When the question is asked, "Why aren't they out there in nature?", Dr. Christy Hyman's wonderful work responds, "We're out there, and have been, by force and by choice. " Her Dismal Swamp work isn't an ode to foreboding darkness, but rather a brilliant illumination shone on Black power in a wild place.

J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

Hyman's rich textual and visual re-mapping of the history of the Great Dismal Swamp makes clear how the oppressive conditions under which Africans labored in the swamps on behalf of colonial extractors paradoxically enabled the enslaved to craft the “navigational literacy” needed to attain freedom.

Andrea Roberts, director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes, University of Virginia

This book is short but sweet. In it, Dr. Christy Hyman braids together three strands of wise study: birds and plants; the shape of the earth; and the history of the brave people who sought freedom in the great swamp of northeastern North Carolina. Follow the thread with her, and see how different people have made, are making, and will make meanings out of this past.

Ed Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize and Avery O. Craven Award