ANEW: Learning Fear
Reclaiming the wilderness from our wild imagination and other real things
I was in the Boy Scouts for one year—maybe third or fourth grade. Our troop leader lived across the street from my great-aunt—my grandmother’s sister. He drove a nice car, maybe a tricked-out Impala or a Buick Deuce and a Quarter, something that gleamed and rumbled and announced itself. What I remember most, though, was that he wasn’t a teacher.
Back then, I didn’t really know what teachers did. But I knew enough to recognize that this man wasn’t used to working with kids.
How do I know? Because he had that nice car, sure—but mostly because he lost his cool quicker than a hiccup.
“No! No! No! Don’t whip each other with the ropes. That’ll leave a mark—and your mamas will be mad at me!”
“Vernon, that knife ain’t a toy! And how do you even know what mumbly peg is?!”
“Don’t drink the paint! It might look like Mountain Dew, but it ain’t!”
What we learned that year was mostly what not to do. Not how to tie knots. Not how to read maps. Definitely not how to earn badges. We didn’t even camp. Not once. I don’t remember seeing a single tent.
We were urban Scouts. And even though we gathered in the name of becoming men, all we really did was gather. No fires. No wilderness. No sleeping under the stars. Just rules. Warnings. Yelling. And a whole lot of fear, dressed up as discipline.
Looking back now, I think that was the lesson: fear.
Growing up, I didn’t know any men who camped. Most of the men I knew had long ago learned that the great outdoors wasn’t a neutral space. Many of them were of Emmett Till’s generation—or close to it. They would’ve known his mama, Mamie. Emmett is buried at Burr Oak Cemetery, right there with most of my people. We could’ve walked there from our house in thirty-five, forty minutes. But we never did.
And maybe that’s the point.
That generation—my parents, their siblings—didn’t just lose their connection to nature. They lost the freedom to move through it without fear. My mother, who was twenty-four when I was born, went camping once. Girl Scouts. Said it was harrowing. My brother, just four years older than me, has never been. Says he never will.
That’s the power of race in America. That’s the legacy.
But not everyone lived that same version of the story. My Down South cousins did things differently. They rode horses. They hunted. They fished. They didn’t fear the land—they knew it. They were taught to live with it. Despite night raids. Despite disappearances. Despite the quiet terrors that hummed beneath so many Southern nights. They still knew how to survive out there.
And maybe that’s why they carry less fear than we do.
I belong to a Facebook group called Black Hikers Unite. Most members are under forty. A lot look like they’re in their twenties. What they’re doing—camping, hiking, stargazing—it’s not just recreation. It’s re-creation. It’s restoration. It’s self-making. It’s soul work.
See, when no one teaches you something essential—how to walk through the woods, how to build a fire, how to sleep beneath the stars—what you inherit instead is fear. And for my generation, raised in Northern cities and suburbs in the long shadow of the Great Migration, fear was what came standard.
It wasn’t until I started writing this that I realized what my old Scout leader was really trying to do—clumsily, impatiently, maybe even lovingly in his own way. He was trying to teach us how to stay alive. All those no’s. All that frustration. They weren’t just rules. They were survival codes.
And that wasn’t so long ago.
But I broke that pattern. I became a teacher. And as a teacher, I did something no one in my family had done before: I took a group of seventh-grade girls from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree. We camped. We hiked. We built fires and watched stars. It was my first real camping trip—and I was leading it. Teaching it. Reclaiming something that had skipped a generation or two.
The world we live in now—messy, magnificent, miraculous—is calling us back to it. Especially we older Descendants of Slaves (DOS). It’s reclaiming us. And if we’re willing to face the fears that were passed down to us, we might just remember what we’ve always deserved:
Freedom. Safety. Wonder.
That’s what our children are learning to unlearn—fear.
It’s like birthing yourself all over again.
May it always be so.
Curated Listening:
When I think of a group in the last 30-35 years who explored the notion of claiming and reclaiming the wildness and hurt of the past, I think of Arrested Development. Arrested Development gave us the “country” and spiritual connection back to those of us who wandered far, far away. Listen to “Tennessee” HERE. (Note: There are some disturbing images in Tennessee, but then again, we are all actors in that great play.)
Love this so much. We all need the wilderness.