‘Their Breath Was Captured in the Tree’

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine , an interview by host Steve Curwood with botanist and author Beronda Montgomery.

When plant biologist Beronda Montgomery sat down to write what became a personal memoir mixed with a botanical history of African Americans, she found her research as a Ph.D. lab scientist had brought her squarely into the world of social science as well.

Her studies of how plants respond to light during photosynthesis led to shining a light on the history of extensive plant cultivation by African Americans, including those who endured forced labor.

Montgomery is the author of “ When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy .”

This interview has been edited for length; the full conversation is available in the player above the story.

STEVE CURWOOD: “When Trees Testify” tells the African American history of enslavement through the lens of trees. What do we see?

BERONDA MONTGOMERY: We see that African Americans’ experience in the U.S. has been tied up with trees from the beginning, in terms of having to pull them up to make land and also the ways in which trees are a part of their life, whether that was going through them, navigating through them, or sometimes the very harsh reality of lynching.

CURWOOD: Trees are, of course, very important to the health of the environment, and they are key agents in the fight against climate disruption, for example. You are a plant scientist—a botanist—but your book is a history book, and maybe a memoir as well. What is this nexus between science and history, and both public history and personal history, in telling these stories?

MONTGOMERY: There was a very strong nexus when I was visiting the former site of a plantation, and saw a tree that was estimated to be 600 years old. I realized that that tree would have been standing there when people were enslaved on the land. My understanding of the science of it gave me some insights into what that meant, and also thinking about my own family’s history in the South. That one tree brought together those areas for me.

CURWOOD: How did this tree capture the experience of slavery that occurred around it?

MONTGOMERY: The tree was standing on the land, and I thought how beautiful it was that something could live long enough that those enslaved people, and me and my family, who were visiting, could have been with the same being. That was the first thing—the long-lived nature.

I also thought about one of the things I study as a scientist, photosynthesis, and how carbon dioxide and water are combined with the energy of sunlight to make sugars, and those sugars are ultimately used to make the compounds of wood. What occurred to me in that moment, and I shared with my sister and son, was that the ancestors’ breath … would be in the wood of that tree. Their breath was captured in the tree, and now we’re standing there with that same tree. Our breath had a chance to be captured together on a kind of recorded carbon archive.

CURWOOD: What did your creative scientific mind think about this notion that some of the carbon that’s in this tree must have passed through enslaved people who were here before? How did that make you feel?

MONTGOMERY: Tiya Miles has talked about trees as material witnesses , but it was really in that moment that I understood the materialness of the material witness and how the breath was actually captured there. Oak trees have been talked about as witness trees, and it gave that a different meaning for me. They weren’t just witnessing in terms of standing there and observing, but they were carrying forward part of the essence of those people’s lives.

CURWOOD: Let’s take an excursion deeper into your scientific background and talk about epigenetics, or how environmental circumstances tend to affect how genes get expressed. To what extent do you think the experience of slavery might have affected how that tree was able to express its own growth and development?

MONTGOMERY: I think that there certainly are likely markers that would have been impressed upon the trees from their living together with people who were enslaved. I mentioned in the book the idea that if there was a tree that was a hanging tree, that it remembers the weight of those bodies. We know in horticulture that if a branch is bent, that can induce flowering, that can induce differences in the way the branches grow.

We think that it’s outside the realm of possibility that a hanging tree would remember its strange fruit because we haven’t had scientists who think about those parallels and imagine that the biology is there. I happened to be visiting the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, and there were some trees whose roots had been soaked with blood several times. You imagine that that also changes the soil and the ways that the roots of those trees grow.

“They weren’t just witnessing in terms of standing there and observ…