“Black Women in Flux: Woods, Water, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp”

• In Event: Energy, Climate, & Insurgent Ecologies: New Directions in Black Environmental History

Abstract

This discussion locates Black women in forests, swamps, and in documentary records – where they have previously evaded our detection and attention. Through their noncompliant, reciprocal, and emancipatory relationships with land, water, woods, and swamps, Black women in the Tidewater mapped insurgency across Virginia and North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. Consorting with the forested swamp’s ecological offerings provided alternative lifeways and insurgent opportunity to nurture personal and community wellness against forced productive labor, reproductive violence, sexual assault, desecrated motherhoods, and pervasive social death outside of the swamp refuge. From their relationships with nature and wilderness, women seized secret and subversive opportunities to rest, and to claim and provide health and nourishment for their own vitality and that of their families and communities. But Tidewater women also conspired with the woods and swamps to make daring escapes as fugitives and maroons, moving in daring strokes of self-possession and autonomy, where it was otherwise forbidden.

Author

• Kathryn E Benjamin Golden