I would hope that “just browsing” readers in a bookstore would encounter the introductory section, “Horse,” or the penultimate chapter, “Dog” first. “Horse” for the simple fact that I try therein to not only lay out the arguments for the book itself, but to make a certain set of claims about ecological criticism broadly construed—and the work of giants like Lucille Clifton and Sylvia Wynter in particular—that I hope will eventually reach a much wider audience of people even outside of those who might feel inclined to pick up the book. What I’m also trying to offer in that introductory passage is an explicitly eco-critical approach to reading the oeuvre of Frederick Douglass; one that is becoming a more and more important part of my larger research project, even beyond Being Property Once Myself.The “Dog” chapter comes to mind for similar reasons. Therein, I’m offering a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s fantastic sophomore novel, Salvage The Bones, that gets us a bit further, I think, than the traditional concerns of something like animal studies—though I’m clear in the beginning of the book that my contribution is more of a piece with what Michael Lundblad has elsewhere termed animality studies—and closer to the core of my concern throughout the text. That is, the way that a certain lived proximity to animals opens up room for the writers I am interested in to make all sorts of compelling claims about black social life, especially within the context of environmental (and otherwise) catastrophe.In the Ward chapter, this takes the form of a close reading of a scene in the book which transpires directly after Hurricane Katrina hits the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. But this concern is also present in the third chapter’s reading of the hurricane that hits “The Muck” in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In these moments where the world—i.e., the province of human dominion, the ostensibly owned earth—falls apart, what modes of black assembly come to the fore? And how might this thematic echo help us think differently about the relationship between black freedom struggle and ecological criticism, black poetics and the black earth, abolition and interspecies collaboration? Many of my favorite lines from the book are also in these sections, so there is admittedly, for me, a craft element at play here as well. As I sit here now, thinking at the dining room table about this question, it’s clear. The moments of composition where I felt most free, most in tune with the music that makes a project like this possible, took place while writing those sections.My hope for the book is that it lives a long life, and that it is ultimately considered a meaningful contribution to the growing constellation of texts examining both the history and present workings of black critical theory concerned with nonhuman life-worlds. I also hope—and I have said this elsewhere—that the book’s engagement with the work of black poets is a reminder that poetry plays an absolutely central role within both black letters and black social life. Here I’m thinking, of course, of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley as some of our earliest literary ancestors in terms of the written page. But I’m also thinking about the role—as Hortense Spillers so beautifully details in her stunning 1974 dissertation, Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon—of black preaching as the first form of black poetry in the U.S. context. The tone and texture of this book (and all my writing, really) was influenced in the first instance by black preaching. Given those conditions of emergence, I hope, whatever its merits are, that my book shines a light on the aesthetic brilliance of black writing, black performance, and black poetics, as they operate outside the borders of the U.S. American academy.I hope as well that the book contributes to a renewed interest in the writings of all the authors whose work I have explored within its pages. The discovery of this particular thread in their works has changed my life in so many distinct, divergent ways—my intellectual, aesthetic, political, and spiritual sensibilities have never been the same—and so it is one of my dreams for the book that it likewise inspires others to think about the work of environmental reparation and black freedom struggle as fundamentally intertwined.Finally, I hope that the book serves as a useful entrée into the contemporary workings of black literary studies as such for anyone who might be unfamiliar with the field. Our work, I believe, is one that comes with a singular responsibility. It was Carter G. Woodson who once wrote that there would “be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.” Our collective project, then, is not only the repudiation of lies about the role of our people in history, but the forwarding of new images, new language, a more robust and truthful engagement with the indomitable beauty of the black expressive tradition, and all that it has given us.