Had a dream a couple of nights ago. I was sitting on a rock wall, at the edge of a large farm — maybe a plantation — next to a young man who was perhaps 14 years old? The scene was very rural, and we were dressed in odd looking clothes, reminiscent of fashions from the 1700s.
We were passing a cigarette back and forth.
I was also a teenager, in the dream… but somehow, I still had access to all my adult memories from my waking life, in 2021.
“This doesn’t taste like tobacco,” I told him. “It tastes like marijuana.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of ‘marijuana’,” the young man told me. “This is hemp. It grows wild along the irrigation ditches, yonder.” He pointed off into the distance, where I could see a number of Black men working in a field of tobacco plants. “But, mind you don’t tell my mother that we’re smoking. She doesn’t countenance my fondness for hemp.” He took a deep drag off the joint, paused, and then coughed as he exhaled. “And Mother is still angry with me, on account of the cherry tree.”
As he passed the doobie, I realized that I was sharing a smoke with young George Washington, and that we were sitting in the midst of his family’s Virginia plantation, decades prior to the American Revolution.
In a dream.
I exhaled and passed the joint back. “I thought it was your father who was angry about the cherry tree.”
“I’m uncertain as to how that rumor got started,” George smiled. “Father planted the cherry tree when he first purchased this land, but he passed away three years ago, and the infamous chopping deed was done just last year. I inherited the plantation when Father passed, and Mother is managing the operations until I attain maturity. But I thought — the plantation belonging to me — that I could remove the tree, as I found its particular location annoying. Little did I know the intense sentiments with which my Mother had endowed that cherry tree.”
He looked down at the joint in his hand, with obvious sadness in his eyes. I changed the subject.
“Your tobacco crop looks healthy. Must be convenient to have slaves, to tend the crops.”
“Yes, Father left me ten slaves when he passed. I can’t imagine anyone operating a successful plantation in Virginia without a team of slaves.”
“You were born here in Virginia, right?” I asked.
“Yes, over near Popes Creek.”
“So, you would call yourself a ‘native’, right? A native of Virginia.”
“I suppose so. Father and Mother were also born in Virginia, so I could call myself a ‘second generation native’. But I generally use that term, ‘native’, only in reference to the Indians.”
“Do you also consider yourself an American?”
“An American? That’s a curious term. I’m most certainly a Virginian.” His face flashed, momentarily, with an offended look. “But where do you come up with these confounding ideas? Are you suggesting that I have something in common with some money-grubbing city dweller on the Manhattan Island? Or with an illiterate hillbilly in South Carolina? Or some abolitionist in Massachusetts? That hardly seems a courteous suggestion, coming from someone with whom I am sharing my hemp.”
I assured him that I meant no offense. “Where I come from, it’s considered a compliment to call someone an American,” I explained.
“Well, you must come from a peculiar place then… to be lumping decent citizens under an identical appellation, when they live in singular locations with obviously divergent political views,” he said, with a glaring look.
“I think you might feel differently about that, when you get older, George.”
“So are you also clairvoyant?”
“Only when I’ve been smoking hemp,” I smiled.
George took a long toke on the doobie, and tipped his head back, letting the smoke rise slowly from his open mouth. Then he smiled back at me.
“If I ever call myself an American, may all my teeth fall out,” he laughed.
“Funny you should say that,” I responded, taking the offered joint.
Then we heard George’s mother calling from the house in the distance. She sounded angry.
That’s when I woke up.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.