More Than Us Contained: The Ecopoetics of Parchman Farm

My beloved brethren:—The Indians of North and South America—the Greeks—the Irish, subjected under the king of Great Britain—the Jews, that ancient people of the Lord—the inhabitants of the islands of the sea—in fine, all the inhabitants of the earth, (except however, the sons of Africa) are called men, and of course are brutes!! And of course are, and out to be slaves SLAVES TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and their children forever!! To dig their mines and work their farms; and thus go on enriching them, from one generation to another with our blood and our tears!!!!
—David Walker’s Appeal, Article 1, “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of Slavery”

We look at the world to see the earth,
at the silver, pedestal-ed globe to see the grounds,
we see what we’ve done with it, what it has
to do with, we see our face bent to a surface
—Ed Roberson, “We Look at the World to See the Earth”

In morningrise, the sun sits on the shoulders of the earth and colors the sky warm yellow and the land a golden orange. You’d believe this is “God’s country.” The rows of okra, watermelon, and sweet potato turn into a field of marigolds as the sun reaches for a higher point in the sky. Everything is expansive. The land stretches toward an impossible horizon. The sky has no edges and no ending. This is the site of Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, an enormous prison farm whose infamy is in its capacity to reinstitute slavery in terms of its work force and its harsh treatment of that work force, who were all Black.

Mississippi’s prison farm opened in 1901, a few decades after secessionists lost the Civil War and a terrorist campaign to kill the newly gained Black suffrage. The prison served to house freedmen who were said to have broken the law. As we have come to know, breaking the law meant Black people were committing minor offenses like vagrancy and loitering. These minor infractions would majorly derail life for Black folks. Mississippi kept its pattern of forcing Black people to work, this time on the chain gang. Bukka White, the Delta bluesman, sings the tale of being sentenced to Parchman Farm and working from sun up to sun down. He opens “Parchman Farm Blues”: “Judge give me life this mornin’/Down on Parchman Farm.” The guitar chords are arranged on a twelve-bar pattern and repeat in the background of White’s nasally voice that shakes as he moves up a register. It is a song of loss and pain and the realities faced in Mississippi’s infamous state prisons. White reminds us of what so many people live and know. That Parchman Farm is a wretched place that tends toward expansion. It claims more and more.

Parchman is fenceless. Its boundaries are arbitrary, and constant political effort is used to expand the prison. The state of Mississippi has an unemployment rate of 16.3%, according to the April 2020 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is roughly 2% higher than the national average for the same month. Most of the eighty-two Mississippi counties’ unemployment rates are between 6% and 12%. The counties with the lowest unemployment rates (approximately 5%) and the lowest poverty rates just so happen to be the whitest: Madison and Rankin, to name a couple. Parchman’s expansion is an unethical attempt to slow down the structural failure. Mississippi’s incarceration practices lean on two things: economic failure and black criminality. By pointing to the state’s “structural failure” (economics) and the state’s belief in Black folks’ innate deviance and thus their criminality, Mississippi can continue to expand places like Parchman Farm and extend, along with its sprawling plantation-like camps, the effects of not being careful on the earth. The expansion of Parchman would mean the extension of its problems, including inadequate medical attention, unsanitary living quarters, subhuman food, concentrated and frequent violence, and environmental damage.

Prison farms are sites of captivity that enforce the myth of “the criminal” and the weapons of the state. The Union is filled with them. These camps of despair and plunder are everywhere from California to Maine. However, they are most unique in the American “Deep South.” Places within the “Yazoo territory” (a region cultivated by First Peoples and stolen by conquerors) exemplify the insidiousness of prison farms. Those places, within that stolen/occupied territory, are Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In content and structure, prison farms are like their antecedent “peculiar institution.” They are plantation-systems updated to accommodate modern liberal sentimentalism, which means they are plantation encampments that use the rise of crime as justification for their existence and inconspicuousness to continue. It is a sprawling institution dedicated to the sport of expansion and a myth about justice and liberty.

To speak or think of the American phenomenon of mass incarceration as a fresh way of doing business is to neglect the democratic codes and racist-capitalist protocol that have always guided America the Great. The high rates of incarceration are an economic exercise, born in the 1970s, which improved on something much older and fundamental: capital accumulation along with religious imposition, male and white supremacy, and ecological domination. Yes, many countries imprison many of their people. No other country uses prisons for profit or incentivizes captivity for capital accumulation. The United States has developed the West’s theological, judicial, political strategies, and the US continues to consolidate its position in dramatic fashion as a carceral state. Writ large, prisons in the American South are an economic and ecological formation, a testament to its commitment to “agribusiness,” that is, chattel slavery, sharecropping, convict-leasing, and incarceration.
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The prison industrial complex is a system situated at the intersection of government and private interests. It uses prisons as a solution to social, political and economic problems. It includes human rights violations, the death penalty, slave labor, policing, courts, the media, political prisoners and the elimination of dissent.
—Huey Freeman, “The Boondocks”

Mass incarceration is a social force energized by the American criminal’s use-value: it pays in the New Jim Crow to lock people up. After all, according to Michelle Alexander, who points to the 13th amendment of the US Constitution, an incarcerated person can work for little to no wage. A criminal in this circumstance is effectively a chattel slave. The advantage of  having a person work for little or nothing is the maximization of profit. This is what makes Edward Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, so revelatory. Baptist’s book examines the economic power of the slave-holding South, and its dependence on free-labor. The operating logic of the South remains: the extraction of land and labor to maximize profit.

Today, those who were once relegated to the slave-class are now consigned to an unpaid, under-served class position by the state and federal juridical apparatus. Building new prisons in places like Arkansas or Louisiana helps the failing economy. In these impoverished states, prisons become the new economic base. People are deemed criminal and they, the said-criminal, are used to blunt the impact of an economy too slow to make necessary changes. Capture and confinement are the dual modes of extracting free labor, and extraction has a bias. The threat of mass incarceration is its restless desire to expand. Anyone can commit a crime, and many of us do, but the “criminal” is often a racist label applied to Black people at large and Black men in particular in this country. “Criminal” has a “reflex anti-Black male behavior-prescription,” as the theorist Sylvia Wynter tells us, wherein Black men are viewed as inherently criminal and their labor is justifiably extractive.

For states with large portions of Black folks, Black people are imagined and implicated as criminals. Sometimes, “reentry” into “society” is not clean. A criminal residue still adheres to the formerly convicted, often leaving them without vital resources like housing and job opportunities. The incarceration rates of Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas evidence such. For states that suffer from a collapsed economy, the detention of Black inmates produces and sustains the state’s wealth. Ta-Nehisi Coates argues,

It is impossible to conceive of the Gray Wastes [America’s carcerality] without first conceiving of a large swath of its inhabitants as both more than criminal and less than human. These inhabitants, Black people, are preeminent outlaws of the American imagination.

And these inhabitants are only increasing in number.
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I must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation.
—Ed Roberson, “ be careful” 

Before oak, grizzlies, hills, and snow, Ed Roberson remarks, “i must be careful about such things as these,” and the poem’s reader gets a peek at the thing rarely considered and often unstudied in discussions of the United States’ “mass incarceration.” Though “mass incarceration” is recognized as the caging of a lot of (disproportionately Black male) citizens, the focus of the discourse on this racist, jurisdictive reflex obscures the completeness of America’s justice and liberty practice, America’s commitment to the “excuse of progress in the annihilation of races,” as Howard Zinn once said. The discussion of America’s carcerality undermines how perfect “mass incarceration” is, how large it is; how justice and nonfreedom are made stronger and more effective over centuries, from the age of colonialism to the age of Obama—a protocol that does more than affect humans. “Mass incarceration” is not merely a plot to cage large sections of the American population for convict labor and some form of justice. Although, if it were, if what we said about “mass incarceration” was wholly true, that would make the current discussion of “mass incarceration” astounding in its callousness. Our current discussion only addresses part of the diabolic nature of the democratic experiment. The experiment is, indeed, a complete and complex project guided by the ideas that have kept the American empire alive: accumulation of wealth, violent imposition of religion, patriarchy, white supremacy, consistent and disregarded dissent, and—the most hidden element, the thing the reader gleams in Roberson’s first statement of his poem, “be careful”— ecological domination.

Roberson’s poem lists natural items and announces the carefulness required in moving around them like a child moving through the woods pulling leaves from their branches and making a trail for squirrels. Whereas literary study has revealed the damage done to human beings inside and around our carceral state, “be careful” offers a way for us to think about the means and ends of “mass incarceration.” To be sure, the phrase “mass incarceration” would have us believe that the raging issue of our moment is political and not, as Roberson’s poem suggests, ecological. “Be careful” does what “mass incarceration” cannot. The poem considers the interaction between Man and Nature and opts for a more harmonious relationship. It does not choose wealth over peace, strength over suffering, or standards-of-living over wholeness. It is the quality of such relationship, moving throughout African-American letters, consistent in African-American Environmental Thought, that not only describes the relationship Black folks have with Nature but also the political relationship Black folks have with Nature as dominated by the locus of America’s most treasured ideas: the criminal justice system. “Be careful” is an argument for an earthly interaction. One where, yes, we walk light on the earth and yet have our light footsteps marshal our political and social considerations. What happens when we consider the problem of prisons as an ecological issue? The poem is a reminder of a different way of living.

Roberson’s poem does not have the words “jail,” “prison,” “cage,” “bars,” or “suspected Black male between the ages of 18–25.” He does not have statistical data showing America’s incarcerated population as 20% of the world’s total. (Russia and China hold the second and third place in the same category in 2015, according to the Institute of Prison Criminal Policy Research.) What he has, in “be careful,” is an equipment for living, a way of thinking about Man’s relationship to the earth as a way of undoing the world. And, what goes with the world are its most dearly held possessions. In this way, Roberson is like Aimé Césaire, who once wrote, “The only thing in the world worth beginning:/The end of the world of course.” Roberson is a poet of the highest order, exercising an economy of language that resists the wasteful discussions often had over American dining room tables. What the poet and his work offer is a new vista for considering our social issues. That is to say, an ecological analysis of incarceration opens up new considerations for the impact of precipitously caging human beings.

“Mass incarceration” is a concept discussed at a level that sometimes overshadows the practical occasions that are jails and prisons. Even then, when we think of jails or prisons or house arrest or parole or probation or in-school suspension, are we only concerned with the form of incarceration? Does the American political imagination, the thing that drives us to fear a place that doesn’t speak “American,” have any capacity to think about the structure and content of incarceration? Are we only concerned with the concept of high-rate incarceration and not the source of the circumstances that yields a wider impact than a human lifespan? Roberson’s poem is effective in its alternative imagination, in its concern for something else. “Be careful” is a revelatory argument against prison farms; that is, an argument that offers both demolition and creation, as the biblical connotation of the word revelation would have us believe.