I spotted a young Black couple on the cover of Outside magazine last May while standing in line at the grocery store. I was ashamed and amazed.
First, the amazement. The couple were Black, fit and glowing in the sunshine of North Carolina's Pisgah National Forest. Their beauty, their confidence, their joy; I couldn't take my eyes off them. Casually dressed, they were real people, representatives of HBCUs Outside, a nonprofit that encourages young Black people to spend more time hiking, kayaking and participating in other outdoor activities I have generally associated with white people.
Which leads to my shame. Why would I think of enjoying the wilderness as a birth right reserved for white people? It's well documented that people of color are much less likely to live in spaces with ready access to nature. There is also research suggesting that the legacy of racial discrimination can make Black people feel unsafe in certain outdoor spaces. But to acknowledge that I'd internalized that image of greenspace being white space was embarrassing.
I thought of this while reading "A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing From Soil to Stars," edited by Minneapolis writer Erin Sharkey. In her introduction, Sharkey acknowledges the fathers and mothers of American outdoors writing: Thoreau, Emerson, Audubon, Carson.
Sharkey invited 10 Black writers to expand the canon, both in scope and perspective. Yes, the outside means hiking through the forest and trekking up hillsides in the Poconos at a family reunion. But what happens if that family is Black and they show up for a July 4th celebration in the nearby town that is nearly all white? Gwen Pogue writes with humor and honesty as she tells her family's story in "A Family Vacation."
In tales of the American wilderness, Black people have typically existed on the margins. For example, there were the formerly enslaved people who lived in Walden Woods decades before Thoreau. There are contemporary Black men who lead game hunts for the wealthy in southern Georgia. Those stories are undertold. This volume helps to fill those gaps.
Poet Sean Hill explores the meaning of land ownership from the perspective of Black 18th-century Revolutionary War veteran Austin Dabney, who, after the war, was granted land in Georgia. In researching Dabney, Hill discovers that the land he hunted on as a boy with his uncle, a Vietnam War veteran, was just a county away from Dabney's. What does it mean to roam free on land you own in a country you fought for but that has not treated you equitably?
Two essays gracefully answer the question: Is wilderness present in built environments, and can those spaces inspire awe, spark creativity or offer healing? "Magic Alley," by Ronald L. Greer II, is a beautiful meditation on his crumbling childhood Detroit neighborhood. Through a child's eye we see a place full of wonders, dangerous and enchanting. There are dilapidated crack houses with lines of customers twitching and dancing as their highs overtake them. Winos turn a felled telephone pole into a story corner where they dispense bottle wisdom and tall tales. There is the pregnant addict who is kind but going under with each hit of the crack pipe. The one welcome clearing in this rugged urban forest: Greer's grandfather's small but prolific backyard garden. These are his neighbors, so the old man shares the bounty with all.
In "There Was a Tremendous Softness," Michael Kleber-Diggs writes of boyhood fishing trips in Kansas with his grandfather. Those outings to creeks and manmade watering holes proved a balm through unimaginable childhood grief.
And Sharkey contributes a clever essay, "An Urban Farmer's Almanac," inspired by the 1795 almanac created by Benjamin Banneker, about the rhythms of an inner-city community garden in Buffalo, N.Y.
"June 10: Best day to string extension cords to your neighbor's house, to tag your name on the vacant park building, to graft, to pollinate," she writes.
"November 2: Best day to take the man from a few blocks over up on his offer to breed his blue-nosed pit bull with yours."
Some may not consider playing in a back alley, angling in a catfish pond or tending a community garden as exploring the great outdoors. "A Darker Wilderness" asks us to reconsider.
Rosalind Bentley is editor at large of Oxford American and deputy editor of the Southern Foodways Alliance and its James Beard Award-winning journal, Gravy.
A Darker Wilderness
Edited by: Erin Sharkey.
Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 312 pages, $20.
Event: Noon, March 2, Olin-Rice Science Center, Macalester College, St. Paul.
