Good Nature

In the Catskills, I had been thinking about what it meant to be safe, and how that definition changed depending on your identity. During the mornings, I was reporting on the police abolition movement, and interviewing sources about how criminalized groups—Black, poor, homeless, undocumented, and mentally ill people and sex workers—were disadvantaged when it came to policing from the jump, unable to escape the target of the state no matter the reform. As we talked in my room, I looked outside at the luxurious tangle of bushes and trees that crept up to the window screens, and at how the sunlight made the bedsheets glow.

In the afternoons, I went outside for walks and runs and sunbaths, protected from health and policing risks. Nature was the escape plan we had hatched in May, the safe haven where we could be free from thinking about how our Blackness, our brownness, our queerness made us vulnerable. (And for the lone white straight man in our group, from thinking of how to support us). Being in the woods, instead of out on the streets, would be the panacea.

The Friday before I rented a car and drove us upstate, I had attended one of the first of a wave of rallies in New York this summer; a Black journalist friend texted that she was nearby, and we decided to go—not to report, but to protest. I held back tears at different points during the march: as we made our way down an idyllic residential street towards Ft. Greene Park, surrounded by people shouting that Black lives mattered; as I later stood on a hill in the park and looked out over the giant crowd, before policemen attacked protestors again.

When we arrived at our cabin, set high on a private dirt road in a thicket of green and far from neighbors, we walked inside, dazed. Puffy clouds floated above; down the path were big, springy fields of pink and yellow flowers, red barns, and lazy cattle. Every house we passed was secured. Fenced and guarded with signs that warned of consequences to trespassers. Within the first few days, we realized other things. We couldn’t turn off the news. Riots had intensified in the city, leading to New York’s mayor imposing a curfew. Everyone in the house felt a little useless, like we were missing out on the struggle of our lives. So we went on group walks, and cooked, and drank, and talked about politics and relationships, and binged the entire Purge movie series.

We also noticed new dangers. Those neon trespassing signs demanding strangers “Keep Out!” were omnipresent, on tree trunks, sticking out of gardens and fields, at the end of gravel paths and near watering holes. If an urban visitor going into the countryside was unworried about meeting hostility, she would start to rethink her position. After all, Black Americans have long feared white hostility in natural spaces. During segregation, Black visitors to city parks, pools, and beaches were harassed, attacked, and prevented from entering. Carolyn Finney, the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, has studied the historic invisibility of Black people in nature. “We often think of beautiful outdoor spaces as being somewhat benign in conversations about race and power and privilege. But when Jim Crow laws were in place in this country, it wasn’t only applied to restaurants and movie theaters. It also applied to beaches and other outdoor spaces,” Finney said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Look at the history of environmentalism and you have Henry David Thoreau who went to live in the woods. Well, that’s because he felt safe enough to do that.” In Finney’s book, she examines the stories our country has told itself about nature and who belongs in it, who owns it. And who has been made to understand to keep out.

We joked about needing the white man in our group to escort us while running, Ahmaud Arbery on our minds. When I did go on my first run, alone, I passed a barn with a “Black Lives Matter” sign and felt a kind of relief; I stopped and took a photo. Every time I encountered white neighbors outside, I returned their waves and put on a big smile.

The country’s stories about who lives in “real America” are often reductive and false—the rural belts are as Black and Latino and immigrant and poor, as they are white and landed. I was writing a book about this very idea, focusing on my home state of Alabama. And I was used to, enjoyed, greeting and checking in with my neighbors when we ran into each other while walking and jogging outside. Still, I wondered what would happen if I didn’t wave back, or smile, or make some other gesture that showed I was, at least at that moment, not a threat—the kind of Black person they could feel safe around. Would I then be unsafe?

Black people deserve this, I told my best friend as we drove from the cabin through the hills to a pizzeria in the nearest town. The drive felt like skiing down green-haired slopes. Her eyes on the violet sky, my friend agreed. We felt lucky to be in the most beautiful setting we had been in some time, during the worst moment we had ever experienced.

Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker.