Kelly Houston Jones invites readers into the little-studied worlds of enslaved people and their Arkansas enslavers in her eminently engaging and nuanced A Weary Land. Jones demonstrates the potential of a landscape-focused history of slavery, taking quite seriously and literally the clichéd phrase history on the ground. For her, an appreciation of the ruggedness of Arkansas's natural landscapes illuminates how the many decisions made by enslaved individuals and their enslavers reflected their personal—and sometimes fantastical—understandings of an ever-evolving and contested Arkansas ground. Mid-nineteenth-century Arkansas agricultural development was thus an outgrowth of both violent enslaver machinations and enslaved placemaking. “Because slavery coerced intimate engagement with cultivated land, perhaps it should have been alienating for enslaved farmers,” Jones muses, “but as the system crumbled, African American Arkansans identified as farmers, as Arkansans, as country people” (7).Jones's study opens with a discussion of early Euro-American efforts to tame what she terms the “morass” of Arkansas—the swampy, treacherous regions of Arkansas that would become, by the eighteenth century, a borderland of French, African, Osage, and Quapaw communities (11). Like most borderlands, the morass rendered the dictates of high government officials rather weak, if not obsolete, but various Euro-Americans remained committed to establishing their colonial presence in the region, eventually investing heavily in enslaved African labor by the opening decades of the nineteenth century, especially after the Louisiana Purchase and the rise of a globalized cotton economy. As Jones points out, however, the landscapes of Arkansas—along with the constant disruptions of Indigenous displacement and population flows—offered enslaved people unique opportunities to “undermine white mastery on the territorial cotton frontier.” In particular, Jones highlights the power of Black flight in framing the Euro-American quest to conquer the “wilderness,” an astute point that resonates throughout the book.The middle chapters creatively—and quite effectively—re-create the day-to-day lives of enslaved people and their enslavers throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Here A Weary Land is most enlightening, as she situates Arkansas individuals and communities within their very specific, variegated domains of power, environment, and work. Enslaved people, she notes, were mostly responsible for transforming the morass of Arkansas into the ordered fantasy of Euro-American settlers, by draining swamps, clearing trees, erecting buildings, and planting crops. Notably, Jones argues that previous scholars have exaggerated the low-country-up-country slaveholding dichotomy in Arkansas; her close study of four Arkansas counties (Hempstead, Conway, Pope, and Independence) reveals that slaveholding density had less to do with low-country status and (nearly) everything to do with access to Arkansas's vast river systems. “Arkansas's waterways concentrated slavery,” Jones argues (79). The alluvial landscapes derived from the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers sustained slavery in Arkansas.But despite enslavers' collective efforts to impose their visions of environmental transformation upon their enslaved land cultivators and laborers, “when enslaved people looked around, they viewed a different landscape than did whites, with different sets of significant points interconnected by their pipelines of information of both the social and subversive kind” (64). As Jones details, the alluvial landscapes of Arkansas may have held promises of fortune and power for enslavers, but for the enslaved they also bore the potential for degrees of autonomy, personal reward, and liberation. Although enslaved people “endured a coerced intimacy with Arkansas's land,” that groundedness provided the exploited Black population of Arkansas, which numbered some 110,000 by 1860, with unique access to natural resources, clandestine networks, and local wisdom (104). Ultimately, Black embrace of mobility—whether within communities or outside of them—proved to be the most effective counter to the carceral, “implacement” practices of enslaver society, even as bondspeople sought their own sense of rootedness through friends, family, material accumulation, and environmental transformation (67). As Jones explains in her final chapter, this was no more apparent than during the Civil War, when Black flight “pull[ed] the rug out from under slavers' economy and war effort” (185).Drawing from slave testimonies, court filings, personal correspondence, diaries, tax rolls, and other government records, Jones's A Weary Land overall offers an excellent account of slavery's expansion into Arkansas, from multiple perspectives and with a keen eye toward human relationships to space, place, and natural environments. Readers will be hard-pressed to find a more meticulous re-creation of the material lives of enslaved people and their enslavers. If anything, A Weary Land pushes scholars to continue examining how enslaved people interpreted their (coerced) role in conquering western landscapes, even as many sought to subvert it.
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Aug 10, 2024
Rea Zaimi 
Open Access