Henry David Thoreau:

"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. ... If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."  

We often lament change, and often quite justifiably. However, this essay is meant to serve as an example of how, although things may change drastically, nature can still remain. Even here, on our University campus, we can find beauty and life among the concrete and aesthetically displeasing architecture. Despite all the advancements we see, God and nature are still one and the same, and neither is lost.

 

I can list dozens of reasons that I love living in Austin. Yet I'm a newcomer in the whole scheme of things, so I often feel that I don't belong, that I'm part of the "problem." The Austin problem: the word has gotten out; everyone wants to live here now. The population is constantly growing, leading to a lack of housing and constant concern about the effect we're having on the environment.

The environment. That is one of the most wonderful things about Austin. No matter where in the city you live, you can't be more than a few minutes from a beautiful green park or a grove of oak trees. Yet when I think of nature in Austin, I sometimes forget about the parks or the bodies of water that beckon to so many who call this city their home. Instead, I think back to a community that no longer is.

It is sunrise, and like the roosters which crow in her backyard, Mrs. Mary Smith wakes at the crack of dawn, pulls herself out of her warm bed, and steps out of her back door. In the cold, misty morning, she hears no sounds of traffic, or of the busy day beginning. Instead, she hears only the sounds of the morning: birds singing, crickets chirping, a soft breeze blowing through the trees. Only the rumble of the train, the International and Great Northern clackety-clacking down the nearby tracks, disturbs the peacefulness of the morning. She stands tall, proud of her freedom, and sings in a clear voice: "Soon in the morning when I 'rise, Soon in the morning when I 'rise, Soon in the morning when I 'rise, Give me Jesus."

Then, from her house behind the Smith residence, Mrs. Jim Haynes picks up the second verse: "Dark midnight was my cry, Dark midnight was my cry, Dark midnight was my cry, Give me Jesus."  The song would reach out to other neighbors, who would join in and send the chorus "Give me Jesus" out into the unobstructed wilderness, unhampered by the city noises. Soon, the whole community joins together in the chorus, greeting the new day with a hymn, united in fellowship to their God and to the nature that surrounds them, which He has created for them.

Perhaps my description sounds like fiction, like it comes from the movies. Yet one hundred years ago, this was the way of life for the residents of Clarksville. Founded by freed slaves in the 1870s, Clarksville was a place where African Americans could come to buy a home and settle, with a sense of community almost as thick as blood. The land was given to the freed slaves by Governor Pease, whose house was very nearby. However, contrary to the understanding of Joseph Jones, who says, "the ex-slaves of Governor Pease, for instance, settled and remained on land in West Austin bequeathed to them" (103), Governor Pease was an abolitionist, staunchly opposed to Texas' secession from the Union. Early residents of Clarksville thought of him fondly.

The old-timers remember the area around Clarksville as being a wilderness, broken only by the railroad tracks and the occasional dirt road. Located west of the city limits of Austin at the time, Clarksville was a closely knit community both geographically and spiritually.

In the densely wooded, unpopulated land they have chosen for their home, there was little to distract them from the wonders of nature. Nearby Shoal Creek was, like Waller Creek, "teeming with fish" with "reaches of deep water... [affording] choice bathing and swimming places for the population." Crawfish hid in its shallow nooks, and deer and other wildlife knelt at its banks to drink. However, nature served to keep Clarksville isolated from the growing city for many years. Shoal Creek, which separated the community from Austin, had a tendency to flood every two to three years, retarding growth in the area. Thus, these lovely hills, so close to town, remained well out in the country for nearly fifty years. The community remained surrounded by woods and without electricity until the 1930s.

Mary Smith once told her grandson Kye Haskell the reason she sang praises to the Lord every morning at dawn from her back yard in Clarksville. Back during the days of slavery, she said, she had to put a pot of loudly boiling water in the door of her cabin to cover the muffled prayers she sang, because she was forbidden by her master from worshiping. In early Clarksville, with no constructed church in which to worship, Mary Smith and the other members of her community clearly found solace and a connection with God in the nature which surrounded them. Their first services were held beneath a tree.

Even in work, residents of Clarksville were surrounded by nature, in the hot fields of summer picking cotton. In most families, even children worked in the cotton fields every fall from September to November, attending school only in the spring. Most residents raised chickens and hogs on their property an dkept a cow for fresh milk. From nature, not the grocery store, came their food, their medicine, and their livelihoods.

By the 1920s, the city of Austin had grown a great deal, and land brokers developed an interest in the community known as Clarksville. Due to its proximity to the now burgeoning downtown, they wanted to move the black community to the east side of Austin to free up the land for expensive houses and commercial areas. But the community of Clarksville resisted, refusing to leave despite the constant and overt pressures placed upon them by the city. The community survived and found itself in the early 1970s, still a part of nature in ways that other Austin neighborhoods could scarcely remember. As the city contemplated building MoPac through their neighborhood, the citizens of Clarksville still lacked paved streets and adequate water and sewage.

Eventually MoPac was built, through the homes of many Clarksville residents. Yet, surprisingly, as I walk through the neighborhood, I sense a calmness, a serenity about the place.

Though I stand only two blocks from the MoPac Expressway, I hear little traffic, only the rustling of leaves on the trees. Birds still sing sweetly, and nearly every variety indigenous to the Austin area can be seen here. Unlike the suburbified neighborhoods located just blocks away from here, Clarksville is still decidedly rustic -- perhaps due to the fact that it had unpaved roads for so long. Sitting in this sunny little park, I am reminded of Waller Creek, so close to civilization, yet so well preserved from it. Clarksville is like that. In the spring, when wildflowers fill this grassy field, once covered with oak trees, it is hard to remember that this community has changed drastically over the past hundred years.

And though the neighborhood is now inhabited by bankers and professors, I can still imagine, as I stand on the front porch of a home that is older than anyone I have ever known, Mary Smith, standing on her back porch, singing to God and to nature,

 "Soon in the morning when I 'rise,

Soon in the morning when I 'rise,

Soon in the morning when I 'rise,

Give me Jesus."

 

 

 

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