Treading New Ground
by Angela Tucker for South Summit 2023
Spanish moss choking live oak trees is one of the most recognizable images of Louisiana’s landscape. A plant that lives in a tree without any contact with the ground, Spanish moss is an epiphyte and causes no harm to the tree itself. It was given its name by French explorers. Native Americans of course called it something else.
When I was 15, I participated in an outdoor education program for kids called Outward Bound. I was on a solo expedition on a small island in Maine. It was a time when, for better or worse, kids were allowed to be left alone. They gave me a bag of gorp (good old raisins and peanuts), water, and a block of cheese and left me completely alone in the forest for three days. When I got there, I could hear the other kids in the distance. Some were banging on trees with their canoe paddles just to end the silence. I just wrote in my journal and stared at the sky. It is still one of my most peaceful memories.
My mother grew up in a small town deep in the Laurel Mountains of Pennsylvania. Most years we would drive eight hours to spend Christmas there. The last hour was the toughest, straight up a steep mountain in a car with old tires. One Christmas we couldn’t make it all the way up and had to spend Christmas Eve in a sheriff’s station at the mountain’s base, eating cookies with salt. I’ll never forget that Christmas. It was a reminder that nature can always intervene.
My parents knew that growing up on the Lower East Side of New York City might limit my connection with nature and so, at a young age, my Dad took me fishing with our family in Kentucky and my Mom taught me to swim. Survival skills that I barely use today.
They died before I was 30. Their loss provided a real understanding of the impermanence of life.
There are many pragmatic reasons why I moved to New Orleans after a lifetime in New York City but honestly, this one pushed me over the edge. At the time, I was emotionally all over the place. I was 37 and as I looked ahead to my 40th year, I couldn’t help but notice that it was looking a lot like my 30th year. I was stuck.
One night, I went to a party in Brooklyn and there was a fortune teller who offered to read my palm. Upon examining my hand, she had one clear vision. She knew I was thinking about a place I wanted to move to but was unsure if I should go.
For a while, a friend had been working on me to move to New Orleans. She informed me that I had traveled there six times in the last two years. I didn’t have a job or even a place to live there but I had a hunch, a feeling that this place might give me something I was missing.
The fortune teller didn’t know the name of the place but she said I should absolutely go. It would change my life.
Every time I direct a project set in Louisiana, I always come upon the challenge of finding visual imagery of the landscape that doesn’t feel overused. It is stressful.
Sofia Coppola’s film, THE BEGUILED, for example, takes place right after the Civil War. It is set in Virginia but filmed in Louisiana. The film has at least 25 shots of Spanish moss. It is a movie featuring Nicole Kidman and Colin Ferrell as Southerners. In terms of authenticity, it skimmed the surface.
Live oak trees, Spanish moss’ landlord, feel too obvious and yet they are gorgeous. As complex as the South itself, they are indescribably beautiful and were used to cause indescribable pain. This contradiction lingers in the air. Bringing it up is a buzzkill but the American landscape is as stunning as it is complicated. Running away and toward it is what you want to do.
Nature was a tool used during slavery. It acted as an accomplice who could not be hidden. The vestiges of slavery are implanted in the soil, move through the Mississippi River, and hang from the branches of the trees. The vestiges of lynching are everywhere as well, but that’s all over this country, not just in the South. Lynching is a form of social control that doesn’t just happen from trees.
I was drawn to spend that solo summer in the woods all those years ago because I never felt totally safe outdoors. I was 14 when The Central Park Jogger Case happened, a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a white woman in Central Park, Manhattan. My Mom told me not to go to the park at night. I knew those boys didn’t rape the white jogger lady. I knew this because they were arresting many of my Black friends, grasping at straws to find any Black kid who might fit the bill, a true skimming the surface.
At the time, I thought my Mom was afraid that I would be raped. I now know she was afraid of something else.
Upon rewatching THE BEGUILED, I discovered that Spanish moss only appears in the film three times. Also, Colin Ferrell is supposed to be an Irish man who emigrated to the South before the Civil War, a historically accurate representation. That movie is still trash but maybe it is more complicated than I allowed it to be.
We have an oak tree in my backyard and its branches are descending. Trees have to be maintained and my husband and I have to do it as we own the land. I never imagined I’d own land and I honestly wonder if anyone actually does but the importance of me as a Black woman playing this role is not lost on me.
As I complete my first decade here, I continue to be struck by this place. Here there is this ability to see the best and the worst of things at the same time. You can not delude yourself. Life is not fair. It is the most intense combination of feelings, dark and light, feelings that force me to dig deeper and deeper into myself and into the stories I tell.
The pandemic strengthened my connection with the outdoors. Like everyone, I would put on a mask and roam around the park, City Park in New Orleans to be exact. My preferred nature activity is hiking. (I really just like to walk but when walking happens outside, it somehow becomes hiking.) Due to my fear of heights, I like to hike on flat ground so the flat landscape of New Orleans suits me. The beauty of the Earth remains no matter how bad things get.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Tucker is an Emmy and Webby-winning filmmaker working in scripted and unscripted film and television highlighting underrepresented communities in unconventional ways. Recent work includes BELLY OF THE BEAST (dir. Erika Cohn) a NY Times Critics Pick, THE TREES REMEMBER, a series for REI and A NEW ORLEANS NOEL, a Lifetime film starring Patti LaBelle. Films in production are THE INQUISITOR, about political icon Barbara Jordan and STEAM (w/t) about a global alternative health treatment. She is a recipient of the 2023 Chicken and Egg Award and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2023. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.
