Whispering Oak

If trees could talk....

I can talk and I have listened to this cliché whispered right under my branches. If people would stop and listen to the breeze that might hear my story or the stories of my branches. I am 460 years old I don't remember when or how I became planted I just know over the years of what I have experienced and things I have heard. Oh, yeah, I am a Carolina Oak tree, planted and grown right here in South Carolina, oh no one planted me, I am a tree from a tree. If trees could talk, well, shall we begin.

My memories begin with hearing voices of an ancient people, people who took care of the land who wanted nothing more from me than shade on a hot Carolina day. As I grew I understood they were the first people of this land and with it came the responsibility to take care of mother earth, I can say these people where my people. We began together, they cared for me and I in turn shared my acorns with them and they thanked me. When winter would come they would leave me alone but by spring time I would see them coming back again to dig for the supplies they buried beneath my roots. I took care of them and they took care of me. I loved to hear them chant and sing until...well, the next people who sat under my trees began whispering about these people. One day I overheard one of the foreign people whispering about the need to expand and then the first people, my people were no more. I wished I could have told them of the plans of this people to push them from the land but I could not speak, I could only watch and shake my branches. I remember screams and the first people no longer needed me for shade they needed me for safety and my branches did the job for a season but when winter came I could no longer hid them, that made me sad. My bark is now marred with holes of me trying to hide them as best as I could. Some of them are still buried under my roots and that had never happened to me. This by far made me the saddest.

My next conversations I overheard where those of children and laughter, now those where some of my best 100 years. I can not count the number of little hands and feet who ran across up and down my now massive trucks and branches. Homes were now beginning to sprout up and the new people who came to the land were innovative but sad. The older people talked of money all the time while the younger ones just sat with no ability to agree or disagree, I missed the first people and I often wondered where they were. One day I thought I saw one but it was only someone dressed as them and putting on a show of a General who massacred them.

My next conversations were that of torture and fire because of a different people that now were brought over to this land. These people were more different than anything I had ever witnessed because their conversations under my branches were either sad or angry nothing more. I can hear one of the Africans, which they were called other things but I shall not use them because I now understand that it was used to make them feel less of a person. The African began her story of men doing awful things to her and the child she had was taken but she wanted her back and the older man told her to not do anything to endanger herself. I remember feeling something I had never felt on my branches before, ropes and fire. I swayed angrily to get them to stop but it did no good, you know the same woman now swung from my branches and she was not talking anymore. The heat from the fire scared me well, we know what fire can do a tree, I still bare the mark of that and many more fires. The anger did not stop at my branches it spread and pretty soon loud and awful noises could be heard and the people in houses were no more. I sat alone for a number of years until a man came and began to build a large home and he was even more angry than the last people and he hated anyone who did not look like him. I am an oak tree and I produce acorns, that is all I am designed to do but with this person my branches now had fruit hanging from it I did not produce. This fruit was a people fruit that was hung with violence and I did not like that at all.

If trees could talk, I would whisper to you that I hated this time with people, I wanted to take my roots and be planted somewhere else but I know I was not the only tree to have seen this type of fruits. Soon it would end and I was glad that person moved away and was replaced with a people who began to build again and again until there hardly any of my trees around me. I watched as they used the other trees for their homes and to make furniture for them to sit and speak of their accomplishments of how they destroyed other trees.

But once again I hear voices of children and soon most of the memories I share with you are now gone. If trees could talk I would let you hear my voice of my branches and what is beneath my roots. Let me get back to the people who are still breathing beneath my branches who now are at peace with their life and the lives around them...my hope is peace beneath my branches.