To restore the ecosystem which lived in me, to recover some of my own inborn wildness, I had to restore the ecosystem in which I lived.
Dear America,
I think I might be a weed.
A weed is any plant that dares show its face in an unexpected place without the gardener’s express permission. A weed takes up space that belongs to the tea roses, sucks up water and nutrients meant for perpetually hungry heirloom tomatoes. Weeds are ugly: too tall, too thick, sloppy, disorganized, utterly devoid of charm. We are fecund hussies, as well: setting seed so copiously that if we manage to get a foothold in your yard, this time next year, all our kinfolk is sure to move in next door, play loud music at odd hours, barbecue in the driveway, ruin the neighborhood ambiance, and drive down property values.
Twenty-plus years ago, I fetched up, a newly minted Ph.D. in southern Illinois suburbia, not because 1,300 square feet of a 1970s suburban ranch house was my dream home, but because the 120-foot by 90-foot lot was fenced for my dog. The roof didn’t leak, its concrete slab wasn’t cracked, and the monthly mortgage payment was less than my student loan payment. I bought it, and told myself, “Self, just thank God for small favors.”
The neighborhood, at the time, consisted mostly of working-class retirees. It looked (and still looks) the way baby formula looks. And tastes. It’s white. Very white. But its whiteness has never been my primary objection. My objection has always been its grinding architectural and landscaping homogeneity. The homes are neat-as-pins ranches tucked on professionally fertilized and manicured lawns. The landscaping consists of cookie-cutter foundation shrubs, featuring obligatorily sterile flowering specimen trees, or perhaps a fast-growing shade tree dying of the power company’s arboreal butchery. The trees and shrubs, all of them, are trademarked versions of about two dozen species that many homeowners and most gardeners know by name.
The one saving grace, I believed, about moving to Similac suburbia was the opportunity to plant a vegetable garden, some raspberries, and dwarf plum trees. I remember my grandmother’s plum trees. She was a stern, deeply unhappy woman who certainly loved hard but did not always do so kindly. Rather, she communicated love in the products of her own manual labor. And she was a gardener’s gardener. As a toddler I would ride on her hip through the garden, skin tingling from the heat of the sun. She would reach up, pluck a plum from one of her trees and hold it to my mouth. I would just gum, gnaw, and suck. Plum juices burst from behind that blue-black skin to pour hot liquid summer down my throat. That’s what her love tasted like. I wanted to give that love to my child. To myself.
Now, the human imposition of monoculture on nature, in this case the tyranny of the suburban lawn, is a profound trauma to an ecosystem. A suburban landscape usually begins as farmland or recovering farmland whose soil structure has been deeply damaged by commercial agricultural practice. Years of being crushed beneath the weight of heavy farm equipment compacts the soil, disrupting its ability to hold water. Soil nutrients, and sometimes even organic matter, have been exhausted, and the mycorrhizal fungi symbiotes that transfer water and nutrients to plant roots have been disrupted by annual tilling. Insect and weed pests, evolved to be indifferent to chemical controls, abound.
When residential developers purchase such land, the first thing they do is strip it bare-assed naked by bulldozing the topsoil away (which they sell to landscaping companies who make you, the homeowner, buy it back in bags). The exposed clay is further compacted to hard-pan beneath the treads of the bulldozers. The streets are laid, the houses are built, and the entire neighborhood is landscaped with a few dozen alien and even invasive, commercially available cultivars that can tolerate such blighted conditions.
Then insult of insults, landscaping companies lay sod directly on top of clay scraped bare of its original fertility. Now the homeowner has to pay good money to continually water grass planted on clay that can no longer sequester water. Now the homeowner has to pay good money, annually, to fertilize the lawn with nitrogen (which runs off in the rainwater that can’t be sequestered by the hard-pan clay). Now the homeowner has to pay good money to poison the very plants evolved to repair disturbed ecosystems: dandelions, plantain, violets, clover, lamb’s quarters, purslane, and sorrel.
The impact of that trauma was everywhere visible in my suburban neighborhood, and in my backyard. Rather than a few representatives of a diverse range of flora and fauna, my property crawled with millions of individuals of only a few species. Without topsoil beneath the lawn, there was nary an earthworm to be found, no matter where I looked, but there were phalanxes of Japanese beetle grubs curled between the clay and the sod, contentedly chewing roots, fattening themselves for metamorphosis, and a summer of drunkenly skeletonizing the leaves of the neighborhood’s costly ornamental shrubs. Mole tunnels snaked beneath the lawn from grub patch to grub patch.
As for birds, there were the usual bird-feeder bullies: cardinals, sparrows, and ground feeders big enough to hold their own against predators: robins, mourning doves, grackles, and Brewer’s crows. Scrawny rabbits gnawed hostas to the ground in search of water or nutrients. Slugs as long and fat as Cuban cigars hitched rides on your pant legs, and made slime trails up and down the siding and window screens. Chains of ants marched in disciplined lines from beneath the house’s foundation through the electrical outlets and into my house to raid bags of petfood and spilled sugar in the kitchen cupboards.
“You can’t grow vegetables around here,” my elderly neighbor sagely opined, watching as I sweated to tote wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of topsoil and compost into the backyard with which to build tumuli beds. “There’s nothing here but pure clay.”
Now, I was raised by a long line of hard-headed Black women who worked close beneath the supervision of the white aristocracy and its terrible critical Gaze. The White Gaze is a bulldozer that crushes the Black soul flat. It compresses our strength to hard-pan. The bulldozing White Gaze scrapes clean away the fertility native to us, packages it, and sells it on the open market where we pay to buy it back. Weeds endowed by their Creator with the capacity to help us heal are rounded up in the industrial school-to-prison pipeline.
As a child, I was taught by my elders that the key to surviving the weight of the White Gaze is to become absolute masters of the Cult of Respectability. To master the Cult of Respectability is to adopt the standards, practices, manners, and mannerisms of the aristocracy. We were only allowed to speak, “the King’s English.” My grandmother taught us the uses and correct placement of the silver at a formal table. I learned to clean a house so well, guests could eat off the floor, and the women in my family didn’t think anything of trash-talking another woman’s house where you couldn’t.
The Cult of Respectability was both a tyranny and a Holy Grail. It took a lot of living between being a little Black girl at grandma’s knee to a grown-assed natural Black woman to unpack how the Cult of Respectability is built on a chassis of racism and self-hatred, and to understand—even more importantly—that it does not work. It doesn’t save anyone. It only makes us docile. The Cult of Respectability is the bit between our teeth, the spur in our flanks. It makes of us the instrument of our own domestication.
I am a traumatized person. I have never NOT lived in fear. I have never NOT lived in existential danger. I have never NOT been crushed to hard-pan beneath the weight of the White Gaze. I have never NOT needed a resting place, where I could hide, and secretly blow upon the flickering flame of wildness that should have been mine but for the obliterating weight of history.
The first time I burned my front yard prairie, the neighbors stepped out of their houses to stare, slack jawed.
So here I am—this weed—fetched up in southern Illinois suburbia where the Cult of Respectability has been imposed upon the landscape, where the ecosystem’s inborn wildness and fecundity have been crushed to hard-pan and scraped away. I needed my home to be a shelter, but there was no shelter in suburbia for me and my son, no way to press a fresh plum, hot from the sun, against his lips. He would not be able to taste the summer as I had tasted it from the safety of my grandmother’s hip. Where would he catch praying mantises, purple his face with mulberries, pull spicy radishes straight from of the ground, poke garter snakes, and learn the names of butterflies? How could he discover his own inborn wildness?
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t, and neither would I, unless I found a way to break suburbia’s coercive White Gaze, and the Cult of Respectability inherent to it. To restore the ecosystem which lived in me, to recover some of my own inborn wildness, I had to restore the ecosystem in which I lived. I had to help it recover some of its own inborn wildness.
And so, I decided to make myself a splinter in the eye of the White Gaze.
I first defied the suburban Cult of Respectability by refusing to rake up my leaves in the autumn. “Those leaves will kill your grass, you know,” my neighbor opined, wringing her hands in consternation. I stole her pile of leaves too, which her husband had raked into the street for the city to take away.
The next spring, nitrogen-fixing “weeds” popped up wherever the grass had died under the damp mats of moldering leaves. I left the weeds to do what weeds do. Native bees began to visit the clover and violets that filled in the bare patches. Dandelion and plantain punched through the hard-pan beneath the lawn, adding porosity to the clay. The increased plant diversity in the lawn gave rabbits something to eat besides grass, so they began to let my vegetable garden and the hostas be. But no lie: I sweated through the censorious gazes of old folks walking their chihuahuas. And every week I was throwing away door-knob advertisements from lawn care companies.
I next defied the Cult of Respectability by taking three whole years to establish a clay-busting native short-grass prairie on the sunny side of my front lawn. This involved smothering the grass with unsightly cardboard, newspapers, and tarps. Boxes full of bare-root plants arrived by mail, bags of mulch and bales of straw stacked up in front of the garage. The driveway became cluttered with misplaced shovels, forgotten buckets of garden tools, and unspooled garden hoses.
Village Citation 1: Noxious weeds are not allowed within the village. Remove all weeds within 5 days or you will be billed for weed removal.
Village Citation 2: Flowers taller than 12 inches are not allowed within village limits. Mow areas to regulation height within 5 days or you will be billed for mowing.
I shadow-boxed myself around village complaints for two years; and I kept hold of my sanctity with neighbors who regularly lead their dogs to pee on the prairie seedlings struggling to grow by the curb.
But by the third year, the prairie finally matured and exploded into blossom, lighting up the street like a wildfire. Three varieties of purple and yellow echinacea, red and yellow ratibida, and lemon-yellow helianthus, goldenrod and purple New England aster, rare native grasses whose seeds songbirds go to war for: side-oats grama with its teeny red flowers, little bluestem and wild sea oats. Purple and white prairie clover, varieties of milkweed, green, pink, and orange, for the monarch butterflies, spiky blazing stars, and larger species like rattlesnake master and even cup plant that tops ten feet.
By coloring outside of the landscaping lines, I seduced the return of earthworms. House finches, goldfinches, dragonflies, skippers, and orb spiders soon followed. Insects whose names I’ll never know began chewing through the prairie’s detritus, making compost.
Prairies require fire to thrive. The first time I burned my front yard prairie, the neighbors stepped out of their houses to stare, slack jawed. But… one morning, I found a card in my mailbox, addressed to “Our Neighbor”:
I’ve watched you working in your front yard, and I wanted you to know that I make a point of driving by your house every morning on the way to work to see what’s blooming. Thank you for adding such joy to the neighborhood.
That was the end of the village’s noxious weed citations.
I really wanted birds to choose to nest in my yard rather than just “drop by for a visit.” Wherever birds nest, they are particularly brilliant at pest control, something vital to the organic gardener. To seduce a wider variety of birds, I determined to establish a miniature woodland area around the raggedy sweetgum tree behind the garage. I reimagined this lonely old thing as the forest “canopy,” and planted native understory trees—downy serviceberry, hawthorn, and redbud to give it some company. I filled in the shrub layer with natives that thrive in partial to deep shade—bottlebrush buckeye, witch hazel, black haw viburnum, Carolina spicebush, hearts-a-bustin’, chokecherries, and the like. These provided year-round food sources for birds. Slowly over the years I added native perennials for the herbaceous layer, and ephemerals for the ground layer. Jacob’s ladder, Solomon’s seal, black cohosh, goat’s beard, wild ginger, May apple, fire pinks, Virginia bluebells, and spring beauties.
I took away the Cult of Respectability’s power to disallow red-eared sliders right-of-way through my property to wherever it is turtles go in the late summer. The Cult of Respectability didn’t get to de-home the house wrens and flickers that arrived to keep the ants out of my house. The Cult of Respectability no longer decided who can and who can’t raise their babies in my yard. Black-capped chickadees, titmouses, juncos, blue jays and barred owls, ruby-throated hummingbirds, blue skinks, brown snakes, toads, thumbnail-sized green frogs, and butterflies beyond number found sanctuary on less than 1,000 square feet of suburban lot.
I haven’t had problems with cigar-sized slugs since.
African American trauma might be unique, but trauma is not unique to African Americans. Despite America’s cultural myth of individualism, all of us are crushed, in some manner, let’s say oppressed—by toxic social norms. Too fat, too thin, too young, too old, too brown, too queer, too foreign, too poor, too disabled, too smart, too ignorant, too religious, too heathen, too liberal, too conservative. We are a traumatized people living in a traumatized ecosystem. Our history and culture have profoundly alienated us from nature, from our own natures, from each other’s natures.
My neighborhood has changed over the years: fewer retirees and more working families with children. My neighbors have three little girls like stairsteps, something like six, eight and ten years old. One evening, their parents brought them out to their backyard to see the fireflies twinkling in mine. Their mother whispered to me that her kids only knew about fireflies from seeing them depicted in story books. “Hell,” she said ruefully, “I’ve never seen so many fireflies in one place at the same time.”
It made my heart hurt, really hurt, to think we have raised a generation of children so profoundly disconnected from a natural world in need of mending. I captured some fireflies in a mason jar so the kids could see what they look like up close. Their awed gazes and murmurs of appreciation were payment in full for the time, money, and physical and psychic labor I’ve spent seducing a backyard ecosystem’s revival.
I say be a weed. Find your in-born wildness. Don’t let anyone rob you of your fecundity. Set copious seed. Your offspring and their friends, and their offspring and their friends, are welcome in my yard. We’ll play loud music and party in the driveway until the sun goes down. And we’ll watch the fireflies come out.
Yours,
Christienne L. Hinz
Christienne L. Hinz is a retired professor of Japanese history, a freelance writer, beekeeper, and Master Gardener. She lives a very full life in southern Illinois with her husband, two children, a dog, and two cats.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo, Christienne L. Hinz in her rewilded suburban yard, courtesy Christienne L. Hinz.
