FOUND:
A Finney Woman Reimagining the Great Outdoors
Before I moved away from Lexington, Kentucky, my dear friend, Kate Black, wise woman of the kitchen, gardener extraordinaire, and sincerest of human souls, had the lovely habit of leaving various and amazing magazine or newspaper articles in my mailbox or folded into the screen of my front door. Kate’s big mind was always flying through the world on the lookout for great new books and the iconic under-the-radar human beings proposing them. Kate was my friend but she was also my "new book" scout in the world.
In December 2013, after living in South Carolina for only a few months, to my great surprise, Kate emailed me. I couldn’t believe it. Kate and I do more with pencil and pen than email. Attached to her email was the announcement of a new book coming down the publishing pipeline from the University of North Carolina Press. The dedicated book scout was still on the case!The book was titled: Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney. "Do you know this woman?" Kate wrote, "Is she related to you?" Kate asked again. "I think you need to know about this!" Kate is often blunt in the most refreshing of ways.
Carolyn Finney? Carolyn Finney? Carolyn Finney?
I had heard this name somewhere before? Someone had mentioned her to me somewhere. I couldn’t remember. I had spent the last two years of my life being swept up in the whirlwind of readings, travel, and moving that I had dropped the ball to find out more. I did remember that whoever had mentioned her name had also asked the same question about familial and psychic connections. I googled "Carolyn Finney" and found that like me she was teaching and writing in the university environment, like me she was a Black woman, and like me we shared an unusual Black woman last name. Something in my belly told me to not miss the opportunity again to know more. I read on. Carolyn Finney was a Black woman raised in Virginia. Virginia was my father’s sacred home ground. The plot thickened. Carolyn Finney was a Black woman of my generation who had written a book about her love and relationship with the "great outdoors." Something old and powerful was coming together for me as I learned more.
"Finney" had always been a very particular and odd name to bear, as a Black girl growing up in the deep Confederate south. "Finney" was an Irish name and I had never met another Black "Finney" man or woman who was not related to me. When her photo finally appeared by way of the Internet it made me smile. I didn’t know if we were related and it really didn’t matter. She seemed to wear her goodness and courage in her face and eyes, eyes that were clear and strong. I trusted her immediately. I rarely question things and people that appear in my life in such pure ways. I try to follow my belly and the voice of my ancestors, who are always whispering in my ear each day; to turn left, right, or move in a circle or counter clockwise. The old ones implored me to do something I rarely do. I had to find Carolyn Finney. I found her email address and wrote to her. By the end of that week she had written me back – from Japan – half way around the world she was hanging out and teaching Japanese students the history of brown and Black folks and the wild blue yonder.
Black Faces, White Spaces by Carolyn Finney is a brilliant exploration of the absence of Black people in our modern day conversations and policy discussions regarding the great outdoors. It’s an engaging, essential book. And for me the subject and connections that Finney makes are incredibly personal. While swimming through its pages I rediscovered memory after memory, moments of my girl self and my girl life that built the life I now love and adore, how the great outdoors was my first true home. The Atlantic Ocean and its sacred shore was clearly where I dreamed the life of a poet into being. The salty sea has remained embedded like a watery jewel deep in my inner ear. Even during those years when I lived far away from the sea and found myself stowed away in the most landlocked of places I would simply walk my long legged self straight into the arms of the mountains for a similar natural healing.
In Black Faces, White Spaces, I found and felt my grandparent’s farm, in Newberry, South Carolina, seventy-five acres of pine and oak trees that I roamed as a girl, my personal dream world and laboratory. The honeysuckle mornings of my childhood were in this book. Those many tadpole afternoons, where at eleven and twelve, I had lost all sense of time and sunk myself, bottom first, into some pond’s wet bank, reading Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries. The out-of-doors was where I had walked and prayed for mercy from the cruel mean world, where I discovered wholeness of silence, where all the genuine sounds and colors of my life were born. The great outdoors was where I disappeared into poetry, where I read my favorite poets aloud, where I did not have to explain my love for quiet or my most private, comfortable, outlier feelings, or my Black girl poet weirdness and eccentricities. It was my most perfect place. It was the place where I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone or anything. It was where me and my overalls -- could just be me and my overalls. And now – here was this Black woman, with the same last name as mine, from my father’s birth ground, who was wondering aloud, into the nitrogen and oxygen and bee hum and passion flowers, why, historically and presently, had Black people been left out of the discussion, photograph, and the official ochre-orange honeysuckle wilderness? I love this life.
Dear World, Carolyn Finney’s first book, Black Faces, White Spaces, has just been published. It’s OUT!!! It’s HERE! Available!! I am writing and posting this letter because part of my responsibility as a poet, and community citizen, is to alert those I care about to new, lovely, profound things. I guess I want to be your book scout in the same spirit that Kate Black is mine. I want you to know about this book. Nothing quite like it has ever been written before. It deserves a great welcome by all of us.
Dr. Carolyn Finney and I are not related by family history. We are connected by way of how we both feel about the great outdoors. She is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, policy, and management at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written and sent us a remarkable gift of a book. It is a message for now and for the future. She is a lovely and fabulous scholar who is using traditional methods of scholarship and non-traditional methods of scholarship, to create a new geography for Geography.
Carolyn Finney is a mango, bee, swamp, sunflower girl and she has planted herself and her life in the heart of an important conversation. She, like so many of us, wants to see a more viable, responsible, aware planet. She is a geographer by training but she is led and girded by art, humanity, and its many first person provocations. She wants Mother Nature, and the powerful scintillating out-of-doors, to more resemble the real world and not just the privileged world. How can I put this: She doesn’t accept the notion that Smokey the Bear is the only brown body moving through the woods! (Apologies to Smokey the Bear! )
I am sounding the sweet bell for Carolyn Finney and her new work. You might want to pass on word about it too. Last week she was being interviewed on The Root. Next week Tavis Smiley has invited her to be on his Los Angeles PBS television show. Check for the date! Word about this wonderful book, and all its wonderful insights, is truly getting around. I know why.
Here is a just a taste from Black Faces, White Spaces that has so much to do with the world we live in today: In the mid-twentieth century, the United States reached its adolescence, so to speak, as a nation, and as such, we indulged our whims, stretched our limbs, and challenged anyone who got in our way. Consequently, by the late 1950’s, we began to recognize the error of some of our ways and began to legislate values and behaviors that would set us straight as a nation, particularly as they pertained to race and the environment. The Wilderness Act and The Civil Rights Act are two of our most enduring and powerful pieces of legislation in the United States. Both legislative acts were passed in 1964, the Wilderness Act on September 3 and the Civil Rights Act on July 2. The power and longevity of these two documents are reflected in their influence on meaning, practice, and the elasticity of American identity. In particular, both pieces of legislation have influenced how we frame, name, and claim issues relating to environment and race. " {Carolyn Finney)
And best of all, I promise, you don’t have to be a Black woman named "Finney" to let her message properly arrange or rearrange your imagining of the great outdoors.
Eyes wide open,
Nikky