Verdant Intimacies: Environmentalism and Ecosexual Desire in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Where there is a woman, there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. — Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, 1 These opening lines of Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) establish its focus on Black femme sexuality as ecological embodiment by unsettling normative definitions of gender and sexuality. As indicated in this epigraph, Shange portrays her protagonists as non-normatively desiring bodies whose fluid and self-determined relationship with ecological entities, like the moon, presents their nonbinary femme sexuality as generative and ecologically intertwined. The waxing and waning of the moon and changing shapes and sizes underscore the alterable, fluid, and expansive nature of queer sexuality. By rendering sexuality as an autonomous and self-contained force that a woman “can share or not share” (1), Shange suggests desire is not fixed but a relational and elective category. Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is set in Charleston, South Carolina, and narrates the coming-of-age stories of its three eponymous characters, all sisters, who pursue arts, ancestral knowledge, and sexual independence: the eldest, Sassafrass, is a weaver who navigates an abusive relationship through creativity, followed by Cypress, who explores her independence and sexual desire through dance, and Indigo, the youngest, who engages in rituals, music, and deep connection with her community’s ecocentric traditions.1 This essay focuses on Shange’s retheorization of desire and sexual relationality in close connection with the environment, as a template for what is now labeled Black queer ecologies. Shange realizes the Black queer ecological vision by thinking sexuality, gender, and ecological attunement as mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive categories, through resistant, life-affirming practices that move toward a nonbinary and ecosexual understanding of eroticism. Alternative sexualities are treated as ecological in this essay, under the phrase “verdant intimacies”—my theoretical framing for Shange’s entwining of queerness, ecology, and Black feminist survival. These verdant intimacies resonate with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned, which calls to organize human action based on the collaborative lessons of marine life, asserting that “collaboration is natural and can be reclaimed” (23). Gumbs’s oceanic lessons extend Shange’s vision of erotic and ecological interdependence, asserting that survival must be collective, whether among people, species, or ecosystems. This reading of Shange extends verdancy beyond the arboreal to encompass the insurgent bonds and queer-erotic continuities between Shange’s protagonists and avian, lunar, and oceanic landscapes. Similarly, Suzanne Césaire’s idea of “an invisible vegetation of desires” (44) conceptualizes plants as models of relationality, rhythm, and resistance to colonial constraint through unchecked proliferation. Césaire’s theorization of plant-being presents a Black woman-centered genealogy, which, as this essay argues, resonates with a botanical interpretation of Shange’s protagonists, showing how their erotic and environmental entanglements fold into Black ecological survival. Verdancy here names the vitality that spans multiple ecologies, while intimacy signals embodied/erotic relationality across all forms of life. Taken together, verdant intimacies insist that ecological flourishing and queer eroticism are not separate terrains but interconnected modes of desiring, through which love and resistance, especially symbolized by Indigo and Cypress, are manifested in erotic, ecological, and insurgently Black ways. By extension, the sisters’ names enact verdant intimacies by being entangled with the botanical world they reference, making their identities inseparable from environmental and erotic inheritances. Naming each woman after a tree species,2 Shange anchors her rendition of Black femme-ecosexual orientation in relation to ecology: affiliated with the Cherokee Indigenous community, the sassafrass tree is known to have culinary, medicinal, and spiritual value as it is consumed in the form of teas and ritual tonics to ward off evil influences and remove curses, while cypress, which is known to have medicinal properties of longevity, is also associated with mourning, which is apt to the reading of Shange’s novel as there is a palpable connection with the dead community members and slave ancestors. Finally, indigo’s significance as a crop grown by plantation owners carries connotations of the violent histories of extractive economies as well as the radical reimagination of desire against that historical backdrop. Evoking both positive healing roots and traumatic or mournful pasts, Shange’s nomenclature is in accordance with this essay’s argument that Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo blurs binaries ecologically. These names, then, embody not a closed category of (sexual) identity but a queer intermingling of bodies, plants, and histories, underscoring my essay’s focus on ecosexual nonbinarism. While most nonbinary scholarship has worked toward destabilizing gender binaries, my work stretches nonbinarism into an ecocritical register that does not stop at gender or sexuality but reveals how ecology itself—lunar foregrounding of menstruation, ritualistic rendition of baths, and the curvy and mossy architecture of Cypress’s studio—enacts nonbinarism. Doing this allows me to read sexuality and gender not as conflated but as situated within ecological processes that are already queer, already multiple. My theorization, then, focuses on an eco-erotic, Black queer, trans, and feminist nonbinarism. The reading of nature as a desiring partner, femme lover, and a site of queer and erotic pleasure develops Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s concept of “ecosexuality”—a movement insisting that earth be read as lover by replacing the earlier epithet of mother (44)—into a Black femme ecosexual imaginary by gesturing toward a more expansive and queered ethics of relation. While Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo foregrounds women’s lives, it also exceeds the category of women to resonate equally with genderqueer subjectivities, which is evident through Shange’s ecological framing of gender as fluid, environmental, and nonbinary: this theorization of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo refuses a cis-essentialist reading of womanhood and acknowledges the importance of this work to both women and genderqueer people as rooted in the environment (queerly understood) rather than biology (heteronormatively understood). Reading Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo through an ecological framework illuminates the enduring relevance of critical concerns of survival and futurity presently animating the field of Black queer ecologies. Shange treats ecology not as a passive backdrop but as an active collaborator, enabling nonbinary and queer sexualities to flourish. For me, as an author, surfacing the potential ecological motivations behind Shange’s treatment of sexuality is both a political and scholarly project that addresses how Black queer ecological writings theorize ecology and sexuality differently compared to the dominant frames of ecofeminism and queer ecology, which have historically centered whiteness and focused their critique on dualisms. In this sense, Sabine LeBel’s call for an ecological framework that centres queer and non-normative bodies as vital respondents to environmental change aligns with Shange’s vision: both treat queer ecological survival itself as a mode of environmental resuscitation. Noting how queer communities contribute significantly to “future building in the face of pandemics and climate change” (57), LeBel extends the foundational vision of Shange, who reimagines queer futurity by entwining erotic desire with ecological survival through critiques of environmental harm, colonial legacies, and heteronormativity. 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