TALES FROM A BLACK GIRL ON FIRE, OR WHY I HATE TO WALK OUTSIDE AND SEE THINGS BURNING

 

I drove into the countryside outside of Appomattox, Virginia. I was going to a party at a friend’s ancestral farm. Thick-branched woods grew densely on either side of the road, absorbing all peripheral moonlight. Wind shook limbs until they waved. I didn’t recognize these gnarled and night-blackened trees. Now and then something startling broke loose and knocked hard on my rear window, my moon roof, my windshield. An acorn. Maybe a pine cone. A twig. Dead ropes of kudzu dangled here and there, and all my people’s horror stories worried through my head. Why was I out in the country at night? Didn’t I know better?

The path illuminated in front of me seemed to lead directly to a cemetery. I could see crosses staked throughout the lawn, cut flowers, newly upturned dirt. A white angel guarded the entrance. As I approached, the road turned sharply. I passed the churchyard, the church, more woods.

Behind the big house, I saw them. Though they’d seen me first. Seven or eight revelers, beer bottles in their hands and an old-time country tune still on their tongues, were pointing in my direction. Their bright skin glowed pinkly in the light of a ten-foot fire. They’d been expecting me.

In the broader light I could see bats the bonfire had disturbed. These were their hours to consume.

•

WHEN I LIVED IN VIRGINIA, I associated open fire with historically informed terror. Many of my Southern white friends enjoyed hosting bonfires, but I started to decline their gracious invitations. Though their gatherings often began with a pleasant hike and a lovely dinner al fresco, I could never relax on these outings. I knew the woods we walked through would reveal their malice because I was conditioned to fear. Eventually the fire would be lit and my friends’ faces transformed.

For the seven years I lived in Lynchburg, I occupied several historical planes at once. I lived in a community that was legally desegregated and essentially welcoming, but I (and it) retained the legacies of times when liberty was not a given. There had been plenty of lynching parties in that part of the country. I couldn’t help wondering, while wandering through the Southern woods, if one such event might have happened on the ground where I stood. I had no interest in reliving history, through memory or experience. Campfires and bonfires represented a conflation between the natural world and the human. The wood in those piles was innocent and yet acted out a role. Because I was afraid of what humans had done to other humans in those woods and on those tree-provided fires, I’d come to fear the forests and the trees.

•

WHEN THE OPPORTUNITY AROSE, I left that neck of the woods. I found myself spending the summer at an artist’s colony in Maine. There, the legacy of racial violence didn’t haunt me the same way. I could hike solo again. Leaf disturbance, the sound of deer in the distance, filled me with wonder, not fear. Ravens warned me off their path and I felt no sense of personal foreboding. I could spend hours tracking wildflowers, losing myself in the dense forest, and never be afraid of who or what might find me there. I was, again, at liberty in the wild.

After a long stretch of such freedom, it began to storm. The rains lasted six days and all the residents of the colony were trapped inside. On the seventh day it cleared. After dinner, reluctant to return to the cabins we’d worked in all week, we decided on a party so we could linger outside listening to the birds, the rustling leaves, and the lapping waves.

The bonfire pit, dug expertly by the sculptor, was perfectly safe. Still, I couldn’t get comfortable. All the writers brought drafts to use as tinder. I torched the one about the wild iris’s melancholy glister under the moon. I didn’t want to write about desperation anymore. The fire warmed all of us, even the dogs. The hound who ran the woods circled me twice before laying its head at my heels.

A painter found a stump that looked like the torso of a man. It had a knot where the navel should be, a twig protruding from the juncture where the solid trunk branched in two directions. There was some banter about the facile ease with which certain artists impress human experience upon the natural world. This was a log, we understood. Still: “Man on fire!” Some of them laughed.

I diverted my eyes from the limbs that reached out of the flames. The hand that extended toward me, whiter than ever silhouetted by the fire, passed me some wine. Everything around the fire was still wet from the rains. We leaned against each other watching sparks join the stars, flying heaven knew where.

Calm down. It’s safe out here. I had to repeat this to myself many times.

•

I GREW UP in the semi-arid hillsides of Southern California, where the spark from a campfire, a stray cigarette, a car’s exhaust pipe, or a magnifying glass trained on one thing too long could kindle a firestorm that will burn a hundred homes, scorch innocent animals, and demolish thousands of acres of habitat. From a young age I heard warnings about open fires. I was told to be cautious around anything that might ignite and people who find pleasure in starting a blaze. Just as I grew up aware of the historical dangers of being black and discovered outside, I knew to fear fire.

Within the context of my received history I read most words and behaviors as potentially devastating. I know the sparks from any fire might provoke a life-engulfing blaze. History is a crucible, but that night in Maine I realized American history alone was not the root of my fear of succumbing to flames. That night in Maine, I realized that as much as I feared the danger posed to my own person when I encountered white people around a fire, I also feared the sparks that erupted from fire and the violence those sparks could visit on a landscape.

The danger fire posed to a human and the danger fire posed to a habitat: I had conflated these. When I encounter fire, these separate fears become one and the same.

•

YOU’VE BEEN TAUGHT not to play with fire. Your whole life, you’ve known the rules. When you live in this country, you have to know the rules.

Yucca, ice plant, chaparral pea, bigcone Douglas fir: even the plants here make provisions for flame. There are those that hoard water to make of themselves an extinguisher, and there are those gamblers that reproduce best in scorched terrain. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. It’s inhospitable here, dry and dangerous. A desert unless you own the water rights. Sudden Oak Death strikes and dead limbs litter the landscape. It’s a tinderbox, this country. Now look what you’ve done. The whole family’s in danger. The whole neighborhood. Acres of wild country. All the beasts and all the birds. You had to look. You wouldn’t look away. A child with a magnifying glass you were. That thin-waisted wasp caught beneath your lens’s gaze. When those sparks found wind, you could not quench the flame. And now, this terrifying blaze.

You knew. You know. You’ve been taught not to play with fire.