Here is a strange and bitter crop: Emmett Till and the rhetorical complications of treescape memory.

• Author: Black, Jason Edward

In November 2014, on a cold and rainy fall morning, a score of Department of Justice dignitaries, progressive agents of Congress, and members of the aging mid-twentieth century U.S. Civil Rights Movement gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds to plant a single sycamore sapling. A cultural salve motivated by the merciless and despicable 1955 murder of Black teenager Emmett Till, the ceremony was--in the words of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder--meant to "commemorate [Till's] legacy by planting a tree in his honor--a tree that will become his living memorial, here at the heart of the Republic" (Holder, 2014, p. 1). When the morning sun glinted across the Capitol grounds the following day on November 18 it revealed the new specter and its constitutive marker amongst the "Memorial Tree" section of the building's 274-acre park. There next to "Emmett's tree" stood a small, spiked plaque that read: "To honor Emmett Louis Till, a young African-American man whose brutal killing in 1955 raised the public awareness that led to Civil Rights reforms" ("Emmett Till memorial tree"). Indeed, the physical wounds of young Emmett connect to the ongoing social wounds of his slaying--made fresh when his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, courageously and presciently displayed his broken body before the nation's conscience and made forever-sore by the circulation of Till's memory in the context of contemporary violence committed against Black communities (Hendrickson 2005; Houck 2005; Tell 2008; Whitaker 2005).

And, so it was that after nearly 60 years following his brutally-exacted and popularly-animated murder, and in the wake of decades of public petitions to bring his name and story to Washington, DC, Mamie's son Emmett finally was remembered in his own nation's capital (Gordon 2014). (1)

This essay examines the Emmett Till Memorial Tree's (ETMT) textual field--from Senator Susan Collins' (Maine) initial petition for commemoration, Holder's memorial address, and Civil Rights activist Janet Langhart Cohen's encomium for Emmett to the "official" Architect of the Capitol press releases about the ceremony and op-eds related to the moment--that engages the rhetorical complications surrounding what critical geographers call "treescape memory" (Cloke and Pawson 2008). Trees long have been a part of memorialization in western culture. They simultaneously are physical place-markers of memory (celebrating life and noting loss) and social space-signs of resilient human nature (moving from "dead" traumatized pasts to "breathing" anticipative futures). However, despite the living monuments that treescapes help craft, they also can be fleeting and temporary; they elicit an impermanence that brick-and-mortar architecture manages to avoid.

In analyzing the ETMT and the public discourse that surrounds it, the optimistic metaphorical sycamore-as-hope can seemingly clash with a fretful sense that the corporeal sycamore itself is insufficient to commemorate such a watershed flag individual of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Concerning the latter, that the tree was planted against a social landscape of battered Black bodies, especially alongside the immediately-contextual August 2014 murders of both Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri) and Lennon Lacy (Bladenboro, North Carolina) only complicates the ways that the tree is understood to mean. That is, the timing of the memorial after years of ignored appeals to honor Till might have struck some as peculiar; is Till being remembered on his own or does it take analogic traumas to call upon Till's spirit? Moreover, the use of a tree, a symbolic and material badge of lynching, signals traumas that might not otherwise be present in the memorialization of an icon through brick-and-mortar; some might question if a memorial tree, therefore, insults Black communities? Finally, a tree is not as enduring as statuary; frankly, is a tree enough to honor Till?

Of course, there is concomitant evidence to suggest that a tree is an appropriate sign of life, renewal, and growth, thus functioning as a suitable emblem of Till's memory. For instance, U.S. Civil Rights activist Janet Langhart Cohen reminded the gathered audience that November day that Emmett's tree will "reach for the sun in the day time and the stars by night, and inspire us to reach for our higher humanity" ("Emmett Till tree memorial").

This essay contends that the ETMT is positioned within a "treescape memory" field that muddles the question of how best to remember Mamie's son. Ultimately, the ETMT's incomplete dimensions and flawed placement are reminiscent of the claim that "it is the structure of our collective memory and public discourse that makes racism a persistent problem" (Wilson 2002, 198). To get to the core of such an examination, this essay unfolds by discussing the contours of treescape memory before next analyzing the milieu and texts surrounding the ETMT. The essay concludes by offering transitory remarks about the case as a problematic way to commemorate Black trauma, especially Emmett Till's brutal lynching, with treescape memory. Contours of "forgetting" and "commemorative privilege" (i.e. work of Vivian and Fitzmaurice, respectively) are accessed to help round-out a critique of the ETMT.

The tenor and travails of "treescape memory"

A culture of nature

The connection between cultural representations and nature is time-tested and remains one of the earliest known examples of human relationships with both the physical and social world. As Samuels (1999) writes, "almost from the moment we flopped out of the sea and onto dry land we have been awed by the regenerative and transformative power of [nature]" (p. 127). It makes sense that humans found (and continue to find) meaning in our tangled and inescapable overlap with nature. After all, we are a part of nature and have always been reliant on our enmeshment with it for material survival, understandings of physical time, internalizations of life span, and appreciation for the beauty of ourselves as imbricated with and parallel to nature's eternal exquisiteness.

There is also something mysterious about nature that magnetizes our visceral focus beyond our basic hybridity with it. That is, nature is sometimes unpredictable, dynamically-shifting, and--like human existence--is evanescent, yet always present. Perhaps because of these qualities, humans have tended to work nature into their memories of lifespan and into their commemorations of the humanly world, especially as they maneuver through the ephemeral and through-to a transcendent ethereality (depending on a culture's spiritual predilections). From deathscape remembrances to public displays of appreciation for people and events, natural landscapes have been with us since recorded time immemorial as a way to make sense of who we are in the world. Of this idea, Ginn (2014) reminds us that "descriptions of memory-laden landscapes rely on tropes of presence: unearthing memory, making the invisible visible, salvaging, recovering, luxuriating in the sensuous, mossy, crumbly, rusty feel and smell and taste of memory" (p. 232). Simply, there is something resplendent about returning to the "idyllic serenity of a presumably more peaceful and pastoral, rural life of the past" (Sather-Wagstaff 2015, 237).

In the western world, beginning with the first rural cemeteries of the 1800s when nature returned to cultural favor following the Enlightenment's hubris and in the midst of the desecration of nature by way of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, such presence has motivated a focus on nature as constitutive. Such an understanding "reflects a concern to bring nature back into social theory," write Cloke and Pawson (2008). That is, nonhuman components of nature are "increasingly seen as not merely inscribed upon human culture but understood as active agents, relationally entwined in the reproduction of ecological, social, economic, cultural, and political formations" (p. 109). In sum, nature has been and is central to human world-making.

The public lives of trees

Part of humans' fascination with nature, especially as marked through commemoration, involves trees. Trees have found themselves the anchor of a number of ancient and spiritual stories. The most obvious placement, in a Judeo-Christian frame, is the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" in the Old Testament. The apple that, in Genesis, supposedly set the world down a particular ontological path was borne of a tree. Oppositely, the olive tree signaled salvation, as did the Cross and its wooden yew planks. The ancient Celts and Druids, too, found the yew tree to be a symbol of immortality and renewal. And, key figures in Greek myths from Apollo and Atys to Daphne and Smilax were transformed into pine trees, laurels, yews, and sycamores as sacrifices to the gods and as tributes to said figures' ennobled character (Sacred Places). In the Greco-Roman world, Plato taught beneath trees, a canopy that can be viewed as a metaphor for connecting human inquiry to the earth. Aristotle even developed his Categories, scaffolding genus and differentia, through a diagrammed tree. The Greek philosopher Porphyr relied on this tree (Arbor Porphyria) in introducing his take on Aristotle's categories (Franklin 1986, 251-252).

Secularly in the United States, maypoles were rallied around as collective hopes for the new year in Anglo and Anglo-American communities. Christmas trees in the west became symbols of Christian faith, but also resonant as symbols of hearth and home (and retail capital). The "Tree of Liberty" and "Liberty Squares" (populated by trees) are central to American lore regarding independence; even Washington's cherry tree offers a sine qua non American cautionary tale of deception to the detriment of truth and justice (Bodnar 1992).

Ultimately, trees wind their ways into our human origin stories and into our cultural narratives. They are rooted in us as we are rooted symbolically in...