birth and rebirths Regardless of its nature, every fire requires the presence of three elements: ignition, fuel and oxygen; without one of them it simply cannot exist. And like any other fire, the ones that burned in the city of Atlanta, whether real or metaphorical, are no exception. In 1864 the trigger was the Civil War; the fuel was the city itself. To those who, on that mild November day, first ventured to return to the strip of land that stretches along a ridge south of the Chattahochee River, the landscape turned out to be very different from what they had called "home". A vast expanse of soft, gray ash, dotted with the blackened skeletons of buildings that had gone up in smoke a few hours earlier, and little else had left behind the unionist army of General William T. Sherman, victorious in one of the epic battles of the American Civil War. It was not the first clean slate in Atlanta's history, born at the end of the Western & Atlantic Railroad of the State of Georgia on what was once the nation of the Creek and Cherokee Native American tribes, exiled by European invaders. And it won't be the last. After the fire and the devastation of the Civil War, another fire spread: that of economic growth and civil rights struggles. Freed from the abolition of slavery, African Americans migrated en masse to the city from plantations, founding the nucleus of what is now one of the largest communities in the country, cradle of civil rights and class wars since the 1940s. The unstoppable demographic growth took the economic one by the hand, and together they transformed what was once only a small group of houses in the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States, eighteenth in the world by gross domestic product. Embodying the American spirit, everything in Atlanta is bigger: from the busiest airport in the world, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, to the headquarters of capitalist giants like Coca Cola (which was born there in 1886), Delta Airlines and UPS. But the dollar greenback isn't the only green in town. Also known as the city in the forest, due to the surface covered by trees that exceeds 36 percent, and the more than three hundred parks and nature reserves in the urban area, the metropolis fades towards the other shades of the agricultural suburbs and the state of Georgia, which produce $ 73 billion in wealth annually. So far the burning fire of the economy, but Atlanta is also the flame of the struggle for civil rights, hometown of Martin Luther King, a spark born at number 501 of Auburn Avenue that was used to inflame the spirits from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was a minister, through the verb of non-violent resistance. Worthy son, the Reverend King, of that city which is rightly called the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. the candidate: the pecan nut And then there are different battles, which do not belong to the sphere of civil rights, but to that of food and local identity. The all-American obsession with identifying the symbols of its cultural heritage and national treasures in the kingdoms of the living and the non-living is followed by the meticulous completion of official lists in each state. And so we know that the official fruit of Georgia is peach, the gem is quartz, the fossil is glossopetra, while among the flowers azalea wins, and it is not difficult to imagine how long and detailed this list is – a list that anyone would surely be anxious to know in the detail, as well as bewildered to learn that the great state of Georgia does not yet have an official nut. The Georgia Parliament recently attempted to fill this gap and put an end to the wait, with a bill still under discussion which saw pecan nut as the favorite. A settlement we'll see soon, then? Actually, no, because pecan nut’s political career has been stalled since the summer of 2020 due to an announced scandal, a lexical misunderstanding difficult to overcome, if not with that collective rite of suspension of credulity allowing to ignore the ambiguous nature of the candidate. In fact, one step away from victory, it seems that the Republican Senator Larry Walker, its sponsor, released compromising documents that would reveal that she would not be a nut in the strict sense of the term, but – botanically speaking, and therefore in fact – we are talking about a drupe. Subtleties, some say; substantial evidence of incompatibility with the coveted office, others argue. The fact is that what is proposed to the electorate is the woody inner part of a fleshy fruit. And to say that pecan nut would have all the credentials to achieve an absolute victory, a triumph at the polls: fruit of the Carya illinoinensis, it is Native American and an illustrious member of the Juglandaceae family, rich in itself (a heritage of unsaturated fats estimated at 60 percent and a very respectable asset 153
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