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Swamped! A review of Anthony Wilson's "Shadow and Shelter" and an interview with the author Swamped! A review of Anthony Wilson's "Shadow and Shelter" and an interview with the authorBy MIKE WALKER "Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture"
Most readers of this newspaper live in the counties of northern Florida to the east of Jacksonville: Duval, Baker, Columbia, Alachua, Bradford, Suwannee, Hamilton . . . and of course, the counties of southeast Georgia. In these places-in places like Moniac, Taylor, Homerville, Mayo, Fargo-the swamp greets us on all sides, even with the vast pine forests surrounding us, even with modern construction and multi-lane roadways, we're still owned it often seems by the dusky, wet, places we know as swamps. The edges of the swamps-those places where firm land fit for farming meets dense undergrowth and brown water fit for cottonmouths and cooters-often define where humans can (or at least wish) to live and where their development of the northern-Florida/southern-Georgia landscape must come to a rest. Yet despite all this, how many of us consider the historical and literary impact swamps have had on southerners like ourselves or even what defines a wetland as a "swamp"? As they are often aspects of the landscape we avoid more than we care to visit, swamps are often neglected by default despite the acres they take up in the greater geography of our region. Anthony Wilson, a professor of English at LaGrange College in Georgia, has written a most interesting book titled "Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture" which explores the role of the swamp in the minds and souls of southerners. As one would expect for an English professor, a lot of the emphasis here is on representations of swamps in literature, but Wilson also investigates the image of the swamp in film, society, history, and politics. Overall, his unique book is the only comprehensive effort I am aware of to look into the position of the swamp in southern lore and history and as the book itself quickly proves, this is a very worthy effort. As swamps so define-often without us even realizing their import-how and where we live in parts of our region, they have made their way into the collective imagination and mythos of southern culture. I had a very welcome opportunity to discuss the book with Dr. Wilson via a short email interview and he was kind enough to provide some detailed responses to questions I asked: Mike Walker: As you point out in the book, the swamp is an ill-defined yet unique feature to the southern landscape. Much of northern Florida and southern Georgia in fact are covered by wetlands that could be defined as swamps, and these areas are also rich in timber and other resources but not very suited to conventional agriculture. Do you feel that swamps have in this region (Georgia/Florida) caused people to change their approach to making a living and have in a sense offered a refuge for those who are interested in a less mainstream lifestyle? Anthony Wilson: I think this is absolutely the case. Particularly in the pre-industrial South, I think there were two major approaches to the swamps: first, the aristocratic, impractical approach of shunning the swamps because they didn't fit the idealized image of the gentleman farmer exercising total dominion over his lands; and second, the more pragmatic approach of realizing that the swamps offered bounties of their own that could be had by those willing to extract them. The middle and lower class Southerners who were willing to abandon the plantation ideal enough to become trappers, for example, could be quite prosperous, even if an aristocratic minority unwilling to "stoop" to such activities dismissed them as swamp rats. One could -- as many Native American tribes did -- live off the swamp's bounty with considerably less effort than it often took to raise crops on cleared land. The swamp as refuge, though, crosses class lines. Even aristocratic Southerners, particularly as boys, tended to go into the swamps for recreation -- hunting, fishing, et cetera -- independent of their professional pursuits. The swamp, in a sense, served the same function that the frontier famously fulfilled in American literature and culture of the colonial era through the end of the 19th century: it was a space of masculine escape from the rules and strictures of domesticity and civilization. The sense of the swamp as a place of escape intensified, and lost much of its gender-specificity, during the 20th century, as swamps began disappearing (often at the hands of "invading" northern timber companies) and came to be regarded increasingly as endangered remnants of an older, distinctive, pre-industrial Southern society. Mike Walker: Swamps also have provided a refuge for projects that would not be desired or easily located near large cities, such as the massive Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Everglades. How do you see this aspect of industry in swamps versus the ecological concerns germane to swamps? Of course, the recent U.S. Sugar buy-out is another fine example of this situation. Anthony Wilson: It's definitely true that projects either undesirable or impractical for urban implementation have historically (and even recently) been carried out in the swamps. This is obviously becoming less true since wetlands are increasingly protected, but we can still definitely see ecological effects. We know now that the swamps are not so self-contained as we once believed, and that damage to and pollution of swamps has real human consequences. It's long been anecdotally and factually documented, for example, that Louisiana tends to accept hazardous waste shipments that most of the nation wouldn't touch, with companies ostensibly dumping the waste into the swamps where it pollutes the ground water, leads to higher rates of cancer and other diseases, et cetera. Not all the ecological consequences of industry meeting swamp are so clear cut, however, and many - like the U.S. Sugar buyout you mention, which could have tremendous environmental impact, but also costs jobs - come down to the age-old conflict of the immediate economic needs of people and communities and the long-term health of the ecosystem. These dilemmas are compounded, of course, by disagreements over the science: some tout the buyout as the Everglades' saving grace, while others claim that the plans to create a flow-way through the Everglades are unworkable and would not produce the desired effect. As recent debates over offshore drilling reinforce, the conflict between short-term human need and long-term ecological health is never as simple as those committed to either side of the debate tend to let on. Mike Walker: The region of Ware, Clinch, and Echols counties in south-eastern Georgia and Columbia, Hamilton, and Baker counties in northern Florida is very much swamp-bound and has found its collective character formed in large part by the swamp environment: communities are sparse and small and often one finds things like churches and graveyards nearly abandoned. How do you think this type of very rural, nearly rustic, socio-ecology forms cultural identities for people, especially kids who grow up there, today? To me, it seems so different from the experience of mainstream America with our shopping malls and big-box stores on every corner. Anthony Wilson: Swamp communities like those you describe can be likened in some ways to parts of Appalachia -- often culturally rich, certainly distinctive, but almost universally fading in the face of the ongoing economic and cultural transformation of the South. My most direct experience with this type of community came in my adolescence, when I was living in Southwest Louisiana, or "Cajun Country." In terms of forming cultural identities, I think the impact of such communities on kids growing up there varies pretty dramatically: there will be some who embrace the particularities of rural culture, and others who will run fast and far and will perhaps only appreciate their roots later in life. Increasingly, though, kids from these communities are going to school with kids from larger towns, shopping at Wal-Mart alongside everybody else, and as the internet continues its inexorable proliferation of even the most rural spaces, that kind of fundamentally insular cultural identity will at least be further challenged, if not compromised. Linda Hogan's novel "Power", which I discuss in the book, deals with issues like these in a beautifully complex and inspirational way, as do many of the works of Tim Gautreaux; Lee Smith's "Oral History" is a fantastic fictional study of a similar situation in Appalachia. Finally, I think it is still a very different experience to grow up in these swamp-based communities, but I wonder how long their distinctiveness can last in an increasingly homogenized America. I don't want to over-romanticize - often, people living in these communities tend to be economically disadvantaged and less educated than those in more developed areas - but I do think these communities tend to be bastions of authentic folk culture that risks only being preserved as an academic artifact - - - Wilson addresses in much greater detail a lot of the same themes he touched upon above in his book, and the book is certainly worth reading for its introspection not only on "swamp culture" but southern culture in general. While about swamps and using them as a touchstone for its extended cultural explorations, "Shadow and Shelter" is really a book about how a distinct and isolating ecological feature grooms human culture alongside natural history. Certain people-often those already at the economic and social margins of society-found refuge in swamps where land was cheaper and population was sparse. Those who lacked education and wealth were able to at the least make a slight living in the swamps that others who were better off would not even consider claiming as their home. The flip side of this, as Wilson mentioned above, is that patterns of undereducation and poverty often continued over entire generations and became part of the legacy of swamps that continues today. Wilson's literary examples are books he selected with care and cover a diverse span of American authors and periods of literature with contemporary novels such as "Power" by Linda Hogan contrasting with the works of famed southern poet Sidney Lanier. One of the prime points Wilson often makes is the transformation of literary interest in swamps from the model of pastoral writing of the nineteenth century to the current model of ecological and socio-ecological exploration in fiction and poetry. Joseph LeConte, a nineteenth-century zoologist and geologist, wrote with wonder of his boyhood explorations around swamps near his family home in Georgia though he also turned his scientific mind towards the possible role of swamps in disease-a long-standing fear of many prior to modern germ theory. Between the awestruck wonder he felt for swamps as a boy and the adult approach of the time that swamps were, at best, to be avoided, LeConte to an extent seemed to find a balance in how southern culture has long viewed the swamp as a landscape. For other authors, mainly those of the nineteenth century who wrote non-fiction and scientiftic accounts of swamps, there is clearly more revulsion than awe in their descriptions. Though literary currents are Wilson's main trajectory in this book, his examination of ecological approaches to swamplands in the south is also very astute and is one of the best short descriptions I have yet read of how academics, liberal environmentalists, and social-conservative sportsmen banded together at times to save wetlands and other wild areas from development. Efforts to save unique wild areas such as the Florida Everglades may now seem like obvious actions, but for years business interests such as the sugar, timber, turpentine, phosphate, and agricultural industries have designed to make use of the vast geographical areas covered by swamps. The problem has always been one of draining wetlands (nevermind the ecological dangers of doing such, the pragmatic cost and logistics have often been massive challenges) plus many swampy areas were in historic terms so isolated that getting to their resources has been very difficult in and of itself. Louis Dupré, a journalist who served as a Confederate scout in the Civil War, accounts for the "shadow and shelter" aspects of the swamp when he writes of how swamps offered cover and hiding places for those who, for this reason or that, did not want to be found. The local, of course, always knew of his swamps and the local who was also poor negro or cracker dweller of the swamp itself actually knew the intimate geography of the same. Such situations are not totally a thing of the past: our newspaper reported not long ago of a police car chase in Bradford County that ended in a long foot chase of the suspects through the dense undergrowth of the Sante Fe Swamp. By the time K-9 units and officers found the suspects, they were in an area so thick and dense that helicopter extraction was the only means of getting the captured suspects and officers out of the swamp. When we consider the expanse of swamp and the difficulty in crossing around or through these in times before automobiles and powerboats, we are faced with a situation that understandably contributed to a lot of lore, myths, and even fear. Once in the swamp, after all, it was often problematic to get out again - both in a literal and metaphoric sense. In all, Wilson's book fits its bill and covers about every period of history in terms of cultural and literary outlooks on swamps in the American south and provides in doing so a nuanced, up-to-date, view on the swamp as a cultural icon and a seat of extended mythos. Wilson is an adept writer who is clear in his prose but also skilled at bringing together a lot of information in a way that never seems overly academic or dry. In fact, when I first learned of this book I was concerned it would not hold much interest for a non-academic, non-specialist, readership but in fact it is a book that I think anyone who has lived near a southern swamp will want to read once he picks it up and starts looking through its pages. There is a wealth of information in "Shadow and Shelter" but when you read chapter after chapter, a picture of the southern swamp as a whole comes together over miles of diverse geography and decades of writing. I would love to have a book akin to Wilson's on life in the rural mountains of North Carolina or about western Texas: other areas with unique literary and socio-cultural atmospheres. "Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture" is a very rare book in that it brings together a lot of things that I wondered about now and then but never saw as being that connected; it brings in a new way of seeing the environment around us via the rich lens of literature and is, far more than a guide or review of such literature, a work of fine and engrossing non-fiction which reads like literature itself.
MIKE WALKER is a journalist and writer based out of Gainesville, Florida. He writes about ecology, natural history, sports, and social history for this and other regional, national, and international news media. He may be reached at: cloudrace@prontomail.com |
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