In many ways, Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence. Kingsolver’s heroine, Taylor Greer, does resemble Huck Finn in her courage, honesty, and adaptability. But in one important way, she departs: Taylor is a woman, and that fact defines much of what occurs in this remarkable story.
Born Marietta Greer (one can understand the name change, Marietta being entirely too feminine for this sassy character) in Pittman, Kentucky, Taylor early feels an outsider, aware of those who shun her and her mother because of their low class and lack of wealth, but unwilling to join the ranks of poor teenage mothers. At the first opportunity, despite her great love for her mother, Taylor starts west in her ramshackle VW bug, unconsciously retracing the Trail of Tears that led the Cherokee tribe (of which her grandmother was one) to Oklahoma. There, at a desolate roadside bar, a woman worriedly foists a gift upon her: an infant girl, a Cherokee. Leaving Oklahoma, Taylor writes her mother that she has “found my head rights [to the Cherokee land]… They’re coming with me.”
Taylor and her new child, whom she names “Turtle” for her proclivity to cling like the mud turtles of Kentucky, hobble into Tucson, Arizona, where the VW bug fortuitously breaks down at “Jesus is Lord Used Tires.” Here, Taylor encounters Mattie, the generous woman who will give her a job and introduce her to Estevan and Esperanza, two Guatemalan refugees for whom she is providing sanctuary. Taylor soon sets up house with another single mother, Lou Ann, also from Kentucky, and with their obvious care and good humor, this quartet redefines what it means to be a family.
All is not easy: Taylor, an inexperienced mother, must figure out how to raise a daughter who she discovers has been physically and sexually abused, and Lou Ann must learn to let go of a husband who cannot commit to staying in one place. Each of the female characters finds within her a strength that she did not know she possessed. Lou Ann secures a job and learns to live independently. Taylor, who has been strongly attracted to Estevan, agrees to drive him and Esperanza to Oklahoma so that they might find a secure home. In a triumphant act of giving, the refugee couple, who have lost their own child, risk their freedom to pose as Turtle’s parents and give her up so that Taylor might adopt her from the Cherokee tribe. Ultimately, this band of disconnected and wayward travelers becomes a more vital and caring community than most nuclear families.
Single parenting, child abuse, Central American refugees—Kingsolver seems to leave no contemporary issue untouched. Yet, though she proudly bears the mantle of a “political novelist,” she never comes across as preachy or stridently sectarian. The Bean Trees, though it gently coerces us into addressing such issues, involves us instead much more deeply on the personal level, as we wonder what will become of the endearingly real characters about whom we have come to care so tenderly. And though Turtle’s and Taylor’s story will continue to unfold in Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, we are still ultimately rewarded here in the end, to find that love does conquer all and that humans will, given half a chance, act nobly and courageously.
SOURCES
DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Murrey, Loretta Martin. “The Loner and the Matriarchal Community in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 5, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1994): 155–164.
Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 77–82.
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