Jen G’s Reviews > When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy > Status Update

Black land trauma

“The tree is also composed of the intermixed breath of the individuals who owned it and the many humans whom they enslaved, who toiled for hours outside in the tree's shadow and gifted the tree with countless molecules of carbon dioxide that now testify to their presence, their journeys, their dreams in the inner wood holding up this tree.”

“I know the tree holds not just the memories but the labored breath, transformed to wood, of the many people who had not just passed by it for a few moments, as I was doing and millions of others who had come to it just for a simple visit had done.”

“As poplars signal when a stressful encounter has occurred, to prepare the neighboring trees to protect themselves, we see that these trees can share information about damage and distress. It leaves one to wonder whether— or perhaps hope that—trees that bore strange fruit also "talk" to other trees about these tragedies.”