Nestled in her 2016 album Heavn, Jamila Woods’ “LSD” opens with “A body of water inside me // Reminds me of oceans, though I’ve never known one.” A play on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, “LSD” is an ode to Woods’ complicated love for her hometown and the waters of Lake Michigan that surround it. The song also happens to be the title of Sam Adams’ dissertation.
For Adams, a 2024–25 James A. Winn Graduate Fellow, Woods’ affection for the lake resonates with her own experience as a child growing up in Milwaukee. Lake Michigan was a physical point of orientation – the water, as a landmark, helped shape her internal geographic compass. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in English and Women’s & Gender Studies, Adams focuses on how bodies of water are central figures in shaping Black subjectivity, drawing from historical narratives and her own childhood experience navigating Milwaukee pools as a Black swimmer.
One of three Black girls on her local swim team, Adams said her first superconscious realization of the swimming pool as a contested racial and socioeconomic space came when her coach, Mr. Moses, told her about the discrimination he faced as a Black man in competitive swimming in the 1970s. His experience helped her articulate the tension she felt between the feeling of camaraderie and the isolation of being Black on a nearly-all-white team.
With a background in creative writing and poetry, Adams draws theory from studies of her own childhood interactions, describing the endurance she acquired as a swimmer as both physical and political. She also steps back in time, tracing the narratives of three Black girls – Inez Patterson, Mimi Jones, and Dajerria Becton – and their interactions with the swimming pool. Through poetry, periodicals, and photography, Adams underscores the potential redemptive power of the pool over the span of a century.
At the Institute, Adams said she finds a generous balance of rigor and care and appreciates the diversity of disciplinary perspectives in lending feedback to her work. She hopes to finish a chapter analyzing Floridian aquatic influences in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God by the end of the term.
