Experiencing Race & Place: Reflecting on Research within Texas' Historic Black Settlements

Sacred Forest, Piney Veil: Black Landscapes of Deep East Texas By Andrea R. Roberts

Photo by Sara Junek

Originally published On June 16, 2015, NotThatButThis.com 

A whole lot of nothing is everything. 

Texas is a vast place, chock full of nothingness, unless you learn to see beyond the open expanses of unpopulated water, cotton rows, or rolling hills, and let the landscape tell you its secrets or better yet find the keeper of the landscape’s secrets. I have been seeking the keepers of the secrets of Texas’ forgotten, Black landscapes, our self-defined geographies. 

For the past few months, I’ve spent time “behind the Pine Curtain” of Deep East Texas which includes Jasper, Texas. It is likely that for many a mention of Jasper or Deep East Texas woods that surround the town conjure up images associated with hate crimes and white supremacy.  The facial expressions I’m met with when I announce my regular trips to Deep East Texas seem to ask, ‘How can a place associated with hate crimes and white supremacists have anything to do with landscapes and landmarks of Black self-governance and sovereignty? And as a Black woman from Texas, I understand. These forests have found their way into a few childhood nightmares. They’re the forests of whispers among “grown folks” heard between hand over mouth hushes at family gatherings. Someone disappeared. Someone was lynched. Remember James Byrd. Driving to Deep East Texas awakened my intergenerational muscle memory of racialized terror.

The region is unsettling, as it is one of the most distinctly southern areas of Texas, but idyllic. The landscape borders the edge of Louisiana’s outdoorsman paradise where one might find more catfish farms and restaurants than gas stations. Driving through Polk and Tyler County is to pass through the lungs of the southeast, the sacred grove of Texas, the Big Thicket whose 106,305 acres span more than five counties and two states.  Once you reach the Alabama Coushatta reservation, where Polk borders Tyler County, you cannot help but feel as if you the trees are in charge. Not white supremacy, the trees. They cover you the way church elders cover you in prayer. Jasper County and the surrounding forests, places associated with the absence of black agency, actually contain some of the last remnants of what the Black Liberation Movement’s first wave looked like during Reconstruction in Texas. Since I’ve begun making this drive to the region, I’ve passed through these forests, and met the Black Texans that lay claim to these woods. These pines are more of a veil through which it is possible to glimpse early African American civilizations than a curtain.

From 1870 to 1890, former slaves founded more than 500 “Freedom Colonies”, Freedmen’s Towns, or settlements across Texas.  Since then, a variety of factors facilitated Freedom Colony descendants’ dispersal. They’ve often left behind intangible geographies where structures and populations associated with early African American placemaking and self-determination have disappeared. However, more than 20 of them are clustered throughout Jasper, Tyler, and Newton Counties in Deep East Texas.

Jasper, and Newton to its East, and Tyler County to the west, are filled with people and a spirit of self-possession not widely celebrated in the popular imagination, and surely not thought to reflect dominant mainstream representations of Blackness. Such communities are said to typify a nostalgic Blackness, but surely not a Blackness of the present or action. Popular Blackness is urban, struggle, class stratification, shared oppression, but not self-determination and agency. These are huge generalizations, terrible tropes, but they are persistent enough in the American imagination to have become the bedrock of dominate current dialogues around Black identity, agendas, and unity. However Deep East Texas is home to a diaspora of Freedom Colonies, settlements founded by ex-slaves. These Freedom Colonies belie these dominant narratives of what it is to be a Black Texan.

Behind the Pine Curtain, formerly enslaved Africans made places, small towns, some of which still have a sizeable population nestled in the marshy bottomland, the edge of forests, and small clearings and white wooden churches at the end of long winding farm roads. Some vibrant and alive, others latent rhizomes, sprouting only during reunions and homecomings. Where many see a whole lot of nothing, I have begun seeing more of Texas’ beautiful, Black everything.