>Pecan nuts were already a dietary staple for Native Americans in various parts of what is now the United States before Antoine’s innovation established the basis for a commercial pecan industry
Who is "Antoine"? Is it a first name? A last name? It doesn't ever seem to say.
Usually this means that the article is actually a book excerpt (often the first chapter of the book), and in this case we can find online the book's table of contents:
Preface
Introduction: Life as Testimony
1. Pecan Trees and the Roots of Stolen Botanical Knowledge
2. Sycamore Trees as a Path to Freedom
3. The Secret Lives of Willow Trees
4. Poplar Trees Bear Strange Fruit
5. The Sweeping Promise of Mulberry
6. A Haven for Community in Historic Oak Trees
7. Cotton Shrubs and Seeds of Subversion
8. The Gift of Apple Trees
Conclusion: Black Botanical Legacy Reclaimed
Usually the first chapter is self-contained, but in this case possibly there was some context about “Antoine’s innovation” in the Introduction that precedes the first chapter.
Not to sound pedantic (I believe this is a very important distinction), but as far as I'm aware most slaves were not _given_ last names by their slavers. They often had (if taken into slavery) or were given (if born in slavery) their own names within their own cultures.
> If composed of two parts, there is often a scion—the upper or shoot portion of a plant—which is joined with a separate rootstock to produce, if successful, a healthy grafted plant.
And like that, I finally figured out why Toyota named their offshoot brand Scion.
> Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson planted pecans at their plantations
At the time of Washington and Jefferson, they were known in English as Illinois nuts. And, living in Illinois, a few years ago I bought a selection of 2-3 year old seedlings of Illinois-native trees from the state department of natural resources to plant on my property. Pecan seedlings were included...
When people say that pecan trees grow slowly, they are understating reality. Mine are growing at maybe an inch a year. I get one or two small leaves at the top. No branches yet. I planted a plum tree near one at the exact same time and it has doubled in height.
If your river often freezes over (e.g. Rock), you're not in the right place. The Mississippi River almost never does where the Pecans grow.
"The tree can only survive in areas with warm winter nights, which severely restricts its distribution.
To ensure your pecan tree grows at the expected rate (1-3 feet per year for non-bearing and 5-12 inches for existing bearing trees) and produces nuts, the two most critical parts of pecan tree care are consistent watering and fertilizing.
A pecan tree purchased from a nursery will reach its full height of four to six feet in 8 to 10 years if planted in the right spot. Pecan trees are considered fast-growing for a nut tree, when in suitable conditions."
>A pecan tree purchased from a nursery will reach its full height of four to six feet in 8 to 10 years if planted in the right spot.
That has to be a dwarf variety. I have seen pecan trees that are more than 80' tall or about half as tall as an Olympic swimming pool is long, with a crown diameter of over 110' or about 2/3 as long as an Olympic swimming pool. The trunk at chest height was more than 3 grown men wide, or about 1/10 the width of an Olympic swimming pool.
These trees get large and if they were solid objects their volume could store nearly as much water as an Olympic sized swimming pool. That is just the part above ground that we can see. Remarkable trees.
Pecan is furniture grade wood like black walnut and commands a premium. It is also prizes for smoking meats as it lends a nutty flavor to the brisket. It's my favorite.
When a pecan nut sprouts it sends all of its initial energy burst into growing a tap root, looking for the best source of dependable water, before you see any top growth at all above ground. Typically if your pecan tree seedling is 1' tall the tap root will already be more than 3' long. This is why nursery pecans are sold in planters that are about 3X taller than they are wide, so that the root is less likely to be coiling inside the pot. You don't want to strangle the tree by letting it become pot-bound.
This is why pecans need relatively deep soil with near surface water. If they have a dependable water supply they can stab that root through any crack and you will eventually have a huge, very productive nut tree.
Pecans are awesome trees. Mine have fed a murder of crows for several crow generations. They show up on the pecans every year about 2 weeks before the nuts are ripe enough to harvest and they strip my trees from the bottom up so that over the years, I have been able to harvest less than 5 buckets of pecans from 5 trees. Very efficient. I think they start at the bottom specifically to deprive me of the ones that are easiest for me to harvest. I surrendered the pecans to the crows a long time ago since they had a much more efficient system of exploitation than any I could conjure. I know the man who planted the trees had fought the same battles with them as I found the rubber snakes and the sad remains of a plastic owl in the trees while climbing them to assess their health right after we bought the place.
I'm on pretty good terms with the crows now. One has learned to ask for peanuts and I'm accommodating enough to provide them, almost on demand.
We talk about slavery as if it is safely sealed in the 19th century, like a museum exhibit with good lighting and a gift shop.
But the underlying pattern never really died. It just updated its paperwork.
Today we call it “employment.” In tech we even call it “talent acquisition,” which sounds almost humane. Yet the structure is familiar: people without capital create the ideas, write the code, design the systems that generate millions or billions. The upside flows upward. The risk flows downward.
Most software engineers do not own what they build. They sign it away on day one. IP assignment. Non-competes. Stock options that vest over four years so you behave. If the company exits, founders and investors get generational wealth. The average engineer gets a redundancy package and a LinkedIn badge saying “#opentowork.”
Yes, this is not chattel slavery. No one is being whipped into compiling C++. But the economic asymmetry is hard to ignore. You sell your time because you do not own productive assets. The owners sell your output because they do.
In IT the extraction is particularly clean. Code scales infinitely. A small team builds a platform that monetises millions of users. Revenue explodes. Valuation explodes. Engineers receive salaries that look high until you compare them to the equity multiple created from their labour.
Sometimes a few are “freed” through shares. Early employees hit liquidity and cross the line into ownership. The rest remain in the wage tier, cycling between companies, rebuilding empires they will never control.
The uncomfortable question is not whether this is morally identical to historical slavery. It obviously is not. The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.
Antoine grafted pecan trees and created an industry. The plantation owner owned the trees.
In tech, we graft distributed systems and machine learning models. Someone else owns the orchard.
Slaves did not get paid and were involuntarily captured, transported, sold, raped, molested, etc. No employer is doing that to you. You have it pretty good compared to slaves.
I agree that employment is “value extraction” and people without upfront capital (or risk tolerance) are selling off their IP to other people.
It’s unfortunate, but in most cases I’d struggle to even call it exploitation. So relating it slavery a bit too far and really underselling the horrors of slavery. I can quit my job or go to a new one. Tech companies aren’t running international mass-kidnapping schemes to get their headcount.
Actual slavery is even legal right here in the US. Per the 13th:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
‘working by candlelight would have provided Antoine a focused, well-lit environment for the delicate dissection of two seedlings’
I think the author needs to try using a candle for light.
Is this article missing opening context?
First line:
>Pecan nuts were already a dietary staple for Native Americans in various parts of what is now the United States before Antoine’s innovation established the basis for a commercial pecan industry
Who is "Antoine"? Is it a first name? A last name? It doesn't ever seem to say.
At the bottom of the article, it says:
> From When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy by Beronda L. Montgomery. Copyright © 2026. Available from Henry Holt and Co., an imprint of Macmillan
Usually this means that the article is actually a book excerpt (often the first chapter of the book), and in this case we can find online the book's table of contents:
Usually the first chapter is self-contained, but in this case possibly there was some context about “Antoine’s innovation” in the Introduction that precedes the first chapter.This article from 2017 goes over the same story but provides better context: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/slave-gardener-turned-pec...
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
A lot of slaves had no last name, or only their owners’.
Not to sound pedantic (I believe this is a very important distinction), but as far as I'm aware most slaves were not _given_ last names by their slavers. They often had (if taken into slavery) or were given (if born in slavery) their own names within their own cultures.
I'm curious, do native African cultures often have multiple names?
The missing context is the title.
Article doesn't say the "trick" - it was a technique now known as inlay grafting.
> If composed of two parts, there is often a scion—the upper or shoot portion of a plant—which is joined with a separate rootstock to produce, if successful, a healthy grafted plant.
And like that, I finally figured out why Toyota named their offshoot brand Scion.
> Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson planted pecans at their plantations
At the time of Washington and Jefferson, they were known in English as Illinois nuts. And, living in Illinois, a few years ago I bought a selection of 2-3 year old seedlings of Illinois-native trees from the state department of natural resources to plant on my property. Pecan seedlings were included...
When people say that pecan trees grow slowly, they are understating reality. Mine are growing at maybe an inch a year. I get one or two small leaves at the top. No branches yet. I planted a plum tree near one at the exact same time and it has doubled in height.
The natural range of the Pecan is somewhat limited, so unless you're in southern Illinois or by the river, it might not be its preferred habitat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecan#/media/File:Carya_illino...
They're actually considered a fast growing tree when in the right place--1 to 2 ft per year at first.
I had never heard about it being called a fast-growing tree :)
I am outside the natural range, but close to a [different] river and feel that with climate change it should be fairly ok. But it appears I am wrong!
If your river often freezes over (e.g. Rock), you're not in the right place. The Mississippi River almost never does where the Pecans grow.
"The tree can only survive in areas with warm winter nights, which severely restricts its distribution.
To ensure your pecan tree grows at the expected rate (1-3 feet per year for non-bearing and 5-12 inches for existing bearing trees) and produces nuts, the two most critical parts of pecan tree care are consistent watering and fertilizing.
A pecan tree purchased from a nursery will reach its full height of four to six feet in 8 to 10 years if planted in the right spot. Pecan trees are considered fast-growing for a nut tree, when in suitable conditions."
>A pecan tree purchased from a nursery will reach its full height of four to six feet in 8 to 10 years if planted in the right spot.
That has to be a dwarf variety. I have seen pecan trees that are more than 80' tall or about half as tall as an Olympic swimming pool is long, with a crown diameter of over 110' or about 2/3 as long as an Olympic swimming pool. The trunk at chest height was more than 3 grown men wide, or about 1/10 the width of an Olympic swimming pool.
These trees get large and if they were solid objects their volume could store nearly as much water as an Olympic sized swimming pool. That is just the part above ground that we can see. Remarkable trees.
Pecan is furniture grade wood like black walnut and commands a premium. It is also prizes for smoking meats as it lends a nutty flavor to the brisket. It's my favorite.
When a pecan nut sprouts it sends all of its initial energy burst into growing a tap root, looking for the best source of dependable water, before you see any top growth at all above ground. Typically if your pecan tree seedling is 1' tall the tap root will already be more than 3' long. This is why nursery pecans are sold in planters that are about 3X taller than they are wide, so that the root is less likely to be coiling inside the pot. You don't want to strangle the tree by letting it become pot-bound.
This is why pecans need relatively deep soil with near surface water. If they have a dependable water supply they can stab that root through any crack and you will eventually have a huge, very productive nut tree.
Pecans are awesome trees. Mine have fed a murder of crows for several crow generations. They show up on the pecans every year about 2 weeks before the nuts are ripe enough to harvest and they strip my trees from the bottom up so that over the years, I have been able to harvest less than 5 buckets of pecans from 5 trees. Very efficient. I think they start at the bottom specifically to deprive me of the ones that are easiest for me to harvest. I surrendered the pecans to the crows a long time ago since they had a much more efficient system of exploitation than any I could conjure. I know the man who planted the trees had fought the same battles with them as I found the rubber snakes and the sad remains of a plastic owl in the trees while climbing them to assess their health right after we bought the place.
I'm on pretty good terms with the crows now. One has learned to ask for peanuts and I'm accommodating enough to provide them, almost on demand.
> full height of four to six feet
In South Carolina, they get to be 20-30 feet. They’re medium-sized trees. I’ve never heard of any variety that is full grown at 6 feet. That’s a baby.
We talk about slavery as if it is safely sealed in the 19th century, like a museum exhibit with good lighting and a gift shop.
But the underlying pattern never really died. It just updated its paperwork.
Today we call it “employment.” In tech we even call it “talent acquisition,” which sounds almost humane. Yet the structure is familiar: people without capital create the ideas, write the code, design the systems that generate millions or billions. The upside flows upward. The risk flows downward.
Most software engineers do not own what they build. They sign it away on day one. IP assignment. Non-competes. Stock options that vest over four years so you behave. If the company exits, founders and investors get generational wealth. The average engineer gets a redundancy package and a LinkedIn badge saying “#opentowork.”
Yes, this is not chattel slavery. No one is being whipped into compiling C++. But the economic asymmetry is hard to ignore. You sell your time because you do not own productive assets. The owners sell your output because they do.
In IT the extraction is particularly clean. Code scales infinitely. A small team builds a platform that monetises millions of users. Revenue explodes. Valuation explodes. Engineers receive salaries that look high until you compare them to the equity multiple created from their labour.
Sometimes a few are “freed” through shares. Early employees hit liquidity and cross the line into ownership. The rest remain in the wage tier, cycling between companies, rebuilding empires they will never control.
The uncomfortable question is not whether this is morally identical to historical slavery. It obviously is not. The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.
Antoine grafted pecan trees and created an industry. The plantation owner owned the trees.
In tech, we graft distributed systems and machine learning models. Someone else owns the orchard.
That parallel should at least make people uneasy.
Slaves did not get paid and were involuntarily captured, transported, sold, raped, molested, etc. No employer is doing that to you. You have it pretty good compared to slaves.
You point out so many problems with our current structure that are worth addressing.
But at the same time, the current system is hugely better than chattel slavery.
Western citizens and workers have gained substantial rights and freedoms over the last 100 years.
That's great! But it doesn't mean we've finished improving.
Completely agree.
Personally I’m optimistic we’ll continue the trend line of improvement.
I’m torn about this.
I agree that employment is “value extraction” and people without upfront capital (or risk tolerance) are selling off their IP to other people.
It’s unfortunate, but in most cases I’d struggle to even call it exploitation. So relating it slavery a bit too far and really underselling the horrors of slavery. I can quit my job or go to a new one. Tech companies aren’t running international mass-kidnapping schemes to get their headcount.
> Today we call it “employment.”
FYI, people may react poorly to exaggerated comparisons like this since Actual Slavery still exists.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Actual slavery is even legal right here in the US. Per the 13th:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If you think it's so easy, you can quit and start your own company and find out.
“If you are homeless, just buy a house.”
Unlike buying a house, writing software can be done without up front investment in one's spare time
Turns out the value of it actually isn't just the code though...
> without up front investment
If you don’t count a computer and the time it takes to learn.
I'm assuming people comparing only earning a Bay Area salary to chattel slavery have reached that point already