During the final week of the year 2020, as I was in the middle of writing this book, my family and I took a short trip from our home in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Edisto Beach, South Carolina. The COVID- 19 pandemic was still raging and Donald Trump continued to, without evidence, contest the election results. As part of this trip, we went to explore Botany Bay Plantation and Driftwood Beach, nearby. Today marketed as a Wildlife Management Area and “Heritage Preserve,” Botany Bay is the site of some of the most violent plantations of the area, where countless enslaved people were murdered. The Catawba and Edisto tribes inhabited these coastal lands before the plantation owners stole them. At the entrance, people register, pay a fee, and can take a map and guide for a driving tour through the grounds. There is no explicit mention or any form of commemoration of the site's brutal, racist history, yet the place had an eerie, haunted beauty (Fig. 36 and Fig. 37). After a turn from the main road, from which, passing over the marsh, we had seen a shamaniclooking tree decorated with colorful shreds of fabric and what looked like small dolls, the drive took us through overgrown fields, past some remnants of human structures, freshwater ponds, to the beach, where the shoreline seems to have slowly eroded the oaks that used to grow along this stretch of land. We wandered along this beach and climbed over halfsubmerged skeletons of trees, tasting the salty sea air.

The surfaces of the trees on the beach are smooth, not wrinkly and “old” as suggested in Pepperminta, when Pepperminta strokes the bark of a tree cross-cut with her touching the wrinkly skin of an elderly woman. The trees feel smooth because they have died, lost their bark to the raging sea and, maybe, the rising sea levels.