Other nature: resistance to ecological hegemony in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman.

The nation was founded on the principles of "free land" (stolen from Native Americans and Mexicans), "free labor" (cruelly extracted from African slaves), and "free men" (white men with property). From the outset, institutional racism shaped the economic, political, and ecological landscape, and buttressed the exploitation of both land and people. (Robert D. Bullard, "Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the Environmental Justice Movement")

[The Earth] is perceived, ironically, as other, alien, evil, and threatening by those who are finding they cannot draw a healthful breath without its cooperation. While the Earth is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned. While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free. (Alice Walker, Living by the Word)

**********

An image from Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) illustrates how the construction of the "Other" in the dominant American culture is as injurious to landscape as it is to groups of people. In the story "Po' Sandy," narrated by the former slave Julius McAdoo, a "conjured" slave, Sandy, has been turned by his wife Tenie into a pine tree in order to escape from his master, who plans to "lend" him to another plantation owner. Each night she turns him back into a man for a short time, before turning him back to a tree again in the morning. After some time, however, this "old pine" is cut down for lumber, an action that symbolizes, at the same time, both the dismemberment of the body of the slave and the exploitation of land in the form of logging. (1) Such images of slaves conjured into aspects of the landscape both wild and cultivated repeat throughout Julius's tales in The Conjure Woman. In "The Goophered Grapevine," Henry, a field hand, thrives in the summer when the grape vines are green and wither s in the fall when the vines themselves do the same. In "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," another slave, Dan, becomes a gray wolf -- already an endangered species when the tale takes place -- who inhabits, and ultimately haunts, a wild remnant of uncleared old growth forest. In Chesnutt's book, the bodies of the men and women who work the land are conflated with the land itself -- and the crops, trees, and animals that inhabit it.

Toni Morrison argues that the characteristics that delineate "whiteness" in American literature are constructed over and against "a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence" (5). Building on this idea toward a reading of The Conjure Woman that shows how Chesnutt's work is concomitantly critical of ecological and racial hegemony, I would add that the same gesture that constructs the (white) American individual over and against the "Africanist presence," at the same time constructs that self over and against the wild presence of the land itself. Both the slave and the tree -- which in the case of "Po' Sandy" literally conflate -- are viewed as property, as resources at the disposal of their owner. What gives the "master" his sense of mastery -- autonomy, individuality, agency -- is his construction of a subjectivity that takes its form in opposition to both slaves and nature, each of which is reduced to property," in the Lockean sense. The two constructions are really the same construction: Both the bodies of slaves and the pine forests of the American Southeast had to be exploited in order to make the fortunes -- and the culture -- that cotton and tobacco plantations made possible. If Chesnutt's stories reveal how plantation owners literally carved this culture from both the bodies of slaves and the forests themselves, Chesnutt also suggests, as I will detail below, that African Americans and the land they have worked, as well as surviving tracts of uncultivated and undeveloped land, have a symbiosis that the slave-owning plantation owners -- and the Northern capitalists who replaced them as land owners -- lack.

Thus, The Conjure Woman is not only a work that deconstructs the nostalgic myths of the antebellum South and attacks the turn-of-the-century racial caste system. The work is also a call for the conservation of undeveloped land and wildlife in the South, at a time when the region was beginning an acute phase of natural resource exploitation, despite the fact that such calls were preserving wild lands elsewhere in the United States. Chesnutt's conservation ethic is in the service of a way of life that is more ecologically sustainable than industrial timber production or cotton and tobacco cash-crop agriculture, practices that created a system of debt peonage for -- and in some cases virtual reenslavement of -- African American farmers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he links the oppression of people of color with exploitation of the environment -- both in theory and in practice -- to expose the foundation of white "mastery" over human and non-human "others," while depicting African American culture as an ecological, as well as egalitarian, alternative to the dominant culture.

On the one hand, this symbiosis could seem to fit into a stereotype of African Americans as "closer to nature" than their more "civilized" white contemporaries. However, Chesnutt's tales take a subversive turn in this regard, and here it is important to bear in mind Houston Baker, Jr.'s discussion of "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery" (xvi). As Baker explains the character of Julius McAdoo, the former slave who narrates the conjure tales:

The old man knows the sounds that are dear to the hearts of the white boss and his wife, and he presents them with conjuring efficaciousness. In effect, he presents a world in which "dialect" masks the drama of African spirituality challenging and changing the disastrous transformations of slavery. (44)

What may seem to the new land owner John like harmless nostalgia represents an alternative view of the relationship between the self and the environment that challenges the dominant culture's mastery over both people and landscape. A careful reading of the tales reveals how -- ironically and quite against their intentions -- the slave owners' practice of slavery required blacks to create a "secondary indigenous" culture that, much like the ones the plantation owners had largely removed by force (such as the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw), was more in touch with the environment, more at home there than the masters themselves. (2) Slaves replanted in American soil traditions that had their roots in West Africa (Baker 43). Furthermore, the association of slaves with the environment recalls historical, land-based possibilities of freedom -- such as the Underground Railroad or Maroon bands of rebelling slaves -- and strongly intimates contemporary claims, for Chesnutt and for the present, of African American owners hip to the territory where they were enslaved. In the period following the Civil War, whites oppressed and suppressed this "secondary indigenous" population with the same violence that they practiced against American Indians. Indeed, the convergence of this set of "folk tales" with the publication just two years later of Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends (1901) suggests interesting possibilities for alliance. (3)

Toni Morrison explains that "black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free, but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me" (38). Adding to this, I would argue that Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman reveals how slaves and landscape figure together and at the same time as the "not-me" against which the white self, illegitimately, constructed itself -- a construction that has had material consequences for both people of color and the environment up to the present time. Exposing the illegitimacy of this construction, Chesnutt simultaneously undercuts turn-of-the-century claims of white supremacy, puts the lie to plantation-era nostalgia by revealing that system's human and ecological untenability, and calls for the conservation of both wild landscape and wildlife. Taken together, the tales imply a necessity to recognize African American culture as intrinsic to the landsca pe that Southern blacks inhabit, similar to the indigenous Native American cultures, traces of which appear throughout the text. By doing so, Chesnutt envisions a way of inhabiting the South that is humanly and ecologically sustainable, an ecocentric way of viewing the self in the landscape that does not require mastery over nature or other people.

Conflicting attitudes toward the environment appear at the very start of The Conjure Woman as the narrator John, a Northern capitalist, moves with his wife Annie to North Carolina, after the Civil War, to take over the old plantation where Julius was once a slave. John tells the reader they have moved to the South to escape the Northern Ohio winters, which aggravated Annie's "poor health" (1), an interesting anticipation of the large-scale movement of affluent Northerners to the "sunbelt" later in the century. It immediately becomes clear, however, that John has pecuniary motives in addition to concerns over his wife's health. As he tells the reader right from the start, he is in the "business" of "grape-culture" (2), and post-bellum North Carolina offers "cheap labor" -- former slaves -- and land that "could be bought for a mere song" (2-3). In fact, after a brief mention of his wife's illness, images of commerce and industry dominate the first four pages of the text: "the business" of grape culture, "the tu rpentine business," the town's "commercial emporium," its "business activity" (2-4). This sizing up of his adopted region's commercial potential epitomizes John's character: materialist, capitalist, rational, and scientific -- what Lorne Fienberg calls his "economic absolutism" (168). Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, plantation owners, as well as the timber, railroad, and mining industrialists of an increasingly industrialized South, benefitted from a convict-lease system, where inmates, often convicted of nothing more than "vagrancy," labored under essentially slave conditions (Cobb 68-69). At the same time, the region's "forests and wildlife were brutally used" by "outsiders, who cut its forests, bought up its land, and financed its railroads and many of its nascent industries" (Cowdrey 103).

Chesnutt's conflation of cheap land and cheap labor signals the book's theme of how land owners, before and after emancipation, exploited both African Americans and the natural world for material gain, constructing both as the "Other" against which the land/slave owner takes his identity. (4) That this construction remains after emancipation is central to the text's contemporaneity: John, who we discover later is interested in philosophy, has the same Lockean view of nature and the self that Julius's former master had. The land is given to humanity to appropriate, and whoever cultivates the land has a "natural right" to ownership of it. The sense of self ("ownership" of one's own person) and the mastery of nature (ownership of property) are tied together (Locke 22). (5) That African Americans, under this philosophy, would be entitled by "natural right" both to freedom and to ownership of the land they have cultivated went conveniently ignored, despite their calls, during Reconstruction, for what one freedman called "their fair share of these accumulations" (Foner 290) and their participation, for a period after Reconstruction, in the agrarian revolt of the century's end (Kremm and Neal 172).

In Chesnutt's narrative, John's and Julius's attitudes toward the environment differ starkly. Whereas John derives a sense of self from his mastery over the land, Julius -- along with the slaves in the tales he relates - gains his from kinship with it. Ironically, John recognizes this difference between them but fails properly to interpret it. He acknowledges that Julius "had a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood, was familiar with the roads and the watercourses, knew the qualities of the various soils and what they would produce, and where the best hunting and fishing were to be had" (64). Condescendingly, though, John attributes this intimacy, along with Julius's uncanny ability with dogs and horses, to "the simplicity of a life that had kept [Julius] close to nature" (64). Thus he dismisses as "primitive" a lifetime of knowledge gained in a particular landscape from a native cultural point of view. What John fails to understand is that Julius has a native's claim to the land, as the American Indians had originally (and continue to have), albeit one that is not recorded on a deed: "Toward my tract of land and the things that were on it--the creeks, the swamps, the hills, the stones, the trees--he maintained a peculiar personal attitude, that might be called predial rather than proprietary" (64-65). Of course, this is knowledge that John desires himself and will never possess, in spite of his titular ownership of the land; he will acquire it (as he has already done at this point in the text) by hiring Julius as his coachman. This acquisition threatens to attenuate Julius's relationship to place, as he enters John's cash economy after having lived off the land. The transaction carries overtones of moves to reduce the autonomy of rural African Americans with the debt peonage of sharecropping or exploitation in industrial mills (Boles 372-73). But Julius accepts the position, as I will discuss, because he hopes it will afford him an opportunity to preserve both landscape and culture.

Note here that what mystifies John with regard to Julius's relationship to the land is the latter's connection to elements of undeveloped nature ("the creeks, the swamps, the hills, the stones, the trees") rather than cultivated fields or improvements such as buildings or roads. This "peculiar personal attitude," so inexplicable to John, signifies a sense of kinship with the land characteristic of a native culture, possessed not only by Julius but also by the other African Americans in his tales. As the practice of conjure makes manifest, this kinship has its roots in the Earth-based spirituality of the slaves' African ancestors, in which, as Will Coleman puts it, "the line of demarcation between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, spirit and human, is ... extremely fluid" (25). Chesnutt, as Eric J. Sundquist explains, presents "a psychospatial representation of a separate cultural world of blackness horizontally coexistent with the crushing world of slavery but also reaching by implication into an Af rican past" (360). In that past, according to Lawrence Levine -- in "the ethos prevailing in the African cultures from which the slaves came" -- "Man was part of, not alien to, the Natural Order of things, attached to the Oneness that bound together all matter, animate and inanimate, all spirits, visible or not" (58). Julius is "predial" -- of the land; John is "proprietary" -- over the land. The valorization of "proprietary" over "predial" that John implies exists only from John's point of view; he cannot imagine a relationship with nature not based on ownership and improvement. Julius, although he fully comprehends John's point of view -- and, in trickster fashion, uses this knowledge to preserve his environment as well as he can (6) -- has a relationship with the land in which ownership and improvement have different meanings.

John misses this relationship completely, saying of Julius:

He had been accustomed ... to look upon himself as the property of another. When this relation was no longer possible ... he had been unable to break off entirely the mental habits of a lifetime, but had attached himself to the old plantation, of which he seemed to consider himself an appurtenance. (65; my emphasis)

But of course it is John who sees Julius as "an appurtenance." Because he regards the land as something inherently separate from himself, over which he holds proprietary control, he cannot view a person "attached" to the land as anything but "an appurtenance," a move that reproduces Julius's former slave status even though he is technically free. John assumes that Julius views the land from the same perspective, and naturally thinks it "peculiar" that Julius feels as though he is part of, rather than separate from, the land. Chesnutt plays here on the association of "peculiar" with the South's antebellum "peculiar institution." For John, Julius's attachment to the land carries the adjective's connotation of 'strange,' whereas John would construe the same word in the phrase peculiar institution to mean 'characteristic.' From Julius's point of view, however, his attachment to the land is characteristic of his cultural inheritance, while the institution of slavery was strange to the point of derangement.

Further, John projects his own motives in regard to the land onto Julius by assuming that Julius tells his stories strictly for personal gain -- as his own motives would dictate -- rather than to preserve ecological and community values, which are Julius's real motives. As Coleman explains, West African spirituality had a "communitarian aspect," which "centered on the well-being of the individual in relation to a densely populated universe inhabited by both human and spiritual beings" (33). For the same reason, John mistakenly believes that "the wages" he pays Julius to be his coachman were more than equivalent" to what Julius made selling the grapes from the vineyard John has bought. In monetary terms, perhaps they are. But as Julius attempts to make clear, his relationship with the land is about more than wages; it is about the intertwining of humans and nature against a history of oppression and violence against both. From the first time he meets them, Julius attempts to relate to John and Annie, through t he story of "The Goophered Grapevine" and shortly thereafter in "Po' Sandy," his own relationship to the land-his sense of kinship, his sense of sameness to it, in spite (and because) of the human suffering by which that relationship was forged. Both are stories that John misinterprets completely and that Annie only partially comprehends.

When Julius tells the story of "The Goophered Grapevine," John's commercial perspective, together with his utilitarian view of the land, limits his understanding; the story he hears is not the story that Julius is trying to tell. What John regards as fanciful embellishments in Julius's supposed attempt to preserve his own "respectable revenue" from selling the grapes -- the way Henry's health and the grapevines' growth become interwoven, the way "Mars Dugal" profits from selling and buying Henry back -- are really at the heart of Julius's tale. None of this detail would be necessary to put John off from buying the vineyard; the story could simply involve the goophering of the grapevines. But Julius's telling of this tale, which begins in the form of a nostalgic plantation tale like those of Joel Chandler Harris or Thomas Nelson Page, performs a Bakerian deformation of mastery in a number of ways. (7) First, by tying Henry's physical condition to the grapevines -- the body of the slave to the product of his la bor-the narrator symbolically portrays the dehumanization that slavery entailed. As Robert M. Farnsworth puts it, "Black man and nature alike suffer from the greed and power of the white master" (xv). When the slave owner profits off the grapes and Henry at the same time and in the same way, we see how, to the slave owner, the slave and the crop were one and the same. Both were part of a landscape (from the master's point of view) that the master exploited, not only for profit, but also to construct his identity as an autonomous individual, separate from (and master over) the environment. The illegitimacy of this construction Julius ironically exposes by portraying the master as an obvious swindler; also insertions, almost as asides, of threats of whipping and dogs belie nostalgia for the agrarian antebellum society. Without cheating and the constant threat of physical violence to keep the "Other" (both land and slave) down, the master's identity disintegrates. Furthermore, it is a subjectivity that depends o n a separation of the self from the environment, an illusory separation that Julius's tale deconstructs. When Julius has "Mars Dugal" call the profits he made on the "goophered" vines monst'us good interest" on his investment (18), Julius demonstrates how "monstrous" the profits made on slaves were. Ironically, the monster here is not the man who turns into the vegetable but the man who separates himself from it.

The other side to this conflation of Henry and the grapevines is equally important. If the master's identity is illegitimately constructed over and against the slaves and the land, the identities of Southern blacks in the tales are organically intertwined with the land itself. This is true not only for antebellum slaves like Henry, but for postbellum African Americans as well: The story Julius tells John about Henry's symbiosis with the vines is really a story of his own connection to a landscape that is not only symbolic but spiritually and materially real. Henry's thriving and weakening as the vines grow and wither could be seen as an extreme example of the pathetic fallacy. However, as Neil Evernden suggests in "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy," the tenets of ecology mean that the "inter-relatedness" of a human and a plant can be taken "quite literally": "Where do you draw the line between one creature and another? Where does one organism stop and another begin? Is there even a bounda ry between you and the non-living world, or will the atoms of this page be a part of your body tomorrow?" (95). It is this level of connectedness that Julius tries to evoke for John -- in the context of "conjure" rather than "ecology" -- through his tale of Henry's and the vines' mutual fate.

This ecological connection is precisely what John misses in his interpretation of the story. From his commercial, "proprietary" point of view, John assumes that Julius employs the tale only to protect his own interest in the grapes. But Julius's motives are not capitalist, although certainly a strong claim is implied for at least some ownership of the land that he has lived, labored, and suffered on for so long. The transition, in The Conjure Woman, from land ownership by white Southern plantation owners to white Northern capitalists underscores the broken promise of "forty acres and a mule" that Reconstruction was supposed to bring, when the provision to grant close to a million acres of public land to freedmen was removed from the Freedmen's Bureau Bill (Foner 157-166). Where freed slaves gained ownership of lands abandoned during the Civil War, as in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, they destroyed the cotton gins and grew subsistence crops such as corn and potatoes instead of cotton (Foner 51-52). When J ohn first arrives at his prospective plantation, he describes how he finds the vines growing in "wild and unpruned luxuriance," a state that he intends to "improve" upon (6). But a "wild and unpruned luxuriance" of landscape and culture is exactly what Julius is attempting, here and throughout the framing narrative, to preserve. The phrase evokes an ecologically healthy and diverse landscape providing a sustainable living, as in the Sea Islands, rather than intensive cash-crop agriculture and industrial-scale logging. Chesnutt writes this at a time when, instead of the autonomous, ecologically stable African American yeomanry which the Sea Islands represented, white owners of large landholdings and corporations were beginning a new phase of massive environmental exploitation in the South, carried out in large measure by an African American labor force.

I have been referring to the three major characters of the framing narrative -- John, Annie, and Julius -- whom Chesnutt introduces in the "The Goophered Grapevine." But there is really a fourth major "character" introduced in this chapter, one which, like Julius, figures in both the postbellum framing narrative and the antebellum tales, one that has an equally big stake in the framing narrative's plot: the pine lands of North Carolina. The first time he takes Annie there, John describes the countryside along their route to the vineyard: "Our route lay partly up hill and partly down, for we were in the sand-hill county; we drove past cultivated farms, and then by abandoned fields grown up in scrub-oak and short-leaved pine, and once or twice through the solemn aisles of the virgin forest, where the tall pines, well-nigh over the narrow road, shut out the sun, and wrapped us in cloistral solitude" (7). This passage does more than describe the scenery that surrounds the vineyard; it characterizes the country wi th which Julius and his African American characters are interconnected, a fact underscored by Julius's first appearance here. It also describes the pattern of classic forest succession in the ecological sense: from "abandoned field" to "scrub oak" to "virgin" (old growth) pine (Raven et al. 72). This is a countryside undergoing the reverse of the economic "progress" that John would bring, a whole countryside reverting to the "wild and unpruned luxuriance" of the vineyard. Replacing a cotton-and-tobacco plantation economy that removed the forests and depleted the soil to grow cash crops on the backs of slave labor (Genovese 88-89), this landscape represents ecological sustainability and a potential space of cultural and material autonomy for Julius, a landscape that he will try to preserve.

After he buys and "improves" the vineyard, John tells us that the "local press" hails it as "a striking illustration of the opportunities open to Northern capital in the development of Southern industries" (34). Of course, this is exactly the result that Julius is attempting to prevent. As his commitment to the "wild and unpruned luxuriance" of the vineyard indicates, his vision is one of land and human culture coexisting in an ecologically sustainable way. From his point of view, Northern capitalist "development" will further degrade a land and people that have only recently emerged from the degradations of the plantation system. The region's turn-of-the-century move toward industrial-scale logging, agribusiness, and other industrial development looms large in this text--and Chesnutt's prescience here is remarkable, as the twentieth-century development of the South's industrial sector has proven. To this day, in places such as Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," African Americans, along with other people of color, s uffer disproportionately from environmental pollution while white executives benefit disproportionately from the profits (Bullard, "Introduction" 12). As Robert D. Bullard puts it in his introduction to Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, "The plantation owner in the rural parishes was replaced by the petrochemical industry executive as the new 'master' and 'overseer'" (13).

In "The Goophered Grapevine," Julius has attempted to save his vineyard and affect John through a tale based on commerce. Failing this, he revisits his theme of the conflation of slaves and landscape in the next tale, one based on love and domesticity--"Po' Sandy"--in an attempt to reach Annie. (8) The sight of a "huge pine log" being sawn into boards--a reminder that native old-growth pine forests are being logged--cues Julius to tell the story of how a conjure woman, Tenie, transformed her husband Sandy into a tree to prevent their separation, only to see the tree cut down and sawn for lumber. When Annie expresses her sadness over this story about "a system where such things were possible," Julius has clearly moved her in a way that John--who expresses only skepticism over the fantastic nature of the tale--is not moved. Annie, however, in spite of her superior understanding, still has not fully comprehended the story. Although she derives the moral about slave owners' inhumanity toward African Americans, it is a point made by writers black and white--Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as prominent examples--fifty years before The Conjure Woman. Julius wants his audience to consider the present, postbellum environment--the land that Southern blacks at the turn of the century are living on and the cultural institutions that they have established there. Regard for that landscape, and a culture based on an intimate relationship with it, runs through the story of "Po' Sandy," as does that landscape's and culture's vulnerability.

The framing narrative begins with John's description of how the schoolhouse, now abandoned, has become part of the landscape: Wild grasses and weeds grow up all around it, animals take shelter there, and vines -- connecting this story with "The Goophered Grapevine" -- cover the chimney. As in the previous story, we follow the main characters through undeveloped, uncultivated country:

We drove down the long lane which led from our house to the plank-road; following the plank-road for about a mile, we turned into a road running through the forest and across the swamp to the sawmill beyond. Our carriage jolted over the half-rotted corduroy road which traversed the swamp, and then climbed the long hill leading to the sawmill. (38-39)

As with the similar passage near the beginning of "The Goophered Grapevine," this one reminds the reader of the presence of pristine forest and wetlands in the country where the narrative takes place, just as the "huge pine log" that is sawn at the sawmill reveals the original ecosystem's vulnerability. Taken together, these two passages reinforce the importance of this country to Julius and the people who inhabit it along with him, as Chesnutt's repetition of the word Sandy indicates.

The very name Sandy implies how the character stands in for the earth itself in this particular ecological region. We are told in "The Goophered Grapevine" that John and Annie's new farm is in "the sand-hill county," so sandy earth is the defining characteristic of the land. (9) The pine forests of the Southeast, like the one Sandy escapes to and joins, grow in sandy soil, so the region's native pines and sandy soil--and Sandy is clearly associated with both--are inextricably linked (Silver 17). At the end of the tale, we hear that the church to which Julius belongs--the one that will use the old schoolhouse made of boards from the "old pine-tree"--is "Sandy Run Colored Baptist Church" (62). A local creek and a local church take their name from this same character of the land (Selinger 673). making manifest the link between landscape and culture. Change Run from a noun into a verb--"Sandy Run"--and the possibilities of escape that the wilderness holds out emerge.

An intimacy with the woods and a knowledge of ecological relationships run through "Po' Sandy" and the rest of the stories in The Conjure Woman. When Sandy and Tenie discuss what element of the forest she should transform him into, they consider several possibilities before arriving at what they hope will be the safest. She asks if he wants to be turned into a rabbit; he replies "'No, de dogs mought git atter me.' "She offers to turn him into a wolf; he replies that he " 'doan want nobody ter be skeered er me.'" She suggests a mockingbird; "'No,' " he replies, "'a hawk mought ketch me. I wanter be turnt inter sump'n w'at'll stay in one place' " (46). Not only do these responses show Sandy's consciousness of the ecological web, his replies suggest a yearning, in his new freedom, to exist in harmony with the landscape--he doesn't want anyone to be scared of him--and to be literally rooted in a sense of place. Unfortunately, the one ecological phenomenon that Sandy and Tenie fail to take into account is the expl oitation of the forest by the plantation owner, who will cut Sandy down as a tree just as surely as he had cut him down as a man.

Similar examples of this knowledge appear later in the story, after Sandy's transformation. When a woodpecker comes and pecks a hole in Sandy's arm, Tenie uses conjure to get a sparrow hawk to guard the tree. When Mars Marrabo sends field hands to strip his bark for turpentine, Tenie sets a hornet's nest to keep them away. Notably, Tenie uses natural means to effect her protection of Sandy, means which show restraint and fit into the ecology of the forest. Conjure descends from West African vodun and appears in these tales as a natural religion that has taken root in the American Southern landscape (Baker 43). Tenie's use of conjure, after a period of fifteen years when she says she " 'got religion'" (45)--i.e., Christianity--suggests the relevance of this tradition to Chesnutt's view of an ecological and humanitarian social structure. As a woman, an African American, and a practitioner of the nature-based religion of conjure, Tenie is, like Aunt Peggy--the other eponymous conjure woman of these tales--triply othered by the dominant culture, making her all the more important to the alternative world view that Chesnutt is staking out. Significantly, Sandy is safe as the tree as long as he has Tenie's protection; when this conjure woman can no longer guard him, the tree is felled for lumber. As Vandana Shiva puts it, "The reductionist mind superimposes the roles and forms of power of Western male-oriented concepts on women, all non-Western peoples, and even on nature, rendering all three 'deficient,' and in need of 'development'" (5). (10) In the characters of Tenie and Aunt Peggy, Chesnutt recovers as complete, whole, and present the landscape and culture denigrated by plantation slavery.

A more subtle, but nonetheless clear, example of this close familiarity with the forest occurs when a number of field hands, according to Julius, pass through the woods shortly after Sandy is transformed: "Dey seed a tree w'at dey didn' 'member er habbin' seed befo'; it wuz monst'us quare, en dey wuz bleedst ter 'low dat dey hadn' 'membered right, er e'se one er der saplin's had be'n growin' monst'us fas'" (47). Of course, they had remembered "right"; the tree had not been there before. Chesnutt underscores that the passing field hands know every tree m the forest individually, know the forest so well that the addition of one tree is immediately apparent to them. In Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneu tics, and African/American Ways of "Telling the Story," Will Coleman cites a recorded oral account of Julia Henderson, a former slave, who reports that her grandfather, a native African who could not speak English, prayed at a particular pine tree and that the ground "'was clean because he prayed dere so much' " (110). As Coleman explains it, "The tree brought him close to the natural spirituality of his own ancestors" (110). Later, in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," with which I will conclude, a slave buries his "life charm" under a particular live-. oak tree, where he believes it will be safe, reinforcing this spiritual bond between human beings and trees. Again, this opposes the utilitarian point of view both of "Mars Marrabo" and Julius's current employer John, for whom a forest is measured in boardfeet of timber and for whom individual trees are without significance.

Here in "Po' Sandy," wild lands signify, as they will throughout The Conjure Woman, the promise of freedom. As Melvin Dixon notes, "During slavery blacks depicted wilderness as a place of refuge beyond the restricted world of the plantation" (3). Not only does Tenie conjure Sandy into a tree, she situates him in a forest, "down by de aidge er de swamp" (47). This location, the swamp's edge, is a motif in Chesnutt's fiction, appearing elsewhere in The Conjure Woman as well as in The House Behind the Cedars (1900). In "Mars Jeems Nightmare," a story in which a slave owner is turned into a slave who is lost in the forest, causing him for once in his life to experience the double-otherness over and against which he has constructed his subjectivity, a field hand who has gone off to be alone discovers "Mars Jeems" at "de aidge er de swamp" (90). In the climax of The House Behind the Cedars, when Rena Walden flees from her suitors in a crisis of identity, she is found unconscious "in the edge of the swamp" (275); in terestingly, of the three men in love with Rena Walden, only Frank--the one purely African American suitor and the only one of good intentions -- is comfortable in the forest and sees the beauty of it. Ecologists also refer to this border between two habitats as an "edge," and characteristic of the edge are diversity and disruption (Bush 285). In "Po' Sandy," as elsewhere in The Conjure Woman and Chesnutt's other fiction, the edge of the swamp represents a subversive site of diversity and disruption that calls into question racial hierarchy, even race essentialism, as "Mars Jeems" finds out when he becomes "black" in the forest or as we discover in Frank's greater ethical values.

For Sandy, his placement here on the edge of the wilderness suggests the importance of the forest as a hiding place for escaped slaves attempting to flee by way of the Underground Railroad. For example, Henry Bibb recounts, in his wilderness-based narrative of escape from slavery, how he "traveled... through the wild forest without any knowledge of the country whatever; for I had nothing to travel by but the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night" (161). (l1) Indeed, even before the first of his escapes, Bibb's narrative resounds with references to the forest as a place of refuge from whippings and other forms of mistreatment at the hands of plantation owners. Sandy's escape and virtual disappearance also call to mind bands of escaped slaves who lived in wilderness areas like North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp or the Florida Everglades, and who in the case of the latter were often adopted into the Seminole tribe (Boles 234). (12) Chesnutt elaborates on this depiction by underscoring the identification o f the refugees with the refuge--as well as their shared predicament.

Sandy's transformation underscores the importance of wild, undeveloped country--both in historical terms and contemporary ones--for Julius. As he tells it, when "Mars Marrabo" discovers Sandy is gone:

He got de dogs out, but de las' place dey could track Sandy ter wuz de foot er dat pine tree. En dere de dogs stood en barked, en bayed, en pawed at de tree, en tried to climb up on it; en w'en dey wuz tuk roun' thoo de swamp ter look fer de scent, dey broke loose en made fer dat tree ag'in. It wuz de beatenis' thing de w'ite folks eber hearn of .... (48)

Metaphorically, Sandy's transformation and disappearance into the swamp suggest the importance of undeveloped country in the South--land that has not been exploited or subdued by the plantation owners--as a symbol of freedom for African Americans in the region. To use another example of Henry Bibb's, when spotted by slave catchers out on an open prairie, he remarks that, "had this been in timbered land, I might have stood some chance to have dodged them..." (159). But perhaps more importantly, on a material level, Sandy's disappearance places a value on wild lands as actual sites for an emancipated culture to thrive, on many levels. The forests and wetlands, as Henry Bibb knew, are difficult places for the white members of the dominant society to control. They offer Julius a sustainable living in the form of the scuppernongs, as we learn in "The Goophered Grapevine," and wild honey, as we learn later in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," which squares with the importance of game and wild edibles to African Americans on antebellum plantations as well as after the war (Bense 326). They are the site of spiritual communities, as we see in the example of the overgrown schoolhouse-church in "Po' Sandy." And they form the basis for the practice of conjure, with its use of roots and herbs, and its many transformations of people into trees and animals, both of which not only derive from Africa but also bear strong resemblance to Native American practices and oral narratives.

When Julius recounts how Tenie decided she would devise a goopher that would "turn herse'f and Sandy to foxes, ersump'n, so dey could run en go some'rs whar dey could be free" (50), Chesnutt is making an association between "wild" and "free" that connects The Conjure Woman not only to the great slave narratives of the nineteenth century--or to his own contemporaries' works on African American cultural identity, such as Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)--that seek to put an end to racial oppression, but also to an American nature-writing tradition, from Thoreau to the present, that as one critic puts it, "has countered the values of progress, development, and improvement celebrated by a dominant tradition" (McDowell 371). (13)

From Thoreau's statement in Walking (1862) that "all good things are wild and free" (652) to Alice Walker's equating the abuse and neglect of animals to slavery in the essay "Am I Blue?" from Living by the Word (1988), this theme represents the confluence of two main streams of American literature, where human and ecological oppression are seen as one. Naturalist and activist John Muir, writing in the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, just two years before the publication of The Conjure Woman (and in the same magazine in which "The Goophered Grapevine" had appeared ten years previously), would call for a wide-scale preservation of what remained of the "American forests": the "broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful, and most beautiful trees in the world" (145). But Muir's vision for conservation is largely devoid of a human cultural presence. In The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt goes Muir one better by bringing together the "wild and free" --where human freedom and ecological integrity are intertwined--as no writer had since Thoreau. And Chesnutt has the advantage over Thoreau of speaking authoritatively from within the oppressed group about the importance--both metaphorical and material---f forest land, abandoned fields, and wildlife to political freedom and cultural autonomy for African Americans.

Thus, when the "big pine-tree" resists so tenaciously the men who come to fell it, haul it, and saw it into lumber, it does so both as Sandy fighting the dehumanization of slavery and as the pine resisting the destruction of the environment. First, the axes glance off the tree, the wood is so hard to cut. Then, when it finally falls, it creaks an shakes. As they haul the hacked wood to the mill, they become mired in a swamp for hours, the chain keeps com ing off, and the log rolls off and escapes down a hill (53). When, in the presence of a grief-stricken Tenie, the tree is run through the saw, it resists again, making the process "mighty hard wuk" (53). The sound of the tree's "sweekin', en moanin', and groanin'" is a living cry of outrage over the devastation wreaked on the bodies of slaves and the body of nature. That the story has been cued by Julius's "shudder" at the sound of an "old pine log" being run through the saw reinforces the contemporary (for Chesnutt) relevance of this story, when, as one hist orian explains it, "the South was the epitome of industrialist capitalism in the lumber industry," new technologies made the lumber mills vastly more efficient, and former slaves labored in company towns (Williams 153-60).

This connection crystalizes shortly thereafter, when, in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," Julius pleads on behalf of an entire tract of forest land that John wants to clear and develop. As historical background, it is important to note that millions of acres of federal forest land in the South were claimed, after Reconstruction, by lumber companies and Northern speculators for as little as $1.25 an acre-land that under a different political scenario would rightly have gone to freedmen (Cowdrey 111-12). John has, with unintentional irony, asked for Julius's opinion on "the cost to have that neck of woods down by the swamp cleared up" (165). As before, John focuses on the commercial aspect of his management of the land, "the cost" --but for Julius that cost is measured in different terms. He replies that it would not cost much "ez fuh ez money is consarned," but adds, "ef dat wuz my trac' er lan', I would n' 'sturb it, no suh, I would n'" (166). Recalling what John characterized as Julius's "peculiar personal attitude" toward John's property, we can see that, in an ecocritical reading of The Conjure Woman, this passage represents the climax of the narrative. Here, Julius attempts to preserve an entire ecosystem, one that has provided material and spiritual sustenance for him and his community throughout their history and up to the publication of the book. It is a plea for the conservation of forest and wildlife staked out in terms similar to an indigenous people's right to their ancestral land in the face of exploitation by the rampant industrial capitalism of the age. Again, John ascribes commercial motives to Julius's attempt to "trick" him out of clearing the forest: When he has it cut down, he finds a honey tree that he thinks Julius was protecting his "monopoly' on. At this point in the text, however, the reader knows the land (and of course Julius) too well even to consider this explanation: As supplier of an abundance of fish and game and wild edibles, as the refuge of escaped slaves, as a symbol of freedom, as the source for the practice of conjure, as the site of the Sandy Run Church, the land has value as a living presence that supersedes its value as a strictly economic resource. The forest has material, spiritual, political, historical, and aesthetic values the loss of which far exceed the "cost," "ez fuh ez money is consarned," to John to clear it.

The most environmentally far-reaching of the tales, then, "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt" tells how Dan--who buries his "life charm," conjured by Aunt Peggy of "roots and yarbs," under a live-oak tree deep in the forest (174)--is tricked into assuming the form of a gray wolf and killing his own wife Mahaly. When he discovers how he has been fooled, he takes revenge on Jube, but only after the conjure man has rendered Dan's transformation into a gray wolf permanent. The choice of a gray wolf for this conflation of man and animal has extraordinary significance: Perhaps no other wild animal has been as hated in American history as the wolf; it is practically the embodiment of nature as "Other." (14) In the half-century leading up to the publication of The Conjure Woman, the gray wolf was practically wiped out in the continental United States; perhaps as many as two million wolves were exterminated between 1850 and 1900 (Lopez 180). In the antebellum period when Julius's tale is situated, the wolves in North Carolina wou ld have been an endangered species, if not already extinct. (The slaves can see that a wolf has killed Mahaly, but "de w'ite folks say no, dey ain' b'en no wolves 'roun' dere fer ten yeahs er [190].) That this period of wolf extermination coincides with a period of extreme violence against African Americans--including the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, the year before The Conjure Woman was published (and the basis for Chesnutt's 1901 fiction The Marrow of Tradition)--strongly suggests that Chesnutt is making a claim for the double-othering of nature and people of color by the white dominant culture that John and Annie represent.

Chesnutt's use of the phrase neck of the woods to characterize the forest to be clear-cut in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt" makes the connection to lynching clear. The same decades, between 1880 and 1910, that witnessed the beginnings of the South's most widespread industrial-scale logging (Cowdrey 113)--as well as the nationwide eradication of wolves--is also the period of the highest incidence of lynchings of African Americans in history (Tolnay and Beck 17). The language of turn-of-the-century racism and the language of turn-of-the-century environmental destruction are startlingly similar, with nearly identical rationales espoused for both human and ecological oppression, the perverse logic of each feeding the other. A pamphlet published in 1908, Destruction of Wolves and Coyotes, depicts these animals, as environmental historian Donald Worster puts it, as "diabolical but craven monsters... [their] eyes glowing with cruel cunning" (265). Likewise, a white supremacist candidate for Governor of Mississippi in 1900 likened lynching to the eradication of predatory animals, stating, "We do not stop when we see a wolf to see if it will kill sheep before disposing of it" (Gosset 271). Both forests and African American laborers (before and after slavery) were seen strictly in utilitarian terms, as commodities, the disposable material that created the wealth of the dominant industrial culture and the false assumption of "mastery" that went with it. On a materialist level, the availability of cheap, easily exploitable labor of former slaves and cheap, easily exploitable land reveals the direct connection between human rights and ecological values in the South of Chesnutt's time. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman clarifies this interrelationship, attacking the assumption of "mastery" at the core of both forms of injustice.

As Coleman explains, the practice of conjure was associated with freedom and rebellion: Slaves turned to conjurers to protect them from the depredations of their masters, while Nat Turner and others "evoked the powers of the spiritual world in their revolutionary efforts" (38-39). Since conjure is also associated with an intimacy with the natural world that has a deep spiritual dimension, conjure creates a link between the natural world as a sacred space and the natural world as site of both literal and metaphorical freedom. In The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt not only undermines the discourse of mastery that defined the "plantation tradition" in American literature. He also, through Julius's attempt to save the forest, calls for an end to the ecological and racial hegemony that made, in Morrison's words, "the American as new, white, and male" possible (43). Chesnutt's work resonates with issues right up to the present--as today's environmental justice movement makes clear--with the way white people and people of color will or will not coexist with each other and the land.

Social justice has often been treated separately from environmentalism, both within activism and politics as well as within the corresponding academic realms of literary criticism and history. For example, two previously mentioned contemporaries of Chesnutt's, W. E. B. Du Bois and John Muir, have spoken to largely separate constituencies, from the time when they were active as writers and activists up to the present. The organizations that they were instrumental in founding--the NAACP and the Sierra Club, respectively--have historically reflected this trend: African American civil rights have focused on enfranchisement and economic empowerment while mainstream environmentalism has often concerned itself with preservation of land and wildlife. But recently, a number of civil rights groups as well as environmental activists have converged on the issue of environmental justice--both by exposing the socioeconomic factors that lead to environmental racism and by looking outside the dominant culture for models of e cological sustainability. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman serves as a locus for the convergence of these two themes: first, by illustrating how white racism and ecological destruction have their roots in the alienation of the self from the natural world of the earth and the body; and, second, by portraying Julius's "peculiar personal attitude" toward "the creeks, the rocks, the hills, the stones, the trees" as an alternative view--deeply engrained in the culture of the American Southeast--of the human relationship with nature that stands as an antidote to that alienation. Ultimately, Chesnutt asks us to imagine a sustainable human presence in the environment that is incompatible with racial oppression, an egalitarian society that emerges from the kindred relationship of humanity with the natural world.

Notes

(1.) A number of critics have treated this "conflation" of Sandy and the tree, as Charles Duncan puts it. Lame Fienberg details "the process of commodification" (169) relating the slave to the tree, and Eric Selinger examines the dynamic among gender, race, and sexuality inherent in Sandy's "dismemberment" (672).

(2.) Later In this article, I point out that a description of a forest in The Conjure Woman reveals a pattern of reforestation that ecologists term "secondary succession," the process of a forest growing up from an abandoned field. The text I consulted, interestingly, uses the example of "an abandoned field in North Carolina" (Raven et al. 72). My use of the term secondary indigenous derives from this well-researched phenomenon. In employing this term, I want to emphasize that I am not ignoring the displacement of Native American peoples, who of course have prior, and continuing, claims. Rather, I am arguing that Chesnutt depicts an African-derived interrelationship with nature that takes root in the same soil that whites stole from American Indians.

(3.) It is important to draw distinctions and acknowledge the differences between the two traditions--one formed on the plantations of the Southeast with roots extending back to West Africa, on the one hand, and beliefs and practices that extend back thousands of years in mid-North America, on the other--yet Chesnutt's and Zitkala-Sa's collections highlight a number of similarities in their depiction of humanity's relationship with other elements of the natural world. Written for an audience that includes the dominant culture (both Chesnutt and Zitkala-Sa appeared. for example, in The Atlantic Monthly). The Conjure Woman and Old Indian Legends manifest a view of the self that does not depend on mastery over nature or other human beings and speaks directly against such ecological hegemony on the part of their audience. It is interesting to note how both works, for instance, Involve many transformations of humans into animals and plants, even as they retain their status as people.

(4.) In addition to Fienberg, see also Brodhead, whose introduction to The Conjure Woman and Other Tales provides an excellent examination of the commercial relationships that the Northern capitalists' arrival on this scene entail (xv-xvi).

(5.) See Thomas for a helpful analysis of Locke's views on private property, which of course strongly influenced Jefferson and others at the nation's founding. These views still significantly inform the "property rights' versus environmentalism debate today.

(6.) A good discussion of the trickster strategies of The Conjure Woman can be found in Farwell, who rightly sees Julius's tricksterism as serving the community rather than himself. I will be emphasizing the land-based nature of the community as well as extending this idea of community to the land itself, in keeping with Aldo Leopold's idea of a land ethic" (see n9). This extension is in keeping, as Coleman points out, with the "communitarian aspect" of West African spirituality and the importance of "trickster-mediator... Eshu Elegbara" to that tradition (33).

(7.) For a discussion of Chesnutt's subversion of the "plantation tradition" of Harris and Page. see Fienberg: Nowatski; Sundquist 323-47.

(8.) For a discussion of the gendered responses of John and Annie to Julius, see Selinger 671-72: Duncan 92-93.

(9.) Perhaps it is more than coincidence that this phrase suggests the title of Aldo Leopold's midcentury nature-writing classic A Sand County Almanac, in which he calls for a land ethic" that "enlarges the boundaries of the community to include... the land" (239). Although Leopold might not have read Chesnutt, the fact that both books are set In a real but unnamed "sand county" Is suggestive. Both works center on abandoned farms that have at least partially reverted to a wild state. How these landscapes are to be treated--whether developed and once again exploited or allowed to develop diversity--is equally at stake In both.

(10.) Although Shiva's book critiques Western development in the Third World, her linking the marginalization of women and people of color with environmental destruction has relevance for North America as well.

(11.) See Dixon for an excellent discussion of Henry Bibb's relationship to wildemess, as well as a most Important treatment of African American literature and landscape.

(12.) For a thorough history of the highly complex African American/Seminole relationship, see Littlefield.

(13.) See Buell for a comprehensive, ecocritical history of this tradition.

(14.) See Lopez and, more recently, Hampton for full-length treatments of this topic. Each creates a portrait of the wolf as iconic of wilderness North America, both for those who would preserve as well as those who would develop. Interesting to note here is the reintroduction of wolves, by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to North Carolina.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston, Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P.1990. Bense, Judith A. Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: Paleoindian to World War I. San Diego: Academic P.1994.

Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb. 1849. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969.

Boles, John. The South Through Time. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999.

Brodhead, Richard H. "Introduction." The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. By Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Brodhead. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 1-21.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Bullard, Robert D. "Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the Environmental Justice Movement." Bullard, Confronting 15-39.

---. "Introduction." Bullard, Confronting 7-13.

Bullard, Robert D., ed. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End P, 1993.

Bush, Mark B. Ecology of a Changing Planet. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1997.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. 1899. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969.

---. The House Behind the Cedars. 1900. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000.

---. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Arno P. 1969.

Cobb, James C. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1984.

Coleman, Will. Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of "Telling the Story." University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000.

Cowdrey, Albert E. This Land, This South: An Environmental History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1983.

Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office. 1845.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. 1903.

Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio UP, 1998.

Evernden, Neil. "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy." Glotfelty and Fromm 92-104.

Farnsworth, Robert M. "Introduction." The Conjure Woman. By Charles W. Chesnutt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 1969. v-xix.

Farwell, Julia. "Goophering Around: Authority and the Trick of Storytelling in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman." Tricksterism in Tum-of-the-Century American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks. Hanover: UP of New England, 1994. 79-92.

Fienberg, Lorne. "Charles W. Chesnutt and Uncle Julius: Storytellers at the Crossroads." Studies in American Fiction 15 (1987): 161-73.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper, 1989.

Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. 2nd ed. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1989.

Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Hampton, Bruce. The Great American Wolf. New York: Holt, 1997.

Harris, Joel Chandler. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Boston: Houghton, 1955.

Kremm, Thomas W., and Diane Neal. "Challenges to Subordination: Organized Black Agricultural Protest in South Carolina, 1886-1895." African American Life, 1861-1900: From Slavery to Sharecropping. Ed. Donald G. Nieman. New York: Garland, 1994. 172-86.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 1966.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Littlefleld, Daniel F., Jr. Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation. Westport: Greenwood P, 1977.

Locke, John. The Second Treatise on Civil Government. Amherst: Prometheus, 1986.

Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Touchstone, 1978.

McDowell, Michael J. "The Bakhtian Road to Ecological Insight." Glotfelty and Fromm 371-91.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Muir, John. "American Forests." Atlantic Monthly 80 (Aug. 1897): 145-57.

Nowatski, Robert. "Passing in a White Genre: Charles W. Chesnutt's Negation of the Plantation Tradition in The Conjure Woman." American Literary Realism 27 (1995): 72-79.

Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia. New York: Scribner, 1917.

Raven, Peter H., et al. Environment. Fort Worth: Sanders College Publishing, 1993.

Selinger, Eric. "Aunts, Uncles, and Audience: Gender and Genre in Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman." Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 665-88.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. London: Zed, 1992.

Silver, Timothy. A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1852.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Thomas, D. A. Lloyd. Locke on Government. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Walker, Alice. Living by the Word. New York: Harcourt, 1988.

Williams, Michael. "The Clearing of the Forests." The Making of the American Landscape. Ed. Michael P. Conzen. New York: Routiedge, 1994. 146-68.

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin). Old Indian Legends. 1901. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

Jeffrey Myers is a Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, having completed his Ph.D. in English at Tufts University. He is currently at work on a manuscript based on his dissertation, Converging Stories: Race and Ecology in American Literature, 1785-1902, which focuses on multiethnic literature and the environment in nineteenth-century American literature. He recently had an article on Joseph Conrad appear in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.