How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife. Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew. (1.9)
As Marietta Greer grows up in Pittman County, Kentucky, she thinks of her high school diploma as the thing that will help her to break away from her rural hometown. For her, education is a ticket to a better (or at least a different) kind of life. Better than a diploma in barefoot and pregnant, at least.
Quote #2
I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl. (1.149)
Taylor gets more than one kind of education in The Bean Trees. Although her high school education and her encounters with violence while working in the hospital gave her basic knowledge, her understanding of the world gets deeper as she witnesses some of the hardships that others are forced to endure.
Quote #3
Mattie's, of course, was a tire store and sanctuary.
Slowly I was coming to understand exactly what this meant. For one thing, people came and went quietly. And stayed quietly. Around to the side of Mattie's place, above the mural Lou Ann and I called Jesus Around the World, there was an upstairs window that looked out over the park. I saw faces there, sometimes Esperanza's and sometimes others, staring across the empty space. (8.102-103)
When Taylor first arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has next to no sense of global politics or America's place on the world stage. Through her association with Mattie, she slowly learns about the kinds of conflict that create political refugees. We're not in Kentucky anymore, Toto.
Quote #4
"He's a good man," she said. "He looks after the ones that get here sick and hurt."
"What do you mean, that get here hurt?" I asked.
"Hurt," she said. "A lot of them get here with burns, for instance."
I was confused. "I don't get why they would have burns," I persisted.
She looked at me for so long that I felt edgy. "Cigarette burns," she said. "On their backs." (8.107-112)
Even after she begins to understand how Mattie gathers and harbors refugees, Taylor still has very little understanding of the world they're fleeing from. Because her own life has been free of violence and torture, it hardly occurs to her that such kinds of experience might be common in other peoples' lives.
Quote #5
"That's not fair. You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that, shiploads of telephones to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? [...] Half the time I have no idea what's going on around me here." (9.36)
Estevan suggests to Taylor that Americans find it easiest not to know about their own complicity in violence and injustice. Taylor refuses to accept this. Do you think her counterargument is valid? In cases like this, does ignorance mean the same thing as innocence?
Quote #6
Try as I would, I couldn't understand this. I was no longer so stupid as to ask why they didn't call the police, but still I couldn't see why they hadn't at least tried to get her back if they knew the police had taken her, and where. "Don't be upset with me," I said. "I know I'm ignorant, I'm sorry. Just explain it to me." (9.48)
Through Estevan, Taylor learns more about the world than she knew previously. Does this knowledge change her in any way? If so, how?
Quote #7
"Esperanza and I knew the names of twenty other union members," he said. "The teachers' union did not have open meetings. We worked in cells, and communicated by message. Most people knew only four other members by name. This is what I am saying. In Guatemala, you are careful. If you want to change something, you can find yourself dead. This was not the—what do you call? The P.T.A." (9.49)
Ah, we love a good joke at the expense of the P.T.A. But hey: this is serious stuff in the union Estevan's on about. While we're at it, Barbara Kingsolver could have had Estevan be involved in another kind of union, but she chose a teacher's union specifically. Why?
Quote #8
"I can't even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that."
"You live in that world," he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn't want to. I started to cry then, just tears streaming out all over and no stopping them. Estevan put his arm around me and I sobbed against his shoulder. The dam had really broken. (9.56-57)
By the end of her conversation with Estevan, Taylor has unconsciously accepted his point. Although there are some things she knows about injustice, there are other things that she doesn't want to know. In Estevan's view, this desire not to know plays a big role in allowing atrocities to continue.
Quote #9
"What helps me the most is to know her life is going on somewhere, with someone. To know she is growing up."
"Sure," I said, but I knew there was another side to this, too. Where she was growing up, what they would raise her to be. I thought of Turtle being raised by Virgie Mae Parsons, learning to look down her nose and wear little hats, and I then I got it mixed up with police uniforms. (9.81-82)
Although Estevan takes some comfort from knowing that his daughter, Ismene, is alive and growing up somewhere, Taylor worries about the kind of moral education Ismene will receive. If she is being raised by the same kinds of people who would abduct her in the first place, what kind of person will they teach her to be? And imaginining Lil' Turtle Parsnip is just too much for her to handle. And we can't blame her, with a name like that.
Quote #10
I thought of the color pictures in my grade-school history books: Columbus striding up the beach in his leotards and feathered hat, a gang of wild-haired men in loin clothes scattering in front of him like rabbits. What a joke. (14.32)
As Mayans, Estevan and Esperanza are Indigenous people whose culture has been misrepresented by colonial forces for centuries, so much that it appears as factual knowledge in grade-school history books young American children read as gospel. By the end of The Bean Trees, Taylor's friendship with Estevan and Esperanza has taught her to be much more critical of her own formal education. Is your state one that has renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous People's Day? That ongoing debate still can tell you a whole bunch about the state of education in the given states of our mighty country.