Camille Dungy’s “Soil” Reminds Us that Black lives and nature are interconnected

When I think of a Black mother’s garden, I immediately see green. I think of an older neighbor of mine bent over in a sea of collards or turnips. As a child I never really knew the difference. But I did know for decades during big family dinners, whether it be for the holidays or just because, the vegetables we consumed were harvested by some Black woman in the community. That was what people did back then—they fed each other.

I’ll send you some black-eyed peas in exchange from some okra—that is the Black communal tradition I was raised on.

In her forthcoming memoir, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Camille Dungy demonstrates how gardens can be a reflection of our respective communities, and really the nation as a whole.

You can’t talk about environmental justice without also talking about race, gender, citizenship, exclusion or violence. Because these all play a role in the human and nonhuman experience of our environment.

In the book, Dungy says: “I enjoy working in the garden. The agency to choose to work in the yard, in our yard, belongs to us alone.”

That quote is a callback to the various ways folks of color have been deprived of their agency to interact with the land on their own terms—slavery, exploitation, displacement, genocide.

“I have always felt an awareness of that sense of agency and that awareness comes both from my personal relationship [to] African American history and from the fact that I grew up in Southern California near agricultural spaces, so I saw what it meant to not have that agency for a lot of the workers who were often migrant workers from Mexico and Central America,” Dungy tells me in our interview.

She recalls the grape pickers strike, led by Cesar Chavez, a Mexican-American civil rights activist who called for a nationwide boycott of non-union California table grapes. It was supported by millions of Americans, including Dungy’s family. That experience was just one of the ways she became keenly aware of how the land can be used to exploit and deprive folks of their basic needs.

“I enjoy working in the garden. The agency to choose to work in the yard, in our yard, belongs to us alone.”

—  Camille Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

What does all this have to do with her garden? It has everything to do with it.

According to Dungy, “Every person who finds herself constantly navigating political spaces—by which I mean every person who regularly finds herself demoralized and exhausted by the everyday patterns of life in America—should have access to a garden.”

When I read that sentence, it brought me back to the idea of agency, and what it means for a Black woman or any Black person to have access to a garden. For Dungy, it provides a space of rest, restoration, and fruition—which she deems necessary when one’s entire existence has been politicized.

In her memoir, the reader gets the sense of safety Dungy experiences in her garden. But not just safety, an intentional presence, communing with the soil, the plants, the weeds, even the mountain cottontails that frequented her yard. These moments are juxtaposed with navigating not just her predominantly white town, but the persistent violence perpetrated against Black folks on a national level.

There are a lot of things that are similar between the human experience and the experience of living beings who aren’t human.

—  Camille Dungy

From the pandemic to police violence to mass shootings, these are all undoubtedly environmental crises.

If you get to the end of her book without understanding how violence against humans and trees and butterflies and any living thing on this earth is interconnected, you have missed the entire point.

“There are a lot of things that are similar between the human experience and the experience of living beings who aren’t human. The amount of DNA we share with most other living beings on the planet suggests these radical differences that we try to create between humanity and everything else are a fabrication,” she says.

The ways in which Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have been forced to work the land, restricted from the land, forcibly removed from the land, or worse, eliminated altogether from any land also reflects how humans exert harmful dominion over nature. Even something as seemingly harmless as a perfectly manicured lawn can be the result of wiping out entire ecosystems.

This memoir gives me a sense of hope that our work as humans through advocating for LGBTQ rights, affordable housing, gun control, or environmental justice, is not in vain.

—  Danielle Buckingham

Our unwillingness to see our connection to the trees, to the dirt, to the birds and even to, Lord forbid, mosquitoes also contributes to environmental disasters that affect humans and nonhumans alike.

Dungy emphasizes this during our conversation:

“If you are a culture that would hold entire landscapes in disdain as dismissible and erasable and useless [and] those landscapes happen to correlate with the native lands of people for whom those landscapes were not dispensable...that is actually [connected to] a policy to eradicate the bison and thus eradicate the native populations by removing food source…if it’s policy to erase an animal in order to erase a people [then] it is absolutely interrelated.”

After reading Dungy’s memoir, I can’t look at gardens the same. But I also won’t look at humanity and our relationship to nature the same either. As reflected in the book, building her garden was no easy feat. It was full of hiccups and unexpected turns, errors and loss that would eventually turn into something beautiful.

This memoir gives me a sense of hope that our work as humans through advocating for LGBTQ rights, affordable housing, gun control, or environmental justice, is not in vain. But it won’t be easy. We will be met with resistance. We will make mistakes. We will even experience what feels like major setbacks. But with consistent nurturing and patience we can create a powerful ecosystem of people, young and old, who are committed to making this world safe and inhabitable for all living things.

If you’re interested in reading environmental writing by other Black authors, Camille Dungy recommends the books below:

• Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
• My Garden by Jamaica Kincaid
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors by Rue Mapp
• The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham
• Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman