When enslaved people first arrived at Smithfield in the early 1770s there were no buildings, no fields under crop. It was their labor that cleared the land and constructed the Prestons’ new home. We know little about who these men and women were. At least one, Jack, was likely from among the First 16. We cannot know if others were as well, or if they had come on other ships, or had been born enslaved in the British colonies. As these Black men and women created wealth for a white family on land never ceded by Native Americans, they found, in the middle of a meadow, a tree.
Or, perhaps, two trees – arborists speculate there may have been a large, well-established white oak, with another oak growing near it, only twenty years old. The two may have been related. In the evocative language of arborists, they were sisters or cousins, or mother and daughter, aunt and niece. For reasons now lost to time, the elder tree died or was cut down, leaving the younger tree to continue on alone for two more centuries, solitary in an open field. Arborists call a tree like this a ‘lone wolf,’ although to extend their family imagery we might call it an orphan.
But such imagery is limited to describing the tree’s proximity to other trees. Its roots spread outward, drawing in water and nutrients that flowed up and out through its branches; its leaves fell and decomposed to enrich the soil; its acorns sustained deer; its branches provided shelter for hatchlings. It stood alone in the field, but was inseparable from all of Smithfield. It was a living, active part of the land and landscape, and yet immobile.
This tree would come to be known, by the enslaved people and their enslavers alike, as the Merry Tree. For enslaved people the Merry Tree may have offered something they had lost. Our language is replete with metaphors that use vegetation to illuminate the meaning of home and community. To be displaced is to be ‘uprooted,’ to make a new home is to ‘sink roots.’ Did the enslaved see in the Merry Tree the rootedness in place that had been taken from them through enslavement? As the seasons passed and the enslaved came to understand that there was no return to their birth homes, did they take reassurance from the Merry Tree? Did they see in it a sign that they, too, could grow roots, become one with this new environment, draw strength and nourishment from the soil, grow and grow old as the Merry Tree did? In the late twentieth century in southwest Congo, an elder would be referred to as “as shin ikuny or shin dia mutoond, ‘root man,’ or ‘foot of the tree.’” With age came an expectation of remaining close to home as if rooted to the ground, and thus “also rooted in the ancestral past.” Though it is unlikely that any of the enslaved could have trace their ancestry to this region, one wonders: Did the enslaved see themselves in the Merry Tree, orphaned yet sinking roots, becoming one with the land, its past and its future?
The Merry Tree would have had another meaning for the enslaved people. Across much of west Africa a solitary tree could often become a place of ritual and political significance. They have come to be known as palava trees, the term derived from the Portuguese palavra, speech or discussion. For as the Portuguese sailed down the coast of Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries, asserting power and garnering economic benefits from the transatlantic slave trade, it was upon the ground beneath great trees that they met African rulers. For example, in Mbanza Kongo, the capital of the central African kingdom of Kongo, Portuguese carried on diplomacy with the king under a massive fig tree in the city’s central square.
Instances of African peoples using trees for important political rituals and debate stretch across the continent, and historical evidence dates back many hundreds of years. In some places in West Africa different trees provided space for specific purposes: religious rituals or divination, circumcision or initiation, and public discussion or political activity. Depending on the regions, the trees might be kapok, cola, acacia, or the iconic baobab which can grow to 60 feet tall, 25 feet in circumference, with lifetimes of a thousand years or more.
Kingdoms and smaller states in West Africa often traced their foundation to a particular tree. When in the early 1700s a king came to live under a karité tree it marked the origins of the city of Segou, capital of the Segou Kingdom. Kings might be coronated beneath the “foundation tree” or, as in the Asante Kingdom, swear to rule his people wisely. Farther north, in the 1680s, a representative of the (English) Royal African Company wished to resolve a dispute with the mansa (king) of Niumi along the Gambia river, and met with him “beneath a great tree.” According to the Epic of Sundiata, which recounts the early days of the Kingdom of Mali, one of the first mansas “loved to sit often at the foot of the great silk-cotton tree which dominated his palace.” In Wolof pénc (pronounced ‘pench’) refers to a tree of any species that is used as a palava tree. The association of pénc with community and political discussion was so intimate that the word has come to be used for any town square or public gathering, including the National Assembly of Senegal.
When the enslaved had been once again uprooted and made to create Smithfield, did the Merry Tree stir a memory? For those who may have been born in Africa, and for others who had listened to stories from their elders who had crossed the Atlantic, did they recognize it as a palava tree?
Holding a dance or marriage ceremony or community discussion under the Merry Tree may have been so much more than simply enjoying its shade. To use the Merry Tree in this way asserted a link to another continent, another home. If a political community could be symbolized by a solitary baobab, why not a solitary white oak? If Africans in west Africa gathered under a penc were asserting their claim to that land, what of Africans in southwest Virginia gathered under the Merry Tree?
If even just in their subconscious minds, under the uncomprehending gaze of the Prestons, the enslaved transformed Smithfield from a white plantation to an African town.
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Works consulted
Filip de Boeck, “Of Trees and Kings: Politics and Metaphor among the Aluund of Southwestern Zaire,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 451-73.
D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Essex: Longman, 1965).
Eric S. Ross, “Palaver Trees Reconsidered in the Senegalese Landscape: Arboreal Monuments and Memorials,” in Michael Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru, eds., African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change (Oxford: James Currey, 2008).
Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia, 2nd edition. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004).
Personal communication, Jamie King, VT University Arborist.
Kapok tree, Ghana: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_kapok_tree.jpg
Baobab tree in Niger, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_under_a_baobab_tree.jpg
