Old, old trees!

Trees can grow to be very old....the sitka spruce in Colorado and the live oak trees on a plantation in Louisiana I once visited. Can you imagine what they have witnessed over the centuries. So with mint julep in hand, I sat under a 300 year old live oak tree and wrote from the perspective of a tree. Strange, I know...but the mint julip assisted!

The witness!

For 300 years history has unfolded beneath my live oak branches.

The lovers who sat in the shade carefully dressed and chaperoned, drinking lemonade…..the children who climbed in my branches, both black and white…..the overseers who tied slaves to my trunk and merciless beat them bloody….and the soldiers who drank cool water and washed the grime from their faces….many have passed this way. I have watched undistorted history, not convoluted by the North or the South, by black or white men. Not revisionist history, but the smell of real history….the sweat and human blood mixed together and running down a brown muscular back, the sound of a crack of a whip or the crack of a rifle, the sight of the best of society departing their carriages, coming down this alley of oaks, dressed in their partying best and fanning themselves on a warm summer’s evening, promenading to the big house.

I am witness to the slave mother laying at my feet in the deepest grief as her children were sold on the auction block, wishing she could be beneath my roots and no longer able to bear children. And the mistress, equally in grief as child after child succumbed to yellow fever….my branches almost touch their gravesites. And now, 300 years later as my heavy branches touch the manicured ground, tourists marvel at my age and the spread of my canopy and what foresight the landscaper had to put us so equally at a distance to form such a beautiful entrance to this plantation. They are without the knowledge of what I have seen…..only listening attentively to the tour guide’s explain the many masters that owned this land of sugar cane and rice.

There are a few among the group, very few, who wonder where the slave’s quarters are and what became of the human lives who built this plantation with raw back breaking labor. The questions become awkward as it interrupts the flow of the volunteer, dressed in hooped skirt and speaking in sweet tones. So the tour moves on, except for one, who leans against my trunk, drinking a mint julep and closes her eyes to feel the history, to smell the heat of the afternoon and to pause a moment to honor all that I have seen. I tell her as she hugs my trunk and pays her respects to all those that have passed before her…..under my branches and upon my roots. Her heart feels my reverence for those journeys as I stand as witness and share it with her.