The Lynched Earth

Focusing first on Welty’s “A Worn Path” then Morrison’s Home, this chapter discusses the authors’ treatment of landscape, which reverberates with lingering touches of racialized violence and trauma, and identifies how black characters read and decode its various evocations. The characters’ ability to recognize trees as signposts of the lynched black male body demonstrates a political consciousness necessary for their survival. Trees in these works figure as totems of death and destruction and as potent life-forces, pointing expectantly toward survival and regeneration. Shifting from figurative burial to affirmative acts of intrusion and trespass, these texts’ protagonists defy the forces of immobilization and the stereotypical images of southern black women depicted in earlier pastoral formations. Ultimately, this chapter argues that Welty and Morrison reorient the apocalyptic visioning of the antipastoral by bending the arc toward resilience and resurrection, permitting their terrain to appear mutably as bleak and beautiful, frightening and futurist.