SOURCE: Bennett, Michael. “Anti‐Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery.” In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, pp. 195‐209. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

[In the following essay, Bennett offers an ecocritical reading of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, arguing that the boundaries of the ecological must be expanded and that the dominant culture must take into account the perceptions of landscape by African‐Americans and not just by white writers who have tended to romanticize the wilderness.]

If we separate the term “ecocriticism” into its two components, its parameters seem clear: “criticism,” engaging in analytical reading practices, and “ecological,” focusing these practices on environmental concerns. In theory, then, ecocriticism could be applied to any cultural artifact since every cultural text issues from, and envisions, a particular relationship with its environment. In practice, however, ecocriticism has tended to focus on the genre of nature writing, a designation usually reserved for essays about the two environments most removed from human habitation: the pastoral and the wild. This narrowed focus of most ecocritics is reflected in Glen A. Love's summary of ecocriticism as a “new pastoralism” (210).

But of what use is ecocriticism if the culture under consideration has a different relationship with pastoral space and wilderness than the ideal kinship that most nature writers and ecocritics assume or seek? This question is foregrounded in the following effort to provide an ecocritical reading of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, a text central to the development of an anti‐pastoral African American literary tradition. By focusing on Frederick Douglass's 1845 narrative, I will show that the method of ecologically informed reading pivotal to ecocriticism can be productive within African American studies, but that the perspective offered by the discipline of black studies challenges ecocritics to expand and reconceptualize the boundaries of the ecological. I begin by tracing the contours of African American anti‐pastoralism, before reading Douglass's narrative in this context and suggesting that the nature of slavery in the United States created the link between anti‐pastoralism and African American culture that has been operative from Douglass's day to our own.

ANTIHPASTORALISM

Pastoralism, the literary and social valorization of country life, has come to refer to “all literature that celebrates an ethos of rurality or nature or wilderness over against an ethos of metropolitanism” (Buell 439). But as Raymond Williams notes in the appendix to his classic work The Country and the City, the word “pastoral” originally came into common usage in English for “shepherds from the fourteenth century, and has an almost contemporary analogical meaning for priests” (307). The problem with using this term in relation to the origins of African American culture should be obvious. African Americans in the antebellum United States were much more likely to be referred to in the lexicon of slavery as sheep rather than shepherds—as soulless creatures excluded from the flock ministered to by those men of the cloth who were part of what Frederick Douglass called the “slaveholding religion of this land” (326). It is this fact that motivated Douglass's scathing critique of American Christianity in the appendix to his narrative, where he argues that slaves were considered as lower than sheep by the pro‐slavery clergy: “They would be shocked at the proposition of fellow‐shipping a sheep‐stealer, and at the same time they hug to their communion a man‐stealer, and brand me an infidel, if I find fault with them for it” (328).

The quintessential space of contemporary ecocriticism, the wilderness, has also had an antithetical relationship with African American culture, for the most part. Melvin Dixon reminds us that African American spirituals exhorted slaves to “go in de wilderness / To wait upon the Lord” and to find “free grace in de wilderness.” Dixon uses such songs as evidence that “during slavery blacks depicted the wilderness as a place of refuge beyond the restricted world of the plantation” (3); however, he also points out that one only travels through the wilderness to reach the other side—a sanctified community waiting with open arms. The slaves also sang, “I'm so glad I come out de wilderness” and “a rock cried out de wilderness / ‘No hiding place!’” So if the wilderness could be a temporary place of spiritual reflection it was also a space of terror and loneliness without the welcoming community waiting in the celestial city on the other side.

I do not wish to totally discount Dixon's argument that the wilderness—along with the underground and the mountaintop—has been a major topographical feature of African American literature. However, Dixon's analysis treats these spaces as “metaphors” for the search for identity. If ecocriticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to view “settings” not just as metaphors but as physical spaces that inform, shape, and are shaped by cultural productions. Lawrence Buell notes that it has been one of ecocriticism's central projects to restore the “referential dimension” to literary criticism by insisting, for instance, that the setting of a novel is not just a formal technique but an embodiment of “nature‐responsiveness” (86, 113). Although the physical spaces invoked in early spirituals and slave narratives may have inherited a certain meaning from biblical typology, the topographical meaning that Douglass and other slave narrators gave them was often a different matter. The apparent freedom of the wilderness—valued by and available to someone in Henry David Thoreau's subject position when he issued the famous ecological dictum that “in wildness is the preservation of the world” (609)—was not available to slaves or even most free blacks, who tended, with reason, to flee the countryside for life in the city. Or again, the mountaintop seen by Dixon to be a “figure for personal triumph and witness” providing a “moment of transcendence” (19)—not a place actually to be occupied or experienced but a metaphor for divine revelation—has little in common with Aldo Leopold's famous ecological essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.” Dixon is interested in figurative mountains, while Leopold focuses on mountains as part of a “biotic community” (225) to which we are ethically bound by ties that are strengthened through our efforts to empathize with nature—to make the attempt to literally think like a mountain or a wolf or a deer.

Although the geography of slavery as Douglass depicts it is not a matter of metaphoric settings, to which space is often reduced in nonecological literary criticism, it is also not in accordance with the ecocritic's lyrical evocation of natural spaces. For a runaway slave, the Ohio River is neither simply the metaphor of renewal that a river becomes for Dixon nor the rejuvenating presence that it might be in an eco‐friendly text such as A River Runs through It; it is the border between the North and the South that, although it may be overwritten as the River Jordan in African American spirituals, represents the very real boundary between slavery and freedom. Whatever we think of Dixon's metaphors of wilderness, mountains, and rivers or of these physical spaces, African Americans and their culture have, since the time of Frederick Douglass, increasingly been involved in a process of urbanization.

Reversing the well‐known narrative progression of the pastoral from corrupt city to revitalizing nature, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass traces its author's efforts to leave behind the cruelty he encounters in rural nature for the relative safety of the urban environment. Douglass suggests that the proximity of other eyes and ears in the city stayed the hand of slaveowners who were given free reign on rural plantations—out of sight and sound of their fellow citizens. In this sense, Douglass's Narrative can be read as a fascinating anti‐pastoral that both draws on and calls into question the conventions of American nature writing. The trajectory of Douglass's slave narrative speaks to the relevance of ecocriticism for African American studies generally and particularly for a black literary tradition that, from its inception, has constructed the rural‐natural as a realm to be feared for specific reasons and the urban‐social as a domain of hope. As H. Bruce Franklin argues, Douglass's narrative foregrounds the “dialectic between rural and urban existence,” contesting the dominant vision of the relationship between country and city in most European American antebellum fiction as a conflict between “rural innocence” and the “infernal city” (12‐13). For Douglass, according to Franklin, the city is the favored term in this dialectic because it “represents consciousness and the possibility of freedom; the country represents brutalization and the certainty of slavery” (13). And so pastoral space and wilderness represent something different for Douglass than they do for either traditional literary critics such as Melvin Dixon or mainstream ecocritics such as Glen Love.

Gesturing toward the racialization of pastoral space that excluded African Americans from such supposedly Edenic environs, Douglass's narrative points to a flaw at the heart of pastoralism that has been evident since its origins in classical Greece. From Hesiod in the ninth century B.C.E. to the present, the pastoral has always imagined some past golden age from which we have fallen. Raymond Williams provides ample instances of this constant pastoral lamentation not just from our industrialized and jejune twentieth‐century context but from Hesiod, who complains that three ages had intervened since the time when mortal men “had all good things, for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint” (14). Hesiod's lament for the fallen state of his own “iron age” is part of the long tradition that includes the Christian story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from their perfect pastoral precincts, on which Douglass comments. The pastoral continually recedes to an always vanishing mythic horizon—a vista even more distanced from the landscape African slaves inhabited in the New World. It is not hard to see why the only consistent pastoral vision in early African American culture is of the Promised Land waiting beyond this mortal coil. But for early African American authors such as Frederick Douglass, this distant pastoral vision offers little solace for confronting the real travails of this world, which are obfuscated and kept in place by a mythic understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment. The world Douglass lived in is one in which the myth that “the fruitful earth unforced bare … fruit abundantly and without stint” can only be maintained by the erasure of the slave labor that brought the fruits of southern agriculture and husbandry to the tables of the white ruling classes. Thus the mechanism of the pastoral in the antebellum South was anathema to efforts by Frederick Douglass, and other slave narrators, to be seen as more than part of an idealized scenery.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS'S 1845 NARRATIVE

The early chapters of Frederick Douglass's narrative establish the pastoral qualities of the plantation on which he was raised and then proceed to lift the veil over this picturesque scene to reveal the cruelty and deprivation the beautiful landscape has hidden. The narrative begins, “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant” (255). And so the first few sentences of Douglass's narrative indicate that he was born in slave country several miles from the nearest town and that he was robbed not only of his birthright but even of his birth by a system that assigned him the same worth as horses and other property of the plantation owner. It was on this isolated plantation that Douglass first witnessed the brutal whipping of a slave—an incident that he calls “the blood‐stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery”—and it was here that he “received [his] first impressions of slavery” (258, 259). Douglass highlights the inadequate food, clothing, and provisions his surroundings yielded, noting that he received little direct physical abuse while on Colonel Lloyd's plantation but that the environment provided punishment enough with its lack of sustenance and warmth (271). The definition of the slave as property makes it difficult for Douglass to have a positive relationship with the southern landscape since he is legally part of that landscape.

One of Douglass's most interesting evocations of his physical environment comes when he creates an allegory of the plantation as an apparent Garden of Eden. Colonel Lloyd's garden is described as “the greatest attraction of the place” (264), drawing crowds of sightseers from the far‐off cities of Annapolis and Baltimore. The fruit of this garden proves to be too great of a temptation for the plantation's hungry inhabitants, until Colonel Lloyd hits on a scheme to capture those who disobey his dictate not to eat of the fruit of his garden. The good colonel has tar put on the fence surrounding his garden and then orders that any slave “caught with any tar upon his person” is deemed guilty of trespassing in the garden and is to be “severely whipped by the chief gardener” (264). This plan proves to be so successful, Douglass reports, that “the slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash” for “they seemed to realize the impossibility of touching tar without being defiled” (264).

The obvious resonances with the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden are complicated by the racialization of the story and its apparent confluence with two other biblical stories describing punishments for transgressions against law and custom. The significant detail that those who broke Colonel Lloyd's commandment were marked with tar calls to mind God's punishment for the first sin committed after Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when God placed a mark on Cain after he slew Abel (Gen. 4:15). In Douglass's time, this biblical story was used to suggest that the darker races were those which had been marked as the descendants of Cain and were thus deserving of ill treatment. A similar use was made of the story of Noah's son Ham, whose descendents were likewise cursed for their forbear's transgressions. The biblical typology applied to the outcast and the enslaved was directly mapped onto those marked as trespassers in Colonel Lloyd's garden of forbidden fruit.

Even this telling allegory of the Garden of Eden does not provide the most compelling reason for the validation of city life and concomitant devaluation of country living that one finds in Douglass's narrative. As William Lloyd Garrison reminds us in the preface to Douglass's narrative, “no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored witnesses, whether bond or free” (251). On the basis of this legal principle, slaveholders and overseers on plantations, far removed from the eyes of white witnesses, attempted to wield complete control over the bodies of the enslaved. Douglass tells the story of a slave named Demby who fled a whipping by his overseer, Mr. Gore, and sought refuge in the middle of a creek, where Gore confronted him:

Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.

(268)

Not only does this passage provide another twist in the complicated relationship between slaves and rivers, it illustrates the danger faced by slaves whose masters were cut off from any social pressures to regulate their conduct. This is not, of course, to say that the lives of slaves in the city were free of abuse, but this incident shows that Douglass and other slaves were well aware of how entirely plantation life put them at the mercy of individuals with no laws to bar the most outrageously cruel behavior. We learn that Mr. Gore's “horrid crime was not even submitted to judicial investigation” because “it was committed in the presence of slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor testify against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives” (269). This grisly scene reminds us that even the most inviting physical environment cannot be considered separately from the sociopolitical structures that shape its uses and abuses.

Given the vagaries of plantation life and the evident dispensability of the lives of the slaves who lived there, the seven‐year‐old Douglass is overjoyed at the prospect of being sent to live with a relative of his master in Baltimore. He refers to the period between the time he learned that he would be heading to the city and the moment of his transport to Baltimore as “three of the happiest days I ever enjoyed,” and he reveals that he “spent the most part of all these three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf, and preparing myself for my departure” (271). While Glen Love speaks of contemporary urban nature writers “slough[ing] off their New York or L.A. skins when they confront western landscapes” (209), the process is reversed for Douglass. Leaving the rigid confines of rural life, Douglass works to scrub the “plantation scurf” off his body before he deems himself worthy of the adventures that await him in the city. Douglass does admit that there was something a little naïve about this preteen vision of his. He ascribes much of the awe that he felt for the city to the stories his cousin Tom told him: “I could never point out any thing at the Great House, no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that he had seen something at Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and strength, the object which I pointed out to him. Even the Great House itself, with all its pictures, was far inferior to many buildings in Baltimore” (272). It is hard not to notice the irony that Douglass launches his trip from Colonel Lloyd's plantation to one of the South's largest cities with a reference to the greater luxury of objects in Baltimore. Douglass as narrator is aware of this irony that the young Freddy is about to become one of the pieces of property that will take on a grander aura by association with the great city.

Despite the bemusement with which Douglass greets his youthful enthusiasm for urban living, the older and wiser narrator is earnest in his belief that were it not for his experience of life in the city he would have remained forever a slave:

It is possible, and even quite probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that plantation to Baltimore, I should have to‐day, instead of being here seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of slavery. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. I have ever regarded it as the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since attended me, and marked my life with so many favors.

(273)

In a sense, Baltimore becomes Douglass's celestial city, the place where Providence awaits him on the other side of the wilderness through which he must travel. On a more practical level, Baltimore is a realm of freedom for Douglass because “a city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation” (275). In particular, Douglass points out that a city slave is better fed and clothed as “few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known as not giving a slave enough to eat” (275). And so Douglass portrays the city as providing the things that his plantation environment most lacked—sustenance and warmth. The same social pressures that compel better treatment of city slaves make it less likely that a city slave would be beaten or otherwise mistreated, although Douglass is quick to add that there were “painful exceptions to the rule” (276). But for Douglass the city is not just relatively more free than the country, it is also a place that offers hope of the ultimate freedom: escape. He notes that “the chances of success [for runaway slaves] are tenfold greater from the city than from the country” (285), indicating that freedom is figuratively and literally closer to the slave's grasp in an urban environment.

Not only does Douglass's new urban environment provide him with the components needed to gain his physical freedom (food, warmth, and proximity to the thoroughfares leading north), it also supplies him with literacy, the skill Douglass credits with contributing the mental freedom he needed to even begin his escape to the North. Douglass praises his Baltimore mistress, Sophia Auld, with teaching him the ABCs before her husband intervenes on the grounds that educating young Freddy would “forever unfit him to be a slave” (274). Douglass takes these words to heart, writing that “from that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (275). The connection between freedom and literacy Douglass forges in this passage has been much discussed, but critics have overlooked the role that Douglass's urban environment plays in his achievement of mental freedom. Douglass writes that the education Mrs. Auld began was completed by “little white boys whom I met in the street” (277)—hungry urban youth who are willing to teach Freddy to read in exchange for a few pieces of bread. And so Douglass literally gets his education from the city streets, for the city of Baltimore provides the physical and social environment that enables Douglass's journey from slavery to freedom.

When Douglass is forced to return to the country after his master's death, he is more aware than ever of his “degraded condition” as a plantation slave (281). His recalcitrance in accepting this role causes him to be sent to the “nigger‐breaker” Mr. Covey, who is depicted as an omnipresent part of the plantation environment: “He was under every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation” (291). The characterization of Mr. Covey as “the snake” whose “forte consisted in his power to deceive” as he skulked through the woods and “appeared to us as being ever at hand” (291‐92) recalls the mysterious stranger, “he of the serpent” (55), who appears and disappears at will in the haunted woods of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story “Young Goodman Brown.” The men in these two narratives are clearly figurations of the devil, who is associated in nineteenth‐century iconography with wild spaces that are seen not as places of spiritual rejuvenation but as threatening domains of sin and suffering. Only by confronting Mr. Covey, the devil incarnate, is Douglass able to face down his internal demons and resist the temptation to become the “brute” that his environment dictates (293). Refusing to be whipped by Covey, Douglass fights him to a draw, claiming that this moment of resistance means that “the day had passed forever when I could be a slave” (299). Thus the rest of the narrative is presented as a fait accompli because once Douglass is able to free himself from the clutches of Mr. Covey and his own plantation mentality, Douglass is determined to once more return to his beloved Baltimore and effectuate his escape.

Ultimately, Douglass self‐consciously describes his escape as a sort of inverted pastoral, whereby he leaves behind the deadening influence of the country for the rejuvenating forces of the city. Eventually returned to the “care” of the Aulds, it is from the port city of Baltimore that Douglass makes his successful escape to the North, running away (as did other slave narrators) along commercial routes. Thus the trade mechanisms that enabled slavery to continue by transporting rural goods to urban centers also make possible Douglass's “glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (299). Once safely established in New York, Douglass looks back to his time as a slave and uses the same animalistic imagery to describe the slaveowner as that which had been applied to him as a slave. In the course of one paragraph, Douglass refers to his former slaveowners, and their agents who would try to capture him and return him to the South, as “a den of hungry lions,” “ferocious beasts,” “hideous crocodile[s],” “wild beasts,” and “monsters of the deep” (320). While others have seen this passage as Douglass taking on the moral authority denied him as a slave or inverting the commodification of the slave as an animal by showing the similar effect on the slaveowner (Franklin 17), an ecocritical perspective highlights how Douglass is also responding negatively to the wilderness and its inhabitants. Those “money‐loving kidnappers” who would return him to slavery “lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey” (320). Or again, these men attempted to seize runaways “as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!” (320). Douglass ties into an active strain of anti‐pastoral discourse that circulated in the antebellum United States, depicting the wilderness and woods as dangerous and frightening spaces. The specific context of American slavery racialized and concretized this discourse in Douglass's narrative, which thus, along with other slave narratives, helped to launch a tradition of anti‐pastoralism within African American culture.

THE NATURE OF SLAVERY

The kind of spaces that most mainstream environmentalists and ecocritics validate—the pastoral and the wild—were not likely to be appreciated by Douglass and other slaves whose best hopes lay with negotiating an urban terrain. Slavery changed the nature of nature in African American culture, necessitating a break with the pastoral tradition developed within European American literature. In a speech given the title “The Nature of Slavery” in the appendices to Douglass's 1855 version of his narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass reiterates one of the fundamental reasons for this difference between African American and European American visions of the landscape: “A master is one who claims and exercises a right of property in the person of a fellow‐man” (272). Slavery created a system whereby those of European descent controlled a pastoral landscape that included those of African descent as part of their property. Is it any wonder that this fact gave rise to an anti‐pastoral discourse that continues to the present day?

This discourse was only strengthened during the postbellum period; the steady urbanization of African Americans after the Civil War ensured that the city would increasingly become more central to African American culture than was the country. More than forty thousand former slaves and free blacks moved north, most from the rural South to the urban North, each decade between 1870 and 1890. More than double this number moved north and west in the 1890s, during the build up to what has been called the Great Migration—the period during the first half of the twentieth century when the African American population shifted so dramatically that the majority of blacks in this country were no longer found in rural southern locales but in northern urban areas, not to mention the increasing urbanization within the South (Osofsky 18). This massive population shift was part of a trend that has continued to the present day, such that 82 percent of African Americans now live in urban areas—a greater percentage than any other ethnic group (Rosler 24). The resulting cultural outgrowths of these dramatic geographical developments shaped a twentieth‐century inheritance of the anti‐pastoral qualities of slave narratives such as Douglass's.

In the twentieth century, the most obvious translation of the Great Migration into African American culture was provided by the Harlem Renaissance, an urban phenomenon during the early decades of the century. In the pathbreaking essay “The New Negro,” which served as his introduction to the influential volume of the same name, Alain Locke frames the Harlem Renaissance as a manifestation of a new generation shaped, first and foremost, by the “shifting of the Negro population” not only “toward the North and the Central Midwest, but city‐ward and to the great centers of industry” (5). Locke traces the huge importance of this development not just to a geographic transposition but to an accompanying sociohistorical transformation, “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern” (6). The forties and fifties witnessed a growing investment in urbanism by African American writers, such that the country recedes into the background of the two most famous African American novels of this period: Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which explore the cultural topography of Chicago and New York, respectively. The anti‐pastoral strain within African American culture was kept alive through the era of the Black Power movement. Drawing on the words of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X made repeated references to “this wilderness of North America” (Haley 193, 197). The urban riots of this period challenged but did not extinguish the efforts of African American writers to explore the parameters and possibilities of city life. As James DeJongh puts it, “the poets of the Black Arts movement were seeking an inner city of the spirit in the ashes of a riot” (208). This anti‐pastoralism continues to the present day. The two best‐known explorations of the relationship between African American literature and geography—Melvin Dixon's Ride Out the Wilderness and Charles Scruggs's Sweet Home—both end with explorations of the complex relationship between country and city in the Nobel Prize‐winning fiction of Toni Morrison as paradigmatic of what Scruggs sees as the balance of utopian and dystopian images of the city evident in African American fiction throughout the last half of the twentieth century. Distrust of rural environments is still deeply associated with images of southern violence and lynchings. The historical memory of slavery and its aftermath includes a forest of trees that were used to enforce southern lynch law, as we are reminded in cultural images from Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” to Speech, of Arrested Development, rapping about “trees my forefathers hung from” in “Tennessee.”

.....

Having built an argument about a certain trajectory within African American culture from slavery to the present, I need to note that the anti‐pastoral discourse at work in each of these historical moments circulated with its dialectical opposite. The urbanicity of the Harlem Renaissance gave rise to the valorization of the country in Jean Toomer's Cane. The appeal to African civilization in the Black Power movement sometimes traveled under the guise of imagining Africa as an untroubled Eden. The cautionary tale about trees in Arrested Development's “Tennessee” is balanced with a genuine celebration of life in the slow lane (the song reminds us that the trees that Speech's “forefathers hung from” are the also the trees that his generation climbed on as kids). And, as Raymond Williams reminds us, the country and the city are not diametrically opposed but construct one another. To return to the era of slavery, urban centers such as Boston, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta established the economic and governmental policies that oiled the machinery of the peculiar institution. So although slaves such as Frederick Douglass may have experienced city life as infinitely preferable to plantation living, the former enabled the latter.

Despite these qualifications, I still argue that a main current within African American culture has, from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison, expressed a profound antipathy toward the ecological niches usually focused on in ecocriticism: pastoral space and wilderness. This fact challenges ecocritics to train our methods of reading and theorizing on African American cultural texts that question mainstream assumptions about the universal appeal of “unspoiled” nature. Just as a careful reading of Douglass's 1845 Narrative reveals an inversion of the usual ecocritical value assigned to Edenic solitude, so attention to the African American‐led environmental justice movement has caused an inversion in the priorities of many environmentalists. By focusing on the challenges confronting black urban communities and questioning the valorization of wilderness spaces and wildlife within the mainstream environmental movement, the environmental justice movement has “transformed the pastoral face of green politics” (Ross 103). A similar transformation of ecocriticism and ecologically informed reading practices is needed to account for the topography of contemporary African American culture.

Lawrence Buell gestures toward such a connection when he suggests that the depiction of the countryside within African American literature as “an area of chance violence and enslavement” might help to explain “the tepid African American interest to date in environmentalist causes” (17). But Buell has it backwards. The vibrancy of the environmental justice movement, which has quickly become one of the most active social movements in the country, indicates a decidedly nontepid African American interest in the “environment” when that term is not conceptualized as solely a domain of nonurban space. Instead of using the few studies that have been conducted on the “ethnic differences in landscape preferences” (17) to show that blacks just do not get the importance of wilderness aesthetics, perhaps Buell and other ecocritics should learn from these same studies, and from the history of anti‐pastoralism within African American culture, that the wildness of the world cannot be preserved unless and until we have broken down some of the racial, class, and gender barriers that distance wilderness and pastoral space from those outside the upper echelons of our society. In short, the long history of the dominant culture's romanticization of the wilderness will have limited appeal until the generations since Frederick Douglass have an equal stake in the dispensation and appreciation of landscape, which has, for most of our history, been written over rather than by them. It would behoove all of us interested in the fate of our shared planet to work for an ecocriticism and an ecological movement that accounts for and is accountable to this vision of environmental justice.

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