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The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

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The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver m 3 m Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. —Estevan in The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver he protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees (1988) (discussed here out of publication sequence as one of two T narratives that focus on the same central characters; the dates of publication straddle that of Animal Dreams) is, like Codi Noline, a quester. Like her (traditionally male) predecessors in American fiction, she sets out from home, “going west” to see the world, where she ends up creating a new home for herself. Along the way she renames herself and passes from the state of young adulthood to motherhood. She leaves her original home—no father but a loving, supportive mother who accepts “whatever [she] came home with”1—because she wants to avoid the limiting and lim- ited fate of her female peers: adolescent pregnancy and early marriage (typ- ically in that order). Ironically, the most decisive and destiny-altering event in her life is her unconventional entry into motherhood. Departing from rural Pittman County, Kentucky, “Missy” (Marietta) Greer throws her lot to destiny, determining that she will acquire a new name and a new place to live based on where her decrepit ’55 Volkswagen R. Rubenstein, Home Matters © Roberta Rubenstein 2001 54 Home Matters Bug stops running;“wherever it ran out, I’d look for a sign” (11). She nar- rowly avoids being named after Homer, Illinois (a name and a place that Kingsolver reserves for significant roles in the novel that she published three years later, Animal Dreams), making it as far as a place called Taylorville before she runs out of gas. Her next stop is considerably more fateful. On a Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma—a place with significance for her since her great-grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee—Taylor finds herself the custodian of a Native American child who is deposited in her car during the night. The woman who delivers the child in this unprece- dented manner implores Taylor to “take this baby” (17), indicating that she is the child’s aunt and that its mother is dead. As a result of this unorthodox “delivery,”Taylor finds herself responsible for the welfare and well-being of a child somewhere in age between “a baby and a person” (17), much the way any new mother does, although in this instance without the customary contributions of either parturition or a father. Through these events early in the narrative, Kingsolver establishes the tone and direction of her story.Initially,Taylor follows her arbitrary destiny, signified by the child’s unorthodox arrival in her life, and only later recog- nizes the challenge to shape or “tailor”the child into a person. Her first sig- nificant choice is to accept the Indian child rather than to return her promptly to the reservation. As Taylor remarks of her initial encounter with the child left for her,“From the first moment I picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt” (22). In fact, the child clings so tenaciously to Taylor that she names her Turtle,“on account of her grip” (36). From that literal attachment, the novel traces the growth of a true emotional bond as the relationship develops from Taylor’s view of the child as “not really mine...just somebody I got stuck with” (52) to her affirmative decision to become the child’s legal mother. When Taylor arrives in Arizona, her unconventional family expands further to include the owner of the incongruously named business, Jesus is Lord Used Tires. Competently assisting Taylor in the repair of the two flat tires her car has developed during the long journey from Kentucky to Ari- zona, Mattie also serves (as her name hints) as a kind of surrogate mater, beginning with her first offer,“Just make yourself at home” (43). In sharp contrast to the austere Southwestern landscape Taylor first encounters in Arizona, Mattie’s tire enterprise beckons as a startlingly flourishing envi- ronment, an incongruous but almost Edenic garden with global geograph- ical references—“a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires” (45). Home/lands and Contested Motherhood 55 The purple bean vines in this garden-run-amok grew from seeds brought from China decades earlier by one of Mattie’s neighbors. Seeking a place to live through the Want Ads, Taylor meets Lou Ann Ruiz, a young woman also transplanted from home; their “hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties . .” (72). Lou Ann affirms her instant kinship with Taylor, remarking,“You talk just like me” (76). In her struggles with the demands of new motherhood and single parenting following her husband’s defection, Lou Ann functions as a kind of sister and double to Taylor; her exaggerated anxieties, guilt, and fear of life form a comic counterpart to Taylor’s earnestness and plucky independence. Tay- lor, affectionately observing her new friend and companion attempting to shield her baby,Dwayne Ray,from all of life’s hazards, concludes that,“For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless” (84). Taylor recognizes that Lou Ann is actually less a pho- bic personality than the possessor of an overly vivid imagination. Her true fear is the “fear that the things you imagine will turn real” (102). Taylor’s new life expands to include a job at Mattie’s,where she encoun- ters two Guatemalan refugees who have fled their country because of political persecution and torture. Only later does she discover Estevan and Esperanza’s connection to Mattie: Jesus is Lord Used Tires is also a safe house in an underground system of sanctuaries for Central American political refugees. Taylor, a foreigner in the Southwest—though not nearly as isolated by differences of language and culture as are the Guatemalan couple—strongly empathizes with their feelings of dislocation and “home- sick[ness]” (103); ultimately, she learns the deeper sources of their misery. When they travel together from Arizona to Oklahoma to reach another safe house, Taylor asks Estevan, who was once an English teacher in Guatemala City,“Do you miss your home a lot?” Elaborating on his dis- placement from his geographical, ethnic, and linguistic origins, Estevan articulates the complex and overlapping meanings of home for the exile. He replies,“I don’t even know anymore which home I miss.Which level of home” (193). Later he defines his sense of longing from the exile’s posi- tion: “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere” (195). The homeless exile Estevan is the moral center of The Bean Trees, intro- ducing Taylor to both the reality of geopolitical displacement and the spir- itual maturity of one who has been punished by an arbitrary destiny. At an early gathering of the friends who evolve into Taylor’s extended family, Estevan offers a parable of nurturance, mutuality, and community. First, he describes a place called hell, where the occupants are starving. Although a 56 Home Matters pot of delicious stew is available, no one is able to eat. “They only have spoons with very long handles. [T]he people can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths” (108). In the other place, called heaven, although the circumstances are identical—a pot of stew and long- handled cutlery—the occupants are well-fed. Estevan dramatically demon- strates how that result is accomplished by “reach[ing] all the way across the table to offer [a chunk of pineapple] to Turtle” (108). Significantly, for this exile, heaven is associated with both nurturance and communal sharing. The possibilities and limitations of nurturance—and their inevitable associations with both mother and home—constitute a central issue in The Bean Trees. When the child,Turtle, begins to speak in English, her first word is “bean,”later expanded to “humbean” (human being)—uniquely suggest- ing the organic continuum of all living things. As Turtle’s vocabulary expands, she names and focuses insistently on vegetables and vegetation; her favorite activity is to plant and “bury” seeds. Bean trees and their look- alikes appear several times in her experience, including once when Turtle identifies a seed-bearing wisteria vine as a bean tree. Taylor, marveling at the resemblance Turtle has perceived, regards it as a “miracle”:“the flower trees were turning into bean trees” (144). Although on the surface Turtle seems as “healthy as corn” (120), she is herself a kind of miracle. During a pediatric exam, Taylor learns that the child has been seriously abused, so damaged by fractured bones and prior injuries recorded in “secret scars” (127) that her physical growth has been seriously stunted. As the pediatrician explains, “sometimes in an environ- ment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop grow- ing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It’s a condition we call failure to thrive” (123). Taylor, stunned by this revelation of an inno- cent child’s suffering, directly glimpses a world in which evil and injustice exist. Yet,in the harsh desert environment of southern Arizona, a counter- vailing image offers itself. Taylor, averting her focus from the X-ray images of Turtle’s damaged body that the doctor places against a window for illu- mination, “looked through the bones to the garden on the other side.
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