B. A. Brittingham, Lonesome #3
Sorting the Beans
Lauren Scharhag
When I was a little girl,
Bisabuela would have me sort the beans,
a good task for small fingers,
sifting through seed bodies,
smooth and speckled as songbird eggs,
picking out pebbles, picking out shriveled or broken bits,
while she chopped onions and prepared the masa.
It seemed the TV was usually off while we worked,
which meant it must have been during the lag
between The Price is Right and afternoon talk shows.
She would tell me how her family in Texas had been so poor,
they hadn’t even beans to eat.
They’d had nopales, the occasional armadillo.
A younger brother was lost to smallpox.
These were her earliest memories, dim and fragmented.
I’ve tried to look up the history of her hometown
but the articles don’t say much before the 1880s,
when the railroad came. To hear them tell it,
there was nothing before then,
just vague references to hunter-gatherer tribes,
any one of which could have been ours.
Bisabuela was only three when her family came north.
Her father died on the way. So for her, too,
there was nothing before America.
This is the way of diaspora: Get assimilated or get discarded.
We’d soak the beans overnight in the old enamel pot,
also speckled. The next day, we’d have frijoles and tortillas,
pork chops if we could afford them.
I tasted time in each umami bite. I tasted 15,000 years.
The same salt and protein and fiber
that nourished all those generations, that multiplied their cells,
also nourished and multiplied mine.
My bones and teeth and tissues are beans and corn.
I can still feel the slide of sun-warmed legumes in my fingertips,
taste cactus crunch, the red pork flavor of Hoover hogs.
I taste golden petals, and though I am not full-blooded,
I am full.
Lauren Scharhag
When I was a little girl,
Bisabuela would have me sort the beans,
a good task for small fingers,
sifting through seed bodies,
smooth and speckled as songbird eggs,
picking out pebbles, picking out shriveled or broken bits,
while she chopped onions and prepared the masa.
It seemed the TV was usually off while we worked,
which meant it must have been during the lag
between The Price is Right and afternoon talk shows.
She would tell me how her family in Texas had been so poor,
they hadn’t even beans to eat.
They’d had nopales, the occasional armadillo.
A younger brother was lost to smallpox.
These were her earliest memories, dim and fragmented.
I’ve tried to look up the history of her hometown
but the articles don’t say much before the 1880s,
when the railroad came. To hear them tell it,
there was nothing before then,
just vague references to hunter-gatherer tribes,
any one of which could have been ours.
Bisabuela was only three when her family came north.
Her father died on the way. So for her, too,
there was nothing before America.
This is the way of diaspora: Get assimilated or get discarded.
We’d soak the beans overnight in the old enamel pot,
also speckled. The next day, we’d have frijoles and tortillas,
pork chops if we could afford them.
I tasted time in each umami bite. I tasted 15,000 years.
The same salt and protein and fiber
that nourished all those generations, that multiplied their cells,
also nourished and multiplied mine.
My bones and teeth and tissues are beans and corn.
I can still feel the slide of sun-warmed legumes in my fingertips,
taste cactus crunch, the red pork flavor of Hoover hogs.
I taste golden petals, and though I am not full-blooded,
I am full.