“The language is glorious, word by word, sentence by sentence.” –Valerie Sayers
“Striking and lovely and so authentic…a major work.” –Keith Hollaman
“Swampitude is the best book I’ve read in years.” –Jane Zenger
“…a fantastic and masterful collection of lyric prose that rewarded me on every page.” –A.E. Stringer
“…thank you for the time it took to walk downstream–and to keep your heart upstream…” –Nikky Finney
(Swampitude: Escapes with the congaree can be ordered at your local bookstore or at bookshop.org & most online booksellers.)
from Swampitude—Introduction: Begin the Flow (excerpts)
And the water comes and goes: standing water, milky or black among the mosses, ferns, and dog hobble, the fallen trees and branches, the dissolving and decay; or the small currents and seepings thickened with the oil of tupelo nuts; or the brown sloughs and guts patient to meet with constant streams and eventually the river. “Come down, come down,” the water says. While rooted efforts take the air and fill with birds, their cries, easy talk, and stitching flights, swampwater reflects all the reaching and waits to hold it, change it, and carry it on…
Though a National Park inspires it, this book is not about splendid or stupefying natural wonders. It’s about a swamp or river bottom forest named after its river, the Congaree. It wanders a bit into the history of the place and the people, including my family and me, around it. It explores the swamp as a place, and as a metaphor. It’s not about a grand sight or a majestic view, such as the heavenly gap at Yosemite as seen by the first white hunters of Indians there, or, for a closer example, the flare of thousands of wings over the Everglades as viewed by preservationists riding the Goodyear blimp. While it includes a stew of subjects, this book flows into one pot, the Congaree Swamp in the middle of South Carolina. The beauties of this place and others of its kind cannot be seen from the air; the swamp provides no special vantage point. An aerial view would only diminish what this book is about. Its subjects would go deeper into hiding, just as you would, if you could…
Born in South Carolina, I’ve a swampy heritage that includes, at least in part: slave ownership in generations past, the first shots of the Civil War, apartheid maintained for decades in America, extreme militarism into the present, politicians whose constant talent has been the exploitation of racist impulses in their historically undereducated constituencies, and willful denial of simple justice and truth. Much, if not all, of this inheritance has been continuously reinforced by religious rhetoric. From here, in recent decades, God has been converted to one political party. This heritage and my view of it make me different from most Americans. I cannot honestly argue from a foundation of correctness, righteousness, or victimhood. So what? Where can I cast my eyes and where escape the destructive effects of a muddy past, my undeniable lack of historical rectitude, and my present and persistent maladjustment? Is there a chance that you of more righteous ancestry and well-adjusted professionalism would join me there?
As Thoreau declared in his essay “Walking”: “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.” In the Congaree’s case, the saving has been mutual. The principle of a swamp and its tangled, often forbidding flow will survive, no matter what we do or say, but the Congaree, as the last grand-mama swamp forest on the continent, needed human rescue. The story of this swamp flows out into the story of the state, the region, and the nation, but it is also a personal story that connects my family and me to its metaphors and mysteries, and to the swamp-flow that touches us all.
Because the swamp is a surpassing metaphor for getting away, this narrative embraces escape. Once there, there’s everything. Contradicting confusion, the swamp beckons ways of looking: at yourself as you walk and think; toward a way out; in search of other amazing creatures; into all kinds of foreignness; beyond the obvious; for recovery; out for danger; around and through history; and of simply going with the flow. Chapters explore religion and race, wildlife and war, authenticity and art, divorce and development, love and liars, travel and time, family and fear. But the story must return again and again to the Congaree, the largest expanse of old growth riverbottom forest in North America. It is in the American South, where most of our national family secrets are hidden. Here is the region first and last settled, most and least mixed, oldest and youngest in various attributes of maturity, and, of course, the most swampy in imagination and fact. This is the story of finding the flow and recognizing the swamp that begins and ends it. The swamp is that inescapable truth that most people and cultures spend their lives trying to deny. None of us has time for that anymore.
A Brief acknowledgement of heroes: Mitchell & Ellison
Here’s a photo of Joseph Mitchell and Ralph Ellison, old friends, at a New York Public Library Literary Lions Event in 1990 (Photo: Star Black). Both of these writers were important to me in the composition of Swampitude. When I came upon this photo and later learned about their friendship via a Paris Review article by Scott Schomburg, I was delighted. Both men are Literary Saints now. They live on among others to whom younger writers might turn for inspiration, encouragement, or even a certain level of permission to go forward, to continue with the task as she or he feels called. (See Introduction and Chapter 6, Swampitude)
also from Swampitude‘s introduction:
The esteemed New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell, did not publish a significant piece in his last 37 years working at the magazine. Some thought he had stopped writing altogether. Mitchell’s legendary writer’s block became a story almost as intriguing as those he himself wrote about the urban world and its characters, his poetic reportage that, re-collected in the 1992 volume Up in the Old Hotel, has been called a biography of New York. What caused the writer who had “set the standard,” as Calvin Trillin put it, for so many others to become so paralyzed? In the years since his death in !996, it has come to light that Mitchell may have been working all along on a great writing project that would bring together his life’s experience: his childhood and youth in rural North Carolina stretched into his adult life in New York City and all the time and change that passed through him and his places. I doubt that he would call it a memoir.
Once or twice, maybe three times, I met Mr. Mitchell. His voice told me he was a Southerner. Someone whispered that he was “Joseph Mitchell,” but at the time I didn’t know who that really was. I lived on West 15th Street in New York City and used to attend Grace Episcopal Church on Lower Broadway, a gathering of worshippers I’d fallen into as a kind of reparation paid to my own Southern past. I recognized the rector’s name as one from childhood: his mother had been my beloved great-aunt’s best friend. There I found the message and life of Jesus, as reported, to be transformative, especially in sheltering the homeless who lay everywhere on the streets of Manhattan in those days, and in offering a way to talk about forgiveness, especially forgiving oneself. Tortured souls, I suppose, were more visible in America then. The powers-that-be in that congregation allowed me to serve as an usher for a while. I had a dark suit, and I was advised to wear rubber-soled shoes that wouldn’t clatter on the tiled floor. It was my privilege, I later realized, to escort this old man—Mr. Mitchell was near 80 years old then—to the pew he desired—“the Princeton pew,” he called it—near the south transept of the handsome church.
I took Mr. Mitchell’s word that the pew we walked to had been at some past time reserved for Princeton graduates, but I’ve never since been able to determine his association—he attended but did not graduate from the University of North Carolina—with that school in New Jersey. Perhaps he enjoyed the reference to another small town, Princeton, NC, in his home tobacco country. Perhaps he appreciated all the silly pretension that our promenade implied: uppity “Christian” snobs making sure to place themselves in even more elite, Ivy League company. His chronicles of a vanished New York include little reference to and no appreciation for society’s elites.
There was a biographical note in the first hardbound 1992 edition of his work that’s missing from the 2008 paperback edition I now have. Part of this missing bit resonates for me, affirming the power of a landscape that is my project, as well as the elusiveness of a particular writer who seemed to slip away into a mysterious silence, but may now be coming back. Here’s the relevant portion of the missing note. Mitchell is speaking in the third person of himself:
“For several years, he has been going back to North Carolina more and more often and spends months at a time down there helping reforest some cut-over timberland and worn-out farmland along the edge of Ashpole Swamp, going into the swamp now and then to look for wildflowers and for woodpeckers and hawks, which are his favorite birds. Once, deep in the swamp, looking through binoculars, he watched for an hour or so as a pileated woodpecker tore the bark off the upper trunk and limbs of a tall old dead blackgum tree, and he says he considers this the most spectacular event he has ever witnessed.”
Mr. Mitchell demonstrates something important here. (No doubt he was also exaggerating a bit, as one might in the moment.) If he could lift a revelation with woodpecker to higher praise than all other phenomena he’d presented in his writing, then it’s clear that the swamp protects much more than trees and animals within its thickets and muddy water. It must be a refuge and guardian of the human imagination.
Below is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about the late Mary Gilkerson’s fine paintings. It predates the book, but it’s fully in line with Swampitude.
Mary Gilkerson’s Minervaville Light
Mary Gilkerson wants to use the dirt of Lower Richland to make paint. As she drove us, on the second day of spring, through a landscape she loves, she explained the ease of that process, the mortar and pestle of it, and her delight in the range of ochres in the clay and even the lavenders it shares with the trees just greening above it. Our movement wasn’t really a drive in the country; it was more a weaving through the background, subject matter, affection, context, and intention of her art. All these things, with the skills accumulated from moving paint around for decades, transfer onto the paintings she’s made along Minervaville, Elm Savannah, Weston, and other small back roads in the suddenly and surprisingly rural country south of Columbia.
Drained by Cabin Branch, Cedar Creek, and Dry Branch, Gilkerson’s subject terrain leans toward the Congaree Swamp, and she has made paintings there that catch the many strains of light that the great trees break and gather to themselves. Capping a recent residency, she painted three walls of an alcove in the swamp’s visitor’s center with a mural depicting seasonal changes in that vast shelter of the imagination. Benches are also there along the walls to rest a visitor’s body and perhaps to thrill his heart and mind with what he will or has seen.
Good art often delivers a thrill, a jolt, which might be followed by a challenge. “Take care of what you see” might be one. “Respect your eyes prior to your mind’s first impression or projection” could be another challenge. “Save your world” is perhaps one more. You can add your own. The challenge to the first landscape architects of Lower Richland was how to preserve their vast system of forced labor and their fortunes made in slaves and cotton. They had little time for any art native to their circumstances. They preferred portraits of themselves in dark, formal costumes, pictures that reinforced their fragile positions atop an unsustainable food chain. They come down to us as ghosts, would-be aristocrats who briefly controlled their time.
The history of putting pigment on some surface in order to commemorate events —to give them a longer life than ours—goes back at least as far as the Lascaux cave painters. The pictures may include people, how she or he or an odd clutch of Spanish royalty or a group of Dutch burghers were seen by an artist at a certain time. The events may have seemed terribly important, and sometimes a genre called historical painting elevates or seeks to preserve that importance. The artist might hope to be elevated along with the event depicted. Sometimes the people and the events are myths, products of the imagination, fantasies, gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs. In our time, the events can be the paintings themselves: how colors, lines, forms, and gestures interact. The material of life transferred onto a surface is open to interpretation or left to the imagination of the viewer. Actually, this has always been so.
Edward Ball, who has notably revealed himself as the scion of a slaveholding family, recently wrote in The New York Times that “in white memory the plantations of the antebellum South were like a necklace of country clubs strewn across the land.” The “p” word still spells success in real estate, or it would have gone out of use long ago. But, as Ball goes on, “In reality, [plantations] were a chain of work camps in which four million were imprisoned,” and he observes a continuing “resonance” of slavery across our country. Where I live now on the coast, residents of St. Helena Island, black and white, still identify themselves as living on ground named for plantations such as Orange Grove or Oaks or Scott or Tombee. The so-called “power of place” in the South, the pull of the region, cannot be separated from its painful history, and that history profoundly separates the region from American exceptionalism. As I write, another anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is passing. How many visitors to Manhattan, perhaps on their way to the 9/11 memorials, linger over that shameful tragedy of 1911, that leaping from windows to escape the flames? Actually, there are no exceptions.
Lower Richland County, in the half century before the Civil War, was defined by a dozen or more large plantations whose owners brooked no towns. Some, like James Hopkins Adams, could send their children away to be educated in the capitals of Europe. Others, like Keziah Hopkins Brevard, childless, widowed by another Southern man with a drinking problem, and left, a woman alone, responsible for huge holdings and hundreds of inherited slaves, were afraid of places where other people, including slaves, might congregate. They were terrified of what might happen with any slippage in white social control. To this day, Richland County south of Columbia contains no incorporated towns but Eastover, whose population at the last census was only 813. All that said, this history has bequeathed advantages: beautiful rural retreats close by tired city dwellers; landscapes that time held long enough for preservation as Congaree National Park, the Cowasee Basin, and in the many easements gathered by the Congaree Land Trust. Artists have a worthy and weighty subject down there.
Mary Gilkerson has made the fields and treelines along Minervaville Road and the nearby lanes between Cedar Creek and Cabin Branch her great subject. She has painted them over and over again. Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts, Minerva was often borrowed for the naming of schools, and a Minervaville Academy, with the village that grew around it, was born around 1800 in Lower Richland. That smudge of civitas lasted but a few years. Inherent troubles needed a place to gather and expend themselves; Minervaville developed a reputation for rowdiness that doomed it as a town and took the school down with it. The whole place was plowed under, and today Minervaville Road traverses one of the widest single expanses of cultivated farmland in the county. While nothing remains of the town and school but a historical marker, a better spirit of Minerva continues there in Gilkerson’s painting the changing light across the fields. The art that comes of it is a song of praise and—Gilkerson knows this well—a kind of redemption of the past and of passing time.
Decades of apprenticeship to the engagements of oil paint, eye, and hand come to bear on her paintings, some no bigger than a modem or a paperback novel, some completed en plein air in one day, paintings applied to a landscape through all its subtle seasonal shifts, under the often dramatic changes of weather and light and time of day, a landscape that has also been cultivated for at least three centuries. The weather in Minervaville—Afternoon Clouds mounts toward the viewer in clouds whose high whiteness tries to corral the mauve and lavender underbellies threatening to dissolve into blue. The golden field seems to have forced this drifting, and the deep green line of trees in the distance keeps pulling clouds from the western horizon. Already the dark eastern faces of the three “tree islands” with their “sky holes” (Gilkerson’s phrases) tell us of the coming night. Summer Backroad with its deep, cool shadows is a nearby shelter from the sun, reminding us of our bare feet in the red dirt of the road, which looks good enough to eat, or to make paint…
Quitman Marshall 