#wolfriver

Joy Brooke Fairfield

I have recently moved to Memphis, TN, a region (like most of the country) heavy with the legacies of US colonialist genocidal practices. When I arrived, confederate statues still populated our civic spaces, and I bike along an avenue that traces the Trail of Tears on my way to work. I’ve been trying to sit with these histories in a manner that acknowledges their ongoing effects, meditating regularly on what we can do in the now to mitigate, memorialize, and provide actual antidotes to the ongoing violences that took place then. When I received Cynthia’s vial, I added it to my altar, hoping to charge the contents with the energies of my questioning prayers.

I’d assumed I would mix Cynthia’s water from the San Lorenzo River with waters from the Mississippi River, the powerful liquid superhighway that serves as the westernmost boundary of both Memphis and Tennessee itself. I’m a Pacific Coast-raised girl, accustomed to tidal sunset vastness to the west, so I’m just now building relations with  the grey-brown snake that separates me from Arkansas and then the rest of the mythical West sprawling out into flatness beyond. But the Mississippi is sick. Conservationists have dubbed the Mississippi “the most polluted river in the country,” and a 2012 report found that almost 13 million pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into it annually.  The farther south it travels, the more poisonous it becomes.  From Memphis, it crosses the border to Mississippi then Louisiana, where it’s been recorded as the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world. I went down to the Mississippi during a high water time, meditated on a log, and snapped some sunset photos.  But I decided to gather water from elsewhere.

A few months before, I had visited the Wolf River, one of the tributaries to the Mississippi.  Until the turn of the 20th century, it was the primary drinking water source for Memphis and before that, its confluence with the Mississippi was the site of Chickasaw communities.  The Wolf is sick too.  Collecting chemical waste and farm runoff, it smelled so bad that in 1960 it was diverted north of the city, and in the 1970s parts of it were declared “dead.”  In 1985, local efforts to help restore the river began, and now a conservancy is dedicated to stewardship of the water and adjacent land.

I’d visited the Wolf River for an interfaith healing ceremony for an unjust extrajudicial murder that happened 100 years ago – the lynching of Ell Persons.  Persons had been accused of the murder of a young girl.  Her death was never solved, and the heinous social event of his lynching under a trestle next to the Wolf River only served to further poison the literal and spiritual waters feeding Memphis. At the 2017 ceremony, faith leaders from a variety of traditions joined with descendants of both the white girl and the Black man who had lost their lives 100 years ago, and diverse participants walked the path down to the river to spread rose petals at the site of Persons’ murder.  I revisited the site next to the highway where a memorial had been erected, then followed the path down to the water.

I meditated by a little inlet, which looked as dirty as the Mississippi. Slapping bugs away, I considered giving up again and looking for a cleaner river, but instead surrendered to the silt and slime and shameful human histories of extraction and pollution. I collected a jar and took it home.

The small vial and the larger jar sat on my altar for months before I mixed them. Maybe I thought I could purify them with time or energy, the prayers I whispered while lighting candles.  All that time I watered my lettuce seeds and tomato starts and mint plants and crawling pothos vines with tap-water, sourced from deep artesian wells below the city that we use now that we’ve poisoned both our adjacent above-ground rivers.  

I’ve never been taught very well how to grow things. I’m at least four generations removed from farmers, by my calculation, and each generation has taught the next to do something they felt was “more important” than caring for the soil and the creatures that grow within it and from out of it.  My grandmother grew roses and my mother has in her retirement finally found time for vegetables, but my hands are ignorant and I don’t know very well how to listen to these green things I’m urging up out of the dirt.  I overwater and underwater them. I abandon them for too long over weekends away, forget to prune and turn, I repot at the wrong moment, I break roots and propagate clumsily.  But my altar and my greenhouse are one and the same right now, and I pray and meditate at both of them hoping to learn better how to listen.

Finally I mixed the two waters, thinking of the San Lorenzo and the Wolf,  the human and non-human creatures nurtured by the rivers, the societies just and unjust who have traveled them, the terrible crimes that have taken place on their banks as well as the moments of human joy and pleasure and all the unrecorded moments of graceful animal being. I poured in some clean clear artesian tapwater too, stirred it all up and looked through it as the light passed through sediment and mineral shine.  I poured a little bit into every altar plant – these green creatures I’m trying to keep alive. The mixture fed them for several days. Eventually some of them moved outside to raised beds (my first!) in my girlfriend’s backyard.  The lettuce died and the kale got nibbled up, but months later a few small red juicy tomatoes escaped squirrel consumption and ended up in our salad.

As I was putting these photos together, I remembered that our mutual friend Annie Sprinkle took some photos of me next to the San Lorenzo River a few years ago as we’d done a walking rehearsal down by her banks.  Annie caught my love of the green and the fresh and the wet in her lens, so I add those pics to mine to connect our rivers.