Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924

3. Golden Hands: Weaving America

133 Chapter 3 Golden Hands Weaving America The dwellings of the colored people, unless they happened to be protected by some influential white person, who was nigh at hand, were robbed of clothing and every thing else the marauders thought worth carrying away. All day long these unfeeling wretches went round, like a troop of demons, terrifying and tormenting the helpless. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. —harriet jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describing incursions that “low whites” made into blacks’ homes after Nat Turner’s insurrection, Harriet Jacobs recounts the physical tortures that the African American community endured. Her grandmother received a visit from one such “pack of hungry wolves,” who “snatched at every thing within their reach.” Mob members were particularly incensed by letters to Jacobs—evidence of her literacy—and by valuable household items, such as “some silver spoons which ornamented an old-fashioned buffet.” Jacobs’s rhetoric portrays the invaders as savages, animals contained only by “the better class of the community,” and she distinguishes between African Americans’ civilized environment and their antagonists’ hungry and violent bodies. While protesting that African Americans lack agency in controlling access to their homes, Jacobs acknowledges that alliances with “influential” white community members buffer some, among them her own relatively comfortable family, from the “brutal” marauders’ worst abuses.¹ Often combined with other forms of social advantage and disadvantage, class has always distinguished among Americans, and those who “work for a living” have viewed nature and the environment differently than those 134 chap ter three who do not. The slaves on antebellum turpentine plantations regarded the pines from which they collected resin differently than the plantation owners who sequestered them in the woods and extracted their labor, while the female slaves with indoor duties had yet another attitude.² As we have seen, Sigourney, Kirkland, and Jacobs value nature’s beauty, but they also recognize what we might grimly call the aesthetics of poverty and racism. The lexicon of civilized and savage, which establishes social hierarchies, extends beyond the ethnic and racial divisions that I have explored in earlier chapters; it also features in depictions of—and by—working-class writers, whose voices have been almost entirely eclipsed in studies of nineteenthcentury American women’s writing, American women’s rhetoric, and environmental literature.³ America was built not only by its founders’ ideological efforts but also by its working people’s golden hands. Owning one’s body—to recall Haki Madhubuti, “the most precious of natural resources”—and one’s labor precedes property ownership or resource management, aspects of which I have mapped in the preceding chapters.⁴ This chapter develops the theme of embodiment I touched upon in relation to Kirkland and Jacobs. Working-class voices require us to reconceptualize resource wars, for dominant-culture individuals consumed resources that included women’s labor and laboring women’s bodies. How working women responded to that understanding depended upon such variables as their race, place, and environmental agency. Such women faced numerous obstacles to writing (let alone publication ), not least of which were the acquisition of literacy and leisure time. Here I foreground three mid-nineteenth-century workers’ writing, paying particular attention to how they envisage their irregular and contingent access to nonhuman nature and the corporeal ramifications of that access. The paid domestic servant Lorenza Stevens Berbineau, the indentured servant and entrepreneur Harriet Wilson, and the factory worker–teacher Lucy Larcom variously circumvent or appreciate their physical presence and claim material, spiritual, and cultural agency, in their individual homes and in America itself. These working-class women’s complex representations of embodiment and their negotiations for access and agency encode examples of environmental writing and early environmental justice literature.⁵ Despite significant differences, the writers’ experiences overlap: the ruralborn Berbineau became a city-based servant; Wilson performed both Golden Hands 13 domestic and agricultural tasks in a rural setting; and Larcom moved from a seafaring community, to a factory town, to the west, and then back to the Boston area. All three women received some education: Wilson and Larcom attended school briefly as children and then gained further education as adults. All wrote out of 180s New England, although Berbineau...