Ancestor Trees

My first tree memory is not my own. It is a story shared by my nana who, along with her younger siblings, was discovered to have taken a longer route home. They’d cut through some backwoods in order to avoid the freshest lynching site. One of the officers on “duty” saw them and, at gunpoint, compelled them back. He warned that these young Black children, no older than twelve years old, would hang from the great oaks, replacing the bodies of the men hanging there currently. Nana went home, her siblings in tow, and made dinner. After that encounter, she was always one of the last to leave the Hanging Trees.

I am a Black woman in the United States surrounded by trees. I am a Black woman in this world, who has lived and grown up in Oakland, a city named after trees.

As a child of the earth, I feel most at home when my feet are firmly planted on soil, land, ground. I am most unlike myself in the sky whether that means an airplane, a tall building, or a ferris wheel. Early on I knew death, that it happened, that sometimes it just happened and nothing could prepare you for it. In my family, we talk of death often. You get used to it.

To come from a stolen and lynched people is an embodied, felt experience. It leaves an eternal mark on the body, one that cannot be erased.

Nana told stories about white folks standing in those fields watching our bodies turn to rot, making Black death spectacle, carnival, reward. Feeding themselves in the face of our terror and then going home with their children and sleeping easily in bed.

My blood boiled, still boils, at the truth of this history. It isn’t something I can explain or imagine intellectually and I don’t want to. To come from a stolen and lynched people is an embodied, felt experience. It leaves an eternal mark on the body, one that cannot be erased.

I remember being angry at everything. God. The police. The people watching. The trees. And while all I heard at the time was pain, white hot and sickening, a small seed of thought placed itself nearby, right on the edge of possibility. I almost shrugged it off, deemed insensitive and unrealistic. Perhaps those very trees hold a sweet memory further up the line. Perhaps those trees gave the deceased comfort as they were passing, even if only the comfort of witnessing.

Around the time that nana began telling stories about the Hanging Trees, whether before, after, or in some other time continuum, I started to notice life all around me. I began to notice spring’s bloom. Those first, awkward, early moments when bees cling to lavender clumsily. When a child is caught fascinated by glittering dew on a dying flower. Where tree branches full to bursting, swing in the air. Where whispers and ghosts and memories begin again.

Pine. Palm. Maple. Cherry Blossom. Redwood. Eucalyptus. Oak. Walnut. Weeping Willow. Sequoia. Manzanita.

These are the seeds that fuel my work.

There is a kind of Blackness in being a tree. Trees are made monstrous, are cleared and gutted and blamed for their fall. Some of the very systems that orchestrate and profit from Black terror also benefit from positioning trees as expendable commodities instead of longstanding residents that have a stake in what changes. All of that is true and yet, these bones know there’s something there above the line, across oceans, beyond borders, prisons, and forced separations. Beyond, before, during and after there are clasped hands, stomping feet, riotous laughter, pleasure, heated, loving debates, and delicious food.

Climbing into the body of a tree is climbing into nana’s lap, is hearing her song on the loneliest days, is rubbing her hands and feet with vaseline, (vicks vaporub when she’s sick), is her watching basketball every week for hours on end, eyes alight and mouth turned up at the edges, is her handing me a quarter for the work, which, even at the time I knew didn’t need payment. She had gifted me with her touch and that was enough.

I celebrate the Blackness of being a tree, of living in a Black body that delights and wonders and worships and shapes and calls for interdependent relationships centered in repair and recovery. From people whose fires couldn’t be tamed, whose love rings from the bottom of the ocean to the highest mountain tops.

I know trees as witnesses. Protectors. Grief workers. Conjurers.

And still, sometimes late at night, I hear them moving and think: conspirators, traitors, liars. I wrestle with this connection which is to say I wrestle with myself. I am working to be more tree. To live into the portal and visions they offer in Tree Space.

Tree Space sits outside of time in a worn nook, protected by a sacred network of threads. It has been called many names: anchor, root, gathering place, home. Tree Space is a blanket of animated possibility that invites all beings to move into more embodied, living coherence with one another. Here everything is felt in and throughout the body. It is training ground for warriors, healing center for those that need tending, cuddle party for all who crave touch, memorial site for the grieving and remembered.

When a tree is cut down, its cluster — the trees surrounding it — mourn. And then they fill the space previously inhabited by the fallen tree, allowing the trees in closest proximity to grow and stretch themselves towards new life. When trees are in distress, they put out a distress signal, an ultrasonic noise indicating they need support. Without trees bursting forth, without this practice of intimacy and deep mutuality, there are no forests.

In Tree Space, you learn to construct altars wherever you go. To make offerings of acorn, pine, sap, and stardust. To open yourself up to clay and sorrow. To soak a bone in syrup, to twist your leg in ecstasy, and bathe in the work of tending.

Trees have taught me the closeness of laboring in community. Of welcoming the cracking. The splitting chill of being reconfigured. Of coaxing sap full with organized memories and luscious, luscious, luscious wisdom.

In the richness of this sacred land work, this lifetime assignment, this call as fosterer and steward, an ancient battery is sparked. In Tree Space, those batteries are charged, and I am held by the hands of our ancestors. Those hands say: In a world next to this one, nana and my great aunts and uncles play late into the night and laugh. The three men are alive and climbing up to the tree house for their weekly game of spades and dominoes. The police officer doesn’t exist, and there is no such thing as Hanging Trees.

And so I pray to the great oak in front of me, forehead at its base, knees bent, belly as close as it can get to the forest floor and sing:

Ancestors, I apologize for my impatience.

Ancestors, I apologize for my impatience.

Ancestors, I apologize for my impatience.

Trees, please teach me to be patient. I am ready.

Trees, please teach me to be patient. I am ready.

Trees, please teach me to be patient. I am ready.

Thank you for the lessons on recovery and repair. On grief and hope in a burning world. I’ll see you tonight.

This piece is a collaboration with Reverb writer Emanuel H. Brown on the role of trees as ancestors. Read Emanuel’s piece here.