts as a kind of fetishism […] still resonates in the different context of today’s neoliberal university” (4). A particularly relevant ecocritical contribution in the context of my reading, due to its (partial) focus on Working with the Hands and the georgic mode is the first chapter of John Claborn’s recent Civil Rights and the Environment (2018). His contribution reframes Washington’s “literary production within the alternative history of colonial-era ecology, marronage, and slave rebellion” and analyzes his “evocation of ecological agencies” (21). Claborn approaches Washington through a “method of eco-historicism” to propose that a “relation between these ecological agencies and marronage sometimes surfaces in the autobiographies, but more often it is only partly conscious or displaced, veiled in the text’s eco-unconscious” (20, 21). His overall argument is that Washington transplants a tradition of maroonage to the “inside [of] the plantation system,” thereby developing alternative forms of black agriculture (29).

This chapter provides an alternative angle on Washington’s autobiographies,Footnote 3 as I focus on Up from Slavery (1901) and its (still understudied) sequel Working with the Hands (1904) to demonstrate how Washington signifies on environmental knowledge of his African American literary predecessors and how his (pastoral and georgic) environmental knowledge relates to turn-of-the-century evolutionary thought to negotiate his vision for African American uplift. Footnote 4 Such a reading contributes to previous scholarly explorations in two main ways. First, by reassessing Washington through (Foucauldian) environmental knowledge to reveal additional facets of his environmentalism, especially regarding Working with the Hands. In this respect, my reading shifts the focus from a contextualization within the tradition of maroonage in previous treatments (Claborn) to Washington’s transformation of a strategic pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative into an African American georgic. Second, I take up a discourse so far not discussed in ecocriticism on Washington, by considering Washington’s environmentalism in the context of evolutionary thought. Although evolutionism and Social Darwinism have been a theme in Washington scholarship (e.g. in studies by Flynn 1969; Williams 1996; or Moses 2004), an ecocritical reading that highlights how Washington’s environmentalism is part of his own (but also subversively resists some dominant claims of a broader discourse of) evolutionary thought is missing so far. Before turning to Washington’s transformation of the strategic pastoral of the slave narrative, the georgics of Working with the Hands, and the ways in which Washington’s environmental knowledge relates to evolutionary thought, I will briefly trace some of the broader shifts in the spatial, visual, and biopolitical parameters for Washington’s environmental knowledge.

The Changed Parameters of Washington’s Environmental Knowledge

Scholars generally acknowledge that Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies provide a revision of the fugitive slave narrative. Primarily with respect to Up from Slavery, many have noted that he employs a characteristic self-reliant voice, formally breaks with a “white envelope” of the antebellum genre, and that his work is, in Robert B. Stepto’s words, an “authenticating narrative […] in which the various authenticating texts are controlled and manipulated by the author” (35). With respect to environmental knowledge, too, Washington’s autobiographical texts perform revisions. I want to take a moment to trace three signifying revisions pertaining to the spatial, visual, and biopolitical dimensions of environmental knowledge, as they signal the changed parameters for Washington’s environmental knowledge, i.e. for his revision of the strategic pastoral of the slave narrative and a shift to the georgic.

With respect to the spatial, Washington’s autobiographies (and his writing and work more generally) can be read as expressions of a post-Emancipation vision for African America that continues a broad revision of literary space. Like Forten and Brown, Washington centrally deals with the themes of education and home in ways that potentially opened up new literary space for expressing environmental knowledge. On the one hand, Washington, after all a symbol of African American “industrial education,” employs ideas and spaces of education in virtually all of his writings, sometimes linking them with depictions of non-human non-discursive materialities. On the other hand, he frequently makes the building of appropriate homes that interact with such materialities in the South his explicit theme. In Working with the Hands, for example, Washington claims to teach “Lessons in Home-Making,” and aims to create “homes that are worthy [of] the name,” e.g. by incorporating “courses in Domestic Science into the regular curriculum” of Tuskegee (98, 100). Thus, (literary) spaces of home and education are just as central in this writer as in other authors of the postwar decades like Forten and Brown, or in writers of the “Black Women’s Era” such as Harper, Dunbar Nelson, and Hopkins (Byerman and Wallinger 193). Washington’s texts, in this respect, provide additional evidence for a broad transformation of postwar African American environmental knowledge through reconfigurations of literary space.

Regarding the visual, Washington’s writing revises both the portrayal of southern visual regimes and the rhetoric of visibility of the antebellum slave narrative; it involves a fundamentally altered network of looks that changes the relation of the narrating observer to a depicted visual regime. While the antebellum, formerly enslaved observer-narrator primarily showed how the visual violence of a disciplining and punishing gaze of the master was acting on the African American enslaved body (and thereby on her/himself) as an object, Washington’s observer-narrator becomes the subject of a black disciplinary gaze within a portrayed visual regime. We see a twofold shift: first, Washington’s texts observe an (at least formally) free instead of an enslaved population; secondly, they represent a shift from looking and describing a panoptic disciplinary regime to looking as performing disciplinary observation. The observing witness of the fugitive slave narrative, in Washington’s writing, turns into a black disciplinary observer.

At points, Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands therefore read like the work of an ethnographer who examines, registers, and meticulously documents the development of the population of the Black Belt. Both texts repeatedly emphasize the need to “get a farther insight into the real life of the people,” to explore their habits, customs and conditions (Up 62). Accordingly, Washington extensively describes his excursions through rural Alabama, “visiting towns and country districts in order to learn the real conditions and needs of the people,” to the end of “investigat[ing] at closer range the history and environment of the people around us” (Working 12, 15). He focuses on diet, living conditions, and homes (cf. e.g. Up 54; Working 13, 37, 162), and often portrays himself as an embedded observer who “ate and slept with the people, in their little cabins,” thus engaging in a form of ethnographic fieldwork (Up 54). In this lies the performance of a basic shift with respect to the observer of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative. An observer who becomes himself the bearer of an analytical, objectifying gaze on the freedman’s body replaces the formerly enslaved witness, who had portrayed the atrocities of slavery’s visual regimes on the enslaved body.

This perspectival shift in Washington to acting as the observing subject of an educational, ethnographic gaze of a postwar African American disciplinary visual regime also alters what I have called the slave narrative’s “rhetoric of visibility.” In contrast to the “eye of the slave,” which was largely circumscribed by the patronizing influence of abolitionists in the antebellum genre, Washington’s gaze on the emancipated population of the South becomes more independent as the “eye of the black educator.” Although formally starting out as a slave narrative with the stock “I was born a slave,” Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands can be more self-confident in their ways of looking than their literary predecessors (Up 7). Especially in Up from Slavery, Washington plays with black autobiographical conventions, as he appropriates the eye of the once enslaved black eye-witness in a more determined way. Up from Slavery is therefore not only, as Stepto has suggested, an “authenticating narrative” that has a self-reliant voice as it plays with the fugitive slave narrative tradition (35), but also transforms the antebellum genre by fundamentally altering what was once the linguistic means of authenticating the enslaved’s visual experience, a rhetoric of visibility. The “I have seen” of the slave narrative, legitimized through the patronizing influence of abolitionists, re-emerges in Washington as the disciplinary “I have observed, documented, examined” of a black educator’s gaze on emancipated African Americans, legitimized through the project of race uplift.

This educational gaze hints at the ways in which Washington’s texts are also revisions of the biopolitical, as this practice of vision becomes one facet of a new form of biopolitics concerning the post-emancipation African American population. Washington’s biopolitical agenda can be traced along the two general lines Foucault has identified with respect to the emergence of biopower in the nineteenth century (cf. Will 139). It involves, first, disciplinary techniques that focus on the individual black body, and, secondly, pertains to the body of the black population as a whole.Footnote 5 Regarding the former, consider the techniques that characterize the system Washington sets up at Tuskegee, which is based on meticulous examination and documentation. In Up from Slavery, Washington describes how

the organization [at Tuskegee] is so thorough that the daily work of the school is not dependent upon the presence of any one individual. The whole executive force, including instructors and clerks, now numbers eighty-six. This force is so organized and subdivided that the machinery of the school goes on day by day like clockwork. (118)

Tuskegee functions like a Foucauldian disciplinary institution. It works like “machinery,” is spatially compartmentalized, temporally regulated as it runs like “clock-work,” and marked by the decentralization of modern power epitomized in panopticism, as it is “not dependent upon the presence of any one individual” to function smoothly (118). It is no coincidence that Tuskegee and Hampton, the school that Washington had first attended and after which his own “Institute” was modeled, were run in a quasi-military spirit, considering that the founder of Hampton and its education model, General Samuel C. Armstrong, was a man of the military. Although the aim was not, as Henry Romeyn, another former soldier who worked at Hampton between 1878 and 1881, stated, “to make soldiers of our students, nor to create a warlike spirit,” military techniques were used to “create ideas of neatness, order, system, obedience” (qtd. J. Anderson 58). In this sense, the Tuskegee-Hampton complex is a prime example of a broader process Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish (cf. “Part Three”), through which the military techniques of drill and examination spread into educational institutions that aimed to produce “docile bodies.” In Washington’s case, the techniques were meant to produce docile black bodies and to control and foster their usefulness as individuals and collectively to the end of solving the “negro problem.” Tuskegee, read in this light, was not only a “machine” in the sense in which W.E.B. Du Bois later referred to it, meaning the powerful conglomerate of Washington and his allies (cf. Dusk 36–41), but also a prototypical “disciplinary machine” that sought to take control of individualized freedmen.

Washington’s disciplinary gaze and methods, however, strove not simply for the production of useful and docile black individuals but ultimately did so to the end of manufacturing a productive black population; he meant to perform the “uplift” of an entire “race.” Washington’s writing therefore also expresses a biopolitical scheme driven by the idea of “taking control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not [only] disciplined, but regularized” (Foucault, Society 246–247). In this respect, his strategies include primarily measures pertaining to health and hygiene; his aim regarding the freedmen was, as Houston Baker’s remarks, to “clean them up” (58, emphasis in original). From Washington’s first employment by a wealthy white family in Malden, Virginia, to the sweeping of a floor that earned him his entry into Hampton (cf. Up 29), and the excessive hygienic policies at Tuskegee, his texts are obsessed with a cleanliness regarded as essential for uplift. One of the most famous examples in this respect is what he calls “The Gospel of the Toothbrush,” an integral “part of our creed at Tuskegee” (80). Washington insists on

[t]he effect that the use of the tooth-brush has had in bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students. With few exceptions, I have noticed that if we can get a student to the point where, when the first or second tooth-brush disappears, he of his own motion buys another, I have not been disappointed in the future of that individual. Absolute cleanliness of the body has been insisted upon from the first. The students have been taught to bathe as regularly as to take their meals. (81)

The regularities of (self-)discipline are envisioned as a means of ensuring the health of both individual bodies and an entire population body. Military-style drill converges with notions of cleanliness and health at Tuskegee, whereby Washington ultimately seeks to ensure the production of a functioning, physically, mentally and morally sound, and economically productive black population. Ultimately, the central question, in Foucauldian terms, becomes that of an “entry of black life into history,” when Washington asks his (white) audience to “decide within yourselves whether a race that is thus willing to die for its country [in war] should not be given the highest opportunity to live for its country” (116, emphasis mine).

Thus, Washington’s autobiographies signify not simply on visual regimes and a rhetoric of visibility of the fugitive slave narrative but also revise its body politics and the disciplinary regimes of American slavery. Where writers of slave narratives described (visually) controlling regimes and disciplinary forces in connection with the iconic and destructive bodily punishments characteristic of southern slavery, Washington appropriates principles of discipline and control into a less archaic, more modern and productive scheme for uplifting a free black population. He aimed to establish and exert new kinds of disciplinary forces on the black body, the productive potential of which he constantly exemplifies in his own person. Consider, for instance, the description of his first employment for a white family in Malden. Washington claims that

the lessons that I learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner were as valuable to me as any education I have ever gotten anywhere since. Even to this day I never see bits of paper scattered around a house or in the street that I do not want to pick them up at once. I never see a filthy yard that I do not want to clean it, a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or unwhitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash it, or a button off one’s clothes, or a grease-spot on them or on a floor, that I do not want to call attention to it. (Up 25)

The drudgery at Mrs. Ruffner’s may technically not be less menial than that in some antebellum master’s household, yet freedom offers, Washington suggests, the opportunity to appropriate discipline for freed individuals and by extension the African American population as a whole. The idea was, as he put it in a 1903 essay in the collection The Negro Problem, that of moving from “being worked” to “working” (“Industrial Education” 9). Before Emancipation, discipline inevitably meant being disciplined by another, since the enslaved black body was the property of that other. After Emancipation, Washington suggests, a modern, empowering self-discipline became possible, which he stresses in the above passage through the repetition of “that I do not want to,” implying his own will. The claim is that even though postwar labor itself may often not look much different than it did before Emancipation, the relation between work and the willful, disciplined black body could become more productive and governable.

Washington seeks to replace relations of domination in which the black body was locked via the antebellum master-slave property relationship with relations of disciplinary power for post-Emancipation generations. His strategy is to appropriate the black body by inducing (self-)discipline to the end of producing a healthier, more useful population. An anecdote of Washington’s trickster play with clock time while working in Malden is emblematic of this strategy: Because his work shift in the coal furnaces ends at nine o’clock, yet school begins at precisely the same hour, Washington “morning after morning” moves “the clock hands from half-past eight up to the nine o’clock mark” (Up 20). The face of the clock, upon which “all the hundred or more workmen depended […] to regulate their hours of beginning and ending the day’s work” comes to symbolize not just a white disciplinary regime, but, more importantly, Washington’s appropriation of it (20). Accompanied by his captatio benevolentiae that “I did not mean to inconvenience anybody,” the appropriation of time itself in order to gain education in this scene epitomizes the ways in which his scheme generally seeks to adopt time and space for new forms of discipline (20). The old, white disciplinary regimes must be broken to create his own education model at Tuskegee, where time and space are by no means less rigidly structured through a black disciplinarily gaze. At the heart of Washington’s signifying revision lies therefore, besides a focus on education and home, both the establishment of a new vision, a black gaze that seeks to discipline individuals, and the notion of a black population at the center of a new biopolitical vision.

From Strategic Pastoral to Georgic

In the passage from Up from Slavery describing his experience at the Ruffners’, Washington refers to his task of cleaning up a “filthy yard” and repairing dilapidated “fences” (25). I want to suggest that his portrayal of the garden at this point not only foreshadows his later obsession with hygiene, but also hints at the ways in which he envisions relations to the non-human natural world. With respect to the latter, the version of the same scene given in Working with the Hands is much more detailed. Here, Washington writes:

My task, as I remember it, was to cut the grass around the house, and then to give the grounds a thorough ‘cleaning up.’ In those days there were no lawn-mowers, and I had to go down on my knees and cut much of the grass with a little hand-scythe. […] I am not ashamed to say that I did not succeed in giving satisfaction the first, or even the second time […] But I kept at it, and after a few days, as the result of my efforts under the strict oversight of my mistress, we could take pleasure in looking upon a yard where the grass was green, and almost perfect in its smoothness, where the flower beds were trimly kept, the edges of the walks clean cut, and where there was nothing to mar the well-ordered appearance. (8–9)

The depiction exemplifies two main elements of Washington’s revised form of African American environmental knowledge. First, there is the idea of a “well-ordered” yard that suggests both pastoral harmony and, crucially, the accessibility of this pleasurable pastoral harmony to African Americans. Secondly, one finds the notion that achieving the pastoral requires hard but rewarding bodily labor and what Washington’s biopolitics centrally celebrates, namely strict self-discipline.

With regard to the first idea, Washington can be read as a revision of the pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative. Recall, at this point, the strategic functions of the pastoral delineated in Chap. 3: fugitive slave narratives, I have argued, employed the pastoral subversively as part of a two-fold frame of their depictions of the plantation and made use of the spatial and temporal dimensions of pastoral (cf. Snyder 3–11) in order to criticize their enslavement, express environmental knowledge, and articulate their hope for a better future. Crucially, a spatial, Arcadian pastoral retreat was disengaged, represented as unavailable in normalizing plantationscapes, tying the mode to a general antipastoral impulse in the antebellum genre. Even if a Golden Age (temporal) pastoral could at points be used to hint at primal pastoral stages and memories and to articulate environmental knowledge, the slave narrative frequently highlighted the inaccessibility of pastoral space to the enslaved due to their dehumanized position.

Washington’s autobiographies, by contrast, proclaim an availability of the pastoral as a “reward”; Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands mobilize a spatial dimension of pastoral, as they suggest that a pastoral experience is possible for emancipated African Americans under certain conditions. Compare Washington’s experience at the Ruffners’ with Douglass’s description of Colonel Lloyd’s garden in his 1845 Narrative. Douglass portrays the Colonel’s “large and finely cultivated garden” as

afford[ing] almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief garderner, (Mr. M’Durmond.) The garden was probably the greatest attraction of the place. […] Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to the hungry swarms of [enslaved] boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the colonel, few of whom had the virtue or vice to resist it. […] The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around, after which, if a slave was caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that he had either been into the garden, or had tried to get in. In either case, he was severely whipped by the chief gardener. (20)

The Ruffners’ garden in Working with the Hands clearly echoes this portrayal when Washington writes that “the orchards around the house bore heavy yields of the finest fruits,” and the menial labor in which he does “not succeed in giving satisfaction” evokes the traumatic memory of the enslaved’s experience epitomized in Colonel Lloyd’s garden (Working 8). Moreover, Washington’s scene repeats elements of the strict discipline and panoptic surveillance of Douglass’s portrayal, when he recalls working “under the strict oversight of my mistress” (8). Significantly, however, the corporeal punishments of the enslaved body described in Douglass’s passage that had traumatized the plantation pastoral have disappeared in Washington’s description of his toil in Mrs. Ruffner’s yard. Additionally, Washington is able to find satisfaction in “the result of my efforts” (9) and gains the potential to value his work and the knowledge he thereby gains—something that, although Douglass implies a botanical knowledge that the “four men” maintaining Lloyd’s garden must possess, could not easily be communicated in the antebellum fugitive slave narrative. Washington, by contrast, is no more entirely excluded; the tarred fences are gone, and when he claims that “we could take pleasure” in looking at the well-ordered, domesticated garden, his use of the pronoun marks his own inclusion in enjoying the pastoral (9, emphasis mine). Although leaving open whether he gains access to the fruit of the yard, pastoral space is not categorically denied. Instead, it becomes available, in Working with the Hands and Up from Slavery, through Washington’s toil, as a “reward” for hard labor.

As this scene suggests, Washington primarily expresses this idea of an availability of the southern pastoral to the emancipated population and to the black writer through his depictions of gardens. This is true for both Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands, even if more pronounced as part of a progressive ideal in the former. In Up from Slavery, the idea of the “pastoral-as-reward” for individual and collective development and as a sign of race uplift becomes clearest in Washington’s descriptions of his own garden at Tuskegee towards the end of his book. In chapter XV, he claims that not only “the woods, where we can live for a while near the heart of nature,” but especially his own yard functions as a

source of rest and enjoyment. Somehow I like, as often as possible, to touch nature, not something that is artificial or an imitation, but the real thing. When I can leave my office in time so that I can spend thirty or forty minutes in spading the ground, in planting seeds, in digging about the plants, I feel that I am coming into contact with something that is giving me strength for the many duties and hard places that await me out in the big world. I pity the man or woman who has never learned to enjoy nature and to get strength and inspiration out of it. (Up 121)

The quote and its position at the close of Washington’s story of his individual development point to the pastoral’s function as a sign of leisure. After all, the above statement is part of his response to the question how he “can find time for any rest or recreation, and what kind of recreation or sports I am fond of” (119). Nonetheless, the passage is neither a mere demonstration of Washington’s ability to slip “into a highly Emersonian rhetoric of nature as a recuperative retreat,” as Willis suggests (116), nor simply an example of what Guha and Martinez-Alier have called a “full-stomach”-environmentalism (cf. Grabovac 14). Instead, Washington’s garden, when taking the progressive structure of his narrative into account, functions as a “reward.” His discourse of nature expresses neither solely an Emersonian or Thoreauvian retreat nor a refuge from racism as in Forten, but the “price” for the self-discipline that Washington has mustered. In a first sense, Washington therefore transforms antebellum African American environmental knowledge by disconnecting himself from the burden of an “enslaved eye” and by re-inscribing the pastoral as accessible space into his texts. Contrasted with the uncleanliness of the slave huts of his childhood and the coal-furnaces of his youth, Washington’s pastoral turns into an environmental reward.

His revision of African American environmental knowledge, however, goes further. While both autobiographies use the idea of the pastoral as a spatialized reward, Washington’s environmental knowledge introduces a second central element that concerns the process leading to this reward: his georgic. The georgic, generally speaking, is a literary mode (the second stage of the Virgilian career, between pastoral and epic) that focuses on agricultural labor, takes the laborer as its central protagonist, and describes work as “first principle, the common necessity, of life itself,” representing it as both dignified and difficult (Ronda 864).Footnote 6 Other typical features of the georgic include its focus on the ordinary and collective, and on the way in which work is “valued for the hard-won knowledge it yields” (865). Many of these features account for the attractiveness of the georgic to post-emancipation African American literature and, in the context of the present study, for its importance to a tradition of African American environmental knowledge. With respect to African American literature of the post-Emancipation decades more generally, the georgic is appealing as “a mode suited to the establishment of civilization and the founding of nations” (Low, qtd. D. Anderson 88), but also because it offers another point of access to the material situation that the (plantation) pastoral so grossly distorted. One could represent and dignify agricultural work in a way that was much more honest regarding the exploitative peonage system, and that corresponded with the way in which, as Houston Baker suggests, “the mind of the [agricultural] South was critical to black personality, cultural, economic, and political formation” during the late nineteenth- to the early twentieth century (24).

In the context of environmental knowledge, one key aspect of the georgic is particularly significant, namely what David R. Anderson describes, in his reading of Sterling Brown’s use of the mode, as the georgic’s “celebration of knowledge created through work and experience” (87). If we broadly distinguish between work and other kinds of practices (both conceptually and spatially), Part I of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature has amply shown that one of the reasons why it was traditionally difficult for African American writers to express environmental knowledge was that such knowledge often emerged through work, but that such work was simultaneously marked by trauma. The georgic, by contrast, attains a significant status and transformative potential in this respect, because it can function as a way to articulate environmental knowledge as a “work-derived knowledge” that has the potential to change images of black labor and represent spaces in new ways as connected to a tradition of African American environmental knowledge (92).

In Washington’s case (and here lies another spatial shift that is specific to his ideas when compared to Forten’s picturesque and Brown’s nostalgic depictions), the turn to the georgic is at the same time literally a return to the plantation through changed parameters, as texts such as Working with the Hands suggest. In this book, which almost reads like a farmer’s manual, Washington views “agriculture” as the most “fundamental industry” to be taught at Tuskegee and declares that his aim is “to awaken in its entire student body a keen interest in farming, farm life, the farm-house and farm society” (Working 57, 118). The text, categorized by Claborn as “a work of conservation as well as racial uplift” (36), by exposing the Tuskegee creed not merely in terms of an ideology but by providing concrete information on the “right methods” of proper farming and the efficient use of Southern soils, becomes itself a practical instrument of Washington’s mission, a georgic manifesto (Working 163). It is, in this sense, part of the larger Hampton-Tuskegee-strategy of creating clusters of education throughout the South. If the general idea was to produce teachers that distributed disciplinary techniques and biopolitical schemes across the South, so that “[w]herever our graduates go, the changes which soon begin to appear […] are remarkable” (Up 144), Working with the Hands is the literary agent of this idea. It acts as a “graduate” with two covers that contains the knowledge to be dispersed and that Washington meant to be read and turned into practice by the black population of the South for the purpose of uplift.

Washington’s African American georgic in Working with the Hands involves various forms of environmental knowledge and may be characterized along three central features: the celebration of the local and communal, Washington’s striving towards regaining a “dignity of labor” through the land, and an aesthetics and ethics that can be derived from this form of labor. A celebration of the local and communal becomes visible in the ways in which Washington roots his georgic in material contact with locales, presents Tuskegee as an institution that works as a self-sufficient system, and suggests a connection with the soil through ownership. Note in this respect that for Washington the process of acquiring knowledge in itself is rooted not simply in a specific locale, but in forms of material tactility. “Knowledge of things near at hand should be acquired first,” he writes at one point, “and later of things more distant,” because “a clear and definite acquaintance with home surroundings (plants, animals, minerals, natural phenomena, and the human body) is made the basis of the teaching as a foundation for more advanced study” (92). The notion of contact with a locale as habitat and home, attains significant meaning throughout the pages of Working, as it is not only the “hands” of the book’s title that are a means of providing this contact, but other senses of the human body as well. Washington stresses, for example, that “the smell of the soil” provides “a contact with reality that gives one a strength and development that can gained in no other way” (64), and, in a passage that echoes a Golden Age pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative, depicts his own experiences as enslaved child as formative for his idea of rootedness within locales, when he declares that “I was born nearly out-of-doors” (151).

This rootedness in locales furthermore finds expression in the self-sufficiency of Tuskegee and in the idea of connecting with the soil through land ownership. As Washington remarks, “the school is a community unto itself, in which buildings can be erected, finished, and furnished, the table supplied the year round, and economic independence achieved in large measure” (Working 70). Just as much as this passage expresses Washington’s entrepreneurial model, it is connected to an idea of a locale that provides the necessities of life (“table supplied the year round”) and a notion of collective efforts as parts of an environmental knowledge that makes “the school self-supporting” (70). Similarly, his emphasis on land ownership expressed at various points in Working with the Hands does not simply have important economic dimensions, but also relies on an intimate and rewarding relationship to the land, since the farmer “must be able to look forward to owning the land that he cultivates” in order to connect with it (32). Through such statements, Washington’s Working with the Hands fleshes out an environmental dimension of his post-Emancipation vision that is also significant for readings of his more famous works, as it makes iconic phrases like his 1895 “Cast down your bucket where you are” more ambivalent (Up 99–100). While this sentence has often been read as aiming to stop migration to the (Northern) cities, and therefore as blatantly accommodating to the interests of the Southern planter class, it can also be understood more fundamentally as an expression of his georgic environmental knowledge, i.e. in terms of working with whichever non-human, non-discursive material conditions are available. Since, Washington realizes, “[t]he South is not yet in any large degree manufacturing territory, but is an agricultural section and will probably remain such for a long period,” the imperative for a Southern African American population must indeed be to work in that local soil, yet his environmental knowledge in Working with the Hands also implies that a primary goal will be gaining black ownership of the land—not succumbing to the planter class of the South (Working 108). Washington chose a place that symbolized the old order to begin his education project and develop his re-interpretation of the rural, namely “an old and abandoned plantation” near Tuskegee, but he also became its legal owner (Up 61). Thus, when Washington’s georgic seeks to root “his” population in a local rurality rather than in cities or factories, often envisioned through a pastoral lens as unclean, unhealthy and morally corrupt, this seems much less accommodationist when read through an environmental knowledge expressed in Working with the Hands as a means of appropriation.

A second classic feature of Washington’s georgic lies in his striving towards reclaiming a dignity of labor through the land; his aim, after all, is to teach students the “advantages of farm life and of work with their hands” (Working 39). Early on in his book, Washington sets the premise for this task by arguing that “during the days of slavery labour was forced out of the Negro, and he had acquired, for this reason, a dislike for work. The whole machinery of slavery was not apt to beget the spirit of love of labour” (17). The last sentence in particular attests to Washington’s double-voiced strategy in Working with the Hands, as it has the potential to alleviate potential feelings of white guilt through its de-individualizing and euphemistic vocabulary (“machinery,” “not apt,” “love”) and, for the same reason, must have seemed purely ironic and cynical to Washington’s black readers who had a first-hand experience of enslavement. It is vital nonetheless for the sake of uplifting the latter that Washington does ascribe blame to the peculiar institution and to the way in which it had, as Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, “degraded” labor (363), since this marks what he has to propose as a form of resistance.

Furthermore, it is significant that Working with the Hands seeks to dignify not only what we might expect, namely agrarian methods and manual labor, but offers a variety of forms of (environmental) knowledge and, in its own form, demonstrates that Washington’s education ethos was by no means intended to involve simple drudgery. On the one hand, it is true that we find a strong emphasis on physical labor and Washington’s almost iconic dislike of the “witty negro” that is present in many of his writings including Up from Slavery. Out of his observations of the “everyday life of the people” and of the devastating and unproductive forms of agrarian toil and vicious circles of peonage and sharecropping, Washington sought to employ disciplinary techniques to the end of introducing a new, more productive relation of the population to the land through a revaluation of labor (Up 54). While an agrarian vision as a means of uplift was not new among black writers by the time Washington was proposing his scheme, his particular kind of education, known as “industrial” or “vocational” training, is often radically set against the stereotype of the “educated Negro, with a high hat, imitation gold eye-glasses, a showy walking-stick, kid gloves, fancy boots, and what not—in a word, a man who has determined to live by his wits” (57). Washington recognized the potential hindrances for race uplift that lay in this stereotype of the “educated Negro,” both with regard to the antipathy it triggered in a white Southern planter class that feared the migration of its main workforce to the cities, and regarding the ways in which such education could lead African American farmers into (self-)destructive agricultural practices. He saw the danger of monocultures, in which black farmers’ “one object seemed to be to plant nothing but cotton,” that could further destroy the soils and lead into new forms of quasi-slavery (54).

On the other hand, it is striking how Working with the Hands balances the notion of purely agricultural or manual labor with additional forms of knowledge and education that are indeed “witty,” especially through its form and its collage-like presentation of material. One need only consider the kinds of examples that are interspersed and presented as emerging from Washington’s georgic throughout Working with the Hands, such as letters written by students (174–180), complex timetables (e.g. 86–87), or contracts (e.g. 53–54), to sense how ambitious his “gospel of hard work with head and hands” is intended to be (173, emphasis in original). Although Washington, as his title suggests, provides an agricultural manual, his book, on the other hand, and through the environmental knowledge that his georgic articulates, also strives for a valuation of other complex forms of knowledge that emerge from re-valuing and dignifying labor. He often suggests this indirectly and encoded in images of the black literary tradition. Consider, for example, his suggestion that “[t]here is something, I think, in the handling of a tool that has the same relation to close, accurate thinking that writing with a pen has in the preparation of a manuscript” and that “one can produce much more satisfactory work by using the pen than by dictation” (59). For a black audience, a statement like this might have (at least) two messages that go beyond the propositional content of the passage and its most obvious intention to emphasize the importance of manual labor. First, it is relevant that Washington signifies on a black literary tradition in which the “pen” had become iconic through the slave narrative (Douglass in particular comes to mind), thus implying that he stands in this tradition of freedomseekers (in addition to a tradition of maroonage (cf. Claborn)). Second, and with this emphasis and background, there is no reason why the quotation should imply that the “tool” should be more important than the “pen.” Washington signals, in other words, that his education and georgic neither simply meant to teach that a rural life “out in the sweet, pure, bracing air” was superior to urban life, nor solely sought to discipline the black body into being a valuable worker (116). Even if there can be no doubt, considering the elaborate forms of environmental knowledge presented in Working through an impressive array of suggestions ranging from course descriptions of experimental agricultural classes to planting schedules and drawings of cultivation plans for fields (cf. 107–118, 135–150, 165–172), that Washington ultimately strives for the large-scale establishment of a kind of black yeoman farmer, there is simultaneously the idea that this dignified farmer’s work will yield a knowledge of the “pen.”

This idea hints at a third facet of Washington’s georgic, namely the aesthetics and ethics that he suggests can be gained through agricultural labor and environmental knowledge. The notion that work means not only physical labor, but includes poetic labor as well, has long been present in the georgic tradition. As Goodman describes, Virgil’s “Georgics are just as much about the poet’s careful labor of representation within a larger field of cultivating activities. Highlighting and reflecting on its own medium, in other words, the poem offers a complex meditation on the affinities and differences between the tending of words and the culture of the ground” (556). What D. Anderson’s reading suggests regarding Sterling Brown, namely that this “self-reflexive tendency to comment upon the role of literature in community-building” could be a particularly important facet in an African American georgic tradition (Working 88), can also be seen in Washington’s use of the mode. One example that shows most clearly that Washington envisions his georgic environmental knowledge not merely in connection with physical work, but sees a writing tradition itself emerge out of a knowledge thus gained, may be sensed in Chapter VI “Welding Theory and Practice.” Once more, this chapter emphasizes a close connection to the local and the communal, as it describes the process of establishing “the needed machinery” to produce brooms and how “the director of the Agricultural Department discovered that broom-corn could be raised on the farm” (68). More significantly, however, the girls manufacturing the brooms “were asked to write compositions descriptive of their work in this industry” (68), one of which Washington includes in his text. It reads:

I am a nice large broom just made Tuesday by Harriet McCray. Before I was made into a broom, I grew over in a large farm with a great many others of my sisters. One day I was cut down and brought up to the broom-making department, and was carefully picked to pieces to get the best straw. I was put in an machine called the winder. […] From the cutter I was carried to the threshing machine and combed out thoroughly, and put in the barrel for sale. I was sold to the school for thirty-five cents. (69)

This short piece of writing, titled “Broom-Making” is striking for a variety of reasons. First, it is an emblem that, in almost uncanny ways, echoes the fugitive slave narrative. It seems impossible to read phrases such as “I was sold” or “I grew over in a large farm” as anything but reminders of the rhetoric of the antebellum genre, and while there will be no absolute certainty about whether the author of this piece herself, one Harriet McCray, was aware of this, I would argue that the fact that Washington chose to include this particular example is another sign of his revisionism. Moreover, the passage reflects central aspects of Washington’s georgic environmental knowledge. That “gaining” a voice through the fugitive slave narrative is replaced by “giving” a voice to a non-human material object emerging from the ground (“I grew over in a large farm” (69)), for instance, hints at Washington’s ethical ideas about an intimate relation to the non-human nature of Southern locales. Even more importantly, the inclusion of the passage highlights how his georgic marks a literary potential of environmental knowledge; adding to his mobilization of a spatial accessibility of the pastoral as a reward, Washington’s georgic is significant for its expression of a link between environmental knowledge and a post-Emancipation writing tradition. Georgic environmental knowledge, the inclusion of McCray’s piece suggests, in addition to celebrating a close relationship to the local and communal, and striving towards a dignity of labor through the land, has the potential of becoming a root and resource of African American writing. Washington’s claim that “[o]ur pathway must be up through the soil, up through the swamps, up through forests” is also the claim of moving up through literature (29).

Washington’s Environmental Knowledge and Evolutionary Thought

Booker T. Washington was a social evolutionist in many ways, as a variety of scholars (more recently Williams 1996; Moses 2004) have suggested. His environmental knowledge must therefore, on the one hand, be read as part of his evolutionism. On the other hand, the pastoral-as-reward and the introduction of a georgic-as-process (leading to this reward) are not simply revisions of antebellum environmental knowledge that serve Washington’s post-Emancipation model of uplift, but (since this model was rooted in a form of evolutionism) also potentially interact with broader discourses of evolutionary thought. Washington’s environmental knowledge contributed to, but also bore the potential to depart from and signify on dominant (racist) discourses of evolutionary thought. Before concluding this chapter by suggesting some of the ways in which this happened, I will sketch some of the general premises of evolutionary thought.

Lee L. Baker describes evolutionary thought as the “ideological cement that fused capitalist development, imperialism, scientific progress, racism and the law into a rock solid edifice within US society” around the turn of the century (“Location” 112). Even if such thought therefore figured as one of the great organizing principle of the late nineteenth century, it was by no means uniform. Its heterogeneity becomes visible not only in the ways various (pseudo-)scientific disciplines (biology, (physical) anthropology, sociology etc.) interpreted and deployed evolutionary ideas, but also in the convergence of (older) ideas about race with evolutionism. Consider, for example, the “American School’s” adaptation of evolutionary thought. At first glance, fundamentally monogenistic post-Darwinian evolutionary thought hardly seems to fit the assumption of different types of humans as distinct species that was characteristic of the work of Morton, Nott, or Gliddon. Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), the book in which he extended his idea of evolution to the human species, claimed that “[t]he most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species is that they graduate into each other” (226). At other points, he was even more explicit in rejecting polygenism, for instance, in an 1860 letter to Charles Lyell, in which he criticized “Agassiz&Co” for their idea of man as different species, arguing that “[a]ll races of man are so infinitely closer together than to any ape that […] I should look at all races of man as having certainly descended from a single parent.” It was nevertheless one of American polygenism’s foremost proponents, Josiah Nott, who, in the mid-1860s, hinted at a way for conjoining evolutionism with polygenist theory. In the first issue of the Popular Magazine of Anthropology of 1866, Nott stated that it is true that “Darwin and other naturalists, have contended for the gradual change or development of organic forms from physical causes,” yet at the same time claimed that “even this school requires millions of years for their theory” and therefore did not “controvert the facts and deductions” he and others had previously “laid down” (108). Thus, staunch American polygenists (and many evolutionists in Europe) played the “trick of time” with regard to questions of race. Man may be, evolutionarily speaking, one species, but the changes visible in the different racial “types” as they presently existed had taken place so long ago and were therefore so fundamentally fixed that stable racial characteristics could well be discerned, which became recognizable not only physically but also in terms of mental capabilities and moral faculties. The process of racial evolution, from this point of view, had come to a halt, so that post-Darwinian evolutionism could conceptually merge with older forms of essentialist racial knowledge.

Despite the diversity of U.S. evolutionary thought in general, I want to suggest that there are some specific features characteristic of evolutionary thought pertaining to race and what was called the “negro question.” Virtually all who engaged in evolutionism as an explicatory framework, among them such leading scientists as sociologist William G. Sumner, paleontologist Nathaniel S. Shaler, or geologist John W. Powell, expressed their views in response to three fundamental ideas. First, there was the notion of (hierarchical) “stages of development” between types of humans; second, the question of the permeability of the assumed boundaries between such stages, i.e. the question of the “improvability” of what were regarded as “lower” racial types; and, third, the question whether one should actively interfere in “racial progress.”

With respect to the first idea, evolutionary thought, based on the premise of developments over extensive periods of time, interpreted racial difference in terms of a difference in advancement through evolutionary “stages.” Evolutionism’s notion of an “ordinary succession by generation [that] has never been broken” meant the assumption of distinct, most often hierarchically and teleologically understood stages of long-term development (Darwin, Origin 426). This new mode of differentiation converged with old racial hierarchies in late nineteenth-century American discourse on the “negro question,” and was most often adapted to produce trajectories ranging from “lower” to “higher” racial types that echoed the “great chain of being” or older polygenist models.Footnote 7 In an article published five years before Washington delivered his famous Atlanta Cotton Exhibition address, paleontologist Nathaniel S. Shaler, for instance, expressed this idea, when claiming that

[t]he negro is not as yet intellectually so far up in the scale of development as he appears to be; in him the great virtues of the superior race, though implanted, have not yet taken firm root, and are in need of constant tillage, lest the old savage weeds overcome the tender shoots of the new and unnatural culture. To those who believe that the negro is only a black white man, who only needs a fair chance to become all that the white man is, these pages are not addressed. (42)

The racial difference that American society had long established through physical racial markers such as skin color or hair form becomes articulated along an evolutionary “scale of development.” Crucially, this happens in Shaler and others along a differentiation that attributes value: there were those that were “superior” and those “inferior” ones whose inferiority could now be explained by their not being “so far up” the ladder of evolution that supposedly led to civilization—an old hierarchization through a new, evolutionary biologization of race.

This hierarchization was articulated in increasingly elaborate ways, for instance, via the notion of “the negro’s” being arrested in a stage of childhood, or in terms of a fixed racial character. Spencer in particular, who had at least as much influence on U.S. evolutionary thought on race as Darwin, continuously compared the children of the Caucasian race to adults from “lesser” races, pointing out that “[t]he intellectual traits of the uncivilized […] are traits recurring in the children of the civilized” (Sociology 89–90 qtd. Gould 146). Many late-nineteenth-century American scientists willingly took up this notion in debating the “negro problem,” thereby helping to scientifically justify an already widely established set of stereotypes of blacks as child-like. Moreover, this idea was connected with the broader construction of “racial character” that becomes visible in various discursive formations towards the close of the century (cf. the study by Boeckmann). Biologist Joseph LeConte’s claim, for instance, that there was a characteristic “instinct necessary to preserve the blood purity of the higher race” (365), or senator Henry C. Lodge’s suggestion of a “soul of a race” which represents “something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect,” were prominent ideas that attest to an essentializing of racial difference via the notion of a racial character (qtd. Lofgren 98, 99). What becomes clear at this point is that the articulation of racial difference in terms of evolutionary stages had taken root as an underlying knowledge that lent itself well to large-scale, scientifically legitimized interpretations of the workings of race in society. One effect was that moral questions concerning the exploitation of racialized groups, most prominently African Americans, became obsolete via this new biologization of race, since one could rely more than ever before on (evolutionary) “nature” as dictating the reassuring “truth” of their inevitable inferiority. Exempting white elites from any responsibility for the black population was possible, because, in the words of senator John T. Morgan, “[t]he inferiority of the negro race” became “so essentially true, and so obvious, that to assume it in argument, cannot be justly attributed to prejudice” (386).

With the establishment of a trajectory from “inferior” to “superior” stages as the basis of U.S. evolutionary thought on the “negro problem,” the most pressing question, secondly, became that of the possibility and means of progress. The question was, in other words, that of the permeability of the naturalized boundaries supposedly separating simultaneously existing racial forms of human life, or, in the language of the time, of the “improvability of the negro” in terms of striving towards what was unanimously pronounced the highest stage of social progress, “civilization.” To some, especially those who essentialized racial difference, the answer to this question was evidently negative, even as they claimed to believe in long-term evolutionary developments. Some essentialized race by claiming a by then supposedly fixed and virtually unchangeable mental or moral “racial character,” while others, supported by a burgeoning number of studies in anthropometry and physical anthropology that continued the American School’s obsession with crania, did the same by referring to physical properties.Footnote 8 In either case, a considerable number concurred with what the Presbyterian pastor Henry M. Field’s claimed in his travelogue Bright Skies and Dark Shadows (1890), namely that after slavery “[t]he whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity” (144). From this perspective, some construed evidence to the end of demonstrating that African Americans were simply not fit—and never would be—for uplift and civilization, and claimed, as one common thesis went, that the black population was inevitably facing extinction.Footnote 9

A large number of participants in the debate, however, did not categorically deny the possibility of a (social) evolutionary change in “the negro,” even if many would see such a change only in the far future. The idea in this respect often was, as historian John Fiske wrote in his Cosmic Philosophy (1874), that “men cannot be taught a higher state of civilization, but can only be bred into it” (Fiske and Spencer 344). Yet another group were those thinkers Daphne Lamothe identifies as “environmentalists” and pits against “evolutionists.” She describes that

by 1880 another group of scientists was developing yet another theory of racial formation. This group, the environmentalists, argued for the influence of historical, geographic, and social factors in determining racial patterns and cultural behaviors. […] while the environmentalists might have shared with evolutionists the idea that Black communities fostered severe pathologies, they differed from them in that they considered their weaknesses to be caused by environmental factors. (22)

While Lamothe’s term “environmentalists” for the folklorists at Hampton is well chosen in the sense that it draws attention to their taking into account environmental factors instead of relying on an assumed innate inferiority (cf. 21–32; also L. Baker “Research”), it is doubtful whether these scientists and collectors of folklore, and especially Armstrong himself, were not “evolutionists” as well. True, Armstrong “argued that Blacks had an innate capacity for social and intellectual improvement” and, in this respect, differed from the bulk of social evolutionists of his time (Lamothe 28). However, reading Armstrong more closely makes clear that his education model was not therefore opposed to evolutionary thought. He embraced, after all, the fundamental trajectory from supposedly lower social forms to higher “civilization,” especially with regard to questions of character, for instance, when claiming that African Americans were marked by “low ideas of honor, and morality” while the Caucasian race was strongly developed in terms of “moral strength, in guiding instincts” (qtd. J. Anderson 39). In this sense, Armstrong has the same evolutionary stages of development in mind, even if he negates an innate or long-term incapacity of blacks for improvement. He thinks of his students as “docile, impressible, imitative and earnest, and com[ing] to us as a tabula rasa so far as real culture is concerned,” yet his aim is always that of moving them towards this “real culture” (meaning exclusively Euro-American ‘civilization’), and out of “lower” forms of barbarism and savagery (qtd. J. Anderson 45, emphasis in original). Armstrong’s approach is, at the core, that of an evolutionist, even if he takes a different, more optimistic position regarding the question of improvability.

Thirdly, like the question of improvability, the question of (not) taking action regarding the “negro problem” became another central point of debate often discussed in terms of evolutionism. In this respect, too, Armstrong’s Hampton ethos presents one extreme end of the responses. Armstrong and his followers’ solution was to render large-scale assistance in uplifting the African American population through Hampton’s quasi-military disciplinary model. At Hampton, blacks and Native Americans were to learn and acquire the traits of “civilization,” which was, in Armstrong’s eyes, without a question the highest stage of the social evolutionary ladder. His assimilationist scheme was one of “whitewashing” non-white populations, sometimes in an almost literal sense, through the Hampton-Tuskegee-machine.

Others, primarily those who believed in an innate or at least, for the time being, rigidly fixed superiority of whites, were far more reluctant about educating “the negro” and suggested instead the opposite, namely non-interventionism. Inaction, a Spencerian laissez-faire, was often the answer, either to the most radical end of leaving the black population unassisted (while exploiting them) in order to die out as a race due to their supposed “natural” inferiority, or with the cynical idea in mind that they should in this way show their own capacity to survive. In this sense, some believed that laissez-faire would give African Americans a fair chance to evolve on their own, by “natural” means, so to speak, through the struggle of life. This perspective can be found, for instance, in prominent academic figures such as LeConte, Fiske, Shaler, or Sumner.

The questions thus raised through evolutionary thought pertaining to race and the tensions they produced across discursive formations were vital in shaping the cultural climate of what has been called the “nadir” of American racial history, and interact with Washington’s ideas and environmental knowledge. While he was by no means the only black writer of the late nineteenth century to respond to racist evolutionism,Footnote 10 the close intertwinement of Washington’s negotiation of evolutionary thought with his environmental knowledge is something that is characteristic of his writing. This is not to say that his pastoral-as-reward and georgic-as-process were only a means to the end of commenting on evolutionism of the day. The revised pastoral is important in its own right as Washington’s way of interacting with a tradition of African American environmental knowledge and as his attempt to write blacks into the human family and overcome the traumatic relation of the black body to non-human nature that resulted from slavery. In this respect, his use of the pastoral continues a line of tradition already visible in Forten’s aim to ameliorate the freedmen’s relation to a Southern landscape free of “the dark shadows” of slavery (cf. “Life” 183), and in W. W. Brown’s nostalgic yet critical attempt to heal a black southern population’s ties to the land.

Unlike those writers, however, Washington is more openly engaging and negotiating turn-of-the-century evolutionary thought through his environmental knowledge. He endorses some but rejects other dominant ideas of evolutionary thought on the “negro question.” Generally speaking, Washington’s autobiographies are written from a (social) evolutionist point of view. At many points, he emerges as a Darwinian monogenist, who proclaims that we find “[h]uman nature […] to be very much the same the world over” (Up 119). Washington moreover reads differences between races in terms of evolutionary stages of development, speaking about white America as “the very highest civilization that exists,” which “got thousand [sic!] of years ahead of the Negro in the arts and sciences of civilization” (Working 233, 231). This often draws him into a framework of divisive social evolutionist language that sought clear demarcations between “negro” and “white” in terms of developmental stages, for instance, in his Atlanta address. Here, his urge to define racial groups figures not only in the (in)famous suggestion that “[i]n all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” but also in a vocabulary that in itself emphasizes and constantly redraws the “color line” (Up 100). Washington’s use of pronouns, his dichotomous “we vs. you,” is, even if he aims for “friendship” between the races, the outward sign of a potentially segregating classification through social evolutionary terms.

Through such divisive language that seems at least tacitly complicit in further inscribing a racializing caesura into the U.S. population, the groups marked as different are described and hierarchized in terms of their supposed stages of development. Echoing voices like Brinton’s, one of Washington’s fundamental ideas is that there must be a “natural process of development” for blacks (Up 69). There must be a social evolutionary “process which means one step at a time through all the constructive grades of industrial, mental, moral, and social development which all races have had to follow that have become independent and strong” (Working 245). Crucially, this implies not simply a process but a (Spencerian) progress that inevitably had to move in the direction of attaining an ideal that, for Washington, too, was Euro-American “civilization.” There was, for him, no satisfying alternative path, which becomes clear, for instance, when he describes teaching a class of Native Americans at Hampton. Conducting the “experiment […] of educating Indians” as a “home father” to this group, he strictly seeks to instill “civilization” in a process that, next to learning English and learning a trade, primarily included “to have their long hair cut, to give up wearing their blankets, and to cease smoking” (Up 47, 48). Thus, Washington embraces not only Armstrong’s model but also the fundamental hierarchies of dominant evolutionary thought. He shares in the belief that no “race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion” and thus expresses both the evolutionary idea of developmental stages and the Spencerian notion of a progress towards civilization (48).

Washington’s environmental knowledge—his pastoral-as-reward and georgic-as-process—is connected with this point of view. It seems only logical to use the (white) mode of an idealizing pastoral as a sign of reward for achieving (white) civilization, and to embrace a georgic working relationship with the land that is in accordance with the stage thinking of evolutionism. If all races supposedly had to follow the same path from savagery to barbarism to civilization and if the pastoral was a sign of civilization, it was appropriate to use that mode to mark one’s achievements. Likewise, if one endorsed the notion of an evolutionary-biologically prescribed law whereby anyone who “is kept employed in one place, […] will begin to build a home, consisting of a number of huts; […] will clear a farm or plantation, and stock it with cattle, sheep, pigs, and fowls” in order to move up towards civilization, it was logical that African Americans had to begin “at the bottom of life” by cultivating the soil (Working 227–228; Up 100). The Hampton-Tuskegee system was thus conceptually based on an evolutionary georgic, in which “the Negro, like any other race in a similar stage of development, is better off when owning and cultivating the soil” (205). The georgic-as-process therefore becomes, when read as an expression of both Washington’s environmental knowledge and his evolutionism, also a georgic-as-progress. In this respect, at least, Washington’s environmental knowledge is clearly in line with evolutionary thought of his age. His environmental knowledge, at this point, is a means to an end, as it does not so much “revise” as “repeat” and adapt to the assumptions of evolutionism of his day.

With respect to questions of an improvability of the black population and of interventional social policies, however, Washington goes beyond repeating a dominant, racist evolutionism and forms alternative positions in conjunction with his environmental knowledge. I want to suggest two ways in which this happens, one having to do with the pastoral, the other with the georgic. The first way in which Washington uses his (pastoral) environmental knowledge to diverge from some of the popular arguments of evolutionary thought has to do with his infallible optimism. This optimism, expressed in both of his autobiographies, regarding the physical, mental, and moral improvability of the African American population, sets Washington in stark contrast to leading scientists like Fiske, Sumner, or Shaler, and authors such as Page or Dixon. His message is, as he declares at the end of Up from Slavery, “one of hope and cheer” (146), and he does not tire to emphasize the various ways in which African Americans have already moved up the social evolutionary ladder after emancipation, for instance through improvements in the ministry and education (cf. Up 40–45, 104–106).

The strongest proof of the improvability of “the negro,” is, however, the progress of the author-narrator of Up from Slavery himself, the representation of which is supported most vividly through his pastoral gardens of success. Washington presents his persona as the epitome of moving “up from slavery”—the title itself capturing the evolutionary stage thinking that is so fundamental to his texts. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington sees himself as moving through progressive social evolutionary stages. Sleeping on the floor under slavery, toiling in the dirty coal furnaces of Virginia, sleeping under a sidewalk in Richmond, Virginia, and ultimately becoming the head of Tuskegee and a planter in his own thriving pastoral garden, are the steps through which not only Washington, but, the book implies, potentially any black American can progress. Moreover, Washington celebrates the idea of moving up the social evolutionary ladder through his much-criticized concept of the “school of slavery” (cf. 13–14), which suggests that slavery placed “black people” in a “stronger and more hopeful condition” (13). Thereby evading addressing the injustice of grossly unequal chances for African Americans in a white-dominated world, he claims to have “learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed” (23). It is important, in this respect, that this comes retrospectively and out of a (pastoral) position of relative safety and success. The take of Washington-the-person on such questions would hardly have been as positive while enslaved or toiling away in the coal furnaces, even if Washington-the-writer interprets this start at the very bottom as proof of the possibility of development as such. Washington’s confession in Working, too, that as an enslaved child he found the roots of a pastoral harmony in “many close and interesting acquaintances with animals,” seems euphemistic (151). Although the suggestion that relations to non-human nature could help survive under the peculiar institution is important and valid, and interacts with the tradition of African American environmental knowledge, Washington often omits the trauma connected with enslavement and refrains from admitting that only his position in the pastoral-as-reward enables such utterances at all.

Significantly, however, the way in which Washington presents his individual development, smoothed into universality through an assumed inevitability of evolutionary progress, acts not only as demonstration of the success of his disciplinary and biopolitical agenda, but also signifies on widely held assumptions about “the negro’s” inability to progress and his inevitable extinction. Even if Washington has rightly been criticized for his belief in his own representative status (he was the exception, not the rule), for the perversion of elevating slavery into a useful “school,” or for his unrealistic belief in meritocracy, his presentation of a black man who did move from rags to riches powerfully signifies on claims that denied the black population’s potential to improve and is enhanced through his use of the pastoral-as-reward. In many other respects a son of his time who endorses the stage-logic and hierarchical trajectory of evolutionary thought, Washington also criticizes some of its racist assumptions. Also by using a revised form of environmental knowledge, he sets his own person as a powerful example in order to disprove the idea that “men cannot be taught a higher state of civilization, but can only be bred into it” (Fiske, qtd. Hawkins 109).

A second way in which Washington’s texts engage in a critique of evolutionary thought, which is related to his georgic environmental knowledge, can be found with regard to the question of (non-)intervention in social progress. In conjunction with more fundamental ideas of the local and communal, which are, as has been seen, key facets of the georgic expressed in Working with the Hands, his emphasis in this respect lies on collective efforts, specifically on the notions of intraracial combination and interracial collaboration. The former, “combination,” had been a theme in African American writing long before Washington’s autobiographies appeared, especially in antebellum pamphlets and in postwar texts like Brown’s My Southern Home.Footnote 11 In Washington’s autobiographies, intraracial combination can be found primarily with regard to his efforts of making Tuskegee a self-sufficient agrarian enterprise, a “community unto itself,” and in his biopolitical idea of a unified African American population body (Working 70). The second idea of interracial cooperation, articulated memorably in the Atlanta Address’s argument for “mutual progress” of the races, pertains to both the local and the national level. On the one hand, Washington sought local cooperation between Southern blacks and whites, recognizing the need of both groups to add “something to the wealth and comfort of the community” as a whole (Up 71). An instance that exemplifies this idea is the episode describing the establishment of a brick trade at Tuskegee. Here, Washington emphasizes the intersection of local economic interests: “Our business interests became intermingled. We [Tuskegee Institute] had something which they [local whites] wanted; they had something which we wanted” (71). Such forms of local cooperation are vital to Washington’s georgic vision of working and living off the land, also because they are connected to his optimistic belief that anybody, collective or individual, “who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race” (72).

On the other hand, he turns to large-scale cooperation between the races on the national level when he praises the donations off which Tuskegee thrives as an expression of the idea that those who give freely for a good cause are exhibiting the highest qualities of what he sees at the top of the social evolutionary ladder, “civilization.” If one does something “that would cement the friendship between the races and bring about hearty cooperation between them,” i.e. if one expresses an ethos of help, this becomes in itself a proof of one’s being civilized (Up 99). In this respect, the autobiographies subversively signify on contemporary evolutionary thought, as they deploy a Darwinian idea to counter arguments for laissez-faire politics. In the chapter on moral faculties in The Descent of Man, Darwin identifies moral-ethical values as a factor of “natural selection” and a means of survival for human groups. Imagining a tribal Ur-scene, he contends that

[i]t must not be forgotten that, although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. (404)

Although Darwin’s notion could have been (and probably was) interpreted by Washington’s contemporaries as supporting the idea of neglecting whichever group was (racially) different, there is at the same time an unmistakable emphasis on “sympathy” and “giving aid to each other” as qualities necessary for human survival in the struggle of life. Washington’s writing picks up this Darwinian notion in its own way: on the one hand, Darwin’s passage generally corresponds with his scheme of morally improving the black population; on the other, his texts appropriate the idea of “sympathy” through the ethical dimensions of his georgic as a marker of civilization as such, which enables him to make a powerful claim for benevolent interventions through charity and education.

To grasp this strategy, it is important to note that Washington constantly stresses that the African American population is an undeniable reality that will not simply vanish, as some of his contemporaries believed. For him, the “negro” and the “white” population of the United States were, despite their presumed difference, in fact one. They were parts of the same (population) body, inevitably intertwined, as the metaphor in the Atlanta speech suggests, as the “fingers” of one “hand” (Up 100). In Darwinian terminology, Washington therefore reads the entirety of the U.S. population as one “tribe,” to the effect that Darwin’s notion of “sympathy” as “one of the most important elements of the social instincts” becomes usable for Washington in his own strategic way (Descent 393). Thus, when he stresses that civilized individuals “lift themselves up in proportion as they help to lift others,” his interpretation of the American population as a whole combines with the Darwinian notion of sympathy to justify and demand interracial cooperation and assistance for the African American part of the population (Up 48). It is true that Washington’s strategy appears submissive in many respects, as his revised pastoral is subsumed to a social evolutionary idea of progress towards (white) “civilization.” After all, he thereby suggests that African Americans should begin “at the bottom of life,” through a georgic cultivation of the soil, in this sense succumbing to the interests of the planter-class of the South who feared the loss of its main workforce (100). His environmental knowledge is, in this sense, involved in an accommodationist strategy. Nonetheless, it could also be used to incorporate empowering aspects of evolutionary thought, as Washington’s subversive weaving of a Darwinian evolutionary concept of “sympathy” into his georgic suggests. By simultaneously segregating but biopolitically unifying the American population, and by signifying on a Darwinian notion through his georgic environmental knowledge, he strengthens his claim for cooperation and introduces an obligation to white “civilization.” If white Americans want to be considered civilized, they must assist in uplift, since sympathy, cooperation, and assistance are “natural” in the sense of evolutionarily acquired traits of a stage of “civilization.”

In conclusion, Washington’s autobiographies therefore not only signify on earlier forms of African American environmental knowledge and introduce new ways for expressing relations to non-human nature through black literature, but are also examples of how environmental knowledge could politically interact with broader discursive contexts in potentially empowering ways. Rereading Washington’s texts through the lens of environmental knowledge marks three aspects that make them “environmental texts” (L. Buell). First, Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands are significant as revisions of the strategic pastoral of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative, as they overcome an “enslaved eye” by celebrating a spatially accessible pastoral-as-reward. Second, they are crucial for their use and development of an African American georgic that celebrates a close relationship to the local and communal, strives towards regaining a dignity of labor through the land, and that, Washington at points suggests, has the potential of becoming a root and resource of African American literature. Although both the pastoral and the georgic elements of Washington’s environmental knowledge are deployed to contribute to his own social evolutionist ideas, it is just as important that, third, Washington’s autobiographies can show how environmental knowledge could be employed to resist claims of late-nineteenth-century racial discourses. They are ambivalent examples of how forms of African American environmental knowledge were involved in larger power struggles by simultaneously writing within but also against newly emerging discourses that prolonged the racial and environmental othering of the black body, such as (large parts of) evolutionary thought. In this respect, Up from Slavery and Working with the Hands demonstrate once more how African American literature connects the political and the environmental, and highlight ways in which African American environmental knowledge continued to signify on dominant forms of racial knowledge.