In Texas, when my parents were still married, we ate fried
chicken, mashed potatoes laden with cream gravy, green beans flavored with bits
of bacon and buttery light biscuits.
Every item on the menu had its own serving dish, and cloth napkins were
always used.
First published in what wildness is this, University of Texas Press, 2007.
Photo by S. Ramos O'Briant "I grew these."
"May
I have another biscuit, ma'am?" I would say.
"You surely may, Sandra
Mae," my daddy's mama would reply and everyone would smile. Or we'd have
fried pork chops and suck on the salty bones, but only when it was just my mama
and me at the dinner table.
In Texas, there were black-eyed peas and ham
and all manner of greens and put-up preserves.
There was watermelon and homemade ice cream from the hand-crank
ice-cream maker. Daddy held a bourbon
and water in one hand, and turned the handle with the other, while Mama and my
daddy's mama drank iced tea on the back porch and exchanged polite
insults. My grandma didn't like it that
Daddy had married a Mexican.
"Don't forget your manners out there,
Sandra Mae," grandma said, after the divorce, and right before me and Mama
set off for New Mexico. She glared at my
mama and then bent down to whisper in my ear. "Remember what you learned
here and act like a lady."
In Santa
Fe, we ate pinto beans muddy in their own gravy at my mama's parent's
house. My aunts, cousins, grandparents
and sometimes neighbors ladled the beans into their bowls from the pot in the
middle of the table. Instead of forks
and spoons to get those beans into our mouths, tortillas wrapped in a dishcloth
were passed around the table.
Each
diner split their tortilla, usually into fourths, but the more adept could
function well on thirds or even halves.
The tortilla was rolled into a half-moon scoop and the eating
commenced. It required dexterity and
speed to fill the tortilla scoop and stuff it into your mouth before the bean
juice had a chance to run out the back and down your forearm. I leaned over my bowl like the adults and
soon shoveled like an expert.
"Hand me another tortilla," my Aunt
Frances would say, not at all unfriendly, pointing her chin in the general
direction of the tortillas. The only green vegetable offered at my
grandparent's table were chiles. Meat,
usually pork, was a rarity and was reserved for the green chile pods. If I wanted meat or vegetables, I was going
to have to learn to eat chile.
Mama
started me off slow, picking up the chunks of meat and sucking the chile juice
out. She’d place the morsel on my tongue
like a sacrament, and sit back and wait.
I chewed tentatively, fearing the bite of the treacherous chile
pod. Occasionally, a seed would sneak
through making my eyes tear and my nose run.
I'd swallow glass after glass of my grandparent's icy well water, my
face contorted in pain.
Then,
I'd ask for more. By the end of that first winter, my yearning for the green
was established. I was an
addict.
"Hatch
chile," the boy yelled from the back of the pick-up. The truck drove slowly down our street,
pausing when a homemaker ran out and negotiated with the chile vendor. The boy sat atop a truck bed piled high with
shiny green pods, some plump and beginning to turn red, others long and thin or
curled into a defiant C. I scooped up a
handful of pods and breathed their spicy promise while my grandfather first
sniffed and then bit into a pod to judge its quality, the latter variable not
strictly related to taste or crunchiness but to the extremity of pain
inflicted: mild, medium, or hot. He
bought a bushel adjudged to be medium.
Yeah,
right.
In
Texas, my father's new wife and his mama might be putting up figs and
strawberries, tomatoes or pickled okra, but in New Mexico the women were about
to put up chile for the winter. A
certain macha bravado was necessary for this task.
The pods
were laid out on cookie sheets and roasted under the broiler. Periodically, my aunt would reach in and turn
the pods over. Soon the house filled
with the acrid scent of burned green.
She dumped the black-mottled pods unceremoniously onto the
newspaper-covered diningroom table. The
black skin of the roasted pods lifted easily, and my aunts, my mother, and I
sat around the table and peeled chile.
Soon our
fingers burned, and we began to sweat and sniffle. Too late my mother warned me not to touch my
eyes. She refused to rush me to the
emergency room. We flushed my eyes with
cold water and returned to our task. At
the end of the day we had laid 200 peeled chile pods to dry across the lines
strung up in the screened porch off the kitchen. Adults and child alike gazed red-eyed, with
nose and fingertips smarting, at our day's work.
I looked
up at the glistening faces of the women in my family, each one content with her
contribution. I had suffered, and wept,
and done my share, too. I felt . . .
full, and at peace for the first time since arriving in New Mexico. The manicured hands of my Texas relatives
might master a pecan pie or divinity, but they didn't have the cojones to deal
with the sultry heat of chile. Feminine
wiles and prissy manners had no place here.
We were the real women.
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