Contending with the Palimpsest: Reading the Land through Black Women’s Emotional Geographies

Abstract

Public history depicting Southern landscapes subjugates Black lived experience, foregrounding Anglo settlerism and romanticizing antebellum-era spaces. This article engages a novel and digital humanities platform as counternarrative spaces dismantling dominant narratives informing these landscapes. The Cutting Season (2012) depicts a Black woman engaging folklore, archives, and family history; solving a murder on a plantation; and constructing a counternarrative of the landscape. Similarly, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas crowdsources stories and archival material to document Black settlements where descendants are displaced-in-place. By recording Black women’s embodied place memories, the site helps Black women resist the deliberate forgetting of endangered settlements and reconstruct emotional geographies. Black women’s counternarratives illuminate their emotional geographies, world building, and rebuilding of communities presumed inert or placeless.

描绘美国南方景观的大众史学, 主导了黑人的生活体验, 突出了欧美定居者主义, 浪漫化了美国内战前夕的空间。本文将新颖的数字人文主义平台作为反叙事空间, 突破了对这些景观的主流叙述。2012年出版的《采摘季节》（Cutting Season）, 用传说、档案和家史描绘了一位黑人女性, 破解了一桩种植园谋杀案, 构建了对景观的反叙事。类似地, 通过对故事和档案材料的众包, 德克萨斯州自由殖民地项目（Texas Freedom Colonies Project）地图集记载了黑人居民点的原地迁移。通过记录黑人女性的具身化位置记忆, 场所能帮助黑人女性抵制对濒危居民点的刻意遗忘、帮助她们重建情感地理。黑人女性的反叙事阐明了她们的情感地理、建设、以及被视为不活跃或失位社区的重建。

La historia pública que describe los paisajes sureños de los Estados Unidos proscribe la experiencia vivida por los negros, colocando en primer plano el poblamiento anglosajón y romantizando los espacios de la era del antebellum [antes de la Guerra Civil]. Este artículo aborda una novela y la plataforma de las humanidades digitales como espacios contranarrativos para desmontar las narrativas dominantes que informan estos paisajes. La Cutting Season (2012) representa a una mujer negra dedicada al folclor, los archivos y la historia familiar; resolviendo un asesinato en una plantación; y construye una contranarrativa del paisaje. De igual manera, el Atlas del Proyecto de Colonias de la Libertad de Texas utiliza historias y material de archivo para documentar los asentamientos negros, donde los descendientes están desplazados del lugar. Registrando las memorias de los lugares personificados en las mujeres negras, el sitio las ayuda a resistir el olvido deliberado de los asentamientos en riesgo y a reconstruir las geografías emocionales. Las contranarrativas de las negras iluminan sus geografías emocionales, la construcción del mundo y la reconstrucción de comunidades supuestamente inertes o carentes de lugar.

Key Words:

• action research
• Black feminist geographies
• digital humanities
• emotional geographies
• literary geographies

关键词:

• 行动研究
• 黑人女权主义地理
• 数字人文主义
• 情感地理
• 文学地理。

Palabras clave:

• geografías emocionales
• geografías feministas negras
• humanidades digitales
• geografías literarias
• investigación de acción

Displacement literature rightly identifies causes, perpetrators, and policy solutions to address the deterritorialization of a people or culture. Displacement has been primarily studied as a top-down phenomenon in the social sciences, however. We argue for transdisciplinary engagement with displacement as a complex, emotional, layered experience with broad implications for scholars, activists, and educators and center Black women’s emotional geographies as a discursive space. We identify consistent sublimation of Black women’s narratives and ongoing displacement from maps and public history and contribute a transdisciplinary heuristic for understanding Black women’s emotional geographies within struggles against displacement. Our intervention recognizes Black women’s emotional geographies’ epistemological value to the fields and practices of planning and historical preservation. We engender an “otherwise” space contesting incomplete stories of the South.

First, we engage diverse bodies of displacement literature and then present our heuristic, a methodological approach to analyzing our case study findings. The first case study is about teaching students to unearth historical counternarratives of place in the novel The Cutting Season. The second is about The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Study, which curates narratives describing freedom colonies through the lens of Black women’s emotional experiences. Finally, we discuss the implications of Black women’s counternarratives across mediums and disciplines, rendering visible their emotional geographies and world building (or rebuilding) practices (Bates et al. 2018; Escobar 2020) in landscapes presumed placeless.

Black Women’s Emotional Geographies: Displaced, Illegible, and Reclaimed

Black women’s emotional geographies inhabit two terrains: (1) relational or dialogic spaces where emancipatory scholarship and states of being can exist across disciplinary boundaries and (2) in counternarratives where historical contestations or claims occur “in place” even when perceived as illegible or illegitimate. Displacement-in-place occurs when Black, Indigenous, and poor people’s communities are deemed unworthy of historic preservation, underresourced, and later gentrified, overpoliced, and made unaffordable for original residents (Hern and Bates 2020). Displacement-in-place “does not involve physical movement but takes the form of constraints on livelihoods and cultural practices and, as a result, ‘displaces futures’” (Mollett 2014, 30; see also Brand 1995; Katz 2004; Vandergeest, Idahosa, and Bose 2006). The result is that Black claims to and sense of place are subjugated, deemed illegible, and omitted from urban planning, historic preservation, and public history.

We examine Black communities in the South where some have “stayed put” whereas others have chosen to migrate or been expelled due to threats of racial violence (Barclay 2001). Manifestations of displacement also occur in academic knowledge production (McKittrick 2021), pedagogy (Eaves 2020), and public histories (A. Roberts 2020), revealing the layered, contested nature of Black women’s emotional geographies. Our shared examination emerges from scholarship on Black women’s relationships to space from literary theory, history, critical and Black geography, political ecology, urban planning, and archaeology. The authors, one in the humanities and the other in the social sciences, meet on transdisciplinary ground, where Black women are valid agents of and their narratives valid subjects of spatial analysis (McKittrick 2006).

Black geographies literature unpacks historical manifestations and Black women’s contestation of multiscalar displacement. McKittrick (2006) explained, “Geographies did, and arguably still do, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays ‘in place’” (9) to retain power. Paradoxically, even in resistance, Black women’s bodies are consumed by Western knowledge production. Black womanhood’s “chaotic in-between-ness” (McKittrick 2000) provides “alternative pathways toward new understandings of space and to the undoing of violent practices of geographic organization” (McKittrick 2006, xiv). Black (and critical) geographies scholarship traces patterns of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005), creating palimpsests of Black women’s displacement on the plantation, in captivity, and during contemporary expansion of racial capitalism, creating new states of permanent indebtedness, precarity, statelessness, and placelessness (Chakravartty and Da Silva 2012). Contending with Black women’s emotional geographies means engaging Black women’s lived and remembered experiences of “racialized economic dispossession stemming from slavery, colonialism, and imperialism” (Hawthorne 2019, 6; see also Heynen 2009; Tyner 2013; Lewis 2015) and “the razing of specific black communities, homes, buildings, and sacred sites” (McKittrick 2011, 952). Intimate displacement occurs when Black women’s emotional geographies, even when central to political change, are framed as errant and without agency (Rodriguez 2021).

Literature on dispossession and displacement in Black rural geographies contends with barriers to preserving Black Southern landscapes—perceived placelessness and illegibility (A. Roberts 2019). McKittrick’s concept of the ungeographic elucidates Black women’s emotional geographies’ persistence, including in rural spaces, despite illegibility in dominant public narratives and policies. Resistance to displacement includes leveraging intangible heritage and cultural reproduction to make Black pasts visible (A. Roberts 2017a, 2019; A. Roberts and Matos 2020a; Giancarlo 2021) and protecting historic Black settlements and their heritage from environmental hazards, disasters, and resource extraction (Williams 2018; Blanks et al. 2021; Purifoy and Seamster 2021) to avoid presumed placelessness (A. Roberts 2018b). Black women preserve emotional geographies through kinkeeping (A. Roberts 2018a) and womanist cartography (Lanier and Hamilton 2020). Scott (2019) described how “family and personal narratives inscribe meaningful community emplacement in otherwise undifferentiated space” (1096). In transnational contexts, Black women’s coalitional work across solidarity economies in Brazilian favelas resists ongoing processes of racialized dispossession and segregation (Vaz 2018), and Anglophone and Francophone Black activists’ collaboration across linguistic borders within Montreal, Canada, demonstrates Black cocreation of community amid ongoing marginalization and displacement (Mugabo 2019).

The temporalities and tangibility of displacement within Black women’s geographies are diverse and inherently emotional and intersect with belonging, identity, and power (Kauffman 2018). Displacement can be a process of alienation from traditions or rituals of belonging even while “in place.” Emotional geography literature addresses where sentiment is located and how feelings mediate behaviors, including research processes, power, and platforms in place (Bondi 2016; Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2016; Elwood and Leszczynski 2018). Feminist emotional geographies literature defines displacement as beyond large-scale, top-down, and physical (De Wet 2006; Mathur 2013; Terminski 2014; Vaz-Jones 2018), arguing for “multiple historical/geographical determinations, connections, and articulations” (Hart 2006). Vaz-Jones (2018) added that displacement discourse often involves “simplistic narratives” obscuring embedded tactics and long-term struggles in contexts fostering specific forms of resistance, framing displacement as “multiscalar, micropolitical, and differentiated,” “centering relationships of power within particular historical, social, and spatial contexts,” and “encompassing a wide variety of processes that sever people’s relationships to place” (711–12).

Black women’s emotional geographies intervene in displacement discourse, foregrounding their diverse range of experiences and material channels for understanding place such as the body (Sultana 2011; Nunn 2017; King, Navarro, and Smith 2020; Mollett 2022). King’s curation, troubling place definition’s temporality, elucidates absented Black accounts of enslavement by examining speculative fiction, eighteenth-century maps, and images from the film Daughters of the Dust of “porous indigo-stained hands of former slaves” (King 2016, 1022). Historians’ dissatisfaction with public archives and historical sites also informs how we read absences of Black women’s emotional geographies. Johnson (2020) described how enslaved Black women’s intimate positionalities in the slave trade complicate contending with emotional landscapes. Hartman (2008, 10) wrestled with telling “impossible stories” of enslavement or bodily dispossession of the will. Black feminist historical archaeologist A. O. Flewellen examined how plantation heritage sites obscure Black women’s experiences, constructing narratives of U.S. history “valoriz[ing] whiteness and mystify[ing] the experience of enslavement, both of the enslaved and of master-enslavers” (Flewellen 2017, 72; see also Eichstedt and Small 2002).

We look to Black women’s emotional experiences navigating predominately White institutions to frame our shared displacement-in-place from our voices and disciplinarily transgressive modes of inquiry. Intellectual displacement and subordination of certain knowledge forms have long plagued the neoliberal university (Nunn 2017), which promotes objectivity (Bain et al. 2017) and individualizes experiences of exclusion to obscure systemic institutional discrimination (Bain et al. 2017). Emotional masking manifests in these contexts, demanding Black women repress and self-silence to perform professionalization (Mabokela and Green 2001), amplifying feelings of displacement-in-place. The narrative, however, is a space of knowledge production where Black women can “imagine multiple resistant subjectivities, voices, experiences, and realities” to find belonging amidst what Hua (2013) called “social and emotional geographies of displacements” (31).

Methods

The authors contend with palimpsests of displacement through qualitative, spatial, and narrative modes of inquiry across disciplines, scales, and media, foregrounding them in the classroom and the public sphere. Interdisciplinary literature and approaches to understanding Black women’s emotional geographies enable urban planning scholars and literary theorists to decipher and contest displacement through narrative-based inquiry (High 2011; McElroy 2018; Smyth, Nyhan, and Flinn 2020). The practice of centering narrative and memory mirrors literature on Black and Indigenous land claiming, displacement, and gentrification (Atalay 2008; Alderman and Inwood 2013; Tuck et al. 2014; Inwood and Alderman 2021). We contest reductive public histories of Southern places, leveraging narratives to teach Black women’s emotional landscapes of displacement and curating them to spatialize unmapped places.

Our methodology stems from lived experience of landscape, classrooms, spatial analysis, urban planning, digital and traditional archives, pages of novels, and places. Whereas the second author’s work merges literary criticism and teaching, the first author merges ethnographic fieldwork and the digital humanities with applied urban planning research. Emotional management and surveillance prevail from field to classroom, informing feelings of displacement-in-place within the academy and the creation of new ground on which to integrate narrative as a method. We will no longer be complicit in displacing our intention and vision from the research space.

As Black women academics, our respective disciplinary conventions (assumptions, protocols, ways of knowing, and interpretation) displace us from our vision for our work by deeming certain bodies of knowledge invalid, invisible, or illegible. Broadening what is considered valid text informs the first author’s methods. She asks Atlas participants to upload images, oral histories, memories, event programs, and obituaries to spatialize Black communities warranting protection. The second author considers how ephemera expands cartographical considerations of literature. The first author’s field, with a bias toward positivism, treats the narrative as a problematic data source, leading her to embrace the second author’s engagement with story. Likewise, the first author’s field’s embrace of the spatial attracts the second author. Our interdisciplinary “cross-talk” method produces a transdisciplinary outcome, this article’s unifying heuristic: visioning, building, and reconstructing Black women’s narratives. Our heuristic emerges through research, mentoring, and pedagogical creativity, meeting on disciplinary neutral ground to broach questions unwelcome in other academic environments and cocreate space for our displaced intellectual futures.

Each of our cases begins with a vision rooted in our embodied, experiential impetus for exploring our specific mediums. To explore vision, we asked these questions: Why this book or digital platform, at this time, in this space? What was our pedagogical intent? What is the intellectual political project embedded in our exploration of narrative, Black women’s agency, temporality, and cultural landscapes? Why does this matter to us? For instance, the second author first taught The Cutting Season as a graduate student in 2015 at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Seeing evidence of historical micronarratives around her, she began to read attentively for sublimated narratives and engaged questions of power, historicity, and possibilities for insurgent pedagogy within Locke’s novel.

We then share our building processes in the classroom and the field. While researching her family roots in freedom colonies, the first author found them largely absent from practice and public history but present in personal archives and storytelling. Recording unmapped settlements whose locations were known only through oral tradition shaped the first author’s formation of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas, a virtual archive where descendants share memories and stories to resist erasure. Freedom colonies’ ephemerality set them apart from better known, platted, and mapped all-Black towns in other states (Walker 1983; Bates et al. 2018; Slocum 2019). The first author’s digital platform re-creates palimpsests of Black communities displaced by White statist public histories and cultural alienation from rural spaces through story and memory.

Finally, both case studies share actual narratives of Black women’s emotional geographies, describing how they interact with, contest, and produce new knowledge about displacement. Together, we reveal the counternarrative creation process and contribute to research, teaching, and writing about gender, emotions, and displacement.

Case 1: The Cutting Season: Teaching the Palimpsest through Black Women’s Counternarratives

Texas author Attica Locke’s (2012) novel The Cutting Season depicts a Black woman protagonist, Caren, engaging various narratives and archives while solving a migrant worker’s murder on the historical tourism plantation she manages in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. This novel, set during President Obama’s administration, addresses historical formations of race, class, and labor persisting in the present. Despite Caren’s discomfort living and working on the plantation, she “could not hate … her real home” (Locke 2012, 182). Discovering her family’s history on Belle Vie, entwined with that of the White owning family, Caren constructs a Black counternarrative of labor, trauma, and emotional investment.² Three spaces on the grounds are significant: Caren’s living quarters, once the overseer’s residence and now also the site of plantation archives; the slave quarters, once inhabited by her ancestor Jason; and the kitchen, workspace of a lineage of Black women who have kept historical knowledge countering the plantation’s touristic narrative. These haunted³ palimpsests of experiences with landscape inform Caren’s counternarrative, steeped in her emotional investment in Belle Vie as a Black woman whose “very identity had been formed around a legacy of labor on a plantation” (Locke 2012, 129).

Visioning: Seeing Landscape with New Eyes

The second author’s students attend to histories, archives, and lore; Caren curates, challenging Belle Vie’s public history. Displacement works on two levels: (1) Jason’s thwarted land claim, displacing his remaining family from the land they inhabited, and (2) Caren’s family’s emotional investment in Belle Vie as homeplace⁴ has been sublimated, creating a palatable narrative for tourists and patrons, displacing landscape layers involving histories of other enslaved and Indigenous people. Caren discovers her ancestor Jason’s land claim while solving Inés Avalo’s murder. Students witness Caren’s emotional commitments to her ancestors becoming intimate foundational memories for her Black placemaking.

Building: Scaffolding Students’ Reading of Narratives and Archives of Landscapes

The paratextual⁵ inclusion of Belle Vie’s tourist map foregrounds cartography as a mode of reading. It depicts a working sugar plantation where Jason once toiled, but Caren’s findings complicate its simplistic depiction of the plantation’s history privileging dominant White capitalist data to sell beneficent narratives of slavery to visitors. Belle Vie’s landscape is a palimpsest⁶ overwritten with experiences of enslaved, free, and precariously employed inhabitants over centuries. Caren’s narrative, featuring marginalized knowledges, overwrites the tourist map’s rendering of the plantation’s natural and built environment.

Caren’s emotional map is a palimpsest; her sense of identity and ties to Belle Vie as homeplace affect her commitments to Belle Vie’s owners, their employees, and the land. A Black woman protagonist, atypical for the mystery genre, causes students to reflect on how emotion informs Caren’s embodied approach to uncovering hidden histories.

Storytelling: Student Findings about Displacement-in-Place

Students learn about displacement-in-place as they uncover missing layers of the Belle Vie map through Caren’s interactions with people, and historical documents revealing Belle Vie’s public history obscure the presence and contributions of Indigenous people and enslaved African Americans to the landscape. Inés Avalo’s murder is the plot driver of The Cutting Season because of her presence as an Indigenous migrant cane cutter, which reveals an obscured map layer: The Global South migrant population is traversing contested lands. Locke (2012) wrote, “Groveland Corporation had been pulling in laborers … Mexicans mostly, and some Guatemalans, plucked out of rice fields and fruit groves for a few months of working Louisiana sugarcane” suffering under precarious employment and human rights abuses to send money home (18).

Three palimpsest portals contain Black histories of Belle Vie through which Caren accesses clues to Jason’s disappearance. First, the slave quarters contain a cabin once inhabited by Jason. Here, Caren finds Inés’s body. A haunting pervades the space; Caren gets chills near the cabins, observing, “Down by the quarters, the grass simply refused to grow” (Locke 2012, 9). This foreshadows Caren’s discovery of Jason’s map: “pressed between two sheets of wax paper, she found a plantation map … [with] a hand-drawn image of a structure, twelve feet by fourteen just behind the slave quarters. In a stiff hand, someone had written the words, built by my hand, August 1872” (Locke 2012, 276). Hidden under Caren’s feet is the foundation of the structure Jason once built to claim adverse possession of Belle Vie after the Civil War.

The second significant space is Caren’s living quarters, the site of plantation archives. The records inform an unpublished dissertation that “suggest[ed] that Jason had been murdered” and an “antique leather portfolio that told the story of the plantation’s chain of ownership” (Locke 2012, 149, 233). This space represents the convergence between plantation archival records, family records (her mother Helen’s unopened box), and Caren’s own embodied memories, which, together, solve Jason’s mystery. With historical documents in front of her, Caren struggles to recall embodied family memories that were never written down: “the nights she and her mother slept back-to-back bed … the soft whispers in her ear, nights her mother tried to tell her, over and over, that Jason’s life mattered, that his story was in their blood” (Locke 2012, 235). Caren’s mother’s stories and Jason’s map are alternative archives that challenge Belle Vie’s public history, revealing Caren’s claim to the plantation. Helen tells Caren, “Belle Vie is yours” (Locke 2012, 270).

Finally, the kitchen is the third portal into Belle Vie’s palimpsest. Removed from the big house, this liminal space allows staff passage between the employees and the owners. This space holds Black women’s shared lineage of domestic work and emotional bonds; it is a repository of intimate and subversive knowledges about Belle Vie (Locke 2012). Here Caren learns Donovan was on the grounds after dark filming his counternarrative to The Belle Vie Players’ performance. Caren must enter the kitchen space to access invaluable plantation knowledge that counters the touristic narrative.

As Caren, the protagonist, accesses and visualizes layers of African American history in The Cutting Season, public authors contributing to The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas build, reenvision, and document a Black sense of place erased from public records. In the process, freedom colonies’ absences are filled, and conventional definitions of place and historical significance are supplanted by those emerging from Black memories and stories.

Case 2: The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas: Palimpsests of Black Placemaking

Visioning: Countermapping Free Black Spaces

In classic urban planning literature, African Americans often appear to be passive participants, and government-led planning happens to Black communities (A. Roberts 2020a). Learning that African Americans founded more than 557 freedom colonies, however, empowered the first author to foreground their stories and agency. African Americans’ Great Migration exodus led to population decline, erasing recognizable freedom colony settlement patterns. Further, founders feared White violence if they substantiated landholdings on county deeds or records, which led to land loss and erasure. Some freedom colonies’ namesakes—Black churches and schools—no longer exist.

Although extant features disappear and settlements are absent from public records, freedom colonies’ descendants engage in place keeping through oral traditions and private archival material (A. Roberts 2018a, 2020a). To address the absence from maps and contest settlerist narratives (R. Roberts 2000), the author envisioned a participatory platform bridging descendant memories, Black placemaking and place keeping, and land use maps.

Building a Digital World of Black Worlds

The process of building The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas emerged from field ethnographic research, surveying, and collaborative storytelling events with descendant communities. The online survey requests visitors’ information about original landowners, stories, place meaning, celebrations, active social networks, anchor institutions’ locations, and dates of origins enabling descendants to reconstruct a “Black” emotional sense of place.

The Atlas’s ESRI Story Map platform (A. Roberts, Biazar, and Blanks 2018) extracts affective impressions of landscapes from creation stories, ephemera, images, and testimonies. Map layers contain verified survey data, geotagged photos of mapped and previously unmapped places, government data and boundaries (U.S. Census, U.S. Geological Survey), transportation projects, and ecological risks. Crowd-sourced survey data verify and map unspatialized place names. Atlas visitors can add, search, and examine spatial relationships between settlements and ecological threats. The Atlas reveals absences and persistent palimpsests of White supremacy, enabling visitors to covisualize a Black sense of place otherwise by contributing stories (Bates et al. 2018).

Users’ contributions converge on approximate locations of each settlement, depicting the multivocality of placemaking and validating social visioning as an essential component of public planning (Woods 2017). Users also upload maps, common throughout the African diaspora, of escape, travel, cooperation, and safe spaces “alongside ‘real’ maps” (McKittrick 2011, 949). Platform designers welcome participants’ recollections of struggle, joy, and collectivities other than land informing place-based identities (Tuck et al. 2014).

The Atlas increases descendants’ capacity to resist displacement (Alderman and Modlin 2014; Hunter et al. 2016; Cross 2017) and increases freedom colonies’ legibility to other descendants. Archaeologists and preservationists use the Atlas to verify the presence of endangered historic resources, identify stakeholders, and suggest ways to mitigate harm in regulatory reports (which reference the Atlas) during public projects (Jalbert and Kimbell 2019). Reports citing the Atlas help descendant narratives interrupt planning processes that threaten previously undocumented sites. Settlements become strategically visible, within and against traditional maps.

Storytelling: Cynthia Matlock’s Black Joy Otherwise

Cynthia Matlock’s entry reveals the Atlas’s function as a portal into Black women’s emotional geographies, where they contend with palimpsests of freedom colony displacement. Matlock calls Green Chapel settlement in Cherokee County, located three hours from Houston, Texas, home. She provides a rich narrative reconstruction of a Black woman’s emotional geography on multiple scales.

She shares land acquisition and church founding stories revealing, from both public record and memory, founding family names and active institutions:

The community church is Brisby Chapel church off U.S. 79 west of Jacksonville … founded on Dec. 11, 1881. Per county records, the deed of the land was held by a Corbin Brisby and wife, who bought his land in 1874. Some of the founding families were the Brisbys, Tony Green’s family, my grandfather, the Adams family, Russell family, and the Franklin family, along with others who branched out or married into these families. Brisby Chapel AME is still in existence with two main families still worshiping there on the 1st and 3rd Sundays.

In addition to a Reconstruction-era church, the reader learns of a Rosenwald school founded in the 1920s and the community’s overgrown cemetery. The Atlas aggregates these landscape features into a legible place (Sitton and Conrad 2005; A. Roberts and Biazar 2019).

Matlock recollects afterlives of Black abundance cultivated among family members, “Most of the families out there, deep in the woods, farmed and raised, chickens, hogs, cows. …” These rich memories of connection, anchor institutions, food security, and land ownership, however, belie its low population. Her parents’ house burned, and only frames of two houses and a dog-trot barn remain.

Recalling what she liked most about visiting the settlement conjured layered childhood memories of Green Chapel’s natural surroundings, tastes, and the sense of safety she experienced:

The family connection is priceless, where we checked on and kept up with each other, even though no one had telephones. Also, I enjoyed walking through the woods and fishing without worrying about being kidnapped. Then when plums and wild berries were in season, we’d grab a bucket and load up. Also, chinquapin, black walnuts, hickory nuts, and sassafras root tea. Just enjoyed things from the land and getting together with family.

In the survey, she describes sustaining Green Chapel’s heritage through rituals such as church homecomings, where she enjoyed “home-cooked items like butter pound cake, Bar-B-Que, chicken and dressing, and all the fixings” as a child. Matlock recounts memorializing ancestors, worship services, and reconnecting with relatives.

Little funding exists, elders age, and communicating the land’s value to distant relatives remains a challenge. Matlock describes the costly and laborious challenge of land stewardship, sustainable forestry, passing down oral histories, and creating opportunities for descendants to engage sites of memory (churches, cemeteries). During events, she reminds attendees of why telling the stories of ancestors’ sacrifices matter. Freedom colonies are “as important as these statues and historical markers … we must be proud to maintain and recognize these colonies.”

Conclusion: Envisioning, Building, and Reconstructing Black Women’s Emotional Geographies through Counternarratives

This article’s narrative heuristic centers layered Black women’s emotional geographies in understanding, teaching, and engaging displacement discourse. We invite more interdisciplinary pedagogy and public scholarship around counternarratives centering Black land, homeplaces, emotion, and joy. Narrative curation and analysis reveal these layers through a novel, The Cutting Season, and a digital portal, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas, enabling readers’ contestation with palimpsests of displacement-in-place.

Recurring themes of emotion as agency, displacement-in-place, public and private archives competing for validity, and counternarratives provide new ways of interpreting Black Southern landscapes in service of truth telling. Caren’s narratives of emotional geography empower her to reconcile complex histories. Similarly, Matlock, by narrating marginalized public histories of Black rural space, contends with palimpsests of displacement, Black joy, and a Black sense of place otherwise.

The concept of displacement-in-place informs reading Black people’s exclusion from landscapes, homes, and communities. Jason’s foiled land claim means Caren reaches adulthood not understanding Black contributions to the landscape. Freedom colonies are obscured layers of landscapes often only recognizable through recollection, the remains of a church, cemetery, or surviving landowners. Curating Black women’s memories of places reconstructs their emotional geographies that resist deliberate forgetting of free Black spaces.

Counternarratives reveal Black women’s contributions to place histories. Caren recalls Helen’s deep relationship with Belle Vie as homeplace after finding Jason’s map. Matlock’s Green Chapel recollections enumerate preservation practices required to maintain a sense of place. Centering Black women’s narratives of emotional investment in homeplace exposes absences from the public record. Our work makes visible and accessible, from classroom to digital sphere to preservation processes, Black women’s contributions to Southern landscapes and communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Roberts

ANDREA ROBERTS is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include Black placemaking history and practice, digital engagement, intersectionality, and preservation policy.

Maia L. Butler

MAIA L. BUTLER is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC 28403. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include African American and diasporic literature, Anglophone postcolonial literature and theory, and Black feminisms.