A Place Full of Rattlesnakes: Interspecies Relationships in a Jim Crow Swamp

Snakes may be the most recognizable animal in Christian mythology, and they are certainly the most loathsome, cursed “more than every beast of the field” (Genesis 3:15, KJV). Snakes’ punishment for having tempted Eve is to live with their bodies to the earth, mouths in the dust. They are crafty, deadly.

So when a rural southern police chief warned five white out-of-towners that the cornfield where they huddled in the dark wasn’t safe, was in fact “full of rattlesnakes,” he invoked a deep-rooted Christian trope. Whether or not he intended the irony, the police chief knew that the three hundred armed white men who had chased the youth into the fields represented the real threat. The youth had been part of an interracial Christian coalition working to, among other projects, start a cooperative bank for poor Black farmers called the Light of Tyrrell.

This paper examines the way that nonhuman species operated both as a metaphor and a lived reality, as both objects and agents, in a swampy outpost of North Carolina in a moment of environmental, racial, and religious crisis. I focus on a single event: the 1947 expulsion of a Christian multiracial work team that had worked for seven weeks to build a cooperative store for a Black farmers’ cooperative, in open defiance of racial segregation. Black farmers in those eastern North Carolina swamps had organized a cooperative to counteract land dispossession; the work team represented a Christian socialist experiment in interracial living designed to support the cooperative. Those are human stories. But they are human stories that unfolded on a landscape as much water as earth, one that reminded its human inhabitants repeatedly of the limits of their power.

Tyrrell County, North Carolina, where this story unfolds, is extremely vulnerable to climate change. The events that unfold in this paper predated the language of climate crisis (which is still largely rejected in the county). Even in 1947, however, a broad sense of crisis loomed, especially for poor and Black farmers. Over the previous fifteen years, Black farmers had lost sixty percent of their land, most of it to predatory timber companies that drained the peat swamps and felled the county’s most important tree, the Atlantic white cedar. Prized for its disease- and waterproof lumber, the living Atlantic white cedar managed the water table and fixed contaminants in the soil. For a few years, the emptied and drained peats the timber companies left behind made productive farmlands. Soon, however, flooding, contaminants, and the poor soil below the peats undermined their production.

Scientific understanding of the ecological crisis was rudimentary, but local people developed their own ways of articulating the loss of the Atlantic white cedar and the related disruption of the habitats of snakes and waterfowl, the perpetual instability of the watery land where they lived. For Black farmers, who also faced the economic and racial injustices of Jim Crow segregation, the Light of Tyrrell offered not only access to banking and pooled purchasing but also a distinctly biblical language of common good that could sometimes include nonhumans. Both the cedar and the potatoes grown in the drained swamps held rhetorical and real significance for farmers. Likewise, the three local species of venomous snake represented a real threat to human life. But as the  police chief’s rattlesnakes comment demonstrates, nonhuman species could also stand in for much more immediate and pervasive threats from human action. Tyrrell County was, in a multitude of ways, “a place full of rattlesnakes.”