Chesapeake Bay

Northeast Maryland

By Alice Sundman

We are driving southward on I-95, toward Washington, D.C. I am trying to take in the landscape around us, a landscape I have never seen before, but that I still, somehow, know in my mind. Here, in the midst of gray concrete and endless numbers of cars, I finally get a few glimpses of parts of Chesapeake Bay, of patches of verdant vegetation — and of a landscape in which Jacob Vaark, a character in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy, makes his way toward the slaveholder D’Ortega’s plantation in Maryland in the late 1600s.

For someone who grew up on a small island in the Baltic Sea, the enormous highway and the great distances are quite a contrast to my childhood windblown pines, low cliffs of red granite, and thousands of tiny islands in the archipelago of the Åland Islands of Finland. I am used to short distances ideal for cycling, to walking in the forest, to picking berries, to going for a swim in calm, shallow bays — to experiencing the place concretely, through my body and thus to get a sense of actually being in the landscape.

In the car on the highway, I am at a distance from everything. I can see water, trees, parts of the ground.… But how does it feel to actually be there, in the place?

In A Mercy, Jacob is travelling by boat, on foot and on horseback. Having sailed down the river into Chesapeake Bay, he is now struggling with the water, the sand, and the mud as he tries to find his way through the fog toward land:

“The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tell whether they remained anchored or risked sailing on.”

For Jacob, the place evokes a sense of chaos, but this is due to political skirmishes and shifting territorial claims rather than the landscape itself, whose Indigenous inhabitants give him a sense of stability and of life lived in accordance with nature and the land.

Seeing the vastness of the landscape and the long distances of seemingly interminable highways, I wonder how Morrison managed to create the sense of immediate bodily experience of the landscape that Jacob experiences. For even if she most likely knew this place far better than I do, her experience from the late 1900s and early 2000s differs considerably from Jacob’s 17th century ditto.

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in her archived manuscripts, the Toni Morrison Papers, at Princeton University Library. It is well known that Morrison did thorough research for her novels. She studied reports and books of facts, and she used places she had visited or lived in as inspiration for her fictional places. But how did she create this particular fictional landscape, through which Jacob is travelling? Her archived research material for the novel includes information about Native American place names and their relation to topographical features that have most likely informed her writing. Facts about and descriptions of actual places thus form part of her creation of the fictional landscape. But more important, I think, are two crucial skills: her crafting and her imagination.

Early drafts I studied in the archive suggest that the landscape in this passage was not a priority at the beginning of her writing process; in these drafts, she focuses on sketching the contours of Jacob as a greedy settler. In later and more elaborate versions, the landscape is gradually given a greater role as she develops it into a thematic feature that becomes part of a human-place relation, which also allows her to develop Jacob into a more complex character. In her final, published version of this passage, as in other textual moments involving other characters in the novel, human-landscape interactions are crafted into complex thematic features that enrich both setting and character.

In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison comments on the significance of imagination for her writing: “memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.” In addition to her drafting and crafting the landscape, she imagined Jacob walking in these regions in 1682. Her imagination enables her to create a story that invites the reader to feel a closeness to the place, despite the chronological, and sometimes geographical, distance. She invites us to experience the place along with a 17th century settler: “he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.”

In the car on the highway, I realize that despite the traffic, despite the concrete, despite the radically changed place, the landscape I see is also the one Jacob is sailing, walking, and riding through. This actual place, marked by the imprint of today’s humans, is interwoven with the fictional place Jacob traverses in another century. Along with these watery landscapes, I see my childhood Baltic archipelago with its narrow fairways on which thousands upon thousands of vessels have sailed through the centuries — some out fishing between the islets, others on their way toward the world’s oceans as part of a growing shipping industry — all on a sea that binds together the continents. In my mind and through my imagination, fed by my childhood island landscape, I can now experience this co-existence of times and places. For this, I thank Toni Morrison, whose drafting, crafting, and imagining made this amalgam of placescapes possible.

Alice Sundman was born on the Åland Islands of Finland and lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is working on a project exploring places of and between water and land in Anglophone literature. She is the author of Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022).

Image: “A New map of Virginia, Maryland, and the Improved Parts of Pennsylvania & New Jersey.” Originally published by Christopher Browne, 1685. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

The post Toni Morrison – Chesapeake Bay, Maryland appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Belle Isle
Waawiiyaatanong

By Daniel A. Lockhart

I’ve come to the river, as one does frequently in Waawiiyaatanong, in the closing weeks of winter. The land has begun to wake up from the snow and the river itself contains patchworks of ice, a south sliding quilt of the lakes above us. The air is thick with fog, giving the world an evenness of white and grey. Punctuated by the restless patterns of geese and swans rejoicing over the return of open water. Across from where I stand, separated by the Fleming Channel of the Detroit River, is the jewel of an urban park, Belle Isle. I reminded of the island and the city across the water from us nearly hourly, as the clarion tower sings out its song across the water and the city streets between. What is before me in this moment is that spirit made real. A near translucent moment of a city in the clouds, an island at its heart.   

To think, this is the same restless river in which, in his poem “Belle Isle, 1949,” Levine and his Polish high school girl were baptized “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” The river of industrial stove making, the river before the monumental decline of the great Horatio Algerian city, the river that is hardly visible past the row of phantom trees that make up the horizon that used to be, and still is, the island anchor of Levine’s poem.  Today, even the vision of the opposite bank is gone and the river is a nexus of dull light. Sharp edges of fluorescent modern Detroit, and Windsor for that matter, are absent. I have loved the constellation of skyscraper lights that dominate us here. Even in daylight they are gone. But here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.

Is this the perfect calm of the water between city and island? “Turning at last to see no island at all / but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight.”  Before me, that darkness chased away and the river sheened as if it had never known of the Griffon, a burning Rouge River, the gore of Bloody Run. This river is a different river than Levine’s. More ancient, freed from ore haulers, the shadow of stoves, the traffic of Jefferson. At least, temporarily, between shipping seasons. Across the river there are certainly drums. A passing car on the island’s ring road, hidden in the dense fog bank hovering above shore. There is no possibility of touching the river beyond. Signs warn of its threat on the metal fence that separates us. Alone. There is no woman, there is no warmth of another in all of this.          The river is changed. And it is light now. And I find myself lost in thoughts of the warmth of a lover’s breath upon my skin. Taken by the heavy cold in the air around me, I understand that each time is of itself. The spirit lives on. But the impermanence of the world allows at best for anchors in our memories. We no longer build stoves. Few of us swim in the river. The water is undisturbed as it passes before me, its surface defiant and purposeful like sturgeon skin. And the world is the white of an elder’s hair; wèlathakèt returned. And the quiet, while the river slides by in her earliest stages of waking in this the earliest hours of spring. Moving us, in silence, “back where we came from.”

D.A. Lockhart is the author of Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill), Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House), and Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce). His work has been shortlisted for Raymond Souster Award, and longlisted for ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and First Nations Community READS Award. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

The post Philip Levine – Waawiiyaatanong appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.