Quote 41
Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.
It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event. Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize. You'd made it that far. (1.9-10)
In Pittman County, teenage pregnancy is enough to derail a young woman's life for good. For most of Taylor's friends and classmates, getting pregnant means having to quit high school and get married—two circumstances that will trap a young woman in Pittman County forever, from Taylor's point of view.
Quote 42
It wasn't the kindest thing, maybe, but at one point I actually asked her, "Jolene, why Newt?" She was slumped down and rocking a little bit in the chair, holding her hurt shoulder and looking at her feet. She had these eyes that never seemed to open all the way.
What she said was "Why not, my daddy'd been calling me a slut practically since I was thirteen, so why the hell not? Newt was just who it happened to be. You know the way it is."
I told her I didn't know, because I didn't have a daddy. That I was lucky that way. She said yeah. (1.40-42)
Taylor's narration makes it clear that she used to care a lot about who her father was. As a child being raised by a single mother, she wanted to know more about the other side of the miracle of life. In this moment, though, Taylor realizes how lucky she's been to be raised by a caring mother, and to be spared from the kind of abusive father figure that so many of her friends and classmates have endured.
Quote 43
She said, "What do you do if I let the air out of the front tire?" Which she did. I said, "Easy, I put on the spare," which believe it or not that damned old car actually had.
Then she let out the back one too and said, "Now what?" Mama had evidently run into trouble along these lines, at some point in her life with Foster and an Oldsmobile, and she wanted to be sure I was prepared. (1.49-50)
Taylor's Mama takes a hands-on approach to preparing Taylor for the world. Rather than teaching Taylor to rely on others for help, Alice Greer shows her daughter that practical skills and self-reliance will see her through.
Quote 44
I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we? (3.22)
In Taylor's experience, no real purpose is served by men making women feel scared of the world. What conventional gender roles does that sort of fear help to maintain?
Quote 45
Mattie started up the machine, which made the front tires of Roger's Toyota spin around, and after a minute she lay down on one shoulder and adjusted something under the front. She didn't get that dirty, either. I had never seen a woman with this kind of know-how. It made me feel proud, somehow. In Pittman if a woman had tried to have her own tire store she would have been run out of business. That, or the talk would have made your ears curl up like those dried apricot things. (3.73)
Well lookie dat, a lady who knows how to work a truck. Taylor's Mama gave her a good example of a strong and independent woman, but Mattie impresses Taylor even more by seeming so at ease in a conventionally "masculine" role. Whereas Alice Greer cleaned houses for a living—conventionally "feminine" work—Mattie has the skill and confidence to run a business in automotive care. More than any other woman Taylor has known, Mattie shows her that women can do more than clean, nurse, serve, type, or file. And that's just in the workforce—in "real" life she can be plenty strong, too.
Quote 46
"Did you get up in the middle of the night to do the feeding and diapering?"
"No," he said, smiling a little.
"I can't believe I'm even asking you that. Does it hurt you a lot to talk about Ismene?"
"At first, but not so much now. What helps me the most is to know her life is going on somewhere, with someone. To know she is growing up." (9.78-81)
After Esperanza attempts to commit suicide, Estevan tells Taylor about their daughter, Ismene, who was stolen by Guatemalan authorities. Their conversation reveals how differently Estevan and Esperanza have reacted to the loss: whereas Esperanza is still too distraught to cope, Estevan finds ways to go on. But does that have to do with gender roles, too? Given what he says about not doing the feeding and diapering, what can we infer about his and Esperanza's different relationships with their infant child?
Quote 47
The rest of us watched. Mr. Armistead stopped fidgeting and Mrs. Cleary's hands on her papers went still. Here were a mother and her daughter, nothing less. A mother and child—in a world that could barely be bothered with mothers and children—who were going to be taken apart. Everybody believed it. Possibly Turtle believed it. I did. (16.27)
When Taylor describes the world as one "that could barely be bothered with mothers and children," what does she mean? What earlier scenes or events from the novel might she have in mind? How does the supposed downplay of mother-daughter relationships fit in with the community Taylor has built for herself?
Quote 48
I had looked at some maps, but since I had never in my own memory been outside of Kentucky
[...], I had no way of knowing why or how any particular place might be preferable to any other. That is, apart from the pictures on the gas station brochures: Tennessee claimed to be the Volunteer State, and Missouri the Show-Me State, whatever that might mean, and nearly everyplace appeared to have plenty of ladies in fifties hairdos standing near waterfalls. These brochures I naturally did not trust as far as I could throw them out the window. (1.56)
Since the gas station brochures are geared towards tourists, rather than people looking to settle down in someplace new, Taylor finds it hard to learn what other states are really like. Why doesn't she look 'em up on the good ole world wide web? Because (duh) these were the days before the Internet was good, or ole, or even existed. Maybe that's also why kids in Kentucky had nothing better to do than get barefoot and preggers all the time.
Quote 49
Mama taught me well about tires, and many other things besides, but I knew nothing of rocker arms. And I did not know about the Great Plain.
The sight of it filled me with despair. I turned south from Wichita, Kansas, thinking I might find a way around it, but I didn't. There was central Oklahoma. I never imagined that any part of a round earth could be so flat. (1.58)
Taylor's cross-country road trip opens her eyes to the vastness and impressive variability of American landscapes. She's not kidding when she says that she never imagined that land could be so flat: the mountains and hills of Pittman County are absolutely all she's ever known.
Quote 50
In Kentucky you could never see too far, since there were always mountains blocking the other side of your view, and it left you the chance to think something good might be just over the next hill. But out there on the plain it was all laid out right in front of you, and no matter how far you looked it didn't get any better. Oklahoma made me feel there was nothing left to hope for. (1.58)
Many passages in The Bean Trees imply that our natural surroundings can affect our senses of safety, health, and wellbeing. If you were to read The Bean Trees as an environmentalist novel, what argument might you take away from this?
Quote 51
It was clear to me that the whole intention of bringing the Cherokees here was to get them to lie down and die without a fight. The Cherokees believed God was in trees. Mama told me this.
[. . .]
From what I could see, there was not one tree in the entire state of Oklahoma. (1.62-63)
Taylor's sense of despair at encountering the Great Plain gives her an important insight into the injustice of forced removal and relocation. When a culture is rooted in specific landscapes, ecosystems, and territories, dislocation—which is exactly what happened to the Cherokee Nation—can be absolutely devastating.
Quote 52
We crossed the Arizona state line at sunup. The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious-looking, like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie. The road took us through a place called Texas canyon that looked nothing like Texas, heaven be praised for that, but looked like nothing else I had ever seen either. It was a kind of forest, except that in place of trees there were all these puffy-looking rocks shaped like roundish animals and roundish people. (3.1)
The Arizona landscape tickles Taylor as pink as a Disney hippo, and inspires her to live there for good. Nothing like picturing stacks of rocks as petrified dinosaur turds and clouds as cartoon ballerinas to inspire a big move.
Quote 53
We got out of the open car and stood under the concrete wings to stay dry. Turtle was looking interested in the scenery, which was a first. Up to then the only thing that appeared to interest her was my special way of starting the car.
"This is a foreign country," I told her. "Arizona. You know as much about it as I do. We're even steven." (3.9)
This is the first of many instances throughout The Bean Trees when Taylor describes herself as a foreigner in a new country. Coming from the relatively self-contained Pittman County, she finds it hard to think of America as a unified nation. To her, individual states seem much more like unique and foreign lands.
Quote 54
Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner too. I come from a place that's so different from here you would think you'd stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirt for decoration and the national pastime is having babies. People don't look the same, talk the same, nothing. Half the time I have no idea what's going on around me here. (9.36)
Taylor's sense that Tucson is a foreign country compared to Pittman County helps her to identify with refugees like Estevan and Esperanza. However, although she means well, Taylor sometimes forgets that, unlike her friends, she can travel throughout America without fear of being arrested and deported back to where she came from. When it comes right down to it, Taylor's citizenship gives her fundamental privileges that her friends may never have.
Quote 55
We were stopped by Immigration about a hundred miles this side of the New Mexico border. Mattie had warned me of this possibility and we had all prepared for it as best we could. Esperanza and Estevan were dressed about as American as you could get without looking plain obnoxious: he had on jeans and an alligator shirt donated from some church on the east side where people gave away stuff that was entirely a cut above New To You. Esperanza was wearing purple culottes, a yellow T-shirt, and sunglasses with pink frames. (14.1)
What is it, exactly, about Estevan and Esperanza's outfits that makes them seem so quintessentially "American"? Do they sound kind of like hipsters, and is that what makes America America?
Quote 56
Estevan and I talked about everything you could think of. He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.
"Not that I know of," I told him. It occurred to me, though, that it might be kind of appropriate. (14.21-22)
Although neither Estevan nor Taylor recognize Lacoste branding when they see it (which means he's looking a bit more preppy than hipster on this fine day), this passage is a neat little window into the power of corporate branding. Symbolically, what would the alligator (or crocodile) meanif it really were a national symbol of the United States? How would you compare it to, say, the bald eagle? Why didn't Lacoste want a bird above the shirts on those gorgeous pastel-hued polos of theirs?
Quote 57
It must have been a very long time since Esperanza and Estevan had been in a place where they looked just like everybody else, including cops. The relief showed in their bodies. I believe they actually grew taller. And Turtle fit right in too; this was her original home. I was the odd woman out. (15.3)
As Taylor, Estevan, Esperanza, and Turtle drive further into Cherokee Nation territory, Estevan and Esperanza are visibly relieved to be in a place where they're no longer two people of color alone in a sea of white. If you compare their lived experience as refugees and people of color to Virgie Mae and Granny Logan's certainty that America is being "overrun" by illegal aliens and foreigners, what stands out?