Study Guide for The Bean Trees Northern Arizona University Summer Reading Program, 1999

The Bean Trees is a novel about Taylor Greer, a young woman from Kentucky who is determined not to get pregnant in high school and who decides to head west after graduation to start her life. She ends up in Tucson, but on her way west she adopts an Indian infant who she names Turtle, and arrives in Arizona as a single, working mother. The novel focuses on Taylor's struggle to raise this child and to find a community where she can live. The novel raises questions about class consciousness, political refugees from Central America, working women, and the relationships between whites and native Americans. It is an engaging, well-written novel that has helped establish Kingsolver as an impressive, prolific writer. In addition to The Bean Trees, Kingsolver has written a book of poetry, an account of the role women played in the strike in Clifton, Arizona against the Phelps-Dodge Corporation in 1983 and 1985, short stories, a book of essays (High Tide in Tucson), and several other novels: Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams and, most recently, The Poisonwood Bible which has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for twenty-five weeks.

Address the following questions as you write your essay onThe Bean Trees. The essay should be approximately 5 typed single spaced or 10 double spaced pages in length, and should follow typical writing and citation conventions.

1. The Bean Trees centers around Taylor Greer, a young woman who moves to Tucson from Kentucky after graduating from high school. Once in Tucson, she lives with a group of women she meets by chance. Can you think about the ways these women interact to support each other? What impact do these other characters have on Taylor? How does she change over the course of the novel? Can you describe moments of understanding she reaches that let you know that she has become more mature, more confident, and clearer about her own identity? What is it that brings about these changes?

2. One of the many wonderful descriptions in The Bean Trees is the smell of desert air after a thunderstorm. What other descriptions of the desert, or of the land in general, did you find particularly powerful? How do those descriptions enhance your appreciation of the environment? Of the characters in the novel?

3. One of the recurring motifs in American literature involves the character who, like Huckleberry Finn, lights out for new territory, who leaves behind what they know for something unknown. Did Taylor Greer find in Arizona new ways of thinking that challenged her previous assumptions about life? How does this new territory (the landscape, the people she meets, and the city itself) shape her?

4. The end of The Bean Trees, in which Taylor adopts Turtle by having Estevan and Esperanza pose as Cherokees raises important and challenging ethical questions. Was Taylor wrong to adopt Turtle in this way? Whose interests did she really have at heart, hers or Turtle's?

5. In another of Barbara Kingsolver's novels, Pigs in Heaven, which also revolves around Taylor and Turtle, a Cherokee lawyer named Annawake Fourkiller writes the following letter to explain why it is inappropriate for Taylor to be Turtle's "mother:"

Dear Jax,

I'm glad I met you in Tucson. I feel you're a person with careful thoughts and a kind spirit. I want to tell you frankly that I'm worried about Turtle. I've spoken with Andy Rainbelt, a social psychiatrist who works with Cherokee children, and he authorized me to write on behalf of our Social Welfare Department. It's premature to take legal action yet, he says, but it's extremely important for Taylor to be in contact with the Nation; there are things she needs to know. I trust you'll get this information to her.

It's difficult, I know, for non-Native people to understand the value of belonging to a tribe, but I know you care about problems Turtle will face on her own. I appeal to you on those grounds. Adopted Native kids always have problems in adolescence when they're raised without an Indian identity. They've gone to school with white kids, sat down to dinner every night with white parents and siblings, and created themselves in the image of the family mirror. If you ask them what they think about Indians, they'll recall Westerns on TV or doing Hiawatha as a school play. They think Indians are history.

If these kids could stay forever inside the protection of the adoptive family, they'd be fine. But when they reach high school there's enormous pressure against dating white peers. They hear ugly names connected with their racial identity. If you think this kind of prejudice among teenagers is a thing of the past, think again. What these kids find is that they have no sense of themselves as Native Americans, but live in a society that won't let them go on being white, either. Not past childhood.

My boss thinks I'm crazy to pursue this case, but I have to tell you something. I used to have a brother named Gabriel. We grew up wearing each other's jeans and keeping each other's secrets and taking turns when our uncle asked, "Who made this mischief?' Gabe was my ayehli, my other wing. When I was ten, our mother was hospitalized with alcoholism and other problems. Social workers disposed of our family: my older brothers went with Dad, who did construction in Adair County. I stayed with my Uncle Ledger. And Gabe was adopted by a family in Texas. No one has ever told me why it was done this way. I assume they thought my dad could handle grown, income-earning sons, but not Gabe and me. As for Gabe, probably the social workers knew a couple who wanted a little boy-something as simple as that. He wrote me letters on fringe-edged paper torn out of his ring-bound school notebooks. I still have them. Texas was hot and smelled like fish. His new parents told him not to say he was an Indian at school, or they would treat him like a Mexican. He asked me, "Is it bad to be a Mexican?"

They put him into Mexican classrooms anyway; his parents were bigots of the most innocent kind, never realizing that skin color talks louder than any kid's words. He failed in school because the teachers spoke to him in Spanish, which he didn't understand. The Mexican kids beat him up because he didn't wear baggy black pants and walk with his hands in his pockets. When we were thirteen he wrote me to tell me his new Mom had closed the bedroom door and sat on the foot of his bed and said quietly he was letting his new family down.

When he was fifteen, he was accessory to an armed robbery in Corpus Christi. Now I only know where he is when he is in prison.

You said, the night we met, that I was capable of seeing one side of things. I've thought about that. I understand attachments between mothers and their children. But if you're right, if I have no choice here but to be a bird of prey, tearing flesh to keep my own alive, it's because I understand attachments. That's the kind of hawk I am-I've lost my other wing.

I wonder what you are giving Turtle now that she can keep. Soon she's going to hear from someone that she isn't white. Some boy will show her that third-grade joke, the Land O' Lakes Margarine squaw with a flap cut in her chest, the breasts drawn in behind the flap, and ask her, "Where does butter come from?" On the night of the junior prom, Turtle will need to understand why no white boy's parents are happy to take her picture on their son's arm. What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful womanhood? As a citizen of Turtle's nation, as the sister of Gabriel Fourkiller, I want you to understand why she can't belong to you.

Yours Sincerely,

Annawake Fourkiller ¹

Keeping this letter in mind, what questions does The Bean Trees raise for you about race, ethnicity, heritage, and identity?

6. In one of her short stories, Barbara Kingsolver writes, "Life always provides me with better jokes that any I could invent." What are some of the "jokes" in The Bean Trees? How does Kingsolver use humor to enhance her descriptions of the characters, their experiences, and environment in which Taylor Greer lives?

7. As a college freshman, you have recently entered a new phase in your life. Taylor Greer left behind a life when she headed west to forge a new one. What similarities, or differences, do you see between Taylor's expectations, feelings, and experiences moving west and your own as a new college student?

 

¹ Kingsolver, Barbara. Pigs in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.