Meet Me at Dancing Rabbit Creek
old souths, new souths, other souths, vol. iii
Driving back home this past weekend from my grandfather's house in east-central Mississippi, we traversed a long stretch of rural east Mississippi and west Alabama, descending the red clay hills to the Black Belt, across what was once the Tombigbee River and up into the Tombigee Hills, before rejoining I-59. The first five years of my life unfolded in this landscape, and I returned to it many times in the years afterwards, driving down from East Tennessee, first as a child, then years later as a graduate student in Knoxville. But then my paths took me elsewhere, and I had not passed through this landscape in over a decade; I had to consult the map for the final stretch of the drive, the roads and forests grown unfamiliar with the passage of time.
It was not what I’d call a relaxing drive, and not just because the kids were showing the strain of a week out of the ordinary capped by long drives out through ‘the sticks.’ What hit me most of all is just how incredibly starkly the the sheer emptying out of so much of the rural South, and America as a whole, can be seen in this region, more than was true even a decade ago: mile after mile after mile of depopulated vast resource basins, mostly vast pine plantations (about which I’ve written previously) with minimal human intervention aside from the widely spaced but all consuming bursts of highly mechanical labor, broken in the middle by the empty agricultural fields of the Black Belt. No human hand touches the fruit of the earth here, machines consume it and spit it out and process it, feeding it into the vast global circulatory systems of capital to which we all look for our sustenance to some degree or another, resignedly, uncaringly, or with attempts at resistance.
Barring some sudden transformation of the global economy—not without the realm of possibility, to be sure—the last human jobs in these places may well soon be replaced by fully automated machines, the odd human mechanic intervening here and there, the terrible industrial dream of the earth as a vast conveyor belt finally on the cusp of realization. Just about the only human population centers remaining in these vast extraction zones are the shattered remnants of once prosperous towns, every census period their populations becoming smaller and more and more racially homogenous, as the remaining white people either die or if possessed of any means flee. You don’t have to use your imagination to determine what sorts of social evil and illicit substance plagues run through these towns, or the remaining little scatters of rural communities, black and white, beyond. You feel it in the heavy gray skies looming over the ruins, our vast global civilization leprous at the bleeding margins, losing feeling, dying from the outside in, a process that started at its birth really, and which we hide from ourselves as best we can, our methods changing by the decade and the cultural class, what things we use to avoid the reality in front of us.
But you can feel something else, something at once terrifying and exhilaritating: the wild is out there, in there, waiting, biding its time, forcing its way into the intensively controlled human structures that continue to shape the land.
The forested tracts are a strange hybrid of hyper-industrialization- pine trees grown in giant monocultures for as far as the eye can see- and unintentional rewilding, hardwood bottomlands too wet for the pines, tracts and strips of untouched forest in between, the deer and coyotes and all the rest weaving in and out at will. Yet it is no healthy wilderness: the densely planted plantation pines choke out almost everything, invasives like privet often the hardiest survivors in the dark understory, trees crammed together like Midwestern corn fields. The trees will never reach maturity, but instead will be sliced down and hauled off in a few years to barges floating upon the Corps of Engineer's great watery slash through the fossilized Cretaceous ocean below. But just as the abundant late Cretaceous fossils that wash out from the chalk badlands and from just about every calcitic wash and exposure along the Black Belt’s width and breadth tell, the world changes. Time’s the revelator, sometimes unimaginably slow, sometimes all too rapid in its operations. Just in my lifetime much of the human footprint in these places has disappeared, and more will be gone in another ten years. Perhaps very much more.
And one day it is safe to say, the roads will vanish, the last timber yard will turn to soil mould, the Tenn-Tom Waterway will silt up and overflow its banks, turning wild and serpentine again; only piles of bricks and leaning granite markers will remain as reminders of centuries of human handiwork. The hardwoods will grow vast and tall in the bottomlands, fire will sweep the chalky soils, and the prairie return. Perhaps the bison will make their way back, along with the bear and the wolf. Already the signs are everywhere. Behind my grandfather’s house the beavers have been busily resculpting the hydrology and the ecology of the brushy stretches and dense pinelands, flooding the pine trees and privet, long slow work no doubt but fast as these things go, and they are working everywhere they can. New meadows, streams once channelized and contained overtopping their banks, finding their freedom again, the wild flowing out and drowning human interventions. Scattered bits of prairie can be found here and there, growing on the chalk badlands—some probably quite ancient, many remnants of destructive agriculture from the century past—refugium for future grasslands.
Perhaps it is for the best, I have often thought to myself, that this land return to the wild—the outworking of fate, or divine providence, or divine judgment. There is a long historical stream of blood and fire that courses over this landscape, that has made this landscape, that has made me. We stopped on our drive back Saturday so I could visit some of my ancestors buried on the crest of the Paleocene hills that front the western edge of the Black Belt; my ancestors, buried alongside some of their slaves, sit in the middle of a nondescript hayfield, a rude chainlink fence surrounding their mostly crumbling headstones. Every other trace of the plantation economy they established up in these rolling hills has completely vanished into the earth from whence it came.
They were for their time rather sophisticated, literarily inclined people, complex and human, not propaganda carictatures, suffering the pains of nineteenth century life despite their wealth—like all such cemeteries, the majority of headstones memorialize infants, children, young adults, felled by one disease after another. Nonetheless, the far simpler, uninscribed field stones hard by bear silent witness to the underlying reality of the society my ancestors were constructing, one built on racialist slavery, humans delivered and held in bondage and marked as less human, even in death. And yet, despite, or because of, this fundamental division of the nineteenth century Mississippi frontier, there were traces of something else, of the opposite of the pernicious and never really accurate ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of later years: ‘together but unequal,’ the stress falling in different places depending on the circumstances. I do not know why these enslaved men or women or children—there is no way now of knowing—were buried in this plot, and why others were not. Genetic analysis has recently revealed, unsurprisingly, that I am related to black Americans, now resident in the North, a reminder that the proximity of slave and master often became literally intimate, the boundaries of white ideological racialism breaking down under the pressure of human reality. Perhaps these field stone markers can be traced back to such relationships, visible and invisible at once, acknowledge and silenced simltaneously. I do not know, and probably never will.
Almost exactly due east of this cemetery is a nondescript site along the banks of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which rises in these ancient hills and flows into the nearby Noxubee River a few miles north of the first town in which I ever lived, Shuqualak, its name like so many other toponyms a reminder and a remnant of the Choctaw people, their destinies forever reshaped by the treaty compelled upon them at Dancing Rabbit. In 1830 the Choctaw were rewarded for their loyalty to the United States and its ideals as so many others have been rewarded, with perdifery and cruelty, years of pressure and conniving finally achieving the goal of forcing the Choctaw people from these lands. Settlers—my ancestors among them, and the enslaved people they would bring with them or obtain afterwards—would soon make their way out onto the rich prairie soils and up in to the hills, the first peoples’ traces fading to place names and scattered individuals and memories. Today the site is difficult to reach, down a long logging road, unpaved like most in the county—I have yet to visit it myself in fact—marked by a stone monument, surrounded by yet another graveyard, the most common trace of vanished human presence in this melancholy landscape. Nearby, as the crow or the spirit flies anyway, Nanih Waiya Mound—the ‘mother mound’ of the Choctaw people—is similarly neglected, attempts at a state park years ago now largely swallowed up by the cypress slough next to it, though the mound continues on, like the persistent place-names. The past isn’t even past, even when we try to look away from it, even when we neglect and ignore it as best we can.
But if there are many deep dark currents that have shaped these places and the people who hail from them—including me—there are still spots of bright memory, of the promise of what could have been, what was, what might still be one day. Tiny churches, some still in use, some derlict, some returning to the earth, belonging or once belonging to black and white congregations of different sorts (though mostly Baptist), appear suddenly in the pine plantation or the cotton fields, the communities they once served now as often as not all but disappeared, their inhabitants lying rest until the Day of the Resurrection in the cemeteries alongside, or others being consumed by the verdant earth. I remembered as we drove my first experience of African-American Christianity, at the age of five, in a little but lively church back up in the red dirt pine hills on the east, Alabama side of the Black Belt, its graveyard the same march of rough concretionary sandstone as marks the resting places of the humans my ancestors once held in bondage. Do those walls still sound with loud song and praise? I do not know. This land consumes memory even as it contains it. We passed over the cypress-studded Sipsey River, and my mind went back to baptism ceremonies I watched from the very banks down from the bridge, the river looking like you might walk on it, so heavy is the sediment load and tannic acid content from the billions of leaves washing down its slow course to the Gulf, carrying our sins and our loves and our folly and our wisdom alike.
It is in many ways hard for me to return to these places, to these memorylands. All of my great-grandparents, and all of my grandparents save my maternal grandfather, are now resting in their graves alongside the generations of our ancestors and our ancestors’ slaves and freedmen, awaiting the Final Trumpet call. I do not know how much longer my grandfather will be with us—his health is not good, in a way that is impossible to overlook anymore, and I do not know how he will react should he truly lose his ability to get around and to more or less care for himself. He still lives in the little house at the edge of Tallahaga Creek, the place he has all but always lived in, content with his postage stamp of land. Unlike our ancestors, who for a century and a half kept pushing west into lands newly dispossed from the native peoples, exhausting one landscape after another from the Chesapeake south and west, he chose to stay. Back in the ‘fifties he was offered a lucrative job in the then absolutely exploding fossil fuel industry, but it meant leaving his home county, so he turned it down. He has never left. For much of my life I thought such stability in one place a bit sad, and dreamed, then realized, my own ambitions to travel the world; I now recognize the profound wisdom and love of such a decision, that if more people in our world of maximized ‘freedom and choice’ accepted such limits we perhaps would not be facing such existential threats to human civilization and to the biosphere itself.
I walked through his little house, in which he has lived alone for years now since my grandmother’s untimely death, memories welling up, this one stable point in my life to which I have been returning for thirty-seven years, the changes incremental, the core the same. I suddenly realized that one day—maybe not today, but it could be soon—I would walk these little rooms, past the old woodburning stove, over the creaking wooden floors and aged carpet, for the last time. I reeled, and had to go outside, where my daughter was carrying pawpaw’s cats around, the old cedars swaying gently in the breeze, the great loblolly in the front yard seeming much bigger than ever before. I looked for the cows out in the pasture, but remembered they had been gone for years now, most of the old fields now filled with sweetgum and pines, the forest swiftly returning.
This seems like a proper place to stop, to try and sum up everything I’ve said above, to try and discern a common theme or meaning, but I’m not sure I can, or should. Life is not simple, life does not present a single message or theme or anything of that nature. As I’ve been writing I’ve been trying to think of a way to work in one of the serendipitous moments of our trip down to Mississippi—we stopped outside of Aliceville, Alabama, to let the kids run around some before pushing on north. I was pleased though hardly surprised to come across a slash of exposed calcitic Cretaceous formation, possibly the Prairie Bluff Formation though don’t quote me on that. It wasn’t the sort of spot I’d go out of my way to visit, but I did find several lovely little Hamulus onyx specimens, funny little narrow oblong shell-making annelid that survived the end-Cretaceous to make a last stand in the succeding Paleocene. Among the bits of Cretaceous shell I spotted something neither shell nor alluvial cobble: a triangular bit of shiny orange and white substance with odd jagged teeth-like projections on one end. Washing the dirt away, I wondered if it might be a bit of mammoth tooth, and upon coming home and examining it next to larger pieces of mammoth tooth in my collection, sure enough, it was. I’d known that Pleistocene fossils show up in the alluvium caps over the vastly older Cretaceous material, but it was still a pleasant surprise, a reminder of yet another layer to this land’s history. I tried to imagine mammoths and ground sloths and other looming megafauna making their way across what must have been truly expansive prairie lands here, perhaps browsing honey locust pods and crunching giant globular osage oranges, both of which still stand in memory of the lost giant beasts. Time rolls on, but some traces remain, sedimented, available to those who know where, and how, to look.
I do not know that the memory of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and of all the other events in this land’s long past, a past that intersects with that of so much of the rest of the South, of America yes but of the South above all, if that memory can ever truly be redeemed, if we can somehow start again, return to the banks of that little red hill creek and a hundred thousand other creeks and rivers and hills and mountains and prairie washes and flatwood sweeps, and make new covenants with one another, with the land, with our ancestors and our ancestors’ slaves and enemies and lovers, with the deeper past, with God Himself. If we can start anew but rooted in these places, without abandoning or exploiting or reducing to raw and desacralized use. Until then, I will dream of the low hills and black earth, of my ancestors and my grandparents, of broken bodies and sanctified ones, of pines and cedars and cypress grown wild and loosed of mechanical grids, of mustard green rows in winter and tall grass in summer, of mammoths on the great river banks, and cleansing fire and nourishing rain, the sky huge, and the voice of God over the deep muddy waters, washing us all and raising us up again, and again, and again.