When Trees Testify
Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees.
The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.
In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Plant biologist Montgomery (Lessons from Plants) mixes memoir, history, and science in this unique examination of the significance of trees in Black history. Trees have traditionally served the Black community as shelters, community gathering places, and centers for education, activism, and worship, Montgomery explains. Sycamores, whose massive trunks become hollow with age, once served as hiding places for enslaved escapees, and part of the Underground Railroad was known as the Sycamore Trail. Some trees have tragic and traumatic associations: poplars, for example, have a history as lynching trees, immortalized in Billie Holiday's 1939 protest song "Strange Fruit." In the West African kingdom of Dahomey, an oak tree became known as the "Tree of Forgetting" after the practice of marching captives around it several times to stress the importance of forgetting their homes before departing for a life of slavery in the New World. Other trees have inspirational associations: the Emancipation Oak on the grounds of Virginia's Hampton University was the site of the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in the South in 1863. Throughout, Montgomery weaves in her scientific expertise and her experiences growing up around trees in Arkansas to deliver a poignant and singular retelling of Black American history. This will resonate with fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
