When Trees Testify

Beronda L. Montgomery, a plant biochemist, weaves together plant biology, personal memoir, and African American history to argue that trees are living witnesses to Black life in the United States. Organized around eight tree species and the cotton shrub, the book traces how plants and African Americans are inseparable in American history, from the era of chattel slavery through the present, and calls for a reclamation of what Montgomery terms Black botanical legacy: the inherited tradition of Black expertise in cultivating, understanding, and relating to plants.

Montgomery opens with two encounters with trees decades apart. As a high school junior at Arkansas Governor's School, she found an assignment to "talk to a tree" absurd and leaned against an American elm in silence. Nearly thirty years later, standing before the more-than-six-hundred-year-old McLeod Oak at a former plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, she grasps the book's central scientific metaphor: Through photosynthesis, plants convert inhaled carbon dioxide into sugars that become wood, meaning centuries-old trees carry the breath of generations of enslaved people in their physical form.

Her reluctant 2019 visit to the McLeod Plantation with her son Nicolas and her sister René becomes the book's catalyzing event. Touring the cramped cabins of the enslaved and viewing the cotton gin, she recalls her parents' upbringing in Jim Crow Arkansas, where their schooling was routinely interrupted for cotton harvest season. She contemplates how enslaved Africans brought critical agricultural knowledge from West Africa that drove plantation success. A "first and only" throughout her scientific career, Montgomery frames her own work in plant biology as a reclamation of ancestral expertise.

The chapter on pecan trees introduces Antoine, an enslaved man held captive at Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, who around 1846 successfully grafted pecan trees, developing what became the Centennial variety and establishing the foundation for the commercial pecan industry. Montgomery connects Antoine's achievement to warm childhood memories of her grandmother's pecan harvests in Arkansas. She also links pecans to the story of Ashley's Sack, a textile keepsake in which an enslaved mother named Rose packed pecans, a dress, and a lock of hair for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley, who was being sold to a different enslaver.

American sycamore trees, with their distinctive white bark and hollow trunks, served as landmarks on Montgomery's childhood adventures near Little Rock and, historically, as hiding places and navigational guides for people escaping enslavement. She draws on John Brown's 1854 Slave Life in Georgia, in which he describes concealing supplies in hollow trees during his escape from enslavement, and explains how sycamores' moonlit trunks guided freedom seekers along rivers central to the Underground Railroad. She also addresses sycamores' use as hanging trees and the 2014 planting of a sycamore on the US Capitol grounds as the Emmett Till Memorial Tree, honoring the 14-year-old whose 1955 murder galvanized the civil rights movement.

The chapter on willow trees becomes the book's most personally devastating section. Montgomery recalls a beloved weeping willow outside her aunt's home in Arkansas, then pivots to the Elaine Massacre of 1919, in which hundreds of Black sharecroppers and their families were killed after organizing to demand fair cotton prices. Journalist Ida B. Wells investigated and concluded the violence was a conspiracy by white men to seize the farmers' cotton. Montgomery discovers that her maternal grandfather, Hosea Thompson, was approximately five years old and living in Elaine during the massacre. He never spoke of it. A memorial willow planted in 2019 at the massacre site was vandalized and cut down; a replacement willow died mysteriously.

Poplar trees carry the weight of the book's engagement with lynching. Montgomery recounts witnessing an effigy hung from a tree during a 1989 homecoming event at Little Rock Central High School, echoing protests against the school's 1957 integration by the Little Rock Nine, the nine Black students who integrated the school. She also describes encountering a noose at a graduate school retreat; as the only African American present, she sat in shock while colleagues laughed at what had been hung as a joke. She connects these experiences to the song "Strange Fruit," most famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, and to research showing that poplar trees store epigenetic markers—chemical changes to DNA that record past experiences and can be passed to future generations—and communicate stress signals to neighboring trees, raising the question of whether trees that bore lynching victims carry biological traces of those encounters.

Mulberry trees lead Montgomery to the history of sericulture, the practice of cultivating silkworms for silk production, which in the antebellum South depended on enslaved labor. Enslaved children gathered mulberry leaves and performed the tedious work of unraveling cocoons, while enslaved women were sometimes sent for specialized training in silk reeling. Montgomery interweaves this history with a childhood friendship with Beth, a white classmate, and the disillusionment of discovering that a summer camp turned out to be an exclusively Black program framed through a deficit lens, revealing that trusted white parents viewed Montgomery and her sister as charity projects rather than peers.

Oak trees receive the book's most expansive treatment. Montgomery visits the Emancipation Oak at Hampton University in Virginia, where free Black educator Mary Smith Peake held classes for formerly enslaved refugees in 1861, and the Angel Oak near Charleston, estimated at up to 500 years old. She connects oaks to the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (1932–1972), in which approximately 600 Black men were denied treatment for syphilis so scientists could study the disease's progression, a betrayal that remains a source of medical mistrust in Black communities. She also describes the Tree of Forgetting in Ouidah, Republic of Benin, where captive Africans were forced to circle an oak in a ritual intended to erase their memories of home before being shipped across the Atlantic.

The chapter on cotton explores the plant most deeply associated with African American trauma. Montgomery recounts her mother's visceral reaction to encountering a cotton plant in a university greenhouse, turning her back and declaring, "I never need to see that again" (167). She traces how cotton drove American economic supremacy through unpaid enslaved labor and how post-emancipation exploitation continued through sharecropping and convict leasing, a system in which incarcerated people—disproportionately Black—were hired out as near-free labor to farms and industries. She introduces Mary Gaffney, an enslaved woman who used cotton root bark to prevent pregnancies and deny her enslaver additional human property, an act of botanical knowledge employed for subversion.

Apple trees anchor the book's final chapter and its most hopeful narrative. Montgomery introduces Blackdom, New Mexico, the first Black settlement in the state, incorporated in 1903. Among the founders were Frank Marion Boyer and his family, who fled Georgia to escape Ku Klux Klan threats, and the settlement recruited farmers who cultivated apple trees in the desert. She connects this to Harriet Tubman, who labored in orchards as an enslaved child and later planted apple trees at her homestead in Auburn, New York, fulfilling a childhood vow to grow fruit in freedom.

In the conclusion, Montgomery describes the founding of Black Botanists Week in 2020, which she co-organized, and reports that after the 2024 presidential election, Black students received anonymous texts stating they had been "selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation." She frames the book as an act of Sankofa, a Twi concept meaning going back to retrieve what has been left behind to enrich the present and future. She declares that Black botanical legacy is "ancient in origin, born of timeless expertise, endurance, and persistence" (257), neither beginning nor ending with enslavement, and carries it forward so that its seeds can germinate into an abundant future.