pushed and pulled. Whether vestigial or preparative they held on. I donned silent passivity as armor—and avoided mirrors. Only teenage encounters with writings by authors who also seemed to be searching prompted me to speak. I met them question to question.
THE SISTERS OF Providence and lay teachers of Immaculata Preparatory School assigned four summer readings to my section of the entering ninth-grade class. They’d be part of the coming year’s courses. Although the fourth book is lost to memory, the other three—Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold—struck me deeply. The worn copies still sit on my shelves within easy reach.
A Sand County Almanac was published in the autumn of 1949, more than a year after Leopold’s death. That his work was hailed as landmark or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles,” I knew nothing about. Nor did I know that this forester, wildlife manager, educator, conservation leader, and writer born in Iowa in 1887 was called by some a “prophet.” What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place: an atom’s recycling odyssey through time; the chickadee, “so small a bundle of large enthusiasms”; the crane’s call “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” And my favorite passage, from “Song of the Gavilan”:
This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
What also appealed was the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In “The Land Ethic,” Aldo Leopold enlarged the boundaries of “community” to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Though I couldn’t find words then, his call for an extension of ethics to land relations seemed to express a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this country but embedded in many Indigenous peoples’ traditions of experience—that land is fully inhabited, intimate with immediate presence.
These ideas prompted new questions. If, as Mr. Leopold wrote, “obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land,” then what part of this nation still lacked conscience broad enough to realize the internal change of mind and heart, to embrace “evolutionary possibility” and “ecological necessity”? Why was it that human relations in the United States I knew at age fourteen could be so cruel?
Other passages in A Sand County Almanac confused: “The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless—to us—if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know.” Why not know “things Chinese”?
I couldn’t understand why, in a book so concerned with America’s past, the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece.
What I wanted more than anything was to speak with Mr. Leopold. To ask him. I so feared that his “we” and “us” excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America. Only uncertainty and estrangement felt within my teenage reach.
Did Aldo Leopold consider me?
JULY 8TH. THE initial phone interview went well, so well my prospective employer wanted to meet in person that afternoon just as a formality. A collector and trader of Civil War memorabilia, he’d advertised in The Washington Post for a summer assistant to help him catalogue and work at fairs. He sounded impressed that a young teenager knew details of the war’s campaigns, of the landscapes where battles took place. I remember my excitement, wearing my most grown-up dress, crossing the Potomac River to Virginia that steamy day; ascending the steps of an old Alexandria row house, knocking. I remember the heavy door opening, my practiced “Hello, I’m Lauret Savoy,” and his single word as the door closed. Sorry.
I don’t remember: How long I stood on those steps. The ride home. Why I watched an ancient rerun of The Mickey Mouse Club, singing along with Annette, Darlene, and the other pale mouseketeers.
My mother came home early that afternoon from her nursing job at Howard University Hospital. What could I tell her? But as she entered the living room, flanked and supported by two of her co-workers, a voice spoke out: Your father died this afternoon. Momma later told me that he was found in his ward room holding the telephone.
Dad had been in and out of the hospital many times that last year, dying shortly after learning cancer had spread from lung to bone, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday. He and I spoke little in that time. There seemed little to say, as if silence itself could metastasize between a man who expected much, and was often disappointed, and his only child who thought his only words to her were Think and Use your brain.
Born September 1916 in Washington, D.C., to Laura Wilson Savoy and Alfred Kiger Savoy, a principal and later assistant superintendent of the District’s “colored” public schools, Willard Wilson Savoy grew to be a man who in appearance would be accepted without question by those calling themselves “white.” Pale of complexion with gray-blue eyes, he’d not be seen or treated as other until he admitted “Negro” blood.
A memory: We are walking hand-in-hand on a Los Angeles sidewalk one bright afternoon and pass an acquaintance of his. I’m four or five years old and catch the emphasis in the question asked. “This is your daughter?”
Years before meeting my mother and more than a decade before my birth, my father had a novel published. The year was 1949. After serving in the segregated Army Air Forces during the Second World War, he wrote about an embittered “mulatto” boy-becomes-man who thinks he might escape prejudice, and his own demons, by redefining himself as white. The book’s title: Alien Land.
But I knew none of this, not until I stumbled upon the book late one night in the basement stacks of my university library. It was the end of my first year there. The dedication alone convinced me of a chance for dialogue after death: “To the child which my wife and I may someday have—and to the children of each American—in the fervent hope that at least one shall be brought to see more clearly the enduring need for simple humanity.”
Yes, I stole the book, last checked out years earlier. Yes, I ran from it many times. Kern, the boy-becomes-man, and I shared too many experiences of hurt, too many questions.
A little boy’s wondering:
A question that had become centered around that part of the pledge that said, “—one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” . . . Kern had for some time entertained doubts that liberty and justice were “—for all.” “Jim Crow” in Washington, the Capital of the Nation, did not seem to him to be “liberty and justice for all.” But then, he supposed such things were written into the Constitution and Bill of Rights just for white boys and girls.
An eleven-year-old’s experience:
He listened intently as Frank Richards talked about subscribers and gave him advice about setting up his route. “—keep your territory compact—” . . .
