Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
By Camille T. Dungy
Simon & Schuster | 2023 | 336 pages
“What new lessons might be possible?” Camille T. Dungy asked recently when discussing her new book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Writing the book during the pandemic, Dungy unexpectedly found herself overseeing her daughter’s remote learning and, in the process, learning to think differently about lessons she herself had learned. A comment Callie made at the dinner table about a class on Manifest Destiny sparked a family discussion on “perceived rights” in the United States. “I could write a book on what this means to us in the first decades of the 21st century. In a way, this is that book,” Dungy writes in Soil.
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 before the pandemic got in the way, Dungy had intended to write about “tak(ing) some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy.” But rather than focusing on “Those crocuses. The patches of purple iris. A cluster of Mexican sunflowers” in her Fort Collins, Colorado garden, she wrote a book that tackles “the seeming improbability of a Black mother writing about nature.” In linked essays about her garden that unfold organically, she blasts open the literary canon of nature writing, blaming racism for its exclusion of people of color and a self-serving myopia for its exclusion of everyday life—a life full of the daily tasks that command the attention of a wife and mother.
Soil, then, is a book about inclusivity: part memoir, part poetry, part essay, part history, part lessons on race, and part photography. Dungy cites her journal entries, emails, and aspects of her thought process. She redefines what “nature” means by broadening her environment to encompass other writers, her human and nonhuman neighbors, her family, her community, her readers. Dungy writes of garden people, fish people, flower people, flying people, bird people, and grass people. In her neighbors’ backyard, she admonishes her exuberant daughter: “Don’t hurt that tree. Trees are people, too.” She also includes her husband Ray’s incredulous response: “Did you just say that trees are people?”
Being forced to stay home during the pandemic changed Dungy’s perspective; she writes, “What I learned changed a great deal about a lot of what I see.” She realized that canonical nature writers seem to consider the environment to be what is outside the home. She, however, wants “what is inside my doors to be part of this conversation. I don’t want to separate my life from other lives on the planet.” “Origin Story,” one of a half-dozen poems in the book, makes this clear:
Outside my window is the beginning
of half my poems. The others start
outside my door. In each case the window
is my body. I am always on
the other side of the door.
Dungy’s new definition of nature writing leads her into a short history of desegregation in America’s public schools. Recognizing that excluding “those of us who are so often erased from or maligned in books held up as environmental masterpieces” creates a less-than-honest view of reality, Dungy calls for what she and her friends refer to as a “quotidian honesty” that pays attention to the realities of all life.
Behind Dungy’s call for quotidian honesty stands Yeats’s phrase about holding in a single thought reality and justice. While Yeats was speaking of “stylistic arrangements of experience,” Dungy argues, “[t]o systemically exclude the lives of your neighbors from the space of your imagination requires a willful denial of nearly every experience outside your own.” The diversity she plants in her garden becomes a metaphor for community. “By cultivating diversity, I learn things I never knew I should know,” she writes.
Dungy learned much of her appreciation for gardening from her father, who studied botany in college before becoming a physician. She cites her father’s “creative defiance” and quotes him as saying, “For us, there is no separation between the environment and social justice.” She tells the story of the six months her parents spent deciding how to landscape their new yard in Irvine, California. A visit from a community council member who informed them they were in violation of neighborhood policy prompts Dungy to recall the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education II, “…a decision directing much of what my parents—and I—have been able to do in our lives.”
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, Dungy’s first prose book and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, set the major themes in her prose. Guidebook was wide-ranging, reaching across continents; Soil is geographically confined to Dungy’s yard but covers similar ground. The history Dungy relates in Soil is both personal, going back to her grandparents in Virginia and great-grandparents in Louisiana, and political, from Jim Crow laws and Green Book guidance to police violence against Black bodies. While planting tulips and daffodils, she recalls the death of Elijah McClain in a nearby Colorado town. She writes, “Burying those little brown bulbs…, I thought of the day I became a Black child’s mother.”
Dungy spent years working on her garden, ripping out sod, carting off river rock, pulling up landscaping fabric, amending soil, and sowing “a riot of color.” Planted throughout the book are spots of beauty: the hissops, troll-doll-haired celosia, hollyhocks, larkspurs, globe amaranth, sweet William, and the sunflowers that grew taller than Ray’s head. One of her first acts was to get rid of the herbicides and pesticides she found in the garage, resulting in a proliferation of weeds. The weeds have their own lessons to teach. “Maintaining a poison-free yard means revising some of my opinions about which plants I want around me and which I do not. I want to stay open to surprise, to stay open to lives that look and act in radically different ways than I am used to or comfortable with,” she writes. Her family and neighbors now enjoy visits from multiple species of bees, birds, butterflies, and bunnies. The neighbors her family saw most often while she wrote Soil were the mountain cottontail rabbits that Callie named Bunny, Lily, Bun-Bun, Bun, and Pebble. It’s clear the poet loves the lilt of language in her incantation of names. She examines how the power of giving plants and animals their names historically had been awarded to a small cadre of explorers. As a result, many living things are named after white men who advanced the cause for slavery. In Soil, Dungy joins the growing chorus challenging this naming convention.
The diversity of her garden includes more than just the variety of her plants. “Making space for someone else’s wisdom… is one of the most important keys to survival and success we have learned.” Lessons learned from her family and friends as well as historical and contemporary figures appear throughout. Dungy is as quick to grasp the realities of her shallow-thinking pastor who spoke from the rhetoric of exclusion as she is to honor the legacy of a 20th-century poet and member of the Harlem Renaissance; she cites examples of a 19th-century English-American botanist as well as an American impressionist who painted the everyday lives of women, especially mothers and children. “If I refuse to grow and to learn, I limit myself and the possibilities for the world around me,” she writes. In a 2010 Poetry Society of America interview, Dungy said, “My job… is to think beyond what I receive as given knowledge and to help extend the realm of what and who and how we know.” In Soil, she challenges received knowledge “to make a bold, fresh way through seemingly pathless terrain,” a path that she says “is familiar to many Black women.”
The reasons why Dungy wrote this book are evident: to present a gift for her daughter—a member of the next generation of Black women moving through a challenging world; to tell stories about Black lives in America that had not previously been widely shared; and, in a time of personal, political, and climactic violence, to ask the question, “Do we still need God?” Her drive to find interconnection with the greater-than-human world stems from her need for meaning. “Seeking the many manifestations of God, I plant restorative love in my garden—and in this book.” She writes that she gets reciprocal grace from having done the work, and she doesn’t mean just in her garden. “One way I experience love is as delight in the flowering of another’s ideas. I want this book to offer such a flowering.”
Readers of Soil will be inspired by the lessons in its pages and beyond its final words. As Dungy writes, “Learning a name for the joy of this grounding may take a lifetime.”
Read an interview with Camille T. Dungy appearing in Terrain.org, and read Camille Dungy’s Letter to America, “Diversity, a Garden Allegory with Suggestions for Direct Action.”
Renata Golden’s essay collection Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment will be published in spring of 2024 as the inaugural book of the CSU Press Nature Series in conjunction with the University of Georgia Press. Other essays and poems have been published in anthologies including Dawn Songs edited by Jamie Reaser and J. Drew Lanham, First and Wildest: The Gila at 100 from Torrey House Press, and When Birds Are Near published by Cornell University Press, as well as numerous literary journals. Her essays have been finalists for the River Teeth Nonfiction Contest, Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award. Renata has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. Originally from the South Side of Chicago, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To read more, visit renatagolden.com.
Read Renata Golden’s Letter to America, appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Ground Photo, courtesy Shutterstock.
