Making Sense of the Past

An essay by What the Trees Remember author Abigail Cutter.

I’d bet many who visit Virginia don’t venture much past the lowlands or the gently rolling eastern part of the state bounded by the ocean. Not unless they have family or friends beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. That’s because the farther you go on a southwestern diagonal from Washington D.C. into the state, the fewer people there are. And those folks haven’t built monuments to celebrate their accomplishments, museums to hold beautiful objects or grand buildings from which to govern. The land is in charge here, and people accommodate themselves to it rather than the other way around. Beauty is everywhere, free for the looking. It can be found in the soft, almost maternal curves of the oldest mountains in the world, a billion years old, and in the narrow valleys and huge boulders at the feet of those mountains.

My historical novel What the Trees Remember is set in Nelson County, in the heart of that steep and shadowed land. The county currently has the same number of human souls, 15,000 or thereabouts, as it did 150 years ago. The original settlers were lured by cheap acreage and no taxes offered by politicians in the east who wanted human buffers between themselves and the Native Americans who hunted beyond the mountains. It took an interesting sort of person willing to take that risk and then survive. Their descendants still live here.

The best land spreads across the narrow valleys, and although there isn’t much of it, that’s where the better-off people lived. Those who were down and out or had something to hide lived higher up in cabins along skinny strips of bare dirt that dead-ended at the top of the remote mountains. That’s where my characters live in a three-story, fine house like one you’d find in the valleys, the only house like it on the mountain, because they too have something to hide.

During the Civil War, the category of conscientious objector did not exist. The Minor family are Quakers, people who wouldn’t take up weapons against another human, but Quakers were not allowed that status until World War I. When a Confederate army draft began in the early months of the war, those who refused to fight were severely beaten by their neighbors. In one case, a man was lynched. After the war, not many Quakers remained in the state. They’d left for Ohio where they’d been part of the underground railroad movement and had often been jailed, or like Quakers in northern Virginia, had formed a militia to fight against the Confederate army. Afterwards they were penalized by some of their own people for wartime killings and were forced to leave their Quaker community.

Soon after the end of slavery, the Minors, like the family who inspired my novel, started a school for Blacks where it would be out of sight of Whites. Virginia was bound by United States law to create public schools by 1870, but that meant taxpayers had to be willing to support education for Black children. And that willingness was hard to come by. What the Minors do is brave. In Louisiana, a young white teacher, like many attracted from the North to bolster the number of teachers now in Black churches, in homes and wherever people could learn, was beaten close to death by members of the Knights of White Camellia, a Klu Klux Klan wannabe as well as by some klan members. In the weeks afterwards, the town’s Black population was chased down through the swamps and within several weeks, upwards of 250 people had been slaughtered, most of them Black.

In 1904, Nelson County was the site of the youngest person lynched in the South—a nine-year old. But there were strong Black voices in Virginia that were unrelenting in their cries of outrage against the practice. John Mitchell Jr, along with 13 formerly enslaved men, founded and edited the Richmond Planet weekly newspaper. His editorials were fiery exhortations to Blacks to seize whatever might do harm—a rake, a knife, a chunk of wood or a branch, maybe a shovel—when they saw a posse of lynchers approaching. They should inflict the greatest injury possible before their inevitable death. He hoped potential lynchers would get the message that lynching was too dangerous to try. Mitchell appears in the novel as a minister who preaches the same message from the pulpit.

The opening of the novel finds its main character Dora Minor, now 93 years old, in August of 1969 wondering if she will survive another kind of violence. She’s flooded with memories of the past, some dark with guilt. This is the same weekend as the event the nation remembers as Woodstock. But this weekend is also remembered for the killing power of nature. After Hurricane Camille devastated the Gulf Coast, it carried its unspent moisture into a higher atmosphere and trundled it northeast until it stalled over the Virginia county. There it absorbed moisture lingering from a very wet summer and added it to the arsenal above, finally dropping as much as 48 inches of rain an hour on the people in the mountains and valleys below. Witnesses described the falling water as so dense it was suffocating. The mountains are limestone with very little soil for trees to find purchase for roots. Very quickly, streams only a few inches deep rose to 40 feet, washing away the soil holding those trees and creating raw, peeled away rock faces and avalanches where there had been forests. Those down below either escaped or died. There were no injured. Bodies were found naked without rings or watches, the force of the water so great that it stripped everything from them. Over 150 people died and some just went missing forever. Dora’s journey through the night and what happens afterward brings her life full circle.

At least for me, well-researched historical fiction is one of the most powerful ways to make sense of the past. Without personal experiences of imagined characters, my heart is left out of the equation, and it’s my heart that holds the sticking places for understanding. Numbers and descriptions of events alone don’t provoke my imagination into insight. What the Trees Remember amplifies history we as a nation must never let disappear, no matter how uncomfortable. Wise people learn from the past and don’t make the same mistakes again. And their ability to see the painful past with insight and make necessary improvements is a positive thing. We admire those qualities in an individual, and there’s no reason not to have the same expectations and admiration for a society that demonstrates the same wisdom.

What The Trees Remember is one of our 2026 Summer Reads.

Abigail Cutter started out as an artist/printmaker with an MFA from George Washington University, but during a long stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities, she developed a deep love of American history. She married a man who came with 200 acres and an 18th-century farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The farmhouse came with a very active ghost that inspired her previous novel, The Last of What I Am. Her latest novel, What The Trees Remember, will be released on July 21. Cutter currently lives at both the farm and in the small town of Waterford, Virginia, with her husband, a black Labrador named Emma and an orange cat genius named Rufus. Learn more at abigailcutter.com.

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