A Darker Wilderness by Erin Sharkey

Author:Erin Sharkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

CONCENTRIC MEMORY

Re-membering Our Way into the Future

Naima Penniman

It’s no wonder the forest can be a terrifying place for Black folks. I don’t even have to tell you. But my great-grandmother told me, “Herein lies the medicine.”

“Light up a lantern in the forest,” she said. “No flame, no fuel, just trust in your footsteps and memory, and a positive obsession with a future teeming with breath.”

There are so many reasons we have been separated.

This is what I re-member.

Childhood in the woods. My brother, Allen; my sister, Leah; and I would spend hours exploring the terrain around our home: a trailer down a dirt road that Dad reinforced with pine milled from the trees he cleared to bring light around us.

Black mother, white father, three kids the color of earth.

The years Mom couldn’t be around, I think she assigned the best babysitter to watch after us: Mama Nature herself. We were lucky to have such a dynamic and ubiquitous caretaker, to be schooled by the marshes teeming with tadpoles, held by the cushions of moss, watched over by the shape-shifting sky.

I remember the way buds burst open in spring, witnessing their immaculate freshness unfurl from tightly clenched tips. I tied pieces of pink yarn around maple and ash saplings and returned every week to register the patterns of their growth in my spiral-bound sketchbook.

I remember the enchantment of July, when the fireflies would blink their glow-in-the-dark spectacle, a stunning rendition of stars spilled out before us. We chewed on sprigs of sassafras, gathered wintergreen leaves for sun tea, and foraged spicebush and huckleberries to make tarts.

Autumn was regal and mature, paper birch white against copper and gold. I remember a warm-on-the-inside sensation, relishing the mushrooms rising throughout the forest floor. I’d nestle in the sweet musk of fallen leaves and revel in the multi-colors twirling down around me.

Even January, when so much went to sleep, was animated. We saw the footprints of fox and cottontail in fresh snow, sucked on icicles, and watched meteors streak the crisp indigo sky.

Being raised in the woods wasn’t easy. An anomaly of Blackness, we were told at our school that we did not belong. Kids sneered at our handmade and hand-me-down clothes, scorned our untamable hair, cursed our skin made of clay not porcelain. But we saw our complexion reflected all around us in the tones of tree bark and fallen oak leaves. We didn’t have an abundance of toys, but we had jungle gyms of trees and front-row seats to ponds and tributaries.

Sometimes it was piercing cold, and one time our wood-burning stove sparked a ravenous fire that expelled us into a wintery night before devouring every last splinter of our shelter. We lost everything we owned that night, but our home extended far beyond those walls, into the forest that did not burn. There were forces that separated us in the time we needed each other most, but nature ensured our connection across those impossible miles.

Mom taught us about being independent, making things from scratch, speaking up, defending what we love, being proud of who we are, about not giving up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.