Book Review: Trace, by Lauret Savoy

5 min readJul 5, 2020

Trace is a collection of essays about American places and landscapes written by Lauret Savoy, a Black American scientist and scholar.

On one level, Trace is a great American road trip story as told by a geologist with a poet’s heart. But this is no luxury bus tour celebrating American land, history, and culture. Trace is a gut-wrenching, bumpy, side-swiping, boulder-mounting Jeep of a tour.

I admit, I’m a snowflake when it comes to adventure tours and, as it turns out, understanding the role of racial inequities in America.

Ever the nervous passenger, I kept trying to reconcile the things Savoy was pointing out with the maps and history books familiar to me as an educated, well-traveled White American woman.

By the time I finished the book, I felt covered in dust and a little shaken, stunned that Savoy could show me so much about a country I thought I already knew.

Trace is a must-read for fans of wayfaring literature, nature narratives, and America.

American Landscapes

Each chapter of Trace is a sketch of an American landscape where Savoy (or her parents, or perhaps her ancestors) has lived or traveled through:

California, the Grand Canyon, the Mojave Desert, the borderlands of Arizona, the Arkansas River Valley, a Southern plantation, the Potomac River, Massachusetts, and the Wisconsin lakeshore.

Land-writing

As a naturalist, Savoy crafts meticulous descriptions of geology and ecology, painting word pictures of complex and hard-to-see features of a place:

“Many headwaters rise in the midcontinent. They flow as the terrain suggests, toward the Mississippi River, toward Hudson Bay, toward the great lake named Superior. Here the forty-ninth parallel’s smooth line separating western provinces from western states becomes a rougher border, its irregularity determined by the lay of land and water. A visitor to the boreal woodland and lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota might suspect that time moves slowly here. But anyone equating gentle topography with quietness does so at great peril. Tumultuous histories lie beneath subtle appearances. They have a far reach.”

Poetic Flair

Savoy has a poetic flair that serves as a counterpoint to technical descriptions of dirt and rocks:

“These mountains continue to lift at rates among the fastest on the continent. But as they grow, they weather away, grain by grain, the residue carried downward to spread around their base like a fallen skirt. The daily business here is uplift and erosion, mountain-making, and decay…Earthquake after earthquake dragged and shoved this terrain against the San Gabriel Mountains like a crumpled carpet shoved into a wall.”

Memory

As a memoir, Trace is about Savoy’s efforts to piece together her family’s history: a process she calls “re-membering”:

“On leave from my job, I wanted to spend the turn of summer to fall in a quiet space, sifting contents of a large box I’d recently found, the box my father had packed and sealed before his death decades ago. I was a child when he taped the box shut. I was barely an adolescent when he died. Releasing its contents wouldn’t be a simple act.”

Frustrating gaps in Savoy’s personal history are made exponential in the context of her ancestral history. Savoy is a descendant of slaves, who could not own property, and of Native Americans, who were dispossessed of their homeland.

“Not finding their stories doesn’t mean they never existed. Spoken words, exhaled breath, are to me just as real as paper records. So is soil embedded into one’s palms. Or knowing the seasonal movements of hawks and salamanders.”

Race

Trace came to my attention in June 2020, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement where it was trending in conversations like #blackbirdersweek and #blackintheivory. I had also just listened to the 1619 Podcast.

Trace contained similar messages about how racial inequity is the foundation of American policy, economics, and culture:

“But what wasn’t taught was how slavery’s yield drove the economies of all thirteen colonies. How it then scaffolded the new nation’s infrastructure even in regions where coerced servitude had ended.”

Trace digs, with a pick and a brush, at the very issues driving today’s charged conversations about toppling statues, removing symbols, and changing narratives:

“Celebratory lessons and stories that don’t face ambiguity and complexity might seem to exempt us from needing to look more closely. … Yet such told history makes it easier to disregard the enslavement of millions. Or, if slavery did happen, it wasn’t so bad. Or it was just a temporary anomaly corrected long ago. There remains no public agreement on slavery’s impact, trauma, or human costs.”

In a statement echoing Robin DiAngelo’s notion of white fragility, Savoy drives the issue to a personal note:

“A supposedly long-gone past offers an illusory comfort to the living. ‘It’s not my fault. I wasn’t there. I didn’t own any slaves, and neither did my family.’ Barricaded safely in the present, the living can even condemn the institution while ignoring what made it desirable to privileged classes — and what has fed an ever-mutable caste system to the present.”

I didn’t read Trace because it was on some Black Lives Matter booklist.

I read Trace because it fit with the things I like to read and write about: walking, birding, and taking notes.

Having someone show you their land up close, as they see it and live it, can be a sacred thing. That’s how I felt about Trace. Savoy shares it all — the good, the bad, the ugly, the rough and uncomfortable. The result is a deeply satisfying, notable highlight in my journey to understand America.