Leah Penniman - Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists

Black Earth Wisdom is dedicated to

Naima and Allen Penniman

My beloved earthwise siblings

I first visited Soul Fire Farm, the farm Leah Penniman cofounded with her partner, Jonah Vitale-Wolff, in the summer of 2015. I was participating in one of their BIPOC farmer-in-training programs, which I found out about from an article in Yes magazine sent to me by two different friends who knew I had been researching Black farming, and was doing so because in my ten years of serious gardening and classes and workshops and certifications and such, Black folks seemed to be, well, few and far between. Scarce. Put it like that. Most of the gardening and farming and eco-books I was reading were by white people (Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Michael Pollan, etc.; Masanobu Fukuokas wonderful The One-Straw Revolution was among the exceptions), as were most of the movies in that vein. The articles in magazines and such, the same. At some point it became very clear to me that something was off, and so I started searching. And, quickly, finding. The Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference in New York. Will Allen up in Milwaukee. Black Oaks permaculture farm in Pembroke, Illinois. Gilliard Farms down in Brunswick, Georgia.

I rooted around and found the email for Soul Fire, then sent them a note expressing my interest. About a day later I got a note back from Leah, followed by a phone call during which, after we got to know each other a little bit, I convinced her I was serious about this stuffI was by then on the board of the Bloomington Community Orchard and had worked with some other growing projects. She invited me to join them for the next session. A couple months later, I was with about twenty or twenty-five other farmers-in-training, in Muck Boots on the wet days, barefoot on the dry, harvesting raspberries and garlic, learning about companion planting and greenhouse growing and herbal medicine and George Washington Carver and Fannie Lou Hamer, sharing food and stories and dreams, and dancing hard to Kendrick Lamar, Whitney Houston, and DAngelo.

Toward the end of the week, I remember leaning on my rake, taking a drink, sweating hard, looking down onto the fields as we were in the middle of a workday. The sky was clear, the sun was high, it was hot, and people were working hardharvesting, weeding, transplantingbut no one seemed to be toiling. There was lots of laughter, and some singing, too. And no one seemed to be suffering. In fact, it seemed precisely the oppositewe seemed to be glad. We seemed to be joyful. We seemed, maybe, to be healing. As I looked down over those fields, it struck me like a bellIve never seen a truer thing. In case you believed slavery and sharecropping and land theft and general misery was the entirety of Black peoples relationship with the earth, here was a different story: all us Black people smiling with our hands (and feet) in the soil. Believe me, I wasnt the only one who said this as that week concluded, and maybe crying a little bit as we said, It feels like Im finally home. And, speaking for myself anyway, home didnt mean only that beautiful gathering with those beautiful people at this beautiful farm on this beautiful land in Upstate New York (though it for sure meant that, too): home meant being in the ongoing stream of Black and Brown people through timethat enormous, rhizomatic, mycelial, polyvocal, choral communitycaring for and being cared for by the land. It meant returning, together, to the beloved earth.

That transformative gathering at Soul Fire, that togethering, is precisely the energy and spirit and power of Leah Pennimans beautiful book Black Earth Wisdom, which brings together a diversity of voices, all of whom are guides to us, deep in the long practice of listening to the earth (one of the beautiful verbs Leah uses to imply closeness, attention, and devotion is listening: those who practice are earth-listeners). She talks with other farmers, marine biologists, lawyers, filmmakers, writers, musicians, ornithologists, teachers, activists, healers, and more; all wondering together how we might better listen to, or care for, or love the earth. Which, it turns out, we sometimes have to be shown how to do. Maybe especially if theres pain or sorrow to move through: which, for me, maybe for you, too, there is. Though pain and sorrow do not foreclose joy. In fact, and maybe this is some Black earth wisdom: its from the sorrow tended together that the joy grows.

Another wisdom of this book is the way Leah has crafted the interviews into conversations, because conversations, if they are good, are also collaborations. They require that we listen to one another, and they understand that the answers are yet to be discovered. They offer us the opportunity to move toward one another. They offer us the opportunity to be moved. Leah, of course, is one of our guidesand an astonishing one at that. Her reverence for the earth, her storytelling, her intimacy with the land, well, its almost like if you shook the pages of this book, seeds would drop out. She is among the earth-listeners I rely on, one of the earth-lovers who has changed my life. But its crucial to note that this book, Leahs book, comes of her reaching toward other earth-listeners. What do you think? she asks again and again. What might we do? She asks that of those who walk the earth now, and she asks it of earth-listeners who walked the earth hundreds or thousands of years ago. What might we do? Thats to say, she adamantly does not do it alone. In fact, you might say this book is a model for how not to do it alone. For how to do it together. Which, if were going to survive, were going to have to practice doing.

Oh, I could go on! But let me just tell this last little story from that time at Soul Fire. After lunch and before getting back to work one day, someone rounded us all up to play a little game. I think they called it the mangrove game. It goes like this: Everyone gathers in a circle within arms reach of their neighbors, twists into some swampy arboreal shape, something awkward and teetery that youd never in a million years be able to hold on one foot. Then you grab hold of whos next to you, their forearm or shin or hand, and on the count of three, everyone picks up one foot, at which point, I was afraid, we would topple (I was the biggest person in that group and really didnt want to smoosh anyone). I dont quite know how to describe to you the pulse, the cinching or gripping up, the sudden rooting of fifteen or twenty people becoming one sturdy organism. But I can tell you we shouted and laughed and looked, some of us, baffled with delight. Baffled by how easy it was, how strong we were, in a grove, all our roots grown together like that. We couldve done it forever, it seemed to me. Holding each other up. Like the Black earths been saying all this time.

As children, my siblings and I spent long hours in the forested wetland, hopping from one sun-dappled mossy mound to the next, never slipping into the soggy muck, and never stepping on any rare ladys slipper flowers or vibrant red-spotted newts. When we grew tired of this game, we wrapped our arms around the nearest sticky white pine or fragrant yellow birch and breathed deeply. Having recently read about photosynthesis and respiration in the heavy encyclopedias our father kept, we imagined that the tree was gratefully taking in our carbon dioxide and gifting us with oxygen to inhale. We siblings passed hours this way, in the delightful safety and supportive embrace of Watatic lands.

The swamp has long been a place of refuge for Black people in the Americas, a destination of escape, marronage, or the promise of passage to a better land. As three Black Kreyol children growing up in a conservative rural white town in the eighties, we also relied on this refuge. To say that the Ashburnham public schools were racially brutal would be an understatement. From elementary school, when we were informed by a classmate that brownies are not allowed in this school; to the interminable bullying of middle and high school, which included taunting, assaults, and one student attempting to blind me with her fingernails so that I would be too ugly for white boys to look at; to the school officials complicity with and excuses for the assaults, public school was a place of terror.