The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account of themselves. The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account of events (small though they may be). This cannot be held against them; an exact account, a complete account, of anything, anywhere, is not possible.
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small PlaceIn 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was hanged and burned by a white mob in Valdosta, Georgia, because she threatened to press charges against the men who lynched her husband. Turner fled to her home for safety, but the lynching mob followed her and hanged her from a tree. As Turner's body hung, this mob removed her fetus and stomped the unborn child underneath their feet. Locally, this gruesome event remained shrouded in silence – no one was willing to discuss or admit that they remembered what happened. However, Turner's memory and the account of this horrific event was kept alive through national media, artists, and literature, such as Angelina Weld Grimké's “Goldie,” published two years after Turner's lynching.Footnote 1 “Goldie,” however, was not Grimké's first, or only, version of Turner's lynching; she actually wrote several fictionalized versions – “The Waitin” and “Blackness” – before publishing “Goldie,” which, as Anne P. Rice argues, suggests that Grimké attempted to come to terms with this horrific event through her fictionalized retellings.Footnote 2 Grimké initially submitted “Blackness” to the editors at the Birth Control Review, but they quickly rejected it, prompting Grimké to draft another version, “Goldie,” which was finally accepted.
Both “Blackness” and “Goldie” center around a black man (named Victor Forrest in “Goldie” and unnamed in “Blackness”) who leaves his urban home in the North to return to the rural South in order to confront the trauma of lynching. “Blackness,” which takes place in the North, and “Goldie,” set in the South, both provide a counternarrative to the assumed safety of urban landscapes and their association with African Americans. Besides shifting the point of view from third person to first person, in “Blackness” Grimké emphasizes the oppressive treatment of African Americans in the United States after World War I through the unnamed protagonist, a lawyer who claims that by killing the white man responsible for his former lover's death he enacts his own sense of justice. The protagonist's explanation highlights the absence of just laws for African Americans. Moreover, unlike Forrest in “Goldie,” the protagonist in “Blackness” escapes being lynched and returns to the North in order to articulate his story to Reed, his law partner, thereby spreading a story of racial injustice and retaliation. Of course, the blatant retaliation and escape of the black protagonist, which would shock the readers of the Birth Control Review, probably led to this version's rejection.Footnote 3
Thus Grimké, who was born in 1880 in Boston as the daughter of Archibad Henry Grimké, the offspring of an enslaved mother and her master (who was part of the Charleston elite), and Sarah E. Stanley, a white woman from a prominent Boston family, invested her time and writing on the subject of lynching and its impact both on African American domestic life and on one's understanding of nature. Through Grimké's personal writings, as Gloria Hull points out, we gain an impression of her “as an individual acutely conscious of her peculiar racial identity and aware of both the intra- and interracial realities.”Footnote 4 Because Grimké grew up in the North during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period better known as the Harlem Renaissance, she was surrounded by political and racial liberalism. Her activism against racial injustice began at an early age: at nineteen, she collected signatures for an anti-lynching petition.Footnote 5 She later campaigned for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which attempted to classify lynching as a federal felony, but it was eventually defeated.Footnote 6 She even directly encountered racial injustice, especially during her time in Washington, DC. Although DC supposedly stood for the protection of American life and liberty, anti-lynching bills, like Dyer's, eventually made it to DC only to die. In fact, DC was not devoid of racial injustice. In addition to previously being a major hub for the slave trade, the city, both during and after Reconstruction, was “as segregated as those in the Deep South.”Footnote 7 Therefore, even though Grimké maintained a relative sense of safety by living outside the South, she was aware of racial injustice and used her writing as a means of telling her version of what she witnessed and experienced.
When discussing African American writings on lynching, scholars such as Evie Shockley and Rice have recently shifted attention away from how Grimké's drama and fiction both deal with the violence of lynching, especially on the physical body, to focus on how Grimké's writing depicts the effects of such horrific events on black communities. Thus, by reanalyzing African American fictionalized versions of lynching, scholars can gain an alternative perspective on the impact of lynching on black communities, domesticity, and southern landscapes. In particular, the literary field of environmental criticism stands to gain from a (re)reading of black authors like Grimké in order to enrich our understanding of the links between race, place, and nature. By reading Grimké's fictionalized versions of Turner's lynching as protest literature designed to illustrate the violent expressions of racism in the United States, scholars overlook Grimké's insights about the transformed meaning of nature in the midst of racial terror. Following in the direction of Shockley and Rice, I contend that Grimké's fiction, which remains understudied, operates as an example of black nature writing, one that provides another perspective on the construction of racialized landscape. Grimké's short stories “Blackness” and “Goldie” not only capture how racial trauma migrates, and affects African Americans in the North as well as the South, but also, and more importantly, reveal how racial trauma transforms the meaning of nature. Through “Blackness” and “Goldie” Grimké relocates the traumatic memory of lynching within an urban setting, while also altering the romantic construction of wilderness for both blacks and whites. Thus, I argue, “Goldie” demonstrates the racial and political constructiveness of nature by revealing the racial trauma embedded within the southern landscape and “Blackness” demonstrates how traumatic memory reinvents place, thereby allowing people outside the South to also experience a shared cultural history of racial injustice.
I. BLACK NATURE DISAVOWED
Wilderness, as a place, is often discussed from a universal (Westernized) point of view rather than from one that explores the multifaceted quality of this place. During the colonial era, whites perceived wilderness as savage and aligned Amerindians and the enslaved as part of the “savage” land. Thus white Europeans settlers constructed a binary between “civilized” and “savage” nature in order to suit their imperialistic agenda. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman ushered in a sense of nostalgia attached to the land, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir continued to (re)construct the wilderness as an idealized place – one where (white) people could find solace – which further disavowed traumatic events or a racialized reading of nature. Our modern understanding of nature continues to depict it as uncomplicated and dualistic; people often consider wilderness as the antithesis of corrupt, urban environments. Wilderness, then, becomes separate from humanity's influence and remains preserved as “pure.” William Cronon, however, challenges the assumption that wilderness provides “the solution to our culture's problematic relationships with the nonhuman world” because the wilderness, as he points out, is itself a part of this problem.Footnote 8 Humanity invades the seemingly benign spaces of the wilderness, turning this space into a real, and often frightful, place.
Even though Cronon emphasizes the constructive idea of wilderness, he fails to account for how people outside this white, masculine construct view nature. While, for a white male, wilderness functions as an idealized construct, one where he can both experience nature and construct his own (white, male) identity, this construction of wilderness – one that Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir all incorporate in their experiences with nature – also relies on “othering.” Only a certain type of person can experience the nature that Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir describe because it is only told through a white, male point of view. The culturally constructed idea of nature, as Shockley points out, “bears the inscriptions of race, gender, class, and other hierarchies and paradigms that have likewise been set in place to organize the world and distribute (or hoard) power.”Footnote 9 Certainly, African Americans, whose identities and physical bodies are positioned as naturalized into environmental landscapes, do not share this romanticized myth of nature being untouched, or untainted. White males avoid confronting this constructive reality of place. Instead, they accept the racial construction as a truth, rather than critically questioning it.
Place, of course, is also an important component in the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and continued until the 1930s, leading one to question if the relocation to an urban place allowed blacks to escape a landscape associated with the trauma of lynching or if the understanding of place shifts as people physically move to new places. Jacqueline Goldsby complicates the association of lynching with a southern space by questioning place and the constructions applied to certain physical locations. She acknowledges that the violent treatment of blacks and whites, as well as racist media, crossed the geographical borders of North and South, and she argues that aligning lynching as a “southern” problem further heightens the contrast between rural “backwardness” and “urban sophistication.”Footnote 10 While one cannot ignore lynching as a form of racial terrorism that occurred across southern landscapes, in this essay I challenge the dichotomous thinking of race and place in order to demonstrate the plurality of experiences associated with nature.
In the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans also contributed to the urban/rural dichotomy. With the New Negro Renaissance, the notion that poetic contemplation of trees or meadows fell outside “the black experience” was implicit, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s this notion became programmatic.Footnote 11 By emphasizing the importance of black writers discussing urban topics rather than rural ones, the Black Arts Movement perpetuated the connection between African Americans and urban landscapes and denoted rural subjects as an unacceptable form of “black” writing, thereby contributing to an essentialized view of nature. In other words, by the middle of the twentieth century, people equated blackness with urban environments. The Great Migration of blacks, coupled with the often unchallenged construction of a white pastoral, easily allows critics to fall prey to this reductive form of thinking about place, but, as Scott Hicks warns, environmental critics should resist the essentialization of “presupposing that communities of color are solely urban.”Footnote 12
Environmental scholarship, then, must continue to resist essentializing nature as “natural” or from one singular perspective. Recent scholarship and anthologies have begun to challenge a simplified understanding of urban places and race by reconsidering and analyzing black nature writing in terms of what these writings can teach the literary field of ecocriticism about the constructed view and plurality of nature. Camille Dungy's Black Nature, for example, broadens the critical understanding of nature by incorporating African American voices in discussions of rural as well as urban landscapes.Footnote 13 Rather than viewing a constructed binary between white–rural and black–urban, black nature writing demonstrates the multifaceted relationships African Americans have with nature. Black nature writing, then, disrupts the notion of nature as nostalgic or idealized and complicates the association between African Americans and urban landscapes. Moreover, black nature writing illustrates how nature does not hold one inherent meaning for a particular group. Instead, individuals experience and construct nature differently depending on their race, class, and gender.
In this essay, I challenge the romanticized view of nature as an untouched place, one free from human construction, by reconsidering Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie” (both of which explore the impact of the southern landscape on African Americans and the political and racial implications of lynching) as black nature writing. African American lynching narratives not only react politically to racial violence, which is often the focus of literary scholarship, but also offer an alternative perspective on how lynching alters the southern landscape. Relinquishing the dualistic nature/culture framework, then, allows for a greater understanding of the diverse relationships with nature that existed and continue to exist.Footnote 14 Thus black nature writing like Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie” allows scholars to rethink the nature/culture binary, which is often constructed and maintained in (white) writings about nature. By recognizing the multiplicity within nature writing, we can reconceive the landscapes (both rural and urban) as politically and racially constructed and culturally specific.
II. (DE)CONSTRUCTING AND (UN)AESTHETICIZING SOUTHERN LANDSCAPES IN “GOLDIE”
Rather than depicting an unproblematicized view of nature – one as an idyllic landscape – the woods in “Goldie” serve as a constant reminder of the past and present threat that lynching and white violence pose for African Americans in the South. “Goldie” begins in medias res with Forrest, who returns to the South after he receives a frantic telegram from his sister, exiting a train and entering the woods. During his journey, he wrestles with confronting both his past and the unavoidable truth he knows is waiting for him: his sister's lynched body. Moreover, Grimké's name for her protagonist in “Goldie” refuses to allow the reader to disavow the racist rhetoric used to align African Americans as part of the American landscape. Instead, Forrest's name evokes a connection between himself and the wooded forest and forces the reader to reconsider how the woods change depending on racial identity and past historical constructions.
Reconsidering “Goldie” as black nature writing, it is not surprising, then, that “Goldie” disrupts the traditional aestheticization of nature. In fact, from the outset, Grimké dispels a romanticized view of nature as an untouched, or unspoiled, place. Upon arriving in the South, Forrest remembers the journey from the railroad station to the woods as difficult, yet he forces himself to continue. He fails to notice the beautiful night sky or the birds' songs. Instead, he focusses on the “palpable darkness” and the woods, which transform into “an ocean that had flowed down in a great rolling black wave of flood to the very lips of the road itself and paused there as though suddenly arrested and held poised in some strange and sinister spell.”Footnote 15 The forest becomes sinister and oppressive as the trauma associated with lynching shifts from Goldie's hanging body to the trees and seeps into the forest itself.
Even though Grimké depicts a gothic southern landscape in “Goldie,” she also keeps one possible safe space – at least initially – for the protagonist: the “white islands of safety.”Footnote 16 For Forrest, these “white islands” serve as bright spots, where he can “drive out expulsively the dank, black oppressiveness of the air he had been breathing” and “fill his lungs anew with God's night air, that, here, at least, was sweet and untroubled.”Footnote 17 Through the assumed safety of the white islands, “Goldie” again reminds the reader of the racialized history associated with nature. Even though, during slavery, forests often provided a haven for the enslaved to escape punishment or the abuse associated with enslavement, the same forests also operated as sites where whites inflicted extreme violence on runaway slaves. Thus, in the aftermath of slavery, whites reclaimed the forests, which at one time potentially symbolized an opportunity for protection or refuge from enslavement, as new sites of trauma. In “Goldie,” this sharp contrast between the dark forest (associated with black suffering) and the “white islands” (associated with a white sense of security), as Paul Outka argues, “underscores how deeply natural experience and racial experience construct each other.”Footnote 18 Grimké's use of “white” appears to imply that the woods remain safe for whites, not blacks. However, by the end of “Goldie,” the woods no longer carry the illusion of safety for whites or blacks, a point I discuss later. Forrest's sense of safety on the “white islands,” then, is misplaced and will inevitably end. Even though Forrest perceives these white spots as safe, this southern forest cannot and does not provide protection from racial violence. Instead, this misplaced sense of safety collapses, and the woods “swallow[] Victor Forrest,” making him another “creaking victim.”Footnote 19
The forest also embodies a false sense of security for Goldie. The woods become a symbol of potential domestic bliss: as a child, Goldie dreams of possessing “a little home – all [her] own,” filled with her own children, “and kittens and puppies and little fluffy chickens and ducks and little birds in [her] trees.”Footnote 20 At first, this landscape appears safe, and Goldie dreams of owning her own place. Even after she obtains her own home, she writes to Forrest that “the trees near the little home all [her] own are the very nicest ever and ever.”Footnote 21 Like Forrest, who feels a false sense of security in the “white islands,” Goldie equates the domestic with a safe place and romanticizes the surrounding trees. However, the threat of lynching and racial violence disrupts domesticity in this story. Because of her racial status as an African American within a southern community, the forest fails to allow Goldie's idealized domestic dream to remain a reality. Instead, the same trees that Goldie describes as “the very nicest” transform into the trees the mob uses to hang her and Cy, her husband, and into the terrifying landscape that later haunts Forrest as he returns South. “Goldie” juxtapositions “the brutal public act of lynching with the private, intimate atmosphere of the home” and creates an incongruity with the idealized notion of the “American home” as a safe place, especially for African Americans during the early twentieth century.Footnote 22 Like Turner, who fled to her home in hopes of finding safety from the lynching mob, Goldie too assumes that the home should be a refuge for her, but the violent nature of the white people in this community – one that is literally written into nature itself – spills into the domestic sphere.
Like Forrest's and Goldie's short-lived, misapplied sense of safety, these idealized views of nature and the home quickly become fragmented and destroyed. As soon as Forrest encounters Goldie's house, the domestic bliss she described in her letters turns into a site of horror:
There was not … one single whole piece of furniture. Chairs, tables, a sofa, a whatnot, all had been smashed, broken, torn apart; the stuffing of the upholstery, completely ripped out; and the entirety thrown, scattered, here and there and everywhere. The piano lay on one side, its other staved in. – Something, it reminded him of – something to do with a grin – the black notes like the rotting stumps of teeth.Footnote 23
The description of the piano's black notes as rotting teeth reminds Forrest of Lafe Coleman, the white man responsible for his sister's lynching, whose grin he earlier described as “display[ing] the dark and rotting remains of tooth stumps.”Footnote 24 Thus part of Goldie's domesticity – her now broken piano – evokes “nauseating memories” of Lafe Coleman's teeth.Footnote 25 White violence, symbolized in this scene by the allusion to Lafe Coleman's grotesque teeth, destroys the life of Goldie's home just as, through the act of lynching, it later dehumanizes her body. In fact, as Rice argues, the “gendered space of the home reverberates with accumulating images of rape.”Footnote 26 Goldie's domestic home embodies the white violence that threatens and eventually takes her life. Grimké draws on the destruction of the black home to reveal the impact the mob's violence had on the black family and community.Footnote 27 The white violence leaves not only Goldie's house and body but also the African American community in disarray. In fact, Goldie fears mentioning Lafe Coleman's attempts at sexual violence because she knows that not only Cy and herself but also their “little settlement” – their community – could pay for any type of retaliation.Footnote 28 “Goldie,” then, becomes more than just a story of physical violence on black bodies; it reveals that domesticity remains unattainable for black communities living within the South, where the realities of racial violence such as lynching threatened these communities daily.
Just as Goldie's house fails to exist as a truly safe space for her black body, Forrest's initial sense of safety with the “white islands” is also tinged with frightful and violent possibilities. These white spaces of safety transition into “stabbing, white stars,” evoking a violent relationship within this natural setting.Footnote 29 In fact, because of the violence associated with trees, the woods immediately haunt Forrest from the moment he steps off the train in the South. And it is not surprising that the forest – filled with potential lynching trees and stabbing, white stars – embodies this sense of potential violence and danger. Rice, in Witnessing Lynching, indicates that Grimké, in her fiction and poetry, often portrays the lynching tree “as a living witness to the truth.”Footnote 30 Nature, filled with trees and stabbing stars, symbolizes the traumatic memory of racial violence – one that Forrest can no longer avoid – and his migration North fails to erase his traumatic memory associated with the southern landscape. As soon as he enters the woods, his mind races “with many thoughts, many memories,” and he cannot escape the feeling of “imminent danger in the midst of this arrested wood-ocean.”Footnote 31 His journey through the forest finally forces him to confront a landscape steeped in the memory of racial violence. Thus in “Goldie” this misapplied “white,” safe place ultimately collapses into complete blackness, thereby transforming the forest into a threatening place, filled with trees that have “borne upon its boughs a creaking victim.”Footnote 32 The trees no longer tell Goldie nice things, and Forrest no longer finds solace in the darkness – the oppression – lurking behind every tree.
III. (RE)PLACING THE TRAUMA IN “BLACKNESS”
While “Goldie” is set in the South, “Blackness” takes place in the North, where the protagonist has returned home after finding his lover's lynched body and enforcing his own justice on the man responsible for her death. Even though scholars tend to focus on the shift in the revolutionary tone between “Goldie” and “Blackness,” I argue that the shift in the depiction and understanding of the southern landscape – especially trees – provides another means for complicating the relationship between these two stories. In “Blackness,” the traumatic memory of lynching reinvents place for both the protagonist, who personally witnessed the horror associated with lynching trees, and Reed, who witnesses the retelling of the protagonist's account. Thus traumatic memories ascribed to a particular place transform, or reinvent, one's understanding of nature, regardless of geographical location. In other words, traumatic memories are not fixed but can alter one's understanding of nature regardless of location or actual experience.
Initially, Reed and the protagonist romanticize the rural scenery of the South. The protagonist, upon his return to the South, embraces the opportunity to be alone in the woods and describes the southern landscape in an idealized tone:
It was one of those beautiful nights about which I have told you. There was no wind, no moon, no clouds. The skies were crowded with stars large white ones and little white ones. It was such a relief to be at last alone amid all this goodness of quiet and beauty and cleanness that I refused to think at all for a while just to absorb it, drink it all in, as it were, if you understand.Footnote 33
Unlike Forrest in “Goldie,” who fears the sinister southern woods and stabbing stars from the moment he steps off the train, the protagonist in “Blackness” disregards the connection between racial violence and the southern landscape. Instead, he not only finds refuge from the stationmaster by entering this assumed idealized landscape but also feels assured that he will not discover this particular landscape altered since his migration ten years ago. Even when reflecting on nature in the South, the protagonist maintains hope in his sentiment about the southern landscape by claiming “there is a beauty still left in the South – that even the polluting touch of the white man can never spoil.”Footnote 34 Thus “Blackness” further complicates a binary association of the romanticization of nature as a purely white experience.
The aestheticization of the lynching site further illustrates the protagonist's romanticization of the southern landscape. The protagonist first encounters the lynching scene through the musical sound the swinging bodies make on the bough of the tree. The creaking noise of the hanging bodies, in fact, serves as a lyrical call and response.Footnote 35 Before the protagonist fully understands what he hears, the bodies, which are swinging on the tree, sound like a musical duet, calling him:
These “voices” lure him into a deep sleep, and upon waking, he finds the woods just as beautiful as he did the previous night. However, his idealized perception of the southern landscape shifts as soon as he discovers the horrific sight of the hanging bodies. The lyrical call and response of the bodies transforms into a gruesome, detailed account of the lynching victims and the dead, unborn child: the protagonist describes their faces as “swollen, distorted, unrecognizable,” and even against Reed's protest for the protagonist to stop, he graphically recounts the unborn child's head that had been “blotted out – crushed.”Footnote 37 The two black bodies hanging on the tree corrupt this natural environment for the protagonist, and both the hanging bodies and the southern landscape become the sight of horror.
Because this initial romanticized depiction of the southern landscape occurs within Grimké's “Blackness,” which is set in a northern, urban place, one can ask if this urban location – one removed from the racialized landscape of the South – allows the protagonist to adopt a romantic tone when describing the woods. Does the protagonist's migration out of the South allow him to disavow his memories of the racial violence constructed within the southern landscape? “Blackness,” however, challenges an essentialized reading of place and racial trauma. Through racial violence, the trauma embedded in the southern forest affects the protagonist's memories of this landscape, and his return to the South ignites his (repressed) traumatic memories. Simply stated, the protagonist's experiences in the South – his witnessing of racial violence and lynching – establish his understanding of nature. The deeper he travels into the southern woods, the more nature shifts from beautiful to terrifying, culminating in his discovery of his former lover's and her husband's lynched bodies swinging from the limb of a tree. Place becomes reconstituted in the mind through the memories associated with it, thereby making place “movable.” In other words, even when people literally move, their memories remain in “place.”
In fact, the South and lynching only exist as a rememory, to borrow Toni Morrison's term, for the protagonist, who recounts his story to Reed. Rememory, which prevents the erasure of past trauma, describes the return or confrontation of a shared cultural past or history.Footnote 38 By returning South, the protagonist confronts the racial history of the United States, and he remembers the racial terror embedded in the branches of the lynching trees. In discussing African American poets, Shockley points out that “American racism has politicized the landscape in ways that seem inescapable to the poet whose current social condition consistently points toward the history beneath its picturesque surfaces.”Footnote 39 With “Blackness,” Grimké also reveals the underlying history of racism lurking beneath the romanticized depiction of the American landscape. In particular, the protagonist's rememory of trees remains with him even after he migrates north. Moreover, the beauty he initially associates with the southern landscape does not extend to the trees. After the protagonist describes the beauty in the South, Reed asks him if he forgot the trees, which Reed considers among “the beautiful things.”Footnote 40 The protagonist, however, has not forgotten the trees, and Reed's reference to them causes the protagonist to “draw in his breath sharply and suddenly.”Footnote 41 Because of the protagonist's experience in the South, trees contain a different meaning for him: they embody the racial violence that lynching mobs inflicted on African Americans. Returning to the South only serves to confirm his association between trees and racial trauma, one Reed does not yet fully understand.
The protagonist's (re)memories also take physical form when a white, southern detective travels north in order to punish the protagonist for killing a white man. As Reed approaches the protagonist's home, he senses the dangerous presence of a man lurking outside the house, which causes him to pass by without entering. However, for Reed, the man's presence evokes a sense of danger, not trauma. In fact, Reed quickly forgets about him, and the protagonist has to remind Reed about the man sitting “motionless, leaning against the tree, screened almost but not quite by its trunk.”Footnote 42 It is important to note that a tree – the embodiment of lynching – screens most of the man's body, thereby literalizing the association between racial violence and nature. The detective from the “far and sunny south” represents the lynching mob, and his own body becomes intertwined with the tree, which also symbolizes racial trauma.Footnote 43 Even though Reed forgets this man, the protagonist cannot forget him any more than he can erase his memory of the hanging black bodies swinging on the tree.
The protagonist's reference to trees, however, slowly begins to physically and emotionally affect Reed as well. After hearing the protagonist's description of the trees as “tall black … nothing more, line on line, row on row, deep on deep,” Reed “shudder[s] involuntarily and quite unaccountably.”Footnote 44 Even though Reed's body begins to physically react to the protagonist's description of trees, he remains unaware of the shared sense of trauma until the protagonist fully recounts the lynching. David A. Hedrich Hirsch argues that while Reed “responds sympathetically” and shudders at the protagonist's mention of trees, he “does not know why he shudders … until he is presented with the ‘speech’ emanating from the trees themselves.”Footnote 45 After the protagonist recounts the call-and-response creaking of the hanging bodies, Reed, then, fully realizes the trauma associated with trees, and when the protagonist, in fragmented speech, describes the woman's golden body swaying from the tree branch while her dead, unborn child lies at her feet, Reed cries out for him to stop his narration. The horrific act of lynching now evokes a stronger response from Reed. The trees begin to “speak,” and what they tell him forces him to (re)place the once beautiful trees with ones that now embody racial violence.
Reed's understanding of trees continues to impact him even after hearing the protagonist's story. After the protagonist discloses his inability to consider trees beautiful, Reed replaces his own idealized perception of trees as beautiful and uncorrupted with the realization that racial violence is embedded in the branches, and he informs the reader that “since that night [of hearing the protagonist's story] no tree has been or ever will be the same … again.”Footnote 46 Therefore these men share a sense of trauma and loss over a particular place: the southern forest. For Outka, this shared sense of loss of the natural world reveals a moment where nature fails to function as a sublime object for these two men; instead, for them, this moment of sublimity collapses into trauma.Footnote 47 In other words, the white, sublime experience fails to translate into a black, sublime experience. The protagonist's perception of nature differs, of course, from a white experience, but, as I stated earlier, “Blackness” complicates a dichotomous reading of nature as black and white. Reed and the protagonist, both African American men, also experience nature differently. Even though Reed, as a northerner, does not share the protagonist's perspective of the southern landscape, by acting as a witness to the protagonist's story he becomes cognizant of the racial trauma attached to lynching trees. As Reed hears the protagonist's memory of the lynching, he too experiences a rememory of racial trauma attached to the land. It is important to note that the term “rememory” reflects not only actual experiences but also memories told by others or absorbed through daily living; rememories, then, contribute to “a sense of self beyond the linear narrative of events, encounters and biographical experiences.”Footnote 48 Therefore Reed's position as a witness emphasizes how his aestheticized view of the South unravels as he shares the protagonist's rememory of the southern landscape.
Reed's name also suggests an alignment between his role as witness to the protagonist's story and the reader's role as witness to Reed's story. Both Reed and the readers of “Blackness” witness the protagonist's retelling of the lynching, which provides them with an alternate perspective of nature. According to Rice, Reed and the reader of the text “must learn a new way to interpret reality.”Footnote 49 Rather than accepting an unproblematicized view of nature, they must confront the racialized constructions inherent in the southern landscape. Drawing on Lawrence Buell's discussion of the “reinventionary aspect of place,” where he questions if one must experience a place in order to be influenced by it,Footnote 50 I argue that, by telling his story, the protagonist transfers the racialized construction of the southern landscape to Reed (and reader), allowing him to share in the protagonist's own sense of trauma and displacement. The southern landscape becomes the epitome of lynching and trauma for African Americans, and the protagonist's inability to forget his traumatic relationship with the southern landscape even after migrating to the North, coupled with Reed's ability to share in the protagonist's trauma, reveals the inescapable reality of racial trauma – one Grimké hopes will affect not only Reed but also the white and black (reed)ers. Moreover, by shifting from a southern landscape to a northern one, “Blackness” not only illustrates the mobility of racial trauma and place but also reveals the disavowal of racial violence and oppression imposed on African Americans who remain in the South by both blacks and whites in the North.Footnote 51 For Grimké, “Blackness,” then, becomes a migration narrative through which she attempts to educate both the black and white readers on the racist and horrific acts preserved and “voiced” in the creaking trees.
IV. TRANSPLANTED MEMORIES AND REBELLIOUS WOODS
In “Blackness,” the change in location provides the protagonist with the possibility of (physical) escape,Footnote 52 and allows him to voice his own story – “to talk about [himself].”Footnote 53 It is important to note, however, that Reed functions as the first-person narrator, not the unnamed protagonist. This subtle shift in narration illustrates Jamaica Kincaid's point (quoted in the epigraph) about people in a small place, or a minority, being unable to articulate their own story, thus preventing an accurate account of events. Because the Birth Control Review rejected “Blackness,” Grimké personally could relate to the challenges African Americans often faced when trying to articulate their stories. Through Reed's (re)articulation of the protagonist's experience, which itself also acts as another form of retelling his lover's story, Grimké illustrates racial oppression both in terms of the violent crimes enacted on African Americans in the South and in terms of the inability, or difficulty, that minorities faced in narrating their own stories, thereby preventing a complete account of events or of a place. “Blackness” and “Goldie,” as examples of black nature writing, provide another perspective, or account, of the traumatic memories associated with lynching and the southern landscape, thereby complicating a linear reading of nature and (white) representations of lynching.
The retaliatory acts of Grimké's black, male protagonists at the end of both stories also prevent a dichotomistic reading of nature. By suffocating the white man responsible for the lynching, the protagonist in “Blackness” reveals the potential danger that the woods hold for whites, as illustrated by the shift in the stationmaster's language. When the protagonist first encounters the stationmaster, his language is confident and controlled, and it is the protagonist who “found it easier to say nothing.”Footnote 54 However, when the protagonist again meets the stationmaster – this time in the woods – it is the white man's language that has become fragmented. As the protagonist, whose voice now remains calm, threatens to present the stationmaster with his own little surprise (revenge for his lover's lynching), the white man's voice breaks, which Grimké indicates through dashes in his speech: “I – I – don't think – I – I get you?”Footnote 55 The stationmaster's fragmented words are finally silenced as the protagonist's “hands [meet] around [the stationmaster's] throat.”Footnote 56 Suffocation also plays a role in the ending of “Goldie” when Forrest exacts revenge for Goldie's death by killing Lafe Coleman. The narrator describes the body of Lafe Coleman as “not a pleasant object to see. There was no bullet in him – nothing like that. It was the marks upon his neck and the horror of his blackened face.”Footnote 57 The protagonists' choice method of revenge – suffocation – parallels the fragmented and suffocated black bodies hanging in the woods, thereby highlighting the potential trauma the woods also hold for whites. In fact, one might ask, if a white person had stumbled upon Coleman's unpleasant body, would these southern woods also have been a source of trauma and fear for whites?
Thus, at the end of “Goldie,” the remains of both white and black bodies are left within this wood-ocean, and in “Blackness” the suffocated, white body remains in the woods, “hidden away among the trees,” paralleling the creaking, black bodies hanging, unnoticed, in the woods.Footnote 58 These retaliatory acts of Grimké's protagonists defamiliarize this once romanticized view of nature, thereby problematizing an idealized landscape for both whites and blacks. So where does this retaliation through suffocation leave this (white) constructed landscape? I do not want to argue that Grimké goes so far as to reclaim this rural landscape as one capable of sustaining a positive black identity, but I do argue that she underscores the inability of racial violence to continue without some harmful repercussions. In short, the “white islands of safety” collapse for the white readers, revealing that although on the surface the wilderness appears safe, it remains dangerous for both whites and blacks.
“Blackness” clearly contains the most evident potential threat for rebellion. Ericka Miller, in fact, argues that the end of “Blackness” suggests revolution.Footnote 59 The story ends with a sense of imminent uprising, or at least the threat of it, because the protagonist manages to escape with his life, “lost in the blackness,” which suggests that he could continue to spread rebellious ideas or again enact his own sense of justice.Footnote 60 Even though Forrest does not disappear into the darkness like the protagonist in “Blackness,” “Goldie” also contains a sense of impending revolution. The story ends not with Forrest's death, but with a symbolic image of the “wood-ocean”:
At night the trees become an ocean dark and sinister … It is an ocean arrested at the very edges of the road by a strange spell. But this spell may snap at any second [and] this sea of evil will move, rush, hurl itself heavily and swiftly together from the two sides of the road, engulfing, grinding, crushing, blotting out all in its way.Footnote 61
This image of a sinister ocean alludes to the potential and inevitable revolution that must occur. Just as the wood-ocean eventually collapses, killing all in its path, racial oppression and borders will also come crashing down. Rice indicates that the illusion of white islands of safety amidst others' trauma “portends an apocalyptic end to the structure of segregation.”Footnote 62 With the image of the wood-ocean and the lurking protagonist, Grimké's short stories refuse to allow the reader to ignore racial injustice like segregation and lynching. By the end of “Goldie,” the white islands and the woods transform into a sinister warning to the reader: to end racial oppression or, like the unnamed protagonist of “Blackness,” people will enact their own sense of justice. Thus, with the concluding image of the wood-ocean in “Goldie,” Grimké not only collapses white sublimity into trauma, to borrow Outka's phrasing, but also collapses blackness and whiteness, simultaneously (dis)placing Forrest and the reader and transforming the forest into a threatening place.
Moreover, with the wood-ocean metaphor at the end of “Goldie,” Grimké firmly places racial tensions within an American landscape and alludes to the possibility of violence. As the passing spectators walk by the “Creaking Forrest,” they maintain their code of silence with “deaf” souls, and their “deaf” souls prevent them from hearing the sounds of the forest with its “transplanted” trees, which had “been chosen … for a reason.”Footnote 63 For them, the woods function as a site of joy and happiness only because they allow this whitewashing to blind them to the racial violence occurring on every branch. The potentially threatening wood-ocean surrounds them and serves as a warning to those “deaf” onlookers, who, without a complete account, remain in the dark, failing to acknowledge racial injustice. Rice argues that the passive construction Grimké uses in describing the transplanted trees illustrates “the operation of traumatic memory, in which events become implanted in the subconscious.” The forest, then, describes “the individual struggle to defend against dangerous memories,” and these dangerous memories, Rice points out, “are not limited to the African American community.”Footnote 64 Grimké's ending, therefore, calls for a restructuring of our understanding of race within various geographical places in order to challenge the potential erasure that often occurs by viewing nature only through white experience.
Like the transplanted trees in the wood-ocean, Grimké also purposely chooses to relocate the setting of “Blackness.” By transplanting her protagonist, Grimké reminds her readers that “traces and residues [of racial crimes] remain within the collective memories of both black and white Americans.”Footnote 65 Collective memories of racial violence embedded in the southern landscape transplant themselves into the protagonist's mind, which he then narrates to Reed/reader, and through this transplanting of (re)memories of racial trauma, Reed, like the reader, no longer can walk past nature with a deaf soul. The hanging bodies and trees all “creak,” voicing black oppression, and this suffering is not a fixed physical location but a shared consciousness that is not just creaking but creeping, threatening to engulf us all.
