There is something quietly radical about The Forever Tree. Tawny Bennett, played by Olivia Washington, is a young Black woman living during the Har
There is something quietly radical about The Forever Tree.
Tawny Bennett, played by Olivia Washington, is a young Black woman living during the Harlem Renaissance. She is intelligent, knowledgeable and working as an antiquarian’s apprentice. Yet when we meet her, she has learned how to exist within the limits the world has placed around her.
The filmmakers described Tawny as “playing small.” That idea gives us a way into the film that goes far beyond the search for a legendary tree.
Sometimes surviving teaches us how to make ourselves smaller.
Living asks us to learn when it is time to become visible again.
1. Being underestimated does not mean you have been accurately assessed.
People can look directly at a capable woman and still fail to recognize what she carries.
Tawny’s world has already decided what kinds of opportunities should be available to a young Black woman. Those limitations exist outside of her, but if she accepts them long enough, they can begin influencing what she imagines for herself.
That happens in ordinary life too.
Someone else’s inability to imagine you beyond your current position is not evidence of your limitations.
Sometimes they simply haven’t seen you yet.
Sometimes they have seen you perfectly well and prefer you smaller.
2. Playing small can begin as a survival strategy.
There are environments where being quiet, agreeable and unobtrusive can protect you.
Black women and girls have particularly complicated histories with this. You may learn when not to challenge somebody. When not to draw attention. When to appear grateful. When to make yourself less threatening. When to keep an opinion inside your own head.
Survivors may develop similar instincts.
These behaviors can be intelligent responses to environments where speaking freely carries consequences.
But survival strategies need expiration dates.
A behavior that protected you in one place can imprison you in another.
3. Gratitude should never be used to stop you from wanting more.
One of the pressures surrounding Tawny is the suggestion that she should appreciate the opportunity she already has.
And she can.
But gratitude and ambition can live in the same woman.
You can appreciate the person who opened one door and still walk through another.
You can love your family and want a different life.
You can be grateful for employment and want a better job.
You can appreciate how far you have come and still know you haven’t arrived where you want to go.
“Be grateful” becomes dangerous when its actual meaning is “Do not grow beyond the place we have assigned you.”
4. Curiosity can be a form of freedom.
Tawny is an antiquarian’s apprentice. She is interested in objects, history and knowledge. Those qualities eventually position her for adventure.
Curiosity is easy to underestimate.
For people whose lives have been controlled, curiosity can reopen the world.
What is over there?
Who wrote this?
Where did this come from?
What really happened?
Can I learn that?
Can I go there?
Could I do this differently?
The controlling person needs your world to remain small.
Curiosity keeps discovering doors.
5. Representation is not only about seeing someone who looks like you. It is about seeing what she is allowed to DO.
This is one of my favorite lessons from The Forever Tree.
Tawny isn’t simply present.
She gets to be curious.
She gets to possess specialized knowledge.
She gets mystery.
She gets history.
She gets danger.
She gets adventure.
She gets to contemplate crossing oceans in pursuit of something extraordinary.
Black girls deserve stories in which they are not merely the person somebody rescues, loves, abandons, discriminates against or harms.
Sometimes the Black girl should get the map.
6. History becomes different when Black people are allowed to be more than victims inside it.
The film places Tawny within a world that incorporates figures such as Madam C. J. Walker and Robert Smalls.
That creates an interesting kind of historical imagination.
Black history contains terrible things. We should never sanitize them.
But oppression is not the entirety of Black history.
There were Black travelers, entrepreneurs, scholars, sailors, inventors, collectors, explorers, physicians, artists, rebels and eccentrics. There were people obsessed with obscure subjects. People chasing dreams. People falling in love. People taking risks. People doing things that had absolutely nothing to do with explaining racism to somebody.
Black children deserve access to the whole inheritance.
Not only what was done to us.
What we did.
What we built.
What we knew.
Where we went.
What we imagined.
7. Sometimes another person recognizes your capacity before you do.
People occasionally enter our lives and disturb the arrangement.
They ask why we aren’t doing more.
They recognize an ability we have normalized.
They invite us somewhere we never considered ourselves qualified to enter.
That can feel uncomfortable when we have spent years adjusting our expectations downward.
But there is an important distinction.
A controlling person tells you who to become because it benefits them.
A good mentor helps you recognize capacities that already belong to you.
One shrinks your choices.
The other expands them.
Learn to recognize people who expand the room.
8. Your life can change because you finally say yes to yourself.
Big transformations are usually told backward.
Once we know how the story ends, everything seems inevitable.
It wasn’t.
There was a moment when someone had to apply.
Leave.
Ask.
Investigate.
Enroll.
Answer the telephone.
Buy the ticket.
Accept the invitation.
Say no.
Say yes.
Walk through the door.
The adventure cannot begin while Tawny remains entirely committed to the safety of the life she already knows.
That doesn’t mean taking foolish risks.
It means recognizing that safety and familiarity are not always the same thing.
Sometimes what feels frightening is danger.
Sometimes what feels frightening is expansion.
Wisdom is learning the difference.
9. There is more than one way to inherit something from the people who came before you.
The Forever Tree plays with history, ancestry and the idea of something enduring across generations.
That raises a beautiful question:
What is our inheritance?
Not simply property.
We inherit stories.
Recipes.
Warnings.
Names.
Photographs.
Faith.
Music.
Knowledge.
Survival strategies.
Questions nobody finished answering.
Dreams somebody else couldn’t afford to pursue.
And sometimes we inherit limitations that no longer belong to our circumstances.
Part of adulthood is sorting through that inheritance.
Keep the wisdom.
Honor the sacrifice.
Preserve the stories.
Question the fear.
And don’t confuse an ancestor’s necessary limitation with your permanent boundary.
10. Survival is supposed to eventually make room for living.
This may be the lesson I would carry longest from The Forever Tree.
Survivors become exceptionally good at surviving.
We watch.
We anticipate.
We adjust.
We read people’s moods.
We calculate risk.
We prepare for disappointment.
We learn how not to need too much.
Those abilities may have carried us through something very real.
But there can come a day when survival is no longer asking us to become smaller.
Life is asking us to expand.
Maybe you don’t need to disappear anymore.
Maybe you don’t have to apologize before speaking.
Maybe you can take the class.
Maybe you can write the book.
Maybe you can travel.
Maybe you can wear the beautiful thing instead of saving it.
Maybe you can leave the relationship that requires constant management.
Maybe you can earn more money.
Maybe you can become a beginner again.
Maybe you can be curious.
Maybe you can have an adventure.
And perhaps that is the quiet beauty hiding inside The Forever Tree.
The magical object everyone is searching for promises something extraordinary.
But Tawny already possesses something extraordinary.
A life she has not fully explored yet.
There are times when surviving requires us to make ourselves small enough to get through.
There are also times when we have to recognize that we made it through.
Now we get to find out how large our lives can become.
