Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

In this meditative outing, poet Dungy (Guidebook to Relative Strangers) reflects on race and history while discussing the garden she maintains outside her Colorado home. “No matter how many years have passed, no perennial in life’s garden roots more deeply than history,” she contends, using her garden as a metaphor to explore the complex historical relationship between Black Americans and the land. She tells of moving in 2013 with her husband and young daughter, Callie, to a majority-white neighborhood in Fort Collins, Colo., where she started a plot of flowers and vegetables in her yard. Gardening, she writes, helps her “feel rooted,” and she recounts taking pains to explain to Callie the difference between their choosing to garden and the labor of enslaved people forced to work the land. Poems inspired by nature appear throughout, serving as connective tissue for ruminations on the garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, 19th-century naturalist John Muir’s racism and sexism, and the overlap between environmental and racial justice. Fans of Dungy’s poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It’s a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots. Photos. (May)