"I was once asked by journalist Ari Gray - who's also my occasional hiking buddy - something along the lines of what it means to me to be Black in the woods. I don't remember what exactly I said, but it was probably something about the relief I felt in shedding the racialized shell like a cicada's when I hit the woods - how I'm just kinda free until another human perceives me. But that was years ago. The way I think about my Blackness has changed. Mine is a Bredda-Nansi Blackness, a needing-to-know-and-to-collude-with-or-(rarely)-conspire-against-every-single-animal-in-the-village Blackness. I come from a tradition that incorporates prayer, storifies every relationship, whose tales are each one of them a woodland vignette. I meet Bredda Nansi, or Aunt Nansi - him, her, them- whenever I go to the woods. When I go looking for mushrooms, i find everything else, including what fruits authentically from within me when nobody is watching.
Mycophilia helped me unlearn a tendency to vivisect and standardize that informed not only my idea of my place within (or outside) the ecosystem, but also my conception of how to inhabit my own Blackness. Before mushrooms, Blackness used to be so much less expansive because i allowed it to be defined for me by others, like cops, amidst concrete. The tools I was using to view my Blackness were of European manufacture, bequeathed by white supremacist schooling that so many of us must work to counteract. That race was socially constructed in these circumstances, but nonetheless informs the cultures one comes up in and the traditions one is pressured or allowed to claim or refuse, of course complicates matters. Amid these tensions, my Jamaicain-ness used to be distinct from my Caribbeanness somehow, which was distinct from my North Americanness, my whole self further segmented by being twice diasporic.
Some will disagree that I am anything but a United Statesian, given how young i was when I migrated here; others might suggest the extent to which I represent my Jamaicanness or even West Africanness to outgroups is the true measure of who I am. But the pursuit of fungi has me reconstructing my conception of the "self" from scratch - with pantry ingredients that spring back to life with rehydration, along with novel staples. What it means to be Black has taken a surprisingly central place in my rebuilding, surprising because it wouldn't have occurred to me to lug into the woods the socially constructed version of myself. But my Jamaicanness is made of fresh-picked food; of making the best of the ingredients available; of gloating with loved ones about how good it is despite its humble ingredients; of knowing how to work the land you live with; of reciprocal relationship with that land. It's church on Sunday, and whereas my cathedral is now usually a canopy of trees, it's as strong as the community that we're building there, which has been growing hunt by hunt, genuflection by genuflection. It's in all things pointing back home, from the chicken-of-the-woods patties, to hen-of-the-woods jerked jerky, to "saltfish" made from fishy salt-cured Hygrophorus flavodiscus. It might be curried venison, jerked wild turkey, or brown stew squirrel. Sorrel made with sumac and wild ginger. Solomon Gundy from fresh fish caught off the Massachusetts coast. Drumskins from amadou. The list goes on. A child of the diaspora, I recognize that every "new" thing is made from ingredients gathered before. I insist that my identity did not spring from a colonizer's head.
The study of mushrooms has given me back some of my ghosts. If most ghosts are gauzy apparitions, mine are slightly more vivid now, somehow. I can see the connections straining to make themselves to me. Some have said that whatever happened before colonizers came is of no comfort, and that feels right to me - with the proviso that whatever happened before is a wind I will happily feel at my back, once the ghosts there are speaking a language I can understand.
Histories of migration, questions of who brought what where, did not come fully alive for me until i found the sticky web of ancient, ever-present mycelium. They can chop down family trees, even hang us from them, but the mycelium keeps spreading under our feet."
Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)





















