J. Drew Lanham

The Home Place


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      © 2016, Text by J. Drew Lanham

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

      (800) 520-6455

       www.milkweed.org

      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.

      Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

      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

      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

       Me: An Introduction

      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.

      Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

      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