All the Colors We Will See by Patrice Gopo

Author:Patrice Gopo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Plucked and Planted

One day, after I had moved to Charlotte, my sister, who lived several hours away in Chapel Hill, called me as she drove toward my home. “Vegetable oil,” she asked, “do you have any?”

I rummaged through the bottles of olive oil and sesame oil, balsamic vinegar and red wine vinegar too. “I don’t think so,” I said, the phone pressed firm into my ear. “No,” I confirmed a moment later, my interest now piqued. My next question wanted to know her reason for asking. “Plantains,” she told me. “I just bought plantains, and I want to fry them.” She said plantains must be fried in vegetable oil. Her quick, matter-of-fact voice placed the emphasis on must.

My sister knows things that I don’t. One afternoon we walked into a grocery store, and she spotted a display of mangoes. She selected a large fruit with green and red mottled skin from the display and lifted the manifestation of our childhood to her nose. She sniffed the mango, the length of her dark hair pulled back, circling the crown of her head, framing her face. I imagined that somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she hurtled for a moment in the direction of Jamaica.

She held the fruit another minute before she returned it to the mound of its siblings and reached for another and then another. The wide hem of her trademark broomstick skirt swayed along with her movements. After each inhale of the musk of a mango, she declared the fruit in question not ripe, not likely to be very good, not something we should place gingerly in our basket and watch the cashier weigh as we bought our groceries.

Not long ago I asked my sister if she remembered our father eating mangoes for his after-dinner snack. Did she recall how he’d kneel next to our parents’ bed while our mother sipped a mug of warm milk nearby? “How did he eat the fruit?” I asked. “In separate pieces? How did he tackle the pit?” All I could recall was our father hunched over an old blue towel spread across a chunk of the bed, a white plate edged with navy-blue flowers, and the juice splattering across his fingers and dribbling near his mouth.

Without even a moment to think about the old memory, my sister said, “He’d slice it, then pull the flesh off the skin with his teeth. At the end he’d just suck the fruit off the pit.” When she told me these facts, I remembered them afresh.

I often think about how my sister and I are not like our parents. We ate the curried chicken our mother prepared with the cubes of potatoes stained yellow with gravy. We split fried dumplings in half and spread butter over their doughy centers. We pinched strips of fried plantains cooling on a plate next to the stove. But my sister and I, we speak with the blocky tones of American accents.

When our parents used to make us repeat Jamaican patwa phrases, they corrected our usage and pronunciation.

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