Quote 21
"You know where we're going now? We're going home."
She swung her heels against the seat. "Home, home, home, home," she sang.
The poor kid had spent so much of her life in a car, she probably felt more at home on the highway than anywhere else. "Do you remember home?" I asked her. "That house where we live with Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray? We'll be there before you know it." (17.184-186)
By the end of the novel, Taylor has come to think of Tucson as home, and, most importantly, she's come to think of the house she shares with Lou Ann, Dwayne Ray, and Turtle as "home" too. Although the highway stretches before them, heading west, the two aren't driving off into the sunset of the great unknown; instead, they're returning to a place they've come to know and love. Now doesn't that make ya feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
Quote 22
It was the second day of the new year. I had stayed on at the Broken Arrow through most of the holidays, earning some money changing beds. The older woman with the shakes, whose name was Mrs. Hoge, was determined I should stay awhile. She said they could use the extra help during the Christmas season, especially since her daughter-in-law's ankles were giving her trouble. (3.2)
Taylor has a rare ability to make friends wherever she goes, and to find herself welcomed into self-contained communities of families and friends. What is it about her that makes this kind of openness and acceptance possible? And what's up with the daughter-in-law's ankles?
Quote 23
"You must have grandbabies around," I said.
"Mmm-hmmm. Something like that." She handed the cup back to Turtle and she sucked on it hard, making a noise like a pond frog. I wondered what, exactly, could be "something like" grandbabies. (3.79-80)
Taylor later comes to learn that the "something like" grandbabies are the refugee children who pass through Mattie's safe-house, leaving lots of colorful pictures behind. For Mattie, these children and their families aren't just "something like" family: they're also part of a global community of human beings, whom she feels it's her responsibility to care for and protect. Which makes Mattie's view of community one of the most expansive and generous around.
Quote 24
Pittman was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of, except the rate of teenage pregnancies. For instance, we were the last place in the country to get the dial system. Up until 1973 you just picked up the receiver and said, Marge, get me my Uncle Roscoe, or whoever. The telephone office was on the third floor of the Courthouse, and the operators could see everything around Main Street square including the bank, the drugstore, and Dr. Finchler's office. She would tell you if his car was there or not. (3.104)
Compared to Pittman County, Tucson feels like a foreign, futuristic world to Taylor. And, whereas everyone in Pittman County knows everyone else, and everyone else's business besides, in Tucson, "it was clear that there was nobody overlooking us all. We would just have to find our own way" (3.104). In the absence of the kind of ready-made community that small towns can provide, Taylor is going to have to make connections in Tucson all on her own.
Quote 25
Mattie's place was always hopping. She was right about people always passing through, and not just customers, either. There was another whole set of people who spoke Spanish and lived with her upstairs for various lengths of time. I asked her about them once, and she asked me something like had I ever heard of a sanctuary. (6.8)
Mattie tries to remind the American people that as a signatory to UN treaties, the U.S. is obligated to take in refugees whose lives are being threatened. Since the state and federal governments aren't doing the job to her satisfaction, she's willing to do what she can to meet those obligations on those people's behalf. In Mattie's opinion, the country is shirking its duties as a member of a global community of nations.
Quote 26
Now and again these days, not just in emergencies, we were leaving the kids with Edna and Virgie Mae on their front porch to be looked after. Edna was so sweet we just hoped she would cancel out Virgie's sour, like the honey and vinegar in my famous Chinese recipe. It was awfully convenient, anyway, and Turtle seemed to like them okay. She called them Poppy and Parsnip. (8.59)
Although Taylor worries about the things Turtle might pick up from the somewhat nasty Virgie Mae Parsons, a.k.a. Parsnip, the neighbors slowly establish themselves as part of the community of caretakers who help to raise Turtle. Some say it takes a village to raise a child, and The Bean Trees certainly agrees. Especially if it's a village with plant nicknames.
Quote 27
In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you—they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing. (9.21)
Taylor isn't exactly describing an ideal set-up for community feeling here, but her high school experiences do teach her one important thing about humans in society. For people like her classmate Scotty, for example, who "didn't belong to any group" (9.25), social loneliness and isolation were devastating. Without having someone to belong to, it's easy to feel worthless and disposable. And even being a Greaser or a Nutter is better than that.
Quote 28
I couldn't sleep nights. I went to work early and left late, even when Mattie kept telling me to go home. Lou Ann took off a week from Red Hot Mama's, putting her new promotion at risk, just to stay home with Turtle. The three of them—she, Edna, and Virgie—would sit together on the front porch with the kids, making sure we all understood it was nobody's fault. (12.77)
When Taylor's shock and depression makes her incapable of caring for Turtle or herself, Lou Ann steps up to the plate. Together, she and Edna and Virgie form a tight circle around Turtle, and Taylor too, proving that a community of caregivers is stronger than one parent alone. Especially when that parent is too depressed to do anything except spend her spare time with spare tires. And used ones, at that.
Quote 29
"Look at those guys in the park with no place to go," I said. "And women, too. I've seen whole families out there. While we're in here trying to keep the dry-cleaner bags out of the kids' reach, those mothers are using dry-cleaner bags for their children's clothes, for God's sake. For raincoats. And feeding them out of the McDonald's dumpster. You'd think that life alone would be punishment enough for those people, but then the cops come around waking them up mornings, knocking them around with their sticks. You've seen it." (12.93)
The more Taylor begins to recognize social inequalities, abuses, and injustices in the world, the more she is saddened by how little sympathy human beings can have for one another. She realizes that many people in the neighborhood would rather see the "riffraff" cleared out by the police than lend a hand to change their situation. In these moments, community feeling fails, and individualism triumphs. Cue the icy shiver down your spine.
Quote 30
Mattie and Lou Ann and the others stood in the early-morning light holding kids and waving. It could have been the most ordinary family picture, except for the backdrop of white-wall tires. Esperanza and Turtle waved until they were out of sight. I kept blinking my eyes like windshield wipers, trying to keep a clear view of the road. (13.180)
Lots and lots of people have gathered to wish Taylor, Turtle, Estevan, and Esperanza goodbye, but as Taylor looks at them all, she thinks of them as a "family." In The Bean Trees, family, friendship, and community form a trio of interrelated themes: to Taylor and the others, they are all wrapped up together. Kind of like beans in a pod. Oh wait, that's peas…
Quote 31
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 32
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 33
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 34
"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 35
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 36
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.
Quote 37
The Indian child was a girl. A girl, poor thing. That fact had already burdened her life with a kind of misery I could not imagine. 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. (1.150)
The sexual abuse of children is one of the clearest targets of the novel's criticism. Taylor's horror at the abuse Turtle has suffered is what inspires her to keep the child for good.
Quote 38
Then the TV showed both Mattie and the interview man talking without sound, and another man's voice told us that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had returned two illegal aliens, a woman and her son, to their native El Salvador last week, and that Mattie "claimed" they had been taken into custody when they stepped off the plane in San Salvador and later were found dead in a ditch. I didn't like this man's tone. I had no idea how Mattie would know such things, but if she said it was so, it was. (7.106)
By getting to know, love, and trust Mattie, Taylor's eyes are opened to the unjust ways of the world. Even more than Taylor's Mama, Mattie provides the young woman with the kind of role-modeling it takes to make Taylor see that she can make a difference in the world. Even if she doesn't always understand how the news on TV works.
Quote 39
"What program did you want to see?" Edna asked. "I hope we haven't spoiled it by coming late?"
"That was it, we just saw it," I said, though it seemed ridiculous. Thirty seconds and it was all over. "She's a friend of ours," I explained.
"All I could make out was some kind of trouble with illegal aliens and dope peddlers," said Mrs. Parsons. (7.109-111)
Virgie Mae's reaction to the television interview is represented as a typically prejudiced response. Like Granny Logan, Virgie Mae's presence in the novel serves to highlight how prejudice and bigotry contribute to social injustice. Thanks a lot, Parsnip.
Quote 40
I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose. If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner. (11.72)
As Taylor begins to understand more about the injustices of the world, the knowledge is overwhelming. Coming to terms with her inability to change the world as one single, solitary human being is one of the most important steps she makes in the novel; learning to do whatever she can is another.