Blood at the Root: Black Americans, Southern Soil, and Shared Trauma
Like my grandfather and his father, I was born in Alabama. I grew up between Birmingham and rural southwest Mississippi — the Miss-Lou, those of you who are familiar. My childhood was punctuated by frequent road trips all over the South — Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas.
It has been said that “The South is every Negro’s old country.” When Stokely Carmichael first laid eyes on Mississippi in the 1960s, he was overwhelmed by a “nostalgic sense of recognition and homecoming,” despite his Trinidadian roots.
I can trace my family’s roots deep in that rich soil. But it’s haunted.
The Scene of the Crime
For black folks, the South may be the “old country,” but it is also the scene of the crime. So many crimes.
The beatings, the hangings, the tarring and featherings. The rapes. The drowning of a 14-year-old boy with the weight of a cotton gin. All over a whistle that never happened. Things that can only be called crimes against humanity.
To pretend these things did not happen would be to spit on your grandmother’s grave.
And the earth suffered too. The same dangerous shift in thinking that allowed one human being to dehumanize, demean, and exploit another for profit was applied to the land at the exact same time. Black bodies and the Southern earth simultaneously became unfeeling objects from which one could extract endlessly, and mercilessly.
Trees felled. Soil depleted. Rivers dammed and rerouted.
This brutal system fueled the antebellum economy, which bankrolled the industrial “revolution,” which launched today’s climate crisis.
The dots are all there, aching for connection.
Mother Earth, Motherland
Sometimes I think about the first Africans forced to cut through forest and wade through swamp, banishing birds and beasts from land freshly soaked in the tears of Indigenous peoples. Clearing land for those opulent, grotesque plantations. Those Africans knew that land belonged to the living, the dead, and the unborn.
It must have felt like striking their own mother.
In Africa, Mother Earth is divine and revered. And her punishments are fierce and collective. As my ancestors were forced to heap violence on her, I wonder if they knew we would all one day reap the consequences.
Strange Fruit and Open Wounds
We could look at Southern trees and see only the strange, strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots. It’s there. But so is the moss that grew on the northern side so that my ancestors had a chance to find freedom. So is the soil that welcomed and nurtured the okra seeds my foremothers tucked into their garments in the haste of their abduction.
That shared trauma forged an unbreakable bond.
These wounds still lay wide open, festering under a blazing sun. To heal them, we must affirm that black lives do, in fact, matter and that crimes against the earth are crimes against humanity. If we believe that, we have to say it. And if we say it, we have to fight for it. And for each other.
