Читать книгу Trace - Lauret Savoy - Страница 13

ALIEN LAND ETHIC: THE DISTANCE BETWEEN

When I was a horse, a wild Appaloosa full of speed, I’d run up and down sidewalks, around playgrounds and our yard—just to feel wind rush with me. But once the world moved beyond sense, I began to run from what I feared. Riots near our new home in Washington, D.C., left burnt, gutted remains of buildings I knew. The “war” in Vietnam joined us at dinner each night as TV footage of wounded soldiers, of crying women and children, of places with names like Khe Sanh, My Lai. Assassinations of men my parents called “good men” meant anyone—my parents, my friends, or I—could disappear at any time. Even the familiar Good night, Chet. Good night, David, and good night for NBC News no longer comforted.

I learned by the age of eight that hate could be spit wetting the front of my favorite, mom-made dress. Hate could be a classmate’s sing-song “never saw nothin’ as ugly as a nigger, never saw nothin’ as crummy as a nigger.” His eyes on me.

I ran not just to feel wind, but in hope it would blow away whatever it was about me that was bad and hate-deserving. Safety lived in my room, in my mother’s arms, and outdoors on a land that never judged or spat.

Does your child-mind haunt you, too?

Confusing doubts pushed and pulled. Whether vestigial or preparative they held on. I donned silent passivity as armor—and avoided mirrors. Only teenage encounters with writings by authors who also seemed to be searching prompted me to speak. I met them question to question.

THE SISTERS OF Providence and lay teachers of Immaculata Preparatory School assigned four summer readings to my section of the entering ninth-grade class. They’d be part of the coming year’s courses. Although the fourth book is lost to memory, the other three—Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold—struck me deeply. The worn copies still sit on my shelves within easy reach.

A Sand County Almanac was published in the autumn of 1949, more than a year after Leopold’s death. That his work was hailed as landmark or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles,” I knew nothing about. Nor did I know that this forester, wildlife manager, educator, conservation leader, and writer born in Iowa in 1887 was called by some a “prophet.” What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place: an atom’s recycling odyssey through time; the chickadee, “so small a bundle of large enthusiasms”; the crane’s call “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” And my favorite passage, from “Song of the Gavilan”:

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

What also appealed was the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In “The Land Ethic,” Aldo Leopold enlarged the boundaries of “community” to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Though I couldn’t find words then, his call for an extension of ethics to land relations seemed to express a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this country but embedded in many Indigenous peoples’ traditions of experience—that land is fully inhabited, intimate with immediate presence.

These ideas prompted new questions. If, as Mr. Leopold wrote, “obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land,” then what part of this nation still lacked conscience broad enough to realize the internal change of mind and heart, to embrace “evolutionary possibility” and “ecological necessity”? Why was it that human relations in the United States I knew at age fourteen could be so cruel?

Other passages in A Sand County Almanac confused: “The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless—to us—if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know.” Why not know “things Chinese”?

I couldn’t understand why, in a book so concerned with America’s past, the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece.

What I wanted more than anything was to speak with Mr. Leopold. To ask him. I so feared that his “we” and “us” excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America. Only uncertainty and estrangement felt within my teenage reach.

Did Aldo Leopold consider me?

JULY 8TH. THE initial phone interview went well, so well my prospective employer wanted to meet in person that afternoon just as a formality. A collector and trader of Civil War memorabilia, he’d advertised in The Washington Post for a summer assistant to help him catalogue and work at fairs. He sounded impressed that a young teenager knew details of the war’s campaigns, of the landscapes where battles took place. I remember my excitement, wearing my most grown-up dress, crossing the Potomac River to Virginia that steamy day; ascending the steps of an old Alexandria row house, knocking. I remember the heavy door opening, my practiced “Hello, I’m Lauret Savoy,” and his single word as the door closed. Sorry.

I don’t remember: How long I stood on those steps. The ride home. Why I watched an ancient rerun of The Mickey Mouse Club, singing along with Annette, Darlene, and the other pale mouseketeers.

My mother came home early that afternoon from her nursing job at Howard University Hospital. What could I tell her? But as she entered the living room, flanked and supported by two of her co-workers, a voice spoke out: Your father died this afternoon. Momma later told me that he was found in his ward room holding the telephone.

Dad had been in and out of the hospital many times that last year, dying shortly after learning cancer had spread from lung to bone, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday. He and I spoke little in that time. There seemed little to say, as if silence itself could metastasize between a man who expected much, and was often disappointed, and his only child who thought his only words to her were Think and Use your brain.

Born September 1916 in Washington, D.C., to Laura Wilson Savoy and Alfred Kiger Savoy, a principal and later assistant superintendent of the District’s “colored” public schools, Willard Wilson Savoy grew to be a man who in appearance would be accepted without question by those calling themselves “white.” Pale of complexion with gray-blue eyes, he’d not be seen or treated as other until he admitted “Negro” blood.

A memory: We are walking hand-in-hand on a Los Angeles sidewalk one bright afternoon and pass an acquaintance of his. I’m four or five years old and catch the emphasis in the question asked. “This is your daughter?”

Years before meeting my mother and more than a decade before my birth, my father had a novel published. The year was 1949. After serving in the segregated Army Air Forces during the Second World War, he wrote about an embittered “mulatto” boy-becomes-man who thinks he might escape prejudice, and his own demons, by redefining himself as white. The book’s title: Alien Land.

But I knew none of this, not until I stumbled upon the book late one night in the basement stacks of my university library. It was the end of my first year there. The dedication alone convinced me of a chance for dialogue after death: “To the child which my wife and I may someday have—and to the children of each American—in the fervent hope that at least one shall be brought to see more clearly the enduring need for simple humanity.”

Yes, I stole the book, last checked out years earlier. Yes, I ran from it many times. Kern, the boy-becomes-man, and I shared too many experiences of hurt, too many questions.

A little boy’s wondering:

A question that had become centered around that part of the pledge that said, “—one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” . . . Kern had for some time entertained doubts that liberty and justice were “—for all.” “Jim Crow” in Washington, the Capital of the Nation, did not seem to him to be “liberty and justice for all.” But then, he supposed such things were written into the Constitution and Bill of Rights just for white boys and girls.

An eleven-year-old’s experience:

He listened intently as Frank Richards talked about subscribers and gave him advice about setting up his route. “—keep your territory compact—” . . .

“Guess we can start you with fifty copies. Think you can get rid of them?” Kern nodded happily. “You’ll get three and a half cents for each copy you sell—”

Kern busied himself with the arithmetic of three and one half times fifty. One dollar and seventy-five cents! The total surprised him. Almost two dollars a week. He began to plan what he would do with it.

“Where do you live—uh—Kern?” Kern answered, his eyes still on a picture booklet showing a model Scott Home Salesman standing at a door, hat in hand, as he talked to a customer. He did not notice that Frank Richards had stopped writing.

“You mean Northeast, don’t you?” He had looked up at Kern.

“No sir, I mean—” Kern realized what the man meant. “I mean Northwest.” He held tightly to the booklet and hoped it wouldn’t happen.

Sick and suddenly miserable, inside, he hoped it wouldn’t happen.

It did.

“I thought white folks had all moved out from there—”

“They ha—” Kern cut himself off. Too late now to cut himself off—to say that a few families still lived there.

“What are you, boy?” Frank Richards dropped his pen on the desk and turned in his chair to face Kern. Kern looked back at him, saying nothing.

“You a white boy?”

Kern shook his head slowly. “No.”

Richards reached forward and drew Kern’s hand roughly toward the lamp on the desk. He started at the outstretched fingers.

“Blue nails! ‘Course you ain’t white. A nigger! Well, I’ll be damned!” He stood up and took Kern by the shoulder. “Come on, boy,” he led him through the hall and out to the porch.

“Get on . . . I ain’t doin’ no business with no niggers.”

That night, after the house was dark, after even the chirping of the crickets had dropped to silence, Kern lay on his bed, wide awake, staring at the ceiling.

“Why?”

The question pulsed in him. Sickness. Anger. Shame. None of these answered the question. He got up and turned on his desk lamp. Then he stood in front of the mirror and stared at his face. . . . Stared at his eyes. They were blue. His nose was lean and his mouth was thin and straight.

“Why? Why am I a nigger?”

His fingers went along the tracery of veins at his temples, dull blue under the skin. He turned and bent under the lamp to peer closely at his fingers. They were not blue. They were pink. Pink except for the little half-moon at the top of each nail. And those were white. His thought became words in the room.

“Why am I a nigger?”

My father’s “alien land” grew from the “hypocrisy which, in one breath preached the doctrine that all men were created free and equal and, in the very next breath, denied to millions the simple respect which should naturally go with such a belief.”

I understood then that I, too, lived in an alien land. A fourteen-year-old’s questions became an eighteen-year-old’s need to understand why such hypocrisy and inhumanity continued. Why my father never told me about this book, or about the wounds and scar tissue of his own growing up. About how he survived not “passing.”

Partial answer to the first “why” came soon enough in Ashley Montagu’s course on the fallacy of race, but it wasn’t answer enough. How was I to survive? I couldn’t “pass” as Kern could. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I hoped instead that safety would come from my fading into the background, unnoticed.

alien. land. ethic. Three words published midway through a century of world wars—as a young man’s semi-autobiographical novel, and as “The Land Ethic,” climax essay in an older man’s “end-result of a lifetime journey.” What happened in the postwar years while my father and Aldo Leopold wrote and revised?

U.S. immigration quotas continue to favor those from northwestern Europe while severely restricting entry from Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, southern and eastern Europe. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by the first practical use of uranium and plutonium bombs, begin to recover. Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans who’d been confined in remote internment camps for three years under Executive Order 9066 try to rebuild their lives—about two-thirds of them citizens, the Nisei or those born in the United States to immigrant parents. Survivors of Nazi concentration camps search for home. The president of General Electric suggests “a permanent war economy,” while a business magazine reports that President Truman’s policies assure “maintaining and building our preparations for war will be big business in the United States for at least a considerable period ahead.” Archibald MacLeish, then assistant secretary of state, reflects on these years: “As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest.”

What else? The United States chooses not to ratify UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document Eleanor Roosevelt believed would “establish standards for human rights and freedom the world over.” The nation’s capital, my father’s home, remains a segregated city. Even Red Cross blood is segregated. (Dr. Charles Drew, the African American physician who developed the blood bank—and a surgeon who worked with my mother at Freedman’s Hospital—had been fired from his job of coordinating wartime donations when he tried to end this government-approved policy.) And, in this decade, at least thirty-three persons, nearly all African Americans, are lynched.

Both Aldo Leopold and my father offered telling visions of American life at midcentury. A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land are inseparable in my thinking. Yet who else, then or now, would put these books on the same shelf?

• • •

After Odysseus returned home, the aged nurse Eurycleia informed him that a dozen of his serving women had misbehaved during his long absence, having slept with Penelope’s suitors. Odysseus hanged them. Leopold began “The Land Ethic” with a reference to the “slave-girls” in Homer’s Odyssey, noting that the “ethical structure of that day . . . had not yet been extended to human chattels.” He continued:

An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. . . .

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.

Leopold added that an ethic could be regarded “as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual.” As “a kind of community instinct in-the-making,” ethics rested on the premise “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” now enlarged to include the land. Then: “This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love?”

At fourteen I wondered who, exactly, “we” are. I wondered, too, what and whom “we” love. Neither an equality of interdependence nor an evenness of cooperation seemed to underlie this country’s human relations. Not in the internment of Japanese Americans just seven years before Leopold’s and my father’s books appeared. Nor in the de facto and de jure segregation that so many Americans took for granted as the second half of the twentieth century began.

If viewed as a trophic or food strategy, one group of people acting upon another by imposing values, definitions, or violence could be seen as deriving part of its energy by consuming or controlling the energies of others. Or so I thought in an ecology course where definitions of parasitism and predator-prey dynamics seemed disturbingly close to some human relations.

Calling morality prescriptive rather than descriptive of behavior, one commentary on Leopold’s land ethic argued that “moral consciousness is expanding more rapidly now than ever before.” Despite continued failings in moral practice, the author cited as evidence emergent moral ideals like civil rights, human rights, and women’s liberation. “Most educated people today,” he added, “pay lip service at least to the ethical precept that all members of the human species, regardless of race, creed, or national origin, are endowed with certain fundamental rights which it is wrong not to respect.” Well-meaning acquaintances have also told me that civil rights laws and a growing attention to human rights now address root causes of human ills. They’ve suggested that racism, class conflict, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia could well become isolated aberrations or vestiges of the way things used to be. Just as slavery, dispossession, and internment became things of the past, they say, so can these. “Don’t you know we’re becoming a post-racial society?”

What have I missed?

Perhaps the sphere of ethical relevancy has expanded outward among “educated people” to embrace race, gender, and class in theory if not practice. But who lives in theory, or benefits from lip service? Without backing belief or means, “rights” become limited and limiting to legal form and process rather than a moral imperative extending from heart and spirit. It still matters to me that more than three score years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, separate and unequal education remains the embedded norm.

A great many things have changed since 1949. Much has not.

With origins from all parts of the world, “we the people” inherit and share the contradictions of this nation’s growth. We carry this history within us, the past becoming present in what we think and do, in who we think we are. It informs our senses of place on Earth and our ties with each other.

A child born today enters a world of rapid and extensive change. The list is often repeated: Human population continues to grow. Ecosystems around the world have never before been so fragmented or degraded, resulting in great losses to the diversity of life. Coal, petroleum, and other fossil hydrocarbons, once abundant and seemingly cheap “resources,” literally fueled industrial revolutions and the mechanization of food production. And because of this fossil-fuel economy, greenhouse gas levels continue to climb, exceeding the highest atmospheric concentrations since our species evolved.

The pace and degree of such environmental changes are unprecedented in human history. Yet the embedded systems and norms behind them in the United States, the most energy-consumptive nation, are not. Their deep roots allowed and continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using nature, as well as human beings.

Consider the “ecological footprint.” Its estimate can mask how exploitations of land and of people are intertwined. Quantifying the area of productive land and water needed to provide ecosystem “services” or resources that are used (like clean water, food, fuel), and wastes then generated, gives but a partial measure of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity. And by this measure alone humanity’s footprint already exceeds Earth’s ecological limits.

But American prosperity and progress have come at great human costs, too. Forced removals of the continent’s Native peoples yielded land to newcomers from Europe and their descendants. The new republic’s economy grew upon a foundation of industrial agriculture built and powered by enslaved workers. Consuming other people’s labor, dispossessing other people of land and life connection to it, devaluing human rights, and diminishing one’s community, autonomy, and health—these are not just events of the past. In a globalizing world, American agribusiness giants have profited from the products of enslaved labor in Brazil at a seemingly safe moral distance. And far too many degraded environments in the United States are also citizens’ homes—in nearly all states with hazardous waste facilities, high percentages of people of color and the economically poor live, and die, next to those sites. Witness, too, farm workers in pesticide-laden fields whose health and lives are rarely recognized as a cost of producing cheap food.

A wiser measure of the ecological footprint would include people, or at least their labor. It might factor in the losses of relationships with land or home, losses of self-determination, and losses of health or life. What if the footprint measured, over time, on whom and what the nation’s foot has trod—that is, who has paid for prosperity?

ALIEN LAND. LAND ethic. What is the distance between them? As a young adult I felt little integrity or wholeness of living because so much of my acquired knowledge came from inculcated divisions. Only slowly did I come to see that I would remain complicit in my own diminishment unless I stepped out of the separate trap: me from you, us from them, brown skin from depigmented skin, relations among people from relations with the land.

Aldo Leopold explained, in A Sand County Almanac, that he “purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’” Rather than being fixed, an ethic must evolve “in the minds of a thinking community.” As he wrote toward his tentative expression of possibility and necessity, Leopold was concerned not just about the primacy of utilitarian values in the United States, but also the inadequacies of dis-integrated thinking and living. Specialization encouraged fragmented recordings and understandings of human experience. He worried as well that the goals and definitions of science dealt “almost exclusively with the creation and exercise of power.” An unfinished manuscript and notes, published posthumously as the essay “Conservation,” offer his developing insights: “We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.”

The scope of America’s “thinking community” remains narrow. A democratic dream of individual liberties and rights hasn’t yet contributed to a “co-ordinated whole”—whether human, biotic, or the land. Danger lies in equating theory with practice, or ideal with committed action, as personal responsibility and respect for others, and for the land, can still be lost to lip service, disingenuous manners, and legislated gestures to an ideal.

Consider the words of a biologist writing on an environmental ethic today. “Our troubles,” E. O. Wilson observes in The Diversity of Life, “arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be. The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins.” “Humanity is part of nature,” he continues, “a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.” Perhaps danger lies most basically in not recognizing who and what we are.

• • •

I pored through my father’s shelves after reading Alien Land that first year at Princeton, concentrating on books he’d marked. On Being Negro in America. Black Skin, White Masks. The Fire Next Time. Anger, and Beyond. These writings showed me that no question, no fear, no anger or shame was unique to me or my time. Still, all of it was achingly personal to each writer. I remember drawing slight comfort in knowing others before me had shared doubt, confusion, or worse. I also recall what at first seemed a bottomless fear-fright once I realized the vicious persistence of human ugliness.

Not long ago I came upon an old box of words my father had packed and sealed before his death. Stacked within it were brittle and yellowed novel manuscripts, journals, decades of letters and photographs, and this newspaper clipping of an ad he had placed:

Monday, March 2, 1959

San Francisco Chronicle

WANTED TO RENT

NEGRO Account Executive and

published novelist; wife, operating room

supervisor, wish to live as human beings

in San Francisco. Seek unprejudiced

landlord to make desirable apt. rental

without regard to race. QUIET IS ALL

IMPORTANT. Need 3 to 4 rooms plus

modern kitchen, bath, minimum 9-12 mo.

lease in $100 mo. range. Call OL3-8242,

10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

I’ve long wondered what a child inherits from a parent, within and beyond the strain of blood—and beyond bitterness and silence lining adolescent memories. Did I overhear or imagine Dad say how he hated the America that believed its lies?

Another ninth-grade summer text was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps who became a leading psychiatrist in postwar Europe. I became obsessed by the last two sentences of his 1959 book: “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” Frankl believed that “each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” He added that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” and thus “evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.”

What did Frankl’s words of choice mean for an adolescent, for her generation? Could one choose between ignorance and innocence in such a world? In the passing years I began to doubt any emergence from a “state of latency,” doubted whether Americans as a whole could choose to answer these questions broadly: What and whom do you love and respect? To what and whom are you responsible, obligated? Respect, from the Latin respicere, the willingness to look again. Responsibility, the ability to respond, the capacity to attend, to stand behind one’s acts. Conscience, from the Latin conscientia, a joint knowledge or feeling, from conscire (com-, together with, and scire, to know). If obligations have no meaning without conscience, without an acceptance of moral responsibility, what is possible?

Fourteen years before A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land went to print, in a decade defined by the Depression and the Dust Bowl, Aldo Leopold and his family began to restore abandoned, “worn out” farmland along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo. They planted native prairie grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and, eventually, many thousands of trees. This was the sand county whose seasonal cycles of life and death the “almanac” celebrated. This was land that felt both familiar and welcoming one recent October dawn, when I took a worn path to that river’s edge to watch the sun rise over the downstream horizon. The gift of time by these waters came from the Aldo Leopold Foundation. On the Wisconsin River’s sand plain, a fourteen-year-old’s questions met the clearest-yet responses.

I could imagine it possible to refrain from dis-integrated thinking and living, from a fragmented understanding of human experience on this continent. Possible to refuse what alienates and separates. To see in fugitive pieces the forces that have shaped the land and ourselves in it. Of course, there is always a danger of fooling myself. But if it is possible, then perhaps a larger sense of who we are as interconnected ecological, cultural, and historical beings could begin to grow. For if the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth. Democracy lies within ever widening communities.

Questioned by life we are held to account. Aldo Leopold and my father never met in their lifetimes. I want alien land and land ethic to meet and answer to each other in ours.

Postscript

There will be many readers who will be contented with the charming nature vignettes and the attractive illustrations, closing [A Sand County Almanac] hurriedly when they discover the knotty philosophical problem in the last part. That will be a pity, for these ideas were the man’s life, and because of them we can place this book on the shelf that holds the writings of Thoreau and John Muir.

—J. W. H., San Francisco Chronicle (November 27, 1949)

Alien Land, by Willard Savoy . . . is written with passion and with anger, so that it has a vitality which makes it linger in the mind. Reduced to its simplest terms it is the story of a man’s loss of the sense of personal dignity, a loss that began in his childhood, continued through his adolescence, and into manhood; and of how he struggled to regain it.

—Ann Petry, The Saturday Review (April 30, 1949)