Summary—Chapter Ten: The Bean Trees
Turtle shook her head. “Bean trees,”
she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day.
. . . It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean
trees.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The morning after Esperanza’s suicide attempt, Taylor
feels more optimistic. She hears birds singing and talks with Lou
Ann about their calls. The house where she and Lou Ann live is becoming
more like a household composed of two women and their children and less
like a space Angel left behind. Lou Ann returns from a reunion with
the Ruizes, Angel’s family. She happily recounts that Angel’s entire
family, including his mother, thinks him the meanest of the bunch.
It seems they still consider Lou Ann part of their family. Lou Ann
and Taylor take the children to Roosevelt Park. They sit under the
wisteria arbor. Turtle looks up at the vines and says, “bean trees.”
Taylor follows her eyes to see that the flowers on the wisteria vine
have gone to seed, producing green pods that look just like beans.
Taylor considers it another miracle that these flowers have turned
to beans.
After the trip to the park, Taylor goes into Lee Sing’s
grocery, where Edna Poppy is shopping. Edna, who is holding a white
cane, asks Taylor to tell her if she is holding lemons or limes.
With a start, Taylor realizes that Edna is blind. A number of odd
facts suddenly make sense to Taylor. Edna always wears red because
it makes dressing easier, Virgie Parsons always announces everyone’s
name when the two walk into a room so Edna will know who is present, and
Edna looks over people’s heads when she talks to them because she
can only look in the general direction of their voices.
Taylor goes to visit Esperanza, who is staying at Mattie’s
house. During the visit, Esperanza stays quiet, and Taylor chatters,
trying to say the right thing. She tells Esperanza she loves her
name, which means both hope and wait, and that Esperanza reminds
her of Turtle because both understand everything people say even
though people forget they are listening. Taylor tells her she is
sorry for Esperanza’s lost child and that she hopes Esperanza will
never give up hope. Toward the end of the conversation, Esperanza
begins to cry, and Taylor feels that tears are better than the emptiness
that filled Esperanza’s eyes when Taylor first arrived. On the way
home, Taylor runs into Lou Ann, who has been out looking for jobs.
Lou Ann tells her about an interview for a job at a convenience
store, where the man called her “sweetheart” and stared at her breasts.
As they walk home, they pass by Fanny Heaven, and Lou Ann expresses
her disgust at the strip joint, especially the door handle that
pushes into a painting of a woman’s crotch. Taylor tells her to stop
ignoring the door and “talk back to it.”
Chapter Eleven: Dream Angels
Lou Ann gets a job at the Red Hot Mama’s salsa factory,
where she puts her heart and soul into her work. Although the factory
reminds Taylor of a sweatshop, Lou Ann loves her job and brings
home all kinds of salsa and new recipes. Lou Ann stops making disparaging remarks
about her own body. She works an evening shift, so Taylor usually
puts the children to bed, and then the two women eat a late supper
together when Lou Ann gets home. One evening, they talk about Lou
Ann’s tendency to worry. Lou Ann tells Taylor that she had a dream
right after Dwayne Ray was born. In the dream, an angel came to
her and told her that Dwayne Ray would not live to see the year 2000.
According to Lou Ann, her own and Dwayne Ray’s horoscopes supported
this premonition. Since then, Lou Ann has been terrified that Dwayne
Ray will die. Since girlhood, Lou Ann has feared death. As a child,
she and her brother played a game in which they imagined themselves
older, but she refused to dream past her teenage years, scared that
she would imagine herself dead. Lou Ann recognizes her thoughts
as irrational and berates herself, but Taylor tells her that her
tendency to worry also makes her a caring, careful person and mother.
Angel sends a box of presents: a hair clip for Lou Ann
and a pair of boots for Dwayne Ray. He also sends a letter saying
he misses Lou Ann and wants her and Dwayne Ray to come live in his
yurt (domed tent) with him. Lou Ann debates what to do. She feels
flattered that he misses her, but she cares about her new responsibilities
at the factory, where she has been promoted to floor manager. Taylor
fears that Lou Ann will go live with Angel. Lou Ann’s possible departure and
Esperanza and Estevan’s troubles upset Taylor. Mattie is worried
that Estevan and Esperanza will be deported. In Guatemala, the government
would almost certainly assassinate them. They could stay in the
U.S. if they could prove their lives were in danger when they left
Central America, but they do not have any documents to prove their
case.
Analysis—Chapters Ten–Eleven
Again, Kingsolver returns to the idea that beauty springs
from barren places. When Turtle sees the wisteria flower gone to
seed and the long pods falling from the branches, she calls the
wisteria “bean trees.” The metamorphosis of flowers into beans is
nothing less than a miracle to Taylor. New life seems to burgeon
in Lou Ann, too. When she and Taylor talk about the birdcalls, Lou
Ann insists, over Taylor’s objections, that the birdcall sounds
like “who cooks for who.” Pleased, Taylor thinks that this marks
the first time Lou Ann has stuck to her own opinion. As small as
this moment seems, it represents the beginnings of change in Lou
Ann. She feels more confident and less inclined to bow to the opinions
of others. This confidence mounts at the end of the chapter, when
she and Taylor pass by Fanny Heaven. The strip club always disgusted
Lou Ann, but for the first time she voices her opinions aloud. She
also tells Taylor about her annoyance at the leering man who interviewed
her while staring at her breasts. For the first time, Lou Ann has
an encouraging, spunky woman to listen to her, and in response she begins
to speak up.
