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

So I bear witness to my ancestors' legacy by carrying it forward. I'm not only my ancestors' wildest dream, I bear their great endowment, and of it I will proudly testity.

Matthew Desmond argues that the combination of these factors led America to rapidly expand the industry that enriched national coffers due to trade-offs in values and morals when it came to land and labor: "Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above."

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.

Mom taught me the concept of "if there are three, let it be." This worked because poison oak, which makes clustered fruit that could be mistaken for unripe blackberries, has compound leaves with three leaflets, whereas wild blackberry was in the "if there are five, let it thrive" category of plants that are not likely to be harmful and possess compound leaves with five leafiets

This use of pecans by Indigenous people should not be surprising given that that the name of the nut, “pecan" itself is thought to be derived from the Algonquin word "pakani, which translates to "a nut too hard to crack by hand" or, alternatively, "a nut requiring a stone to crack."