© 2016, Text by J. Drew Lanham
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Published 2016 by Milkweed Editions
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover photo of Carolina wren by Stephen Tabone Nature Photography / NatureExposures.com
Author photo by D. Colby Lanham
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First Edition
Special underwriting for this book was contributed by the Hlavka family.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lanham, J. Drew (Joseph Drew), author.
Title: The home place: memoirs of a colored man’s love affair with nature / J. Drew Lanham.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016009677 (print) | LCCN 2016024050 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571318756 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Lanham, J. Drew (Joseph Drew) | Zoologists--South Carolina--Biography. | African American zoologists--South Carolina--Biography. | Conservationists--South Carolina--Biography. | African American conservationists--South Carolina--Biography.
Classification: LCC QL31.L373 A3 2016 (print) | LCC QL31.L373 (ebook) | DDC 590.92 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009677
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Home Place was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Edwards Brothers Malloy.
For all who wander and love the land
Contents
Me: An Introduction
FLOCK
The Home Place
Mamatha Takes Flight
A Good Name
A Field Guide to the Four
First-Sunday God
FLEDGLING
Little Brown Icarus
Whose Eye Is on the Sparrow
Cows
Life’s Spring
FLIGHT
The Bluebird of Enlightenment
Hoops
Birding While Black
Jawbone
New Religion
Thinking
Digging
Family Reunion
Patchwork Legacy
Acknowledgments
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.
I AM A MAN IN LOVE WITH NATURE. I AM AN ECO-ADDICT, consuming everything that the outdoors offers in its all-you-can-sense, seasonal buffet. I am a wildling, born of forests and fields and more comfortable on unpaved back roads and winding woodland paths than in any place where concrete, asphalt, and crowds prevail. In my obsession I “celebrate myself, and sing myself,” living Walt Whitman’s exaltations, rolling and reveling in all that nature lays before me.
I am an ornithologist, wildlife ecologist, and college professor. I am a father, husband, son, and brother. I hope to some I am a friend. I bird. I hunt. I gather. I am a seeker and a noticer. I am a lover. My being finds its foundation in open places.
I’m a man of color—African American by politically correct convention—mostly black by virtue of ancestors who trod ground in central and west Africa before being brought to foreign shores. In me there’s additionally an inkling of Irish, a bit of Brit, a smidgen of Scandinavian, and some American Indian, Asian, and Neanderthal tossed in, too. But that’s only a part of the whole: There is also the red of miry clay, plowed up and planted to pass a legacy forward. There is the brown of spring floods rushing over a Savannah River shoal. There is the gold of ripening tobacco drying in the heat of summer’s last breath. There are endless rows of cotton’s cloudy white. My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.
I am as much a scientist as I am a black man; my skin defines me no more than my heart does. But somehow my color often casts my love affair with nature in shadow. Being who and what I am doesn’t fit the common calculus. I am the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.
But in all my time wandering I’ve yet to have a wild creature question my identity. Not a single cardinal or ovenbird has ever paused in dawnsong declaration to ask the reason for my being. White-tailed deer seem just as put off by my hunter friend’s whiteness as they are by my blackness. Responses in forests and fields are not born of any preconceived notions of what “should be.” They lie only in the fact that I am.
Each of us is so much more than the pigment that orders us into convenient compartments of occupation, avocation, or behavior. It’s easy to default to expectation. But nature shows me a better, wilder way. I resist the easy path and claim the implausible, indecipherable, and unconventional.
What is wildness? To