#DrainTheSwamp
A Note on Ecologies of Black Unfreedom
Gulf, Florida & Alabama Railway Company turpentine camp. 19--. Black &
white photoprint, 5 x 7 in. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
<https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/17685>, accessed 16 October
2019.
Salvador Zárate
Dr. Salvador Zárate is University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Winner of the 2018 American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation, he is currently finishing his book manuscript, "The Social Life of Plants: Black and Latina Reproductive Laborers in the U.S. Sunbelt, 1921-1963." He also writes on immigrant labor and the ecology in Orange County’s residential gardening economy, which he worked since he was a child. His reviews, essays, and creative works have appeared in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Anthropology and Humanism, and Cultural Anthropology.
Since Toni Morrison’s passing, perhaps because I research ecologies of racial capital, I have thought a lot about the passage in Beloved where Sethe, who is living with a ghost of antebellum plantation slavery in her home, describes the process by which a Southern chokecherry tree (prunus virginiana) was made to grow on her back. More precisely, I have thought of Sethe’s description of the chokecherry tree as resulting from extraction; the forced taking of her milk and the draining of her blood with a cowhide on the Sweet Home plantation: “Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree” (Morrison 1987, 20). Morrison has given us the language to understand how the extraction of the flesh through ungendering violence (Spillers 2003, 207) is a process of power and domination, violence and mutilation, that (re)produces the Southern landscape from the flesh of the slave. And although the layers of social sinew of postbellum legal personhood attempt to abstract and distance the extraction of the flesh, the chokecherry tree remains a hieroglyphic and a living ecology– prunus virginiana growing in postbellum time, turning blood into “sap” underneath Sethe’s flesh. Sethe meditates: “Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know” (Morrison 1987, 18).
I. Swamp Expropriation Across the Twittersphere
My invocation of Morrison’s black unfree ecologies results from drawing out the material history of postbellum swamp expropriation at a moment when our current-day political discourse has become saturated in abstract swamplands. Most notably, that of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which grounded his adversarial relationship to Washington D.C.’s political establishment deep in metaphorical swamp ecologies. Trump used Twitter to roll out of a five-point plan to limit the political influence of lobbyists, stating: “I will Make Our Government Honest Again – believe me. But first, I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp in DC” (@realDonaldTrump, October 18, 2016). Trump’s call to “drain the swamp,” now a common refrain at his political rallies, gained significant traction by appealing to his supposed status as political outsider and positioned him as uniquely capable of clearing the political mire caused by politicians’ and private interests’ murky back-door dealings. Is it a coincidence that swamps should be invoked at the very moment that conservatives and white supremacists are calling for a remaking of America (into its past)?
An even simpler question: What does “drain the swamp” actually mean? The metaphor’s circulation back into the American popular lexicon has spurred a wide-array of public interest pieces trying to piece together its origin and use in U.S. politics. While some have written of the supposed efficacy of Trump’s battle against the swamp, others have kept a headcount of the number of indictments coming from his own office. A piece in The New Yorker took the metaphor’s meteoric rise in public consciousness as an opportunity to explore the Capital Building’s construction on actual swamplands– “on shaky ground,” as the author put it (Widmer, 2017). What if, however, we shift focus from the Capital to capital; from the metaphorical “shaky ground” of political institutions to the black unfree ecologies of swamp expropriation from which the settler state has continually sought to remake itself?
To do so, let’s tarry a moment in Trump’s twitter-slogan “Make Our Government Honest Again” for the way it doubles his racist campaign slogan “make America great again.” This transcription of “drain the swamp” into a MAGA dog-whistle pining for a Jim Crow past leads us to consider how any supposed concessions gained by limiting private interests, the so-called draining of the swamp, has only ever been imagined, as Carol Anderson (2016) has succinctly put it, as the means to secure “access to America’s resources [for] ‘whites only’ again.” In fact, the expansion of white life through the expropriation and accumulation of resources is tightly bound to actual swamp draining; a history of dual ecological and subjective extraction of pine and black bodies.
In the early colonial era, for example, settler colonists forced enslaved Africans to drain the swamps of the Carolinas to secure the extraction of resin, a viscous sap bled from pine that was refined into a sealant for ships and used to secure/subject human and non-human cargo to Atlantic weather (Outland 2004; Edelson 2007).[i] To extract resin, the enslaved chopped as deeply as possible into swamp forest pine without killing the tree. This dangerous and demanding work created a series of interlaced wounds (called a “cat-face”) in the shape of an arrow’s fletching that stretched down the tree’s trunk to its base, where a pot was hung, and/or steel pans and blades were physically inserted by force, ensuring that the pine would be bled for multiple days. This process was repeated by alternating the wounding across the pine’s sides over a span of years, keeping the tree on the brink of death for as long as possible as a means to maximize accumulation. Once tapped, trees were felled for lumber. Some pines remain etched with scars to this day.
It wasn’t long before industry denuded the Carolinas, forcing operators to push south across the Atlantic seaboard, eventually reaching pine stands in northwest and central Florida during the postbellum era (Jones 2005). While the technologies of swamp pine forest extraction remained little-changed for over two-hundred years, the end of chattel slavery required new legal and extralegal technologies for remaking black unfreedom (Shofner 1981; Hartman 1997). This updating, or regime maintenance as Cedric Robinson (2007) has termed it, entailed forms of unfreedom buttressing postbellum modes of liberal humanist free labor that, in the isolated swamp forests of Florida, meant the subjection of the newly freed to the “death litany” of vagrancy statutes, the chain gang, convict-leasing (and subleasing), and usage of wage contract and debt bondage. Ultimately, Florida’s swamp industries, as part of the “southern labor colony,” played a significant role in the rerouting of global finance capital to the U.S. North through private investment squared on the continuation of black unfreedom in the South, which in turn extended the life of the settler nation-state (180-185).
The literature on Jim Crow swamp forest economies is incomplete. It has focused on the labor and social life of male workers, with little attention to black women’s sociality and reproductive labor necessary for its expansion. The gendering of black women’s labor in Florida’s swamp industry has resulted in the effacing of their relation to and critiques of racial capital’s regimes of race and accumulation.[ii] In my own work, I draw on legal documents, business ledgers, and Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic and literary writings, which is to say her own form of extraction, to center how the extraction of black women’s inseparable biological and social life was the precept to swamp expropriation, the emergence of modern anthropology, and, building on the work of Sarah Haley (2016), the precondition to Jim Crow modernity.[iii] This undertaking requires a radical rereading of Hurston’s work as marking black women’s deep social practices of queer kinship and theorization of ecological destruction and survival in the wake of continued expropriation of land premised on the draining of their life and bodies. Building on what Kalindi Vora calls life-creative activity, often referred to as reproductive labor, we may apprehend how the extraction of life from workers as “an accumulation strategy, which depend(s) on structures of racialized and gendered difference,” is also at the core of processes of settler ecological extraction (2015, 9). Ultimately, I demonstrate how gendered forms of accumulation and dispossession are central to swamp expropriation but also sites from which black women challenged the very systems of racial capital that sought to appropriate their life and labor.
II. Ecoglyphs
“I’m draining the Swamp, and the Swamp is trying to fight back. Don’t worry, we will win!” (@realDonaldTrump, September 5, 2018). Trump’s tweetmogrification of the swamp into an abstract force that is encircling U.S. society draws on a long history of the swamp as a racialized threat to liberal humanist ideologies of subjectivity that if not kept in check will over-run settler institutions and bodies.[iv] I read the tweet at about the same time I was on a hike in a Florida regional park in the region that Hurston had undertaken some of her ethnographic research. There, amidst the svelte pine, I noticed blades buried deep into the trunk of scarred tree. The blades, which were most likely placed sometime during the early Jim Crow era, ran with the grain of cat-face wounds and formed a kind of lattice to maximize the collection of sap. Now, the blades were partially submerged by large bulb formations, overtaken and taking on a warped semblance, a “rememory” of enmeshed pine and subjective extraction; the inverse pair to Sethe’s chokecherry tree. It is a haunting index of the accumulation of racialized bodies and ecologies that inhabit what it means to #DrainTheSwamp.
REFERENCES
Allewaert, Monique. 2013. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Anderson, Carol. “Donald Trump is the Result of White Rage, Not Economic Anxiety.” Time, November 16, 2016. https://time.com/4573307/donald-trump-white-rage.
Edelson, S. M. 2007. “Clearing Swamps, Harvesting Forests: Trees and the Making of a Plantation Landscape in the Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry.” Agriculture History 81 (3): 381-406.
Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2016. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.”
Haley, Sarah. 2016. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Jones, William. 2005. The Tribe of the Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
King, Tiffany L. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Morrison, Toni. (1987) 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage International.
Outland III, Robert. 2004. Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Robinson, Cedric. 2007. Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & The Regimes of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shofner, Jerrel. 1981. “Forced Labor in the Florida Forests, 1880-1950.” Journal of Forest History 25 (1): 14-25.
Spillers, Hortense. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Vora, Kalindi 2015 Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Widmer, Ted. 2017. “Draining the Swamp.” New York Times, January 19, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/draining-the-swamp.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[i] The swamp naval stores, as they were termed, were a cornerstone of the colony’s economy and were rivaled only by cotton and tobacco (Outland 2004). I am invoking Christina Sharpe’s (2016) notion of “weather,” which she categorizes as “a singularity– a weather event” that is the “total climate” of anti-blackness and which is constantly being remade: “the weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies” (106).
[ii] In Hartman’s discussion of black women and the category of labor, she highlights the difficulty of “assimilat[ing] black women’s domestic labors and reproductive capacities with narratives of the black worker […] even as this labor was critical to the creation of value, the realization of profit and the accumulation of capital (2016, 167).
[iii] Robinson has noted that swamp conifer industries played a crucial role in the financing of turn-of-the-century World Fairs– the stomping ground of modern anthropology (2007, 185).
[iv] See Monique Allewaert (2013). Also, Édouard Glissant (1997), Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), and Kathryn Yusoff (2018).