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Abstract
This article examines Black communities’ engagement with practices of place and alternative figurations of land and water in the antebellum and post-emancipation periods around the lower–Chesapeake Bay. It historicizes the work of enslaved, free, and emancipated communities to create a distinctive and often furtive social architecture rivaling, threatening, and challenging the infrastructures of abstraction, commodification, and social control developed by white elites before and after the formal abolition of slavery. Practices centered in the various iterations of the plot—the site of the body's interment, the garden parcel, and hidden insurrectionary activity—fostered a vision of de-commodified water and landscapes as well as resources. Evolving in dialectic with mastery and dominion—or biblically justified total control—enslaved and post-emancipation communities claimed and created a set of communal resources within the interstices of plantation ecologies, constituting the Black commons.
Acknowledgments
I thank Tikia Hamilton, Sarah Haley, Jaz Riley, Alex Alston, Ellen Louis, and Julius Fleming for helpful engagement with various iterations of this article. As well, I thank Jarvis McInnis and Justin Hosbey for their ongoing engagements with me regarding Black ecologies. As always, appreciation to Huewayne Watson.
This article extends an argument I initially made in a digital piece, “Towards a Usable History of the Black Commons,” Black Perspectives (February 2017), https://www.aaihs.org/towardsusable-histories-of-the-black-commons/ (accessed February 28, 2017).
Notes
1 Here in describing the river as an ecotone, I follow Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr who describe an ecotone as “the meeting point of two ecologies across which value flows.” “Gender Abolition and Ecotone War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 2 (April 2016): 291–311. Here various kinds of value are created at the meeting of the river and the city’s human communities.
2 Brady Dennis, “Trump Budget Seeks 23 Percent Cut at EPA, Eliminating Dozens of Programs,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/02/12/trump-budget-seeks-23-percent-cut-at-epa-would-eliminate-dozens-of-programs/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2d120a0c8c2e (accessed February 6, 2018).
3 According to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association report from 2012, approximately 17,000 people, primarily African American, Latino, and Asian regularly consume catfish from the Anacostia River. https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/study-reveals-dc-community-near-anacostia-river-are-eating-and-sharing-contaminated-fish (accessed January 8, 2017).
4 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Tumors in Catfish from the Anacostia River, Washington, DC,” Report of the Chesapeake Bay Field Office, undated, https://www.anacostiaws.org/userfiles/file/BullheadFS.pdf (accessed November 1, 2016). For a study of the toxic effects of polynuclear aromatic compounds in other rivers on the Chesapeake see Alfred Pinkney et al., “Tumor Prevalence and Biomarkers of Genotoxicity in Brown Bullhead (Ameiurus nebulosus) in Chesapeake Bay Tributaries,” Science of the Total Environment 410 (2011): 248–57. This species is a species introduced for food and sport in the late 19th century.
5 Chris Myers Asch and George Derick Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
6 Take the example of the Anacostia watershed, which between 1970 and 2000 lost 70% of its forested area. Impervious surfaces now cover 25% or more of the watershed.
7 On dominion and biblical justification see Delores S. Williams, “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies,” Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed.Carol J. Adams (New York: Continuum, 1993): 24–29 and Wende Marshall, “Tasting Earth: Healing, Resistance Knowledge, and the Challenge to Dominion,” Anthropology and Humanism 37, no. 1: 84–99.
8 Timothy Silver, A New Face in the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Edgar T. Thompson, The Plantation (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010 [1935]).
9 J. B. Jackson, “The Virginia Heritage: Fencing, Farming, and Cattle Raising,” Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997): 129–38.
10 Jack P. Greene, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752–1778 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965): 127–200.
11 I borrow the language of hybridity from Brian McCammack, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
12 J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures After Property and Possession,” Humanities Futures Blog of the Franklin Humanities Institute, https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/the-black-outdoors-humanities-futures-after-property-and-possession/ (accessed August 1, 2018).
13 Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal,” Carceral Notebooks, vol. 12 (2015), http://www.thecarceral.org/journal-vol12.html (accessed October 30, 2018).
14 Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102. Thank you to Nijah Cunningham for introducing me to this essay.
15 Sonya Pomentier, Cultivation and Catasrophe: The Lyrical Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 41.
16 Lynn Rainville, Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
17 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
18 Karla F.C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
19 Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 15.
20 Vincent Brown, The Reapers Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 152; 7.
21 Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 3. See as well for further reflection on the way that proximity to death reorients Black life, Darius Bost’s forthcoming, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
22 H. R. McIlwaine and Wilmer L. Hall, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, VA, 1925–1945), I: 86–87. Also in Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1609–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 160.
23 Nicholas May, “Holy Rebellion: Religious Assembly Laws in Antebellum South Carolina and Virginia,” American Journal of Legal History 49, no. 3 (2009): 237–56.
24 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). As Browne notes, in 1722 the Common Council of New York City regulated burials to no more than twelve attendees plus pallbearers and gravediggers in order to cut down on possible conspiracy. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 78.
25 Lynn Rainville, Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
26 Barbara Heath, “Space and Place within Plantation Quarters in Virginia, 1700–1825,” Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, ed. Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 156–76.
27 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 37–64.
28 Rebecca Ginsberg, “Escaping Through a Black Landscape,” Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 54; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Places, 2, no. 2 (1982): 95–119.
29 Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 8, Maryland, Brooks-Williams. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn080/ (accessed January 12, 2017).
30 Saidiya Hartman also references this scene. As she explains, “These day-to-day and routine forms of contestation operated within the confines of relations of power and simultaneously challenged those very relations as these covert and chameleonic practices both complied with and disrupted the demands of the system through the expression of a counter-discourse of freedom.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 68.
31 Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Condition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
32 Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 8, Maryland, Brooks-Williams. 1936.
33 Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Broadway Books), 36.
34 Marguerite T. Williams, A History of Erosion in the Anacostia River Basin (Dissertation, Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 1942).
35 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
36 Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 1.
37 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
38 Stephanie Camp, “‘I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Slavery and Abolition, 22, no. 3 (2002): 1–20.
39 Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, ed. Arthur Schlesinger (New York: Alfred and Knopf, 1953), 29.
40 Ibid., 27.
41 Browne, Dark Matters.
42 I borrow the language of the otherwise from Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecosta Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
43 Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, 35.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 36.
46 James Lindsay Smith, The Autobiography of James L. Smith Including, Also, Reminiscences of Slave Life, Recollections of the War, Education of Freedmen, Causes of Exodus, Etc. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1881]), electronic edition.
47 La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” Social Text 34, no. 4 (December 2017): 4.
48 Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
49 Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 9.
50 Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
51 James, “Captive Maternals,” 253.
52 Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 70–71.
53 Minnie Fulkes, interviewed by Susie Byrd, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Vol. XVII (Washington, DC: Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration, 1940).
54 Aaliyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” GLQ 24, no. 2–3 (2018): 343–65.
55 Smith, The Autobiography of James L. Smith, 27.
56 Abdur-Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” 350.
57 Fulkes, “Interview of Minne Fulkes.”
58 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
59 Richard Slaughter, interview by Claude W. Anderson, December 27, 1936, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project, 1936–1938.
60 Interview with Page Harris, Federal Writer’s Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 8, Maryland (Washington, DC: Works Progress Administration, 1941): 22–25.
61 Ibid.
62 Lt. George R. Alvord, to Capt. W. W. Winship, cited in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ed. Steven Hahn et al., vol. 1, series 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 352.
63 Unknown, “Welcome GAR,” Washington Evening Star, September 19, 1892, in Theodore W. Noyes, The National Capital: Newspaper Articles and Speeches Concerning the City of Washington (Washington, DC: Byron S. Adams Printer and Publisher, 1893), 61–73.
64 Unknown, “Some of Washington’s Grievances: The Good Times to Come,” Washington Evening Star, March 17, 1888, in Theodore W. Noyes, The National Capital: Newspaper Articles and Speeches Concerning the City of Washington (Washington, DC: Byron S. Adams Printer and Publisher, 1893), 50.
65 Unknown author, “Seine Fishing on the Potomac,” Frank Leslie’s Weekly, July 24, 1869.
66 Ibid.
67 There is a Black feminist literature with substantial interventions for historicizing and theorizing Black queerness as a registering in that is essential for the emergence of a distinctive Black queer studies field. See Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2004); Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 17, no. 2: 64–81; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hazel V. Carby, “Policing Black Woman’s Body in the Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 738–55; Sharon Harley, “‘Working for Nothing but a Living’: Black Women in the Underground Economy,” Underground Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, ed. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 48-66. For Black queer studies engagements around the relationship between queerness and Blackness, see C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Omise’seke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ, 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 191–215; Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
68 For a critical genealogy of “Man” in Western thought and its influence on the hierarchical structuring of our contemporary social order, see Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. Also, see Anibal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power, Eurocentricism, and Latin America,” Nepantla, 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80; Françoise Vergès delineates a genealogy of the discourse of the Anthropocene in “Racial Capitalocene,” Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), 72–82.
69 Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 89–112.
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J. T. Roane
J. T. Roane is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the university's urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated as a challenge to the dominant rubrics of growth in Philadelphia in the second half of the 20th century.