Saving the spirit trees: by cataloging the Virgin Islands' "remarkable" trees, a university professor hopes to save its wealth of stories about ancestral shrines and jumbie trees--and create a link between environmentalism and the islands' cultural history.

There are spirits in the baobab tree. Many older residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands know this to be true. Look at its trunk, massive and columnar and reaching towards the sky, its branches like interlaced fingers. When all the world was made, the baobab was the last tree created. That's what the grandmothers say.

Large baobabs are old, old trees, but they are comprised mostly of water. When they die, the water evaporates. The bark and bole turn to dust and blow away. Like human flesh, the tree goes back into file ground. That's only one reason the spirits live there. Jumbles--the spirits, the undead--love to hide in the baobab. For hundreds of years, Virgin Islanders have known this to be true.

But for how long will they remember? Will these stories survive the next few decades? And will a host of culturally and historically significant U.S. Virgin Island trees and tree species remain a viable component of the changing landscapes of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John?

Those are questions being asked in an intriguing study called "Remarkable Big Trees or Cultural Interest in the U.S. Virgin Islands," now underway on the West Indies islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. Thanks to the efforts of University of the Virgin Islands professor Robert W. Nicholls and the university's sponsorship, the USVI's largest trees are being documented under the protocols of AMERICAN FORESTS' Big Trees program. In the project's initial two years, 78 of the islands' largest trees have been located, measured, and proposed for a U.S. Virgin Islands Register of Big Trees. Now the hunt for more soaring specimens of kapok, wild ficus, Dead Man's Tree, and gnarled kenip continues, as efforts to save the trees gain steam.

But that's only part of the initiative. Many the trees of these Caribbean islands have deep cultural and historic significance. Native Carib Indians believed that certain trees and tree species were the homes of spirits. As untold thousands of West African slaves poured through the West Indies in the 17th through the 19th centuries, they brought with them their own spiritual traditions, many involving tree spirits and the magical powers of trees.

This reliance on trees as a cultural reference eventually evolved a historical counterpart, Over time, certain island trees were established as significant meeting places for slaves fighting for emancipation and later for workers struggling with labor issues. The result: Many of the remaining big trees of the Virgin Islands are indeed remarkable, in addition to being sites of significant historical interest, they are a collection of ancestral shrines, portals to ancient homes, repositories of healing and curses, and jumble tree where spirits were said to live ill the roots, and the souls of the dead were stored--and were not to lie trifled with.

Save the trees, figures Nicholls, and you save the stories. "An by saving the stories," he explains, "we save the important affective dimension of experience--the ability of our environment to truly affect us emotionally. Our forefathers had that; maintaining that continuum of experience is important to maintaining community."

An associate professor of education, Nicholls admits that his initial interest in the island's largest and most storied tree specimen had little to do with tree o1" forest conservation, in the 1980s he'd conducted deep research into the music, dance, and mask-wearing traditions of the Igede people of Nigeria, where he was on the faculty at AhmaduBello University. There he learned that musicians clustered around huge trees that shaded traditional meeting grounds. As a curiosity, he started collecting stories and spiritual traditions based on trees, and tucked them away.

In 1993 Nicholls arrived at the St. Thomas campus, his work on the spiritual aspect of African trees an intriguing footnote to a budding academic career. A few years Inter he ran across a request for proposals for projects that would increase public appreciation of local trees, put out by the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Program of the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture. Forest and tree cover on the islands were being severely impacted by road, housing, and resort construction. When he heard of the program, Nicholls says, something clicked.

"I got the idea that if people were aware of the connection between West African beliefs about trees and the long historical traditions of trees and folklore in the eastern Caribbean, it might create a real avenue for community concern," he explains. "My own interests were mostly anthropological But it didn't take long to become very conscious of the environmental dimension of trees especially in an island context where tree conservation is vitally important to maintaining landscape ecology."

The project came along at a critical time. "The older people they know the stories, know the trees," says Olasee Davis, forestry ecologist with the U.S. Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Service. "But the teenagers, the 20-year-olds, for the the stories are fading away. We need to give these traditions to those younger generations."

Consider the kapok, or silk cotton tree. Known as the "jumbie tree" to many natives, the kapok has long been considered a primary spirit tree of the West Indies. With its huge buttressed roots and gargantuan dimensions the kapok can't help but draw the eye and fire the imagination. "In a traditional environment devoid of man-made wonders such as towers and temples, obelisks, and so forth," writes Nicholls, "a ficus or kapok would stand out and it is not so surprising that these trees were identified as spirit trees." Kapok trees were considered a holding place for departed souls and a place where the living could meet the dead. Eggs were thrown at certain kapoks that were known to be spirit trees in order to free a person's shadow or soul that had been stolen by a jumbie.

There are distinct African parallels, Nicholls reports. The kapok was an important ancestral lineage shrine for a number of West African groups--from Senegambia, Guinea, and Nigeria--many of whom were shipped to the Caribbean early in the slavery era.

The Carib Indians used kapok for drums and canoes but otherwise sheathed their axes in regard to the tree. Observers in Trinidad in the 1877s wrote that the kapok is "a magic tree ... land] the trees are Icier standing about in cane-pieces and pastures." During Virgin Islands funerals, slave funeral processions paused by kapoks, according to one account, "to give the spirit of the dead" time to search the branches or roots of the great tree for spirits of friends or relatives "waiting to greet the newcomer." In the mid-18th century the Watje, an enslaved African group in the Virgin Islands, prayed to kapoks to help drive away the evil spirits they believed caused diseases.

Another tree known for its supernatural dimensions is the feathery foliaged tamarind, also native to Africa but introduced to the Virgin Islands in the colonial era. These short, fat trees produce very deep shade, lending them the look of a place where both good spirits and bad might linger.

One Virgin Islander told Nicholls that even the youngest were warned about the tamarind. "Children were told, 'don't sit under a tree after 6 p.m., or lean up on the graveyard. A jumble will follow you home,' " Asta Williams said. "You will feel the heat. You get hot, that's how you know a spirit is in the vicinity."

Archaeologists have long known that certain tamarind trees were considered sacred. A 300-year-old tree near the National Guard Armory on St. Croix called "The Emperor" by local Rastafarians is the site of more two dozen graves.

There are others. Wild ficus, kenip, mampoo with its tentacle-like above-ground roots, sandbox tree. Olasee Davis speaks of a "jumble bead" vine whose poisonous, red-and-black seeds were placed in lamps. "If you got home late at night and didn't, have jumbie beads in your lamp," he says, "yon had to walk into your house backwards or the jumbles would follow you in."

Save the trees and you save the stories, but you also save a centuries-long ethic of conserving the trees and forest cover. Save that, and Virgin Islanders could give the world a new way to relate trees to culture, history, and future ecology.

"I was struck by the cultural and historical aspects of these trees," says Thomas Brandeis, a Caribbean forest specialist with the U.S. Forest Service who reviewed the project. "I also recognized the potential for education not only locally, but to engage visitors from all over the world to appreciate and understand these trees."

Nicholls is thinking in the same vein. He hopes to get landmark status for three dozen of the best documented flees and begin a tree maintenance program. He also hopes to publish a book and driving-tour maps. A tree-planting initiative would reintroduce Virgin Islanders to some native species; a few, such as mastic-bully, with exposed roots like long braids of hair, are especially beleaguered.

"We can never bring the Virgin Islands back to their pre-Columbian condition," Nicholls says, "but we can certainly bring back aspects of the kind of beauty that served and sustained communities for hundreds of years. These trees and stories still have much to say."

A TRIO OF SPIRIT TREES

The Grove Place Baobab. The baobab at Estate Grove Place on St. Croix is the largest tree on the three islands: 53 feet high, with a circumference of 53 feet and a 67-foot crown spread, (It, pulls in 729.9 points on AMERICAN FORESTS' Big Tree rating system.) The tree has a huge hole in the trunk where, local tradition holds, people have ridden out hurricanes and women have given birth. Veronica Gordon, an island expert on traditional plant medicines--what locals call a "weed woman"--remembers being told as a child that if she went to the huge baobab during a full moon, the hole would open up and she would be transported back to Africa. It was the site of another transformation in 1878, when plantation laborers rallied under its crown in the critical Fairborn uprising.

The Frederiksted Banyan. Popular with locals and tourists until it was destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, this enormous ficus tree near the Fisherman's Market in Frederiksted, St. Croix, played a critical role in both the spiritual and labor history of the islands. Ficus trees, with numerous tangled root shoots and tall, dense crowns, were signature trees of the islands, well known as the favorite haunt of jumbies. Before emancipation, "weed people" or medicine men and women, would gather at this huge ficus to chant and dance, for its massive, braided root system was considered a "jumbie congregation."

The Tallo Taman Tree. Located in St. Thomas between the Ulla Mullar School and John Thomas funeral parlor, this tamarind, or "taman," tree could be the oldest on the island. The wall-known French impressionist Camille Pissarro sketched the tree when he lived in St. Thomas early in the 19th century, and local tradition holds that it was standing when a Moravian mission was established 300 years ago. In the Virgin Islands the tamarind and the kapok are the two species most commonly held to be spirit trees.

--T. Edward Nickens

Eddie Nickens writes from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina.