The Soil

On the morning I set out for Louisiana, the night uncurled her gray fingers to reveal the soft light of dawn. With an overnight bag in the back of my bite-sized Nissan, the wooly landscape of Florida began to stretch and morph into humid exhales of wetlands. I had told my aunt I would visit only a few days before, but by that afternoon it seemed as if everyone in the state of Louisiana knew knew the youngest "Florida Girl" was coming home.” ​That was the beginning of my journey back into the wilderness of my family's legacy. For four days, I traveled the twisting roads of Maringouin and returned to visit relatives who had only seen me in photographs as a child. While conducting my interviews I listened more than spoke as they repainted Maringouin as they recalled it. Many landmarks and structures, now either overrun with vegetation, or entirely wiped from history. When night fell, I would return to my aunt's home in Baton Rouge to write while murmurs of cicadas and crickets spilled through the window.  ​As I catalogued and revisited all I had gathered, I considered the language Stefanie K. Dunning used to describe the complex disruption of Black American's connection to nature in her work, Black to Nature: pastoral return and African American culture. The author identified three reasons or "ruptures" for the disconnection to nature as associations of Black people and primitivism, racial violence, and forced labor. To contrast the ruptures, Dunning examined various forms of Black media for their examples of remaining connections to nature and called these moments "sutures."  While this language functioned within the context of her work, I felt it necessary to rename both the damage and healing to suite the narrative nonfiction construction of my essays. I decided to keep my language within the theme of nature and refer to the breaks in the Black American connection to nature as moments of uprooting, and in contrast them with moments of  rerooting or opportunities to heal.  Through this collection essays, and the shared stories I rewrite, I was able to plant myself in the soils of my culture and allow the earth to heal my family's generational wounds, the opened lacerations mended and the fever cooled. I wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, and cast light on what has been consumed in shadow. While this body of work is distinctively tied to my experience, I hope for its capacity to reach an infinite audience and spread the hope and healing that grace has allowed me through this journey. I hope to inspire those of my generation and those who will follow to look down to the land at their feet, beyond concrete and brick, and find their home on earth. This is where we plant our feet in the soil and mark our homecoming.