“Varied features now, and form
Change has bred upon her;
Crush no bug or nauseous worm
Lest you tread upon her.
Pluck no flower lest she scream;
Bruise no slender reed”(Cullen 79).
In these six short lines, Countee Cullen articulates the strong ties between the natural world and the “brown girl.” The poem is a “threnody,” a lamentation of grief, mourning, or remembrance—the “brown girl” has died, and the poem speaks about her. In her afterlife, the girl’s “features” and “form” have changed and shifted (Cullen 79). Her essence is no longer contained in the body of a brown girl, but lives on in the “bug or nauseous worm,” in the flowers, in the reeds (Cullen 79). Similarly, in “A Theory of the Bottom,” Jennifer James cites Alexis Gumbs who ruminates on the Atlantic as a “sea of bones,” where she ponders the possibility that the bones of captives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that were thrown overboard turned into sediment, were consumed by whales, and thus, “became whales”(James 50). The idea that the physical bodies are made of matter that will always return to the natural world is at the core of these narratives. Despite Western conceptions of the human/nature dichotomy, of the human as a supreme figure that eclipses the disorder of the environment, the material of life is always equal, and both James and Cullen see this connection and base their politics on it. At the “bottom,” life is unified and recognized as such, whereas at the “top,” despite material conditions of physical matter being objectively the same (the bodies of “white, western, heteropatriarchal, capitalist, able-bodied [males]” will still return to the earth, in one way or another) the lack of unity and enforcement of hierarchical and exploitative relationships prevents a meaningful connection to the natural world (James 50). In Cullen’s move to memorialize the “brown girl” by emphasizing her presence in the natural world, an abstract connection is made literal, just like Gumb’s thoughts on whales, and the unity between Black women and the natural world is explicitly acknowledged and honored—it is sacred.