This chapter turns to the pastoral and its involvement in antebellum African American expressions of environmental knowledge. Conceptualizing the idea of a “strategic pastoral,” seen in moments in which pastoral elements become part of a doubled (visual) perspective in slave narratives, provides a means for examining how this writing technique enables an articulation of environmental knowledge, social critique, and utopian hope. Through a variety of texts and with a specific focus on the narratives by Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Box Brown (1849), this chapter demonstrates where, how, and with what effects slave narratives strategized pastoral elements. This also suggests an alternative framework for thinking about the (anti)pastoral in ecocritical readings of African American literature.