Working the Roots
When I found the poke sallat growing in my backyard, something in me – that part of you that knows and you don’t know how it knows – knew that the things that were happening in my life in relationship to my ancestor Granny were not coincidences.
In western culture, we are socialized to prioritize cognitive ways of knowing. So, naturally, the temptation would be to dismiss the auspiciousness of my move-in date and how it came to me without my consciousness of its significance, along with the presence of this plant growing in my backyard and me becoming aware of it at the very time I was planting another herb in Granny’s honor. But I’m so glad to know that we can move beyond our western socialization and become more open to the other ways we know the things we know.
Certain that discovering poke sallat growing in my backyard had significance, I immediately picked up the phone to text my herbalist sista-friend who has Gullah ancestry and would certainly know more about this “poisonous” plant than I and Grandma Google knew. She told me the little bit that she remembered off of the top of her head and pointed me to the work of Michele Elizabeth Lee, specifically, her book Working the Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African-American Healing. This book is a treasure trove of African American traditional medicine and, in her own words, “is a book that honors the ancestors who survived the Middle Passage and preserved the healing traditions. It also honors all who carry on those traditions today in its diverse and expanded forms.”
Once I got my hands on this book, my first thought was, “oh. my. God. Granny was a rootworker!” The remedies that filled this 8.5 by 11 inch book were as familiar to me as the smell of my dad’s cologne. They were the remedies that healed me all my life, things I thought only my family did. Each herb has generally about a half page to one full page of medicinal and spiritual uses. I was so awestruck for the first few minutes that I nearly forgot why I had purchased the book in the first place. I flipped as fast as my fingers could move through the alphabetically organized herbs to get to page 302: “Poke Sallat, Poke Berries, Poke Leaves, Poke Roots”. My jaw dropped when I saw not one, not two but FIVE whole pages filled with medicinal uses for every imaginable part of this plant. From inflammation to rheumatism to cysts to fibromyalgia, respiratory infections to ulcers and psoriasis (admittedly, no stroke cure mentioned), this plant was well known and revered by my ancestors and it had come to me…in my own backyard.
I have come to believe that encounters like this one are examples of ways purpose reveals itself to us in the most unexpected moments. And that, while we were in the hospital with Granny that day, refusing to pick what we thought was a poisonous weed, purpose was coming alive in me — like a seed germinating just beneath the soil that Granny had planted. I imagined that she decided to wait patiently for me in the ancestral realm for its magic was revealed to me. With the book still in my hands, I marked the moment as the instant I knew that there was a deep relationship being born between poke sallat and me and that I, in fact, would never stop talking about this plantcestor.
