Great Dismal Swamp, still a place of refuge

ecollective rendering

ecollective

Wood engraving of a Dismal Swamp maroon called “Osman” in the September 1856 edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The engraving was based on a eyewitness testimony by David Hunter Strother, author of the article about the swamp.

Fleeing enslavement in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, black people developed communities in the Great Dismal Swamp.  

Their flight in some ways continued a tradition of immersion into the wilderness in what the Bakongo people called the “mfinda.”  

The Ecollective mfinda allows us to create a metaphorical as well as historical and natural history of the Dismal Swamp which was called “dismal” because the English-speaking colonizers perceived dense, southern marshes as disease-breeding miasmas but like Brer Rabbit regarded the briar patch, Africans felt right at home in the ewamp.  

Through this space, we will travel to places of refuge within the natural world. 

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We begin with an invocation from the South Carolina coast

Photo: Margeorge 2022  for  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Return pose

(balancing the glide)

eyes downward, stepping forward with right foot toes pointing left

on moist clay that becomes pots 

hands aloft in mid-flight, fingers turned outwards

balancing the glide of geechee gullah girl divination

between visible and indivisible

Entrance area of the Osun-Osogbo grove, Nigeria

The Osun grove is among the last of the sacred forests which usually adjoined the edges of most Yoruba cities before extensive urbanization. There is a relation between how the Dismal Swamp regarded by Africans and African descendants and the sacred forests of West Africa including the Osun-Osogbo Grove and the mfinda of Central Africa.

Photo: Doris Ulmann, Lang Syne plantation, South Carolina peninsula, early 1930s