Afro-Caribbean folklore describes the baobab tree (Adansonia digitata) as a portal to the ancestral continent. It is said that if the tree is approached beneath a full moon and an aspirant enters the tree’s hollow trunk, he will be returned to Africa. As a mysterious and beloved feature of the local landscape, the baobab tree is perhaps the preeminent physical symbol of the many historical and cultural linkages that exist between the Virgin Islands and Africa. Like many other local plants, the baobab was introduced to our landscape via the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans carried the seeds of home on their journeys along the infamous Middle Passage. They planted them here and over time they took root in the soil as well as in the mythology of the Caribbean region.
Given this history, it seemed fitting that my first encounter with members of the Black Heritage Tree Project should take place in the shade of the prodigious spreading branches of the Grove Place Baobab on St. Croix. Dr. Alicia Odwale, a National Geographic Explorer, professor of archaeology and the organization’s director is visiting St. Croix along with other members of the organization. Together they are working with the project’s local team to identify, catalog and celebrate the island’s historically and culturally significant trees.
As the Black Heritage Tree Project website explains, the organization is dedicated to “honoring the legacy of Black communities through the powerful presence of trees.” In addition to St. Croix the BTHP maintains local project sites in Greenwood, Oklahoma and Galveston and Houston, Texas where they map, collect oral histories and build archives around trees they describe as “living witnesses that stand in places where history unfolded — sites of resistance, struggle, and resilience.” By preserving and sharing the stories these trees have to tell, the Black Heritage Project aims to “connect people to the land and the memories it holds.” The work they carry out is about “recognition, remembrance, and healing through place-based storytelling.”
As precisely the kind of culturally significant tree the organization is devoted to, the Grove Place Baobab is considered “a living monument.” The tree has borne witness to three turbulent centuries of Virgin Islands history. Planted around 1750, this majestic baobab flourished in St. Croix soil, enduring a century of slavery in the Danish West Indies before bearing witness to the 1848 Emancipation Day rebellion, the 1878 Fireburn Revolt, the transfer of the islands to the United States in 1917, and even the devastating winds of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and Maria in 2017. Having withstood this impressive sweep of often violent local history, this venerated “elder” of the local landscape remains solidly rooted in St. Croix soil, a profound symbol of resilience and empowerment.
Standing before this “guardian of memory and culture,” examining the gray flanks of its three distinct trunks which seem to meld into one at the tree’s base, the obvious comparison is to the legs of some enormous elephant. One cannot help but imagine a sort of mythic elephant trudging through 300 years of St. Croix’s history while remaining stationary and resolutely rooted in place. The comparison seems fitting, too, both because elephants seem emblematic of ancestral African landscapes and because they are believed, like the tree before me, to be blessed with an almost supernatural capacity for memory. Indeed this “beloved jumbie tree” is now listed on the National Register of Historic Trees and is widely regarded as the oldest Baobab in the territory. In the lore and legend of the territory, it is known for “carrying stories of resistance, freedom, celebration, and survival.”
Dr. Alicia Odwale and her team recognize that trees like this one are not mere features of the landscape, they are truly “guardians of memory and culture”. Because baobabs can live for up to a thousand years, the Grove Place Baobab may continue to bear witness and accumulate memories for generations to come. BHTP member Dr. Justin Dunnvant, an archaeologist and assistant professor of Anthropology at UCLA, describes the tree before us as “a holder of memory and of place.” Trees like this one, he explains, “help us to chart an African geography onto a landscape that has traditionally been defined by colonial maps.”
— Joshua Grant Canning holds a Master’s Degree in Environmental Journalism and in his writing he pursues projects that involve the intersection of nature and culture. On the basis of his writing about the ecological and cultural implications of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, he was awarded a Middlebury College Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Journalism 2008-2009. The fellowship enabled him to travel widely in Japan (where he had lived previously for four years) to research and write about pressing environmental and cultural issues. He and his wife Wendy moved from Vermont to St. Croix in 2010 and he taught World Literature and AP English Literature at Good Hope Country Day School for over a decade. He is also a musician and jazz guitar enthusiast and performs regularly at events and venues around the island.
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