The Cartography of Memory: An Ecocritical Reading of Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

As a reader, I have traveled with Toni Morrison. I have gone to Shalimar, Virginia, to Lorain, Ohio, to Ruby, Oklahoma to Danville, Pennsylvania. I have journeyed to the City, the Bottom, Sweet Home, Isle des Chevaliers, Solomon's Leap, and Up Beach. I have visited 124 Bluestone Road, One Monarch Street, Not Doctor Street, Lenox Avenue, the Convent, L'Arbe de la Croix. And in the summer of 2008, I went with Toni Morrison and The Toni Morrison Society to Sullivan's Island. We journeyed to the Low Country to place a commemorative bench on the shore where nearly half of all those who survived the middle passage first set foot on American soil. The Society's "Bench by the Road Project" was sparked by Morrison's contention that the nation is bereft of African American monuments: "There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road" ("A Bench by the Road" 4). That the Society chose Sullivan's Island as the first inscription of that vision—the bench facing the Atlantic with Africa behind it—elucidates the coastal Sea Islands as an environment where place, water, and memory converge. In a ceremony where libations were poured and wreaths offered to the Charleston harbor, Morrison claimed: "It's never too late to honor the dead."

Responding to Morrison's call by creating an outdoor memorial, the Society implicitly recognized the natural world as a repository of African American cultural and literary history, an important gesture insofar as ecocriticism—defined broadly as the "study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (Glotfelty vxiii)—has routinely excluded African American history and texts. Ecocriticism was initially confined to "Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing" by British and American authors (Garrard 4). As Deming and Savoy aver, "[b]oth scientific and literary writing about nature, as traditionally defined, have not emphasized cultural difference as a tool for seeing nature, place, and environment" (5), and thus ecocritical analysis has largely been circumscribed to the work of Anglo writers. By contrast, the African American literary tradition situates place as a politically charged topography, recognizing the "interwoven fabric of nature and culture" (Deming and Savoy 14).¹ Including African American texts in the canon of environmental literature expands the contours of nature writing by reflecting the natural world in culturally specific ways: "Contemporary nature writing has moved beyond narratives of solitary encounter in the wild to explore how people and cultures have been shaped by and have shaped the land" (Deming and Savoy 6). This current trend finds an earlier analogue in the work of African American writers, who persistently attended to their physical environments; indeed, slave narratives are deeply situated in place, for geography was a definitive factor in determining free and slave status. In this way, navigation of the environment—woods, swamps, and rivers—constitutes a major narrative event. Thus, encounters with nature— whether in the form of rivers marking the Mason-Dixon line, the cosmos guiding the way to freer landscapes, migrating birds flying north in the summer, or moss growing on the north side of tree trunks—underscore the complex interweaving of freedom and slavery, as mapped onto social and physical topographies in slave narratives.

Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is illustrative of a contemporary African American ecocritical narrative insofar as memory, in the novel, is written on water, humans, and land. In this way, the representation of nature in the novel is not as "a pristine external scene but the marriage of a place with the lives that have lived in it" (Deming and Savoy 4). Specifically, Shange turns to the environment—the Atlantic Ocean, Sea Islands, plants, and herbs—in her characterization of Indigo, a central character in the novel who is repeatedly elided with the Southern coastal climate: she is a "sapling" who is embraced by the weeping willows; "the land and salt-winds moved her through Charleston streets," and she has "tough winding...