Never Put Your Feet Where Your Eyes Cain’t See: A Meditation on Deepness

Deep is a spatial term, one that has significantly more powerful social and psychological dimensions than other adjectives such as narrow or wide. The word has a long-standing connotation as a synonym for profound. In 1845 Frederick Douglass wrote of how he did not understand the “deep meaning” of slave songs when he was still captive (28). Lunsford Lane, another former slave, reflected in 1842 about how bitter it was to be under the total control of another human being, writing, “deep was this feeling and it preyed upon my heart like a never-dying worm” (8). When uttered aloud in the present moment, the expression “deep” continues to mark an observation of importance and complexity that invites lingering pause and reflection.

Although deep is an adjective that signifies the affective, it is grounded in units of measurement connected to the physical world. As a scholar of inter-American geographies, for example, I find that the word deep most immediately evokes the sea, its unfathomability coupled with its hemispheric expansiveness. It is relational and connective. And yet when followed by the word south, deep carries a certain heaviness associated with isolation. I refer particularly to rural isolation, captivity, and poverty. My scholarly work on slavery and my own family’s history of that institution and its aftermath generate images of back-breaking fieldwork, torturous punishments, hunger, and living far from schools or medical care. “Deepness” connotes a certain stuckedness in hostile territory. “Inner city” has comparable allegorical connotations for deepness, albeit in urban landscapes.

This reflection uses the concept of the deep to tie together rural geographic locations of the antebellum and Jim Crow South, the presence of esoteric knowledge within the black community, and the profundity of sentiment—often sublimated—felt by slaves and their descendants. In an era of commercial, scholarly, and political connectivity (globalization, diaspora, transnationalism) it is important to remember that the study of interiority provides an alternate entrée into intellectual, artistic, and emotional life. I am reminded of the criticisms made by the Nigerian scholar Wande Abimbola, who observed that despite living in the so-called age of information, few of us can identify more than a dozen of the common plants that surround us, much less their medicinal or other properties.¹ At its best, isolation results in a rootedness that brings about communal self-reliance. Deepness can serve as a methodological guide to assessing a region and a people mired in centuries of violent contact and antagonisms. It invites an exploration of where we get stuck and how we might get free.

My meditation on deepness is rooted in the junction between the landscape and the imaginative world. Specifically, I discuss the dynamic relationship between black communities and the popular wisdom they developed from their simultaneously hostile and cooperative coexistence with the environment. The specificity of place—in these examples woods and swamps—combined with the omnipresence of racial terror to generate ways of knowing and being. My framing reflects a personal concern with how this knowledge was and continues to be passed down between community elders and children. The act of storytelling plays a vital role in keeping people safe. And there is no deeper urge than to keep children safe in a context in which they lead precarious existences and the law provides little or no remedy for their protection. Narrative storytelling remains an active strategy of teaching, warning, and remembering. Hence, proverbs that have shaped my own upbringing structure this account of deep danger, deep trauma, and ultimately, deep wisdom.²

NEVER PUT YOUR FEET WHERE YOUR EYES CAIN’T SEE, OR, IT DOESN’T TAKE A PROPHET TO PREDICT BAD LUCK”

I am a Yankee southerner. This appellation will not seem an oxymoron to the many who grew up in the northern United States but spent significant amounts of time in the South with extended family. I confess that Faulkner’s oft-quoted dictum that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (92) remains amazingly prescient to me each time...