Thin Lines and Hard Times at the Wahalak K-Pg Boundary
Thin Lines and Hard Times at the Wahalak K-Pg Boundary
old souths, new souths, other souths, vol. iv
Just south of the tiny community of Wahalak, Mississippi, we pulled off of the mostly empty four lane highway, US 45, this long and broad manifestation of concrete modernity that like all such constructions of the post-War world seem dropped from the air onto the landscape, unfeeling and unbending, a straight line into an obscure future. A gash of chalk marks the path up into the woods, straggles of cedar that indicate, if the white of the chalk were not enough, that the calcerous sediments of the Cretaceous—the age of chalk—lie just beneath. Around a curve a lovely and deep pond opens up, and along the bank to our right there is a low bluff of chalk, forest marching back from the rim, cedar, then larger, taller hardwoods. There are a lot of chalk outcrops in this part of Mississippi, the entire Black Belt region stretching from West Tennessee all the way to South Georgia largely underlain by chalk, thousands of feet of the stuff, silent testimony to what must have been a very pleasant warm and calm sea here sixty-six million years ago.
But this outcrop is special. It’s the tip-top of the Cretaceous, a thin line intervening between the chalk and the Paleocene sandstone above, a thin line that is overburdened with significance, a boundary marking the end of one world and the beginning of another, our world. Beneath the line, ammonite and mosasaur and the odd non-avian dinosaur bone (float from the shores to the north in what is now central Alabama) crop out; immediately above it, not only are they all missing, but the only traces of living things are some sad little mollusks. The asteroid did a real number here, almost instantaneous.
To get closer to that K-Pg boundary we strike out into the woods, tearing through the dense tangle of cedar branches. Then, there in the deep shadow of the cedars, we see another layer of time here: headstones, not very many, but scattered all along the line of the low bluff, some at the very edge, others receding back into the older forest behind. The markers are few, but the forest floor here is largely devoid of plant life thanks to the heavy shade, and dozens and dozens of shallow depressions, each the length of a human body, are easily visible. As far as we can make out, only black people were buried here, this cemetery, like so many African-American burial grounds even in an age of heightened awareness of history and injustice, forgotten and neglected. The few graves with legible markers post-date Emancipation, but it is entirely possible that people who died enslaved were also buried here; a plantation once stood nearby, later developing into a settlement, only to be swallowed by the forest after the twentieth century emptying out of the region, part of the larger ‘Great Migration’ of Southern blacks to what were them booming industrial cities of the North.
The modern Black Belt was made by slavery, slavery at a massive scale, in a way that is scarcely paralleled anywhere else in the United States, except perhaps the South Carolina Lowcountry. There is no getting around it, no delicate way to put things; it’s hard to convey the enormity of it, really (not for nothing this basic theme has continued to crop up in my own writing, see for instance this recent essay with some shared themes and localities as this one). There are so many graves in this forest, and each one represents a human being whose labor was mixed with these soils year after year after year, enslaved or, after 1865, technically free but just barely so. I wouldn’t be here were it not for that labor, were it not for the humans buried here and in similar sad plots all over these old prairie lands and the brooding hills to the west. Guilt, shame, whatever you want to call it, yes, but also a sense of things become distant, receding into the past, but pulling you with it, lying heavy and thick on your soul like the eroded chalks and red clays after the rain. Slavery was a catastrophe of a different sort, slower moving perhaps but none the less a death of many worlds, a violent working of ruptures and destruction, turned to particular economic ends. The long after shocks are not over, and there are no heroes, no happy endings, no cinematic fade into the sunset.1
We wander silently among the graves. I stop at the edge and make the sign of the cross and pray for the souls of the departed gathered under the soil here. Then, pushing out from the cemetery somber and heavy I step out onto the Paleocene surface (visible in the photograph below). Outwash of the tsunami, maybe, a rough grained sandstone, broken into big heaving blocks at the edges of the hill, sliding down onto the Cretaceous. It’s a weird feeling, walking along the edges of time, the apocalyptic thread that runs through everything but is easy to forget in ordinary waking life. We explore the outcrops, they’re fossil-poor, but geologically and minerologically interesting, features near the top of the Cretaceous sequence I don’t fully understand in fact. It’s nice to be stumped sometimes. Trace fossils mark the chalk, our guide finds an ammonite internal mold, its tiny fractal sutures, some of the most exquisite things in all of nature, still visible. Among the last of its kind.
There’s a single visible fossil horizon in the Paleocene rock, and it’s nothing to write home about—no fractally fantastic ammonites, no giant mosasaurs, not even the spectacular clams and oysters whose buried reefs crop out in so many Cretaceous horizons. The world’s seas would recover, eventually, but here and in the time marked by these rocks, it was a ‘depauperate’ fauna, a few rather dull bivalve species, poorly preserved to boot. Survivors, pioneers, the heirs of the apocalypse. Things would get better, of course, eventually; the day before I had prospected the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, gathering bits of fossil leaves from an alluvial clay, signs of a once spectacular and vibrant tropical forest that grew near the shores of the receding sea some fifty million years ago. The Eocene seas of Mississippi, which crop up in many places across the state, are rich and beautiful, a long ways from the disaster taxon of these earliest layers of the Cenozoic.
Our guide—a family friend well versed in area geology and paleontology, from nearby Shuqualak, site of my first home some thirty-seven years ago—had told us to be on the lookout for native American pottery, that it is abundant at this site, too, and regularly washes out onto the chalk. Sure enough, towards the end of our visit, he finds a gorgeous little piece, from near the top of a pot, a wavy etched line just under the rim. I don’t know Mississippi pottery sequences, maybe it’s Woodland, or Mississippian, or even proto-historical. Certainly it predates the first modern apocalypse to wash over the Black Belt: the removal of the Choctaw, the ethnic cleansing that prepared the ground—literally—for the rapid expansion of chattel slavery. Like every apocalypse, there were holdouts and survivors—a few Choctaw who hid out, refused to go west, and, in far greater numbers, linguistic holdouts, the melliferous map that traces over so much of Mississippi and Alabama, the place names that have persisted, bright points of possibility. Wahalak, Noxubee, Shuqualak, Scooba, just to name some in close geographic proximity. I’d like to think that in a hundred years, or two hundred even, precious little of the past couple centuries will persist, but the names will.
I’d like to spend some more time scouring the chalk for pottery, but the sun is getting high, and there are more places to visit before I get back on the road for home. We circle around back to the highway, itself the trace of another apocalypse, the current one of steady climate change and, well, everything else that is following in the long outwash of industrial modernity and its effects upon the biosphere and upon humanity as a whole. Roads like this are unremarkable in a country criss-crossed by four lanes, a country full of wide rural fading lands bisected by unrealized promises of concrete and asphalt, a few travelers speeding north or south or east or west, always on to somewhere else. Thin on the land and all but invisible, yet a crucial chapter in the land’s long history. The pond and the exposure are both due to this highway: when they were building US 45 they dug out the pond for fill, having come to an arrangement with the land owner to the two parties’ mutual benefit. Probably the pond will outlast the highway. Chalk holds water, and other substances, very, very well. So well that decades ago the government wanted to build a nuclear waste disposal site not far from here. The proposal was defeated, fortunately, a rare bright spot in the recent human history of this land. The pond itself is a haven for life, its waters rich and cold and clean, agriculture having now long passed out of use here. I watch a leopard frog swim in the deep clear water, until he spots me and dives deep and out of sight.
The great catastrophe of industrial modernity—and that is what it was here, and in many places now mouldering and forgotten, the vast sacrifice zones that built the comforts and benefits we now inhabit—is receding from these shores, but it is too soon to speak of real recovery. We are the disaster taxon of its aftermath.
Most places on earth are really many places coexisting and overlapping. The Wahalak K-Pg boundary seems exceptionally so. I don’t really know the best way to link them all together, to find some sense of things in these thin boundary events, these traces of rupture and catastrophe. Sometimes history is just overwhelming, everything all at once, and you feel a little dizzy trying to take it in, to synthesize what you’re seeing and feeling and thinking, to make sense rationally and emotionally both. There’s something grounding about geological history, I’ve found: it’s simply there, and there is nothing you can do, nothing you can imagine yourself doing, about it. It’s how things turned out. With these other apocalypses and boundary events, the catastrophes of Southern history and of the world’s history, you can’t have the luxury of distance, it’s all close, but neither can you imagine yourself having all the answers, or being able to fix things. It’s not that easy.
I’m a historian, and my reflex is to start into any historical question with some degree of disinterest, of critical reflection and thought, contextualization, all that. And there is good to that reflex, it can lead to real wisdom, but it only gets you so far. Sometimes, you just have to let it all hit you, and sometimes you have to let go, to admit you can’t put it all together. I certainly can’t. In the face of the heaviness and enormity of things, cropping out from the ground and sticking fast in your heart and in your thin veins overloaded with the weight of it all—well. You ask what you ask, and gird yourself for answers, or no answer at all.
In every icon of Holy Friday, of the death of Christ upon the Cross, there is a little skull and some bones down at the foot of the Cross, representing Adam, representing really all humans, the sweep of human history, condensed into a taphonomic fragment, settled into the rock. Above the strata is the Cross, the great rupture, the great boundary event, existing in and existing beyond the chronological flow of time, the fabric of the histories we know, and don’t know. I wish I could wax eloquent about how that boundary event, how that point of rupture, registers in the human tragedies and dark shadows that run through places like Wahalak, that run through my blood, through my genetic and historical inheritance. But what I can see, and what I can point to, is just the Cross standing over those bones, wedged into a vast accumulatory layering of human history, itself a thin precipitate over the far deeper wedge of deep time. It’s better not to try and explain things, sometimes.
On the way back to the car, I stop to pick up some pieces of turtle bone—modern, only fragments, but lovely and complex. The sun is high, and while it’s still spring time, sweat is starting to form on my brow. The chalk grins the color of exposed bone. Golgotha is everywhere, Paradise is everywhere. We reach the car, it’s hot now in the open, the cedars nod in a slight breeze. The land yawns wide north to Wahalak Creek and the sweep of the old prairie lands and the bottomlands, the past isn’t past, there are worlds yet to be born, worlds lost and hidden, wounds that refuse to heal, the Cross jagged and dark and holy planted in the Cretaceous limestone, over it all, the answer without words. Lord have mercy.
Case in point: this story in today’s New York Times, a sordid and sad and entirely predictable affair for those who know Noxubee County (the county just to the north of Wahalak, which lies just within Kemper County) well; it doesn’t really fit into anyone’s narrative or stereotypes (strikingly, at least one of the commenters to the article seems to have completely missed the racial identity of all of the actors in the story, instead superimposing a pat narrative with little actual relationship to the facts at hand). Neither liberals nor conservatives have the epistemic tool kit to make sense of places like Noxubee County, or anywhere else for that matter; the urge to obscure through self-serving narratives is usually just too strong.