Land is a Maudlin thing

 

Yesterday I listened to a moving talk by "Bootsie" Bullock, Chief of the local Patawomeck Tribe. The Chief described a Potomac Creek that I recognized immediately: a place where -- until sometime in the late 1970s, perhaps -- a kid could wander freely across property lines in search of fish or simply a good spot to while away the hours. People didn't care; we local kids were mostly invisible to adults with bigger things to worry about. 

That Creek is gone now. Today, it's always a struggle to find access to fields, woods, and water, as property values have increased and landowners have become, for lack of a better word, meaner.

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I’m no Marxist, but on Potomac Creek for the last four centuries and until quite recently, it’s fair to say that nothing influenced people’s status and equanimity more than their relationship to the means of production. And that has usually meant their possession – or lack of possession – of privately-held land. If you knew someone’s property in this traditionally rural society, you would know, with only the mildest hyperbole, who they are. 

That weightiness has never quite faded away; people with roots in the County frequently break into tears when discussing land, even with complete strangers.

However, Potomac Creek runs through Virginia, which means landownership is also tied to relations between the races. “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” the state song from 1940 until 1997 (and now, its official “song emeritus,” whatever that means), began with the lyrics

Carry me back to old Virginny,

There’s where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,

There’s where the birds warble sweet in the spring-time,

There’s where the old darkey’s heart am long’d to go.

The song’s blithe racism and nostalgia for slavery – the singer yearns to see his beloved “massa” in the afterlife – overwhelm the senses. Regrettably, its racism also buries an implicit but more universal message of the sweetness of fecund land. Such land, which Virginia enjoys in abundance, is perhaps the most coveted resource in human history.

Virginia historically is one of a subset of societies where land runs hand-in-hand with racial or ethnic segregation. I visited other such places while working overseas. In South Africa during apartheid (“separateness” in Afrikaans), townships like Soweto concentrated Black laborers in one place, making them easier for Whites to control. The land of the occupied Palestinian West Bank is coveted by Jewish settlers and controlled by the Israeli military. The conflict over land infuses virtually every aspect of Palestinian life.

For centuries, in ways that resemble and differ from these places, the urgency of skin color has permeated land relations in Virginia. My family faced this reality as soon as we moved to Stafford County from Indiana. Looking for a place to rent, my White German mother saw a newspaper ad and met with the landlord. When my Asian father appeared after work to see the house, it quickly became unavailable. I was three years old then, and about to enter the area’s first racially integrated preschool. That same year, 1967, the Supreme Court issued Loving v. Virginia, a decision that found the state’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. 

All this history of conscious ordering/reordering continues to affect where our feet touch the soil. Chief Bullock remarked that his tribe now leases property from Stafford County. The people after whom the waters are named owns no land of its own. Let's hope that changes soon.

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"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness" Aldo Leopold wrote. It's easy to be maudlin about Potomac Creek, and no one should be so stupid to want to exchange the present for the past. That young people are less likely to face or be complicit in overt racism now than before is something to be grateful for. But they cannot roam as we did, either.