Lauret E. Savoy

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward herpaths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this landlie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of race,” have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital,Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories -- natural, personal, cultural -- to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. Every landscape is an accumulation, reads one epigraph. Life must be lived amidst that which was made before. Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memoryand to be one. Though deeply personal,Trace concerns who we all are in this terrain called the United States, inviting readers to have a more honest understanding of history's impact in our lives.

Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Trace

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"Names are magic. One word can pour such a flood through the soul.” Had I at the age of six understood Walt Whitrman's words, I would have counted him friend. Word-moments could blaze with an intensity that seemed to concentrate all life. I placed myself by the compass of places sung aloud. That I hadn't yet set foot in most mattered little. There were other ways to travel to them.

What to remember, what to forget. Colonial historian Ber- nard Bailyn writes that memory's "relation to the past is an embrace. It is not a critical, skeptical reconstruction of what happened. It is the spontaneous, unquestioned experience of the past. It is absolute, not tentative or distant, and it is expressed in signs and signals, symbols, images, and mnemonic clues of all sorts. It shapes our awareness whether we know it or not, and it is ultimately emotional, not intellectual." How a society remembers can't be separated from how it wants to be remembered or from what it wishes it was-that is, if we believe stories of ancestors re- Hect who we are and how we came to be. The past is remembered and told by desire.

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