Abstract
People of color bear the heaviest environmental burdens and are prevented from accessing environmental amenities, especially public lands, in part because black environmental history and literature have been forgotten or erased. Abolitionist texts by black writers like Charles Ball, John Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano employ multiple landscape topoi, including the anti-slavery gothic, the radical pastoral, and the revolutionary sublime. Frederick Douglass creatively adapts these tropes in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and The Heroic Slave. Changes in his ways of writing about nature reflect changes in his thinking as he evolved from a moralistic to a political abolitionist. They also reflect his attempts to engage the broad Free Soil movement and to build multiracial solidarity in the struggle to end slavery. This evolution culminates in My Bondage and My Freedom, which mounts an integrated socio-environmental critique of the South, slavery, and racism. After Emancipation, Douglass articulated an inspiring vision of a free human community that possesses the land with care.
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Notes
- 1.
The title of this section was provided by the headline of Francie Latour’s Boston Globe interview with Carolyn Finney. The issue of environmental racism was first brought to public attention by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice report, Toxic Wastes and Race, published in 1987. For a comprehensive survey with several compelling case studies, see Taylor, Toxic Communities.
- 2.
Taylor, Grandjean, and Gramann, 9, 11, and 17.
- 3.
Finney, 2–10, provides a comprehensive review of relevant research, especially in the social scientific fields of geography, environmental history, and critical race studies.
- 4.
Quoted in Peterson, 12.
- 5.
Taylor, Grandjean, and Gramann, 17.
- 6.
National Park Service, A Call to Action, 9.
- 7.
National Park Service, “Yosemite National Park Ranger.”
- 8.
National Park Service, A Call to Action, 4.
- 9.
See Myers, 3, for a sharp critique of the National Park Service’s history of interpreting canonical “Great Landscape Texts” in ways that enable their segregation by obscuring their active construction and ongoing management, by invoking a common heritage that elides cultural difference, and by foreclosing questions of access. In her memoir about her relationship to her native state of Kentucky, bell hooks writes, “Unmindful of our history of living harmoniously on the land, many contemporary black folks see no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns. Recalling the legacy of our ancestors who knew that the way we regard land and nature will determine the level of our self-regard, black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy where we connect our well-being to the well-being of the earth” (39–40).
- 10.
Spence, 4. Mazel set the stage for contemporary studies of “environmentality” by showing how Nature has functioned as “a powerful site for naturalizing constructs of race, class, nationality, and gender” through the mediation of early American literature (xxi). Evans describes the process of white identity differentiation: “Nature is encountered (and subsequently conquered) by a (white) male figure, who then wrests from the confrontation an instatement or reinstatement of his hegemonic identity. Nature is proffered in these representations as an unproblematic reality, when in fact it is a cultural product designed to serve an ideological function: having conferred upon him his hegemony, Nature is reified as that which has the power to do so” (182). Outka puts this point sharply: “The natural sublime can all too easily serve to ‘greenwash’ white identity, removing the historical and cultural context that establishes white supremacy, and substituting for it a dehistoricized white individuality and a luminous present moment of fantasized escape from culture, race, and time itself ” (24–25). However, as Finseth has shown, Nature also played a key role in anti-slavery and anti-racist discourse in the antebellum era: “Invocations of nature in the cultural fight over the meanings of race entailed a remarkable diversity of representational strategies [and] responded continuously to shifting cultural circumstances” (6). See also Myers, 87–110, for Charles Chesnutt’s “resistance to ecological and racial hegemony.”
- 11.
Outka, 3 and 80. Michael Bennett observes that the wilderness that is most familiar to black historical experience consists of “trees that were used to enforce southern lynch law.” As a result, “anti-pastoralism continues to the present day” as a “main current within African American culture,” but it has always “circulated with its dialectical opposite” (207–208). Kimberly Smith summarizes the ways in which the agricultural, legal, political, and folk cultural practices of the South “created a complex relationship between slaves and the landscape, forcing most of its victims into an intimacy with the immediate natural world but also, in some respects, alienating them from it” (14). Above all, “slavery deprived slaves of property rights and the right to travel” and “these rights would become critical components of the freedom sought by black Americans, linking self-possession with possession of the land” (37).
- 12.
Glave, 8. Finney, 10. Robert Butler argues that black writers have “usually found it inappropriate to envision idealized non-urban space as a relief from the pressures of urban living” because of “the historical experience of black people in America” (11).
- 13.
Dixon, 3.
- 14.
The segregation of the environmental commons can be seen as part of the larger pattern of segregation of public space in general. And at a time when countless people are being killed for being black in public, integration of the commons is a fundamental civil rights issue.
- 15.
Speth and Thompson, n.p.
- 16.
Klein, n.p.
- 17.
Alston, “The Summit.”
- 18.
Greening Youth Foundation, “The Company.”
- 19.
National Park Service, “Grand Canyon Hosts Camping 101.”
- 20.
Green 2.0, “Rue Mapp.”
- 21.
Diverse Environmental Leaders Speakers Bureau. Two other notable urban environmental justice organizations are Sustainable South Bronx and Alternatives for Community and Environment in Boston.
- 22.
As Bullard documents, activists of color have been engaged in vital environmental justice campaigns for decades. For additional anecdotes and case studies, see Purdy and the first section of Adamson, Evans, and Stein.
- 23.
Buell, Future, 119. Reed frames a general research program for “environmental justice ecocriticism.” Myers envisions an ambitious interdisciplinary effort to “make ecology a site upon which an egalitarian racial paradigm can be grounded” by integrating “critical race studies and ecocriticism” (8).
- 24.
Glave and Stoll collect a set of essays that represent the impressive range and depth of the burgeoning field of African American environmental history.
- 25.
Deming and Savoy’s 2002 collection has a broader focus, both in terms of genre and in terms of cultural heritage: “If what is called ‘nature writing’ aims to understand how we comprehend and then live responsibly in the world, then it must recognize the legacies of the Americas’ past in ways that are mindful of the complex historical and cultural dynamics that have shaped us all. Perhaps some would say this isn’t the goal of writing about nature or natural history. But if such writing examines human perceptions and experiences of nature, if an intimacy with and response to the larger-than-human world define who or what we are, if we as people are part of nature, then the experiences of all people on this land are necessary stories, even if some voices have been silent, silenced, or simply not recognized as nature writing. What is defined by some as an edge of separation between nature and culture, people and place, is a zone of exchange where finding common ground is more than possible; it is necessary” (6–7).
- 26.
Dungy, xxi.
- 27.
Ruffin, 2–3 and 16.
- 28.
Ruffin, 25–55. Focusing on the work of poet and critic Sterling Brown, Anderson argues that African American literature has relied heavily on the georgic mode, which emphasizes the moral value of agricultural labor, both to reframe black relations with nature and to critique the slavocrats’ plantation pastoral fantasies. Ronda makes a related argument, showing that Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s georgic poems in Lyrics of Lowly Life “disarticulate manual labor from discourses of racial self-improvement and emancipation” at the same time that they “assert the sympathetic humanity and blamelessness of African Americans in the face of virulent institutional racism” (864). See also Montrie’s chapter, “Living by Themselves: Slaves’ and Freedmen’s Hunting, Fishing, and Gardening in the Mississippi Delta” (35–52), in Making a Living.
- 29.
Ruffin, 6. Kimberly Smith carries out important historical reconstruction in African American Environmental Thought (2007), in which she describes a long tradition of theory and practice that has not been recognized as valuable by mainstream environmentalism because “African American activists [have] usually framed their concerns as civil rights issues” (3). Smith argues that “they are civil rights issues based on the assumption that environmental amenities and freedom from environmental harms are critical to the good life and should be available to all” (7–8, emphasis added). She shows that “black theorists reasoned that race slavery and post-Emancipation racial oppression put black Americans into a conflicted relationship with the land—by coercing their labor, restricting their ability to own land, and impairing their ability to interpret the landscape.” As a result, a “central theme in this tradition is the claim that denial of freedom to black Americans has distorted their relationship to the natural environment; indeed, it has scarred the land itself. To black writers working in this tradition, America—not just the political community but the physical terrain—is a land cursed by injustice and in need of redemption.” On the other hand, “plantation slaves experienced the American environment in the context of a struggle to achieve self-mastery through mastery of a disordered and often hostile natural world. That struggle made the connection between nature and freedom—between possessing the land and possessing oneself—a central theme in black political thought” (19).
- 30.
Black abolitionism was an international movement whose transatlantic networks have been incompletely mapped. Gilroy traces the contours of a black Atlantic culture that transcends national boundaries and literary-historical periods. Delbanco tells the riveting story of the fugitive slaves, who, during the antebellum decades in the United States, “pushed the nation toward confronting the truth about itself” and “incited conflict in the streets, the courts, the press, the halls of Congress, and perhaps most important in the minds and hearts of Americans who had been oblivious to their plight” (2). Michael Bennett’s Democratic Discourses demonstrates how radical abolitionists, particularly black abolitionists, transformed political consciousness and literary culture by insisting that “one cannot think about democracy in the United States without thinking about gender, race, and class” (8).
- 31.
Ball, 326.
- 32.
Ball, 328.
- 33.
Ball, 333.
- 34.
Ball, 336. The second half of Ball’s Slavery in the United States also relies heavily on the radical pastoral topos. Ball escapes from Georgia and makes his way across country to Pennsylvania. He lives off the land for several months, surviving intense privation, but he is still able to coolly observe daily life on the plantations that he passes.
- 35.
Marrant, 9 and 14.
- 36.
Marrant, 15.
- 37.
Marrant, iv.
- 38.
Marrant, 21.
- 39.
Marrant, 28.
- 40.
Marrant, 30 and 29.
- 41.
Marrant, 31–32.
- 42.
Marrant, 39.
- 43.
Equiano, 25.
- 44.
Equiano, 8.
- 45.
Equiano, 3 and 13–14.
- 46.
Equiano, 8 and 14.
- 47.
Equiano, 12 and 14.
- 48.
Equiano, 4–5 and 7.
- 49.
Equiano, 57 and 143.
- 50.
Parts of the following section were published as Newman, “Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’”
- 51.
Jay argues that Douglass “had no choice but to draw upon the cultural archive of white society and then transform his materials rhetorically.” In doing so, he achieved a “mastery of the master’s tongue [that transformed] him from the dictated subject of ideology into the agent of historical (and literary) change” (224 and 228).
- 52.
My reading of the landscapes of My Bondage and My Freedom differs from Joseph Bodziock’s in “The Cage of Obscene Birds: The Myth of the Southern Garden in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.” Bodziock sees the Narrative as minimalist, and argues that the second autobiography “used Gothic modes of expression” to invert the “moon-and-magnolias” myth peddled by apologists for slavery and to portray the South instead as a corrupt garden occupied by a decadent aristocracy. This misalignment may reflect the fact that Bodziock focuses mainly on the characterization of figures like Covey and Lloyd, while my own reading is more concerned with passages that describe the land.
- 53.
In “Violence Done to Nature,” Finley notes that most historians of Free Soil emphasize the racism of the movement’s political candidates and ignore the broadly multiracial character of its rank-and-file participants (5). Finley analyzes “the archive of antislavery literature that treats slavery as unnatural and as an ecological problem” and shows that when “Free Soil doctrine is refashioned into the literature of Free Soil, its imagery, tropes, heuristics, and presumptions become more imaginative, evocative, and affecting, as well as increasingly sophisticated and complex, enabling not only a more incisive and radical condemnation of slaveholding hegemony, slaveholding practices, slavery’s effects on land, and anti-black racism across the United States, but also a sophisticated critique of the racism of normative Free Soil ideology, its insufficient stance on immediate abolition, and the anti-ecological paradoxes contained within its argument that slavery is pollutive and degrading, yet can be contained to its present location” (4 and 7).
- 54.
Frederick Douglass, Papers, Series Two 1.80. Subsequent citations will identify this two-volume series as PS2.
- 55.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 10.
- 56.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 11.
- 57.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 11. Later, Douglass accused himself of a “slavish adoration of [his] Boston friends” (PS2, v. 2, 227). On the other hand, Garrison never proclaimed an absolute prohibition against politics, even when the split between nonresistant abolitionists and political anti-slavery advocates grew bitter. Moreover, despite his claim to the contrary, Douglass was never a doctrinaire Garrisonian (Sewell, Ballots, 24–41.) During his years with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he advocated moral suasion not on abstract principle but because he was convinced that it was the strategy that was most likely to produce swift emancipation (Goldstein, 61–72). Also, he was a disciplined organizer who understood the importance of consistency in a group’s message.
- 58.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 20–21.
- 59.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 40.
- 60.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 61–62.
- 61.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 47.
- 62.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 46.
- 63.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 48.
- 64.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 52–53.
- 65.
Riss argues that, in the discourse of liberalism, the meaning of “personhood” has varied radically through history and therefore “questions about the reality of the ‘person’” should be “replaced by questions about who controls the terms that establish this conceptual category” (23). Focusing on the fight with Covey, Riss argues that while the Narrative is often read as the paradigmatic liberal text, since it assumes the “always already existing ‘personhood’ of the slave,” it simultaneously dramatizes how personhood is “an identity that must be enacted” (167).
- 66.
Howard Jones narrates the events on the Creole that inspired The Heroic Slave. See Harrold for an account of abolitionist responses to the mutiny. Even Garrison compares Douglass to Patrick Henry in his preface to the Narrative (Douglass, Papers, Series One, v. 1, 4). Subsequent citations will identify this two-volume series as PS1.
- 67.
Andrews argues that Douglass engages in an act of generic radicalization by abandoning the highly managed slave narrative form for the more potentially disruptive historical romance, where he represents Washington’s exploits in “fictive, not merely fictional” terms, thus calling specific attention to the way that his text simultaneously dramatizes the factual material on which it is based and makes a claim of representative accuracy (23–30).
- 68.
There has been limited scholarly discussion of The Heroic Slave, most of which focuses on its relation to the ideology of nationalism. Walter points out that Douglass’s use of republican discourse risks reproducing its racism and sexism. Hopper argues that republicanism functions as part of a rhetoric of universality that attempts to transcend race. Sale concludes that Douglass transforms the discourse in the act of repurposing it (700–704). Finally, Wilson argues that Douglass emphasizes the transnationalism of his hero in order to inoculate the book against jingoism.
- 69.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 175.
- 70.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 176–177.
- 71.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 178, emphasis in original.
- 72.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 180.
- 73.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 181–182.
- 74.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 181
- 75.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 190.
- 76.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 190 and 192.
- 77.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 192–193. Yarborough argues that Madison Washington is characterized according to antebellum notions of bourgeois masculinity, compounding Emersonian self-reliance with such characteristics as “nobility, intelligence, strength, articulateness, loyalty, virtue, rationality, courage, self-control, courtliness, honesty, and physical attractiveness as defined [ironically] in white Western European terms” (168).
- 78.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 193.
- 79.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 194.
- 80.
Another example of the revolutionary sublime in early African American fiction is Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America, an 1859 novel about a fugitive slave who takes refuge in the backcountry with a band of Choctaw Indians and is convinced by their chief to return to his plantation and lead an insurrection. Henry finds the determination to pursue liberty through armed rebellion while “standing upon a high bank of a stream, contemplating his mission” in the wilderness (69).
- 81.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 196.
- 82.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 198.
- 83.
Douglass, The Heroic Slave, 205.
- 84.
For an excellent introduction to the historiography of this topic, see Foner and Shapiro, ix-xxx. This volume gathers a representative sample of primary sources, mainly editorial columns and correspondence from radical newspapers, that illuminate the interrelations between the abolitionist, utopian socialist, and labor movements of the 1840s and 1850s. For a survey of the diversity of the Northern working class, see Jacqueline Jones, Social History, 89–117.
- 85.
Douglass, PS1, v. 1, 433–434.
- 86.
Bradbury, 169–186. McFeely, 138–143.
- 87.
Giles, 781.
- 88.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 217.
- 89.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 212.
- 90.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 212.
- 91.
Ferreira, Fulkerson, and Rice and Crawford provide varying accounts of Douglass’s transformative exile and return.
- 92.
Foner, 2, 48–66.
- 93.
Bradbury, 171.
- 94.
Douglass, PS1, v. 1, 370–371.
- 95.
Colaiaco provides a full-length study of Douglass’s republicanism. For a concise survey of republican ideas in the discourse of abolition, see McInerney, 7–25.
- 96.
Quarles, 183–185.
- 97.
Kraut, 71–99, and Sewell, Ballots, 43–106.
- 98.
Sewell argues that “antislavery politicians, recognizing the racist nature of their society, conceded the need to float abolition in a larger vessel: the freedom of all men from monopoly and class legislation” (Ballots, 115).
- 99.
Quarles, 185–187.
- 100.
Earle provides an excellent full-length analysis of the Free Soil movement that emphasizes its ideological diversity. For a broader history of working-class republicanism, see Wilentz, especially 299–396.
- 101.
Lause narrates the history of the antebellum land reform movement and its intimate connections with abolition, socialism, Free Soil, and other radical movements. Stauffer shows that Free Soilers “identified with the Indian as a symbol of the savage fighter par excellence who rejected white laws and civilization and [who] found hope, strength, and courage in the wilderness and the Great Spirit in Nature” (237).
- 102.
Quoted in Commons, 353.
- 103.
Quoted in Commons, 354–355.
- 104.
Quoted in Earle, 36.
- 105.
Dyson describes Smith’s land distribution efforts. In This Radical Land, Daegan Miller narrates this episode of African American agricultural settlement in the Adirondacks as an example of “the ecology of freedom” (47–96).
- 106.
For an account of the growth of black working-class communities and the racist backlash against them in the antebellum North, see Jacqueline Jones, American Work, 141–68 and 246–72. Roediger surveys working-class white-supremacist ideology during the antebellum period, with a special focus on language and popular culture (43–166). Roediger’s afterword to the 1999 revised edition includes several important clarifications, partly in response to Lott, who offers a more consistently dialectical analysis of what he calls the “conflicted intimacy of American racial cultures” (75). Consciously anti-racist abolitionism was a powerful, perhaps even dominant, strain in the Free Soil milieu, as documented in Lause, 72–84. Mandel, 61–110, remains a balanced narrative of Northern working-class abolitionism.
- 107.
Sewell, “Slavery.”
- 108.
Quoted in Foner and Shapiro, 17.
- 109.
Cunliffe, 1–31, provides a fascinating survey of the transatlantic discourse of “white slavery.”
- 110.
Greeley, 353.
- 111.
Quoted in Lause, 80.
- 112.
Quoted in Foner and Shapiro, 72 and 76.
- 113.
West, n.p.
- 114.
Pierson, 71–96.
- 115.
Quoted in Foner and Shapiro, 11. On black leadership of the abolition movement, see Quarles 23–41. Jeffrey, 161–170, surveys women’s participation in the Liberty and Free Soil parties. Magdol analyzes the demographics of abolitionism just prior to the split into moral suasion and political wings.
- 116.
Quoted in Foner, 2.13.
- 117.
Douglass, PS1, v. 2, 255 and 257.
- 118.
Douglass, PS1, v. 2, 388.
- 119.
Douglass reproduces substantial passages of the Narrative inside quotation marks, observing that he sees no need for improvement.
- 120.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 28.
- 121.
My reading of My Bondage and My Freedom shares many features with Finseth, who argues that the book’s “pastoral ethic … calls into question not only the practices of the South, but also the values of the whole country” and that Douglass “reconceptualized the role of the natural environment in his and his cultures’ (plural) experience, coming to see the natural world, both symbolically and literally, as the foundation for a revitalized African American community” (280 and 272).
- 122.
Douglass, PS2, v. 1, 52.
- 123.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 134–135.
- 124.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 136–137.
- 125.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 142.
- 126.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 21, emphasis in original.
- 127.
The log cabin as badge of anti-elitism became so widely familiar in the antebellum years that it could be deployed with no regard whatsoever for autobiographical fact and actual class status. For instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 campaign autobiography of his Bowdoin chum, the wealthy lawyer Franklin Pierce, treats the reader to a bait-and-switch ruse in order to introduce the indispensable cabin. Half of Hawthorne’s first chapter sketches a portrait of his subject’s father, Benjamin Pierce. Hawthorne insists that the elder Pierce grew up with the “simple fare, hard labor, and scanty education as usually fell to the lot of a New England yeoman’s family” and that he traded his plow for a gun on the first day of the Revolution. After the victory of the former colonies, he betook “himself to the wilderness for a subsistence” and “built himself a log hut” (8–9). Hawthorne now quietly makes the switch, remarking that from “infancy upward [Franklin Pierce] had before his eyes, as the model on which he might instinctively form himself” his father, whose frontier upbringing ensured that he was “a most decided democrat, and supporter of Jefferson and Madison; a practical farmer, moreover, not rich, but independent … a man of the people, but whose natural qualities inevitably made him a leader among them” (10). In order to establish his candidate’s republican authenticity, Hawthorne’s uses the trope of the log cabin to make an invidious comparison between economically and morally self-reliant republicans and a decadent and debased elite. It was irrelevant that Pierce was in fact the Bowdoin-educated scion of one of the oldest families in Massachusetts.
- 128.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 23.
- 129.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 25 and 27.
- 130.
Outka reads Douglass’s description of his log cabin childhood as “a sort of Blakean Song of Innocence, a stereotypical pastoral nature that depends on ignorance of the realities of the commodified historical and economic landscape in which the child has already been emplaced” (63). When Douglass realizes that he is a slave, his innocence collapses traumatically. Rather than read the passage as a transparent record of traumatic experience, I emphasize the rhetorical virtuosity of Douglass’s self-fashioning.
- 131.
Ellis examines the landscapes of My Bondage and My Freedom and argues that Douglass raises the “pragmatic objection that slavery may be economically and environmentally hazardous” and “develops a pointedly amoral critique of slavery on the grounds of its practical unsustainability” (276–277).
- 132.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 67.
- 133.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 35.
- 134.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 29.
- 135.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 108.
- 136.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 109.
- 137.
Shore, 16–41, describes how the Southern elite countered Smithian critiques of slavery by adopting the lexicon of political economy and describing themselves as “slaveholding capitalists.”
- 138.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 144.
- 139.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 182.
- 140.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 177.
- 141.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 176–177, emphasis in original.
- 142.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, xx.
- 143.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 177.
- 144.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 109.
- 145.
Shore, 42–78, gives an important account of the antebellum period’s increasingly open class conflict between slaveholding capitalists and the Southern working class.
- 146.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 25.
- 147.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 38.
- 148.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 62.
- 149.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 87.
- 150.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 92.
- 151.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 52.
- 152.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 53.
- 153.
In this section, I rely heavily on the work of James Finley, who writes: “In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass portrays slavery as an ‘earth-polluting business,’ an environmentally destructive and ecologically unsustainable system of violence against people and landscapes. Drawing upon natural science, evidence of environmental degradation, and agrarian rhetoric throughout My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass constructs an explicitly ecological antislavery critique. Whereas Douglass’s 1845 Narrative positions chattel slavery as an unspeakable sin and pressing moral issue, My Bondage and My Freedom also renders slavery as deeply unnatural, condemning it as ‘violence done to nature’ (114), and providing an incisive analysis of a white-supremacist system that animalizes or bestializes people of color and violently manipulates the species-line to maintain racial hegemony while simultaneously blighting and destroying landscapes and natural resources” (8).
- 154.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 22–23.
- 155.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 38–39.
- 156.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 39–40.
- 157.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 40.
- 158.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 37.
- 159.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 41 and 42.
- 160.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 51.
- 161.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 46.
- 162.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 47.
- 163.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 50.
- 164.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 123.
- 165.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 59–60. An ash cake is a lump of corn-meal dough baked directly in the coals of a fire.
- 166.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 62–63.
- 167.
In Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Kevin Bales demonstrates that Douglass’s critique still holds true. Across the world, criminals and criminal corporations rely on slave labor to reduce costs, with the result that some 38.5 million “slaves are producing many of the things we buy, and in the process they are forced to destroy our shared environment, increase global warming, and wipe out protected species” (8).
- 168.
Douglass, PS2, v. 2, 340.
- 169.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 385–386.
- 170.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 387.
- 171.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 388.
- 172.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 389.
- 173.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 390.
- 174.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 393.
- 175.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 394.
- 176.
Douglass, PS1, v. 4, 393.
- 177.
Kimberly Smith, 39–97, surveys black agrarianism in the nineteenth century and offers insightful commentary on the tradition’s emphasis on private property ownership as the basis for economic independence and political freedom. As Smith observes, this emphasis runs counter to the mainstream environmental movement’s emphasis on public land management.
- 178.
Kimberly Smith, 40.
- 179.
Kimberly Smith, 8.
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Newman, L. (2019). Black Nature. In: The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14572-9_2
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