Sabal minor is Native to Southeastern Virginia, it's undeniable

[Muslim Gardener]

Hello guys, I know you guys have seen maps and most people here will argue to the bitter end and die on the hill of believing Dwarf Palmetto (Sabal minor) grows native and wild up the coast of North Carolina and them just stops near the Virginia state border outside of the Virginia Beach city limits. After all, that's what the maps online of their native range say. Never mind the wild mature Dwarf Palmetto stands growing deep in the woods on swampy islands way off trails all over wooded areas such as First Landing State Park (zone 8b like Myrtle Beach) nor the wild palms on the Virginia Peninsula that my people have said grows here since atleast the 1620s which we've been using for centuries which have been seen as far North and inland as Lightfoot, Virginia. Wait a minute? What?! You may be wondering, "how could I have missed this?!" Buckle up. This is a wild story of hidden history, a mixed race Native American Islamic tribe, separatists declaring independence from the USA, an internet troll, a YouTuber all the way in British Colombia Canada who is affectionately known as Banana Joe, and how naturalist accidentally erased the history of the northernmost wild dwarf palmettos. Crazy as it sounds, this is all true, totally relavant, and it's all interconnected. This one is a long time coming, a truly bizzare story I hope you all enjoy, and 100% true.

In the 1620s and other years around that era, Black slaves and White and Black indentured servants sometimes escaped the plantations they worked and lived on on the coastal plains of the Atlantic Ocean between Georgia and New Jersey and Long Island. They sometimes even formed independent and self-sufficiemt communities hidden from the law and slave catchers. These are called maroon communities. The descendants of the maroon people's became multi generation mixed race families, a triracial mix of Black, White, and Native American, as the maroons often encountered and mingled with natives. Different groups of the descendants of the various communities became collectively referred to as triracial isolates, or Sweetgum Kriyul groups. The different tribes of Sweetgum Kriyul people each developed unique cultures and diets and lifestyles based on their isolatation and environment. The largest Sweetgum Kriyul community is the Melungeons, which famously produced Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and other influential people of partial Melungeon ancestry, such as current VP of the USA, JD Vance. But what does this have to do with palm trees? Well, you see, the Sweetgum Kriyul people who migrated to southern Appalachia became Melungeons, those in the mountains of New York and New Jersey's mountains became the Ramapough people, disparagingly called Jackson Whites people. On the southern coastal plains of North Carolina, they managed to stay on the populated coast and not have to flee to the mountains inland to avoid racism, they hid in swamps and became the Lumbee, and in the swamps of Delaware among the northernmost wild Bald Cypress, they became Nanticoke Moors, some even migrated out west to the frontier and became the Louisiana Redbone Nation and even settled Texas ranches from there. But the specific Sweetgum Kriyul people we will talk about today, are the Qarsherskiyans, who stayed on the coastal plains of Virginia and North Carolina, famously written about by Harriet Tubman as one of the earlier Qarsherskiyan groups, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons. These Qarsherskiyans originated on the coastal plains of Virginia and North Carolina, also spreading inland to nearly all of Ohio and much of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Many settled along Ohio's Lake Erie Coast. From North Carolina's alligator river and the Chesapeake Bay, inland to Lake Erie in Ohio, the triracial Qarsherskiyan community often had Jews, Roma/"gypsies", and other people considered non-White intermarry into their community due to laws preventing them from marrying White people. This created a diverse community we see today. My family of Kurdish origins has some members who married into the Qarsherskiyan tribe. That's how I learned about it. My relatives are Qarsherskiyan and I am culturally part of the community too. This is where the palm trees finally come into the picture and it should all start to come together now that you have this important context. The Sabal minor palms grew on the lower Virginia Peninsula as far up the peninsula as Lightfoot, Virginia and also grew in Isle of Wight County along tributary creeks of the River James and all around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, down into.... The Great Dismal Swamp! Sound familiar? From there, they extended across the border into North Carolina where the range map finally starts to get it right, albeit not showing some inland parts of NC they can grow in. According to the archives of the Qarsherskiyan tribe that I've read, they started disappearing from Virginia by the early 1800s and their disappearance coincided with the disappearance of another sacred species to the Qarsherskiyan people, the Carolina Parakeet. Virginia also had a wild parrot year-round that was native, I swear I'm not making this up, guys, but it gets even more shocking and crazy, what was kept hidden from us! 

You see, there was a young Qarsherskiyan youth leader who currently is 19. When he was around ages 14 to 16, he wreaked havoc in the Cold Hardy Palm Tree growing community. The Qarsherskiyan tribe considered Palm Trees sacred because they used the leaves of dwarf palmettos to make mats and thatch roofs for shelters and the plant fibers made clothes and baskets and all kinds of important things, and also because dwarf palmetto was the closest thing these people had to the date palm trees of Karbala. I won't get into the religious beliefs of Shia Islam, but let's just say that around half of the Qarsherskiyans are Muslims. The Great Dismal Swamp maroons were free in the swamps for 200 years. Them and other maroon communities Qarsherskiyan people descended from kept Native American and African spiritually and traditions alive while Black Americans lost them after hundreds of years of being taught Christianity and losing their cultural connection. Many Qarsherskiyan people still practice religions from their West African ancestors such as Voodoo and Islam. Palm trees are important to the Muslim Qarsherskiyans because of date palms. The Quran has a special story about the birth of Jesus (peace be upon him) when Mary needed to eat the date fruits to be strong to give birth, and there were date palm trees in Karbala when Imam Hussein died so Shia Muslim Qarsherskiyans would decorate their mourning locations for Hussein with palmetto leaves, and there are stories of prophet Muhammad planting date palms. You can look into it more if you want, I don't want to get into religion or off topic any further.

Anyways, a Qarsherskiyan youth leader who lived on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio was a young teen several years ago when he would comment on live streams about palm trees and parrots, because he considered Dwarf palmettos and Carolina Parakeets to be sacred. This is a very important politician and youth leader who is 19 now and I can't say his name for legal reasons, but many people famously would claim he was responsible for all the trolling that YouTuber BananaJSSI got a few years ago, although it was actually later found out that a Brian Lowry who lived further East along Ohio's Lake Erie coast was doing it and blamed the Youth leader and his old channel, BigfootSquad BWPP, which was deleted and recreated several times now. BigfootSquad channel might not have pranked called Banana Joe, but they had posted all kinds of strange videos claiming they could grow tropical palms in zone 7a in Northern Ohio by Lake Erie, claiming they were actually in zone 7b, that the USDA maps were wrong, and that they'd built an 8b microclimate, which drew much skepticism, although he truly believed this and was dead serious, no trolling. He tried to overwinter Chamaedorea palms in the ground under glass jars turned upside down and placed over them like greenhouse covers by a south-facing wall. Many didn't take him seriously but he believed all that he said, now he lives near me (I'm in Yorktown, he's in Newport News) and he truly is in zone 8, so good for him. After his relocation to Virginia, he continued growing palms, faded from having an internet presence as much, and became a well-respected high ranking authority for Qarsherskiyans on the Virginia Peninsula between ages 14 and 25, called the youth. He's been involved in local politics and I can't say much else about him because of this, but I'm sure you're all familiar with him. So, why is he and Qarsherskiyan people relevant to this story? On Virginia's Eastern Shore, on the Delmarva Peninsula, he mentioned a library in a town called either Easton or Eastville by different Qarsherskiyan folks in Virginia. I went to the library and saw records mentioning what he said precisely, Qarsherskiyans in North Carolina AND VIRGINIA have used wild native Dwarf Palmetto leaves for centuries, as I mentioned earlier. The records are written in an extinct Creole/Pidgin English that is similar to Ocracoke Brogue, and written using the Arabic alphabet. Only some very literate Qarsherskiyans who can read the Arabic alphabet and love palm trees enough to really dig for this stuff in this private library collection in someone's garage can access it. The information isn't available online, but the Qarsherskiyan youth leader mentioned it in a speech in 2024 June when he dissolved the Islamic Sultanate of Qarsherskiy, which was a proposed microstate, a small independent country with some Islamic laws for local Qarsherskiyans, somewhat like a cross between an Islamic version of the Vatican and a Native reservation. Just like with his Ohio Palm Tree rants, nobody took the young fellow seriously, but this lad wasn't trolling and truly meant it. It took him 2 years before giving up his bizzare separatist movement after he received threats from the FBI and was called a traitor to America and threatened by patriots. In his speech disolvimg the movement in June of 2024, he urged his nearly 2000 online supporters, former citizens of the formerly unrecognized and illegitimate ethnostate, he urged them all to form a political lobby to "gain access to city planning in Newport News" so he can launch a campaign to turn Newport News into a Qarsherskiyan Riviera. His plan was to fight to make all beaches public and open to tourists, have people paint their houses light blue and pink and deign it with nautical and maritime themes, and "plant natives such as Live Oak, Spanish Moss, Palmetto Palms, and other Palms, Broadleaved evergreens, and bamboo such as our native rivercane bamboo everywhere, lining every street!" Basically, since Newport News is zone 8b, just like Myrtle Beach, he wants it to be a Myrtle Beach in the North, full of tourists and exotic flora. He wants the city to plant more palms like Windmill Palms because the look exotic and are sacred to Qarsherskiyan people, but he needed the cover of them being native plants, so he tried to emphasize native palmettos although he also wanted Needle Palms and Windmill Palms planted along road medians. He had two issues. 1. The area where the Qarsherskiyans are is in Northern Newport News and inland adjacent parts of York County between Harwood's Mill Reservoir, Lee Hall Reservoir, and Jefferson Avenue. There around Grafton of York County and Colony Pines and Huntington Pointe of Newport News, Qarsherskiyan people are heavily concentrated more than anywhere else, but they are still only 6% of the population there, a few thousand, and not all of them support the palm-addicted teen's palm tree fever dream for Newport News. He has 2,000 followers but they're scattered across the USA and even a bit internationally. They're mostly online and have no power in the real world collectively. To solve the problem of garnering support, he is getting backing from people who aren't Qarsherskiyan, working with local White and Black people and getting involved with groups who clean up trash around Newport News Park. To argue for his "palm trees are native" issue_ he's pointing out what nobody except a few literate Qarsherskiyan palm fans knew for a long time: Dwarf Palmettos are native to coastal Virginia. That's when he mentioned in his speech the old journals and documentation rotting away in a "library" garage somewhere South of Kiptopeke and North of Cape Charles. I went there to see for myself and was blown away to see these reports! 

And that's how internet trolling, a mixed race Native American Islamic tribe, separatist movements, hidden history, and a beloved palm YouTuber known as Banana Joe affectionately all come together to make a true story that's so crazy even Kanye West wouldn't make it, revealing the secret of Virginia's Native Palm. 

To this day, legend has it, a few Dwarf Palmettos grow wild in the wooded areas between Denbigh Boulevard and Richneck Road, held dear by a few protective Qarsherskiyan folks who revere them as a sacred vestige from the ancestors' era, tucked away in the swamps that feed the source of the Poquoson River, in the bald cypress creeks and ravines upstream from Harwood's Mill Reservoir. A few miles hike from the trails at Huntington Pointe have rewarded few with a glimpse, before being chased off with arrows fired by a group of people with curly and wavy hair of Brown, Black, Auburn and Red Color, and with Brown, Hazel, Amber, and Green eyes, and skin ranging from pale and fair to olive tan, dusky, caramel, beige, or even a deep swarthy. A group of strange hybrid people who call themselves the Qarsherskiyan people ("Car-Sheer-Ski-Inn") who have long deeply influenced the online cold hard palm growers community, but have seldom been covered or mentioned by news and media, remaining in the shadows of Virginia's loblolly pine forests. Maybe one day, the public will know for sure, are the oral stories of the Qarsherskiyan's chronicles true? I believe so. Palms don't care for invisible borders. 

[PAPalmtrees]

  On 4/19/2025 at 3:54 PM, Muslim Gardener said:

Hello guys, I know you guys have seen maps and most people here will argue to the bitter end and die on the hill of believing Dwarf Palmetto (Sabal minor) grows native and wild up the coast of North Carolina and them just stops near the Virginia state border outside of the Virginia Beach city limits. After all, that's what the maps online of their native range say. Never mind the wild mature Dwarf Palmetto stands growing deep in the woods on swampy islands way off trails all over wooded areas such as First Landing State Park (zone 8b like Myrtle Beach) nor the wild palms on the Virginia Peninsula that my people have said grows here since atleast the 1620s which we've been using for centuries which have been seen as far North and inland as Lightfoot, Virginia. Wait a minute? What?! You may be wondering, "how could I have missed this?!" Buckle up. This is a wild story of hidden history, a mixed race Native American Islamic tribe, separatists declaring independence from the USA, an internet troll, a YouTuber all the way in British Colombia Canada who is affectionately known as Banana Joe, and how naturalist accidentally erased the history of the northernmost wild dwarf palmettos. Crazy as it sounds, this is all true, totally relavant, and it's all interconnected. This one is a long time coming, a truly bizzare story I hope you all enjoy, and 100% true.

In the 1620s and other years around that era, Black slaves and White and Black indentured servants sometimes escaped the plantations they worked and lived on on the coastal plains of the Atlantic Ocean between Georgia and New Jersey and Long Island. They sometimes even formed independent and self-sufficiemt communities hidden from the law and slave catchers. These are called maroon communities. The descendants of the maroon people's became multi generation mixed race families, a triracial mix of Black, White, and Native American, as the maroons often encountered and mingled with natives. Different groups of the descendants of the various communities became collectively referred to as triracial isolates, or Sweetgum Kriyul groups. The different tribes of Sweetgum Kriyul people each developed unique cultures and diets and lifestyles based on their isolatation and environment. The largest Sweetgum Kriyul community is the Melungeons, which famously produced Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and other influential people of partial Melungeon ancestry, such as current VP of the USA, JD Vance. But what does this have to do with palm trees? Well, you see, the Sweetgum Kriyul people who migrated to southern Appalachia became Melungeons, those in the mountains of New York and New Jersey's mountains became the Ramapough people, disparagingly called Jackson Whites people. On the southern coastal plains of North Carolina, they managed to stay on the populated coast and not have to flee to the mountains inland to avoid racism, they hid in swamps and became the Lumbee, and in the swamps of Delaware among the northernmost wild Bald Cypress, they became Nanticoke Moors, some even migrated out west to the frontier and became the Louisiana Redbone Nation and even settled Texas ranches from there. But the specific Sweetgum Kriyul people we will talk about today, are the Qarsherskiyans, who stayed on the coastal plains of Virginia and North Carolina, famously written about by Harriet Tubman as one of the earlier Qarsherskiyan groups, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons. These Qarsherskiyans originated on the coastal plains of Virginia and North Carolina, also spreading inland to nearly all of Ohio and much of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Many settled along Ohio's Lake Erie Coast. From North Carolina's alligator river and the Chesapeake Bay, inland to Lake Erie in Ohio, the triracial Qarsherskiyan community often had Jews, Roma/"gypsies", and other people considered non-White intermarry into their community due to laws preventing them from marrying White people. This created a diverse community we see today. My family of Kurdish origins has some members who married into the Qarsherskiyan tribe. That's how I learned about it. My relatives are Qarsherskiyan and I am culturally part of the community too. This is where the palm trees finally come into the picture and it should all start to come together now that you have this important context. The Sabal minor palms grew on the lower Virginia Peninsula as far up the peninsula as Lightfoot, Virginia and also grew in Isle of Wight County along tributary creeks of the River James and all around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, down into.... The Great Dismal Swamp! Sound familiar? From there, they extended across the border into North Carolina where the range map finally starts to get it right, albeit not showing some inland parts of NC they can grow in. According to the archives of the Qarsherskiyan tribe that I've read, they started disappearing from Virginia by the early 1800s and their disappearance coincided with the disappearance of another sacred species to the Qarsherskiyan people, the Carolina Parakeet. Virginia also had a wild parrot year-round that was native, I swear I'm not making this up, guys, but it gets even more shocking and crazy, what was kept hidden from us! 

You see, there was a young Qarsherskiyan youth leader who currently is 19. When he was around ages 14 to 16, he wreaked havoc in the Cold Hardy Palm Tree growing community. The Qarsherskiyan tribe considered Palm Trees sacred because they used the leaves of dwarf palmettos to make mats and thatch roofs for shelters and the plant fibers made clothes and baskets and all kinds of important things, and also because dwarf palmetto was the closest thing these people had to the date palm trees of Karbala. I won't get into the religious beliefs of Shia Islam, but let's just say that around half of the Qarsherskiyans are Muslims. The Great Dismal Swamp maroons were free in the swamps for 200 years. Them and other maroon communities Qarsherskiyan people descended from kept Native American and African spiritually and traditions alive while Black Americans lost them after hundreds of years of being taught Christianity and losing their cultural connection. Many Qarsherskiyan people still practice religions from their West African ancestors such as Voodoo and Islam. Palm trees are important to the Muslim Qarsherskiyans because of date palms. The Quran has a special story about the birth of Jesus (peace be upon him) when Mary needed to eat the date fruits to be strong to give birth, and there were date palm trees in Karbala when Imam Hussein died so Shia Muslim Qarsherskiyans would decorate their mourning locations for Hussein with palmetto leaves, and there are stories of prophet Muhammad planting date palms. You can look into it more if you want, I don't want to get into religion or off topic any further.

Anyways, a Qarsherskiyan youth leader who lived on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio was a young teen several years ago when he would comment on live streams about palm trees and parrots, because he considered Dwarf palmettos and Carolina Parakeets to be sacred. This is a very important politician and youth leader who is 19 now and I can't say his name for legal reasons, but many people famously would claim he was responsible for all the trolling that YouTuber BananaJSSI got a few years ago, although it was actually later found out that a Brian Lowry who lived further East along Ohio's Lake Erie coast was doing it and blamed the Youth leader and his old channel, BigfootSquad BWPP, which was deleted and recreated several times now. BigfootSquad channel might not have pranked called Banana Joe, but they had posted all kinds of strange videos claiming they could grow tropical palms in zone 7a in Northern Ohio by Lake Erie, claiming they were actually in zone 7b, that the USDA maps were wrong, and that they'd built an 8b microclimate, which drew much skepticism, although he truly believed this and was dead serious, no trolling. He tried to overwinter Chamaedorea palms in the ground under glass jars turned upside down and placed over them like greenhouse covers by a south-facing wall. Many didn't take him seriously but he believed all that he said, now he lives near me (I'm in Yorktown, he's in Newport News) and he truly is in zone 8, so good for him. After his relocation to Virginia, he continued growing palms, faded from having an internet presence as much, and became a well-respected high ranking authority for Qarsherskiyans on the Virginia Peninsula between ages 14 and 25, called the youth. He's been involved in local politics and I can't say much else about him because of this, but I'm sure you're all familiar with him. So, why is he and Qarsherskiyan people relevant to this story? On Virginia's Eastern Shore, on the Delmarva Peninsula, he mentioned a library in a town called either Easton or Eastville by different Qarsherskiyan folks in Virginia. I went to the library and saw records mentioning what he said precisely, Qarsherskiyans in North Carolina AND VIRGINIA have used wild native Dwarf Palmetto leaves for centuries, as I mentioned earlier. The records are written in an extinct Creole/Pidgin English that is similar to Ocracoke Brogue, and written using the Arabic alphabet. Only some very literate Qarsherskiyans who can read the Arabic alphabet and love palm trees enough to really dig for this stuff in this private library collection in someone's garage can access it. The information isn't available online, but the Qarsherskiyan youth leader mentioned it in a speech in 2024 June when he dissolved the Islamic Sultanate of Qarsherskiy, which was a proposed microstate, a small independent country with some Islamic laws for local Qarsherskiyans, somewhat like a cross between an Islamic version of the Vatican and a Native reservation. Just like with his Ohio Palm Tree rants, nobody took the young fellow seriously, but this lad wasn't trolling and truly meant it. It took him 2 years before giving up his bizzare separatist movement after he received threats from the FBI and was called a traitor to America and threatened by patriots. In his speech disolvimg the movement in June of 2024, he urged his nearly 2000 online supporters, former citizens of the formerly unrecognized and illegitimate ethnostate, he urged them all to form a political lobby to "gain access to city planning in Newport News" so he can launch a campaign to turn Newport News into a Qarsherskiyan Riviera. His plan was to fight to make all beaches public and open to tourists, have people paint their houses light blue and pink and deign it with nautical and maritime themes, and "plant natives such as Live Oak, Spanish Moss, Palmetto Palms, and other Palms, Broadleaved evergreens, and bamboo such as our native rivercane bamboo everywhere, lining every street!" Basically, since Newport News is zone 8b, just like Myrtle Beach, he wants it to be a Myrtle Beach in the North, full of tourists and exotic flora. He wants the city to plant more palms like Windmill Palms because the look exotic and are sacred to Qarsherskiyan people, but he needed the cover of them being native plants, so he tried to emphasize native palmettos although he also wanted Needle Palms and Windmill Palms planted along road medians. He had two issues. 1. The area where the Qarsherskiyans are is in Northern Newport News and inland adjacent parts of York County between Harwood's Mill Reservoir, Lee Hall Reservoir, and Jefferson Avenue. There around Grafton of York County and Colony Pines and Huntington Pointe of Newport News, Qarsherskiyan people are heavily concentrated more than anywhere else, but they are still only 6% of the population there, a few thousand, and not all of them support the palm-addicted teen's palm tree fever dream for Newport News. He has 2,000 followers but they're scattered across the USA and even a bit internationally. They're mostly online and have no power in the real world collectively. To solve the problem of garnering support, he is getting backing from people who aren't Qarsherskiyan, working with local White and Black people and getting involved with groups who clean up trash around Newport News Park. To argue for his "palm trees are native" issue_ he's pointing out what nobody except a few literate Qarsherskiyan palm fans knew for a long time: Dwarf Palmettos are native to coastal Virginia. That's when he mentioned in his speech the old journals and documentation rotting away in a "library" garage somewhere South of Kiptopeke and North of Cape Charles. I went there to see for myself and was blown away to see these reports! 

And that's how internet trolling, a mixed race Native American Islamic tribe, separatist movements, hidden history, and a beloved palm YouTuber known as Banana Joe affectionately all come together to make a true story that's so crazy even Kanye West wouldn't make it, revealing the secret of Virginia's Native Palm. 

To this day, legend has it, a few Dwarf Palmettos grow wild in the wooded areas between Denbigh Boulevard and Richneck Road, held dear by a few protective Qarsherskiyan folks who revere them as a sacred vestige from the ancestors' era, tucked away in the swamps that feed the source of the Poquoson River, in the bald cypress creeks and ravines upstream from Harwood's Mill Reservoir. A few miles hike from the trails at Huntington Pointe have rewarded few with a glimpse, before being chased off with arrows fired by a group of people with curly and wavy hair of Brown, Black, Auburn and Red Color, and with Brown, Hazel, Amber, and Green eyes, and skin ranging from pale and fair to olive tan, dusky, caramel, beige, or even a deep swarthy. A group of strange hybrid people who call themselves the Qarsherskiyan people ("Car-Sheer-Ski-Inn") who have long deeply influenced the online cold hard palm growers community, but have seldom been covered or mentioned by news and media, remaining in the shadows of Virginia's loblolly pine forests. Maybe one day, the public will know for sure, are the oral stories of the Qarsherskiyan's chronicles true? I believe so. Palms don't care for invisible borders. 

Expand  

This story is amazing If it's true I 100% believe Sable miners are native in Virginia One of my other passions other than palms is genealogy I love learning about all of these mixed race communities 

[Muslim Gardener]

  On 4/24/2025 at 4:42 PM, PAPalmtrees said:

This story is amazing If it's true I 100% believe Sable miners are native in Virginia One of my other passions other than palms is genealogy I love learning about all of these mixed race communities 

Expand  

Even for those skeptical to trust the oral history, there are a few remaining wild ones on the Virginia Peninsula and between Isle of Wight County, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Atlantic Ocean. I'm sure many local Qarsherskiyan people and friends of the community like Southern Dendrology must've been posting some to iNaturalist for several years now.

[PAPalmtrees]

  On 4/25/2025 at 9:17 AM, Muslim Gardener said:

Even for those skeptical to trust the oral history, there are a few remaining wild ones on the Virginia Peninsula and between Isle of Wight County, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Atlantic Ocean. I'm sure many local Qarsherskiyan people and friends of the community like Southern Dendrology must've been posting some to iNaturalist for several years now.

Expand  

Yep on Inatural there is tons of observations of sable miners in the Virginia Beach area also when I first read this story I was skeptical but now I believe it's true