The Lord God Bird

I’ve been thinking a lot about loss and transformation these past few weeks, especially as we lean into fall and spy winter peeking out from around the corner. I just got back from Oxford, Mississippi where I participated in the Southern Foodways Symposium at the University of Mississippi. It was my first time visiting the Southern state (home of the blues), and I must admit that as I drove my rental car from the airport in Memphis to Oxford I was filled with both trepidation and curiosity.

I decided to take a cue from this year’s theme for the symposium, which was “Environments and Transformation,” and be open to the possibilities. Over the course of three days, writers, chefs, and creatives of all types shared good food and stories about the connections between who we’ve been, who we are, and our collective roots in a history that may define us, but does not need to confine us.

Illustration by Mark Catesby (1683-1749)/Rawpixel.

Writers such as Janisse Ray and Aimee Nezhukumatathil spoke of the wonder of trees, plants, and this moment of climate change; Kayla Stewart regaled us with the adventures of Black fishermen; we watched Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis dance their Southern and Northern roots by, as Tanya put it, “going into the interiors” of her family’s life and putting “those traces back on her skin,” remembering through physical expression a past that may be forgotten. We heard Feizal Valli make an excellent case for a bar being a place to build relationships across differences, something that The Atomic Lounge in Birmingham, his fever dream brought to life, proved daily. In all cases, “environments” were giving room to breathe, everything was in relationship, and the love of place was exposed and celebrated.

I had decided that the story I would share would be about the estate I grew up on, my parents labor, the complexity of loving land that can never be yours, and the subsequent erasure and recovery of my family’s story. But while my parents were children of the South, I am not. So, I wanted to show, much like Tanya Wideman-Davis did, the “traces” of my family’s Southern roots on my skin and in my life.

As I worked on my presentation in the weeks leading up to the symposium, I read a story in The Washington Post about 23 species that were now going to be declared extinct. It was the first line of that article by Dino Grandoni that got me: “The Lord God bird is dead.” I don’t know if it was the biblical reference or sense of loss or the poetry of a bird, also known as the ivory-billed woodpecker, being called the “Lord God” that got me, but I kept reading. And when I saw that bird was known to inhabit the swamps of the South I immediately felt that the story of the woodpecker brought those traces of roots, place, loss, and yes, transformation to life in a way that begged my heart to listen.

I read how people have been fascinated with spotting this bird since the days of John Jay Audubon. We have hunted this bird, cut down the forest where it lives, worn its feathers in our hats, and been motivated by the knowledge of its impending extinction to pass the Endangered Species Act in 1973. We, humans, are complicated beings. Near the end of the article, the author talked about how there was a potential sighting of the bird in 2004 in Arkansas (though ornithologists don’t all agree) and as a result, new reforestation projects popped up in the hope of seeing the Lord God bird once again.

Loss and transformation. Pain and possibility. The traces of who we’ve been reminding us that we are always in relationship and accountable to our actions. At every second of every day there is always the chance to transform ourselves. What are we willing to risk in order to gain?

Yes – we are complicated. And the traces of our past will always be a part of our collective consciousness. Species have gone extinct; land is abused; people are mistreated and the sense of impending loss is omnipresent. But here’s the thing: As Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative says: “We are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” We can forgive, but not forget. And every moment offers us another chance to make a different choice.