The Silk Cotton Tree

In villages all across the Caribbean, there is one tree that stands taller and wider than any other — the silk cotton tree. Its trunk is enormous, sometimes as thick as a small house. Its roots do not hide underground like other trees. They rise up out of the earth in tall, curving walls, like the buttresses of an old cathedral. Its branches spread so wide they can shade a whole village square.

The elders say the silk cotton tree is sacred, and they say it in a voice you do not argue with. Under its enormous branches, families gathered for hundreds of years. They talked politics, they argued, they made peace. Young people fell in love in its shade. Old people were said goodbye to beneath it. Every important moment of village life happened, at some point, under a silk cotton tree.

Some believe the spirits of the ancestors rest inside the tree's great trunk. Because of this, no one dares to cut a silk cotton tree down without a reason and a prayer. Even the biggest bulldozers, when they clear the land for a new road, will sometimes stop and go around one, because the workers refuse to be the ones who touched it.

During the time of slavery, the tree became something more. People who ran for freedom, escaping through the bush toward the mountains, would often stop at a silk cotton tree to catch their breath and whisper a prayer. They would ask the ancestors for protection, for good directions, for luck. Many of them believed the tree carried their words up into the sky and passed them along to those who had gone before.

There is a story from one small village that during a night of terrible storm, a family had nowhere to shelter. They ran to the silk cotton tree at the edge of the village and sat between its huge roots. The wind roared. The rain came sideways. But the roots held them, like arms, until morning. When the sun rose, the family walked home safe, and from that day on, no one in that village ever went near the tree without touching it lightly and saying, "Thank you."

If you ever come across a silk cotton tree in the Caribbean, be quiet for a moment. Listen. That tree has been standing in one place for a very long time. It has heard everything our islands have to say. And it is still listening.