The Bean Trees

| 1988

The Bean Trees

Published: 1988

The Bean Trees is a book readers have taken to their hearts. It is now a standard in college literature classes across the nation and has been translated for a readership stretching from Japan to Romania.

When it was first published, however, its author was unknown. Word of mouth spread slowly among booksellers, librarians, critics and readers with a passion to share their favorite books. In The Bean Trees they found a spirited protagonist, Taylor Greer, who grew up in poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when Taylor heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time she arrives in Tucson, she has acquired a completely unexpected child and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Most readers of The Bean Trees discovered the novel in its paperback edition. On the 10th anniversary of its first publication, Harper Flamingo offered readers a special hardback edition, redesigned to be easy on the eyes and priced to be accessible to every lover of good fiction.

Praise For The Bean Trees

“As clear as air. It is the Southern novel taken West, its colors as translucent and polished as one of those slices of rose agate from a desert shop.”

— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“The work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.”

— LOS ANGELES TIMES

“So wry and wise we wish it would never end. … The down-home audacity of Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable first novel hooks us on the first page.”

— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Idealistic and exhilarating, The Bean Trees is a book that combines the most careful craft with a moral code that is loving and expansive.”

— PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“The Bean Trees is a story propelled by a marvelous ear, a fast-moving humor, and the powerful undercurrent of human struggle. … There are surprises in the book. There is adventure. And there is resolution, as believable as it is gratifying.”

— MARGARET RANDALL, WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS

“A major new talent. From the very first page, Kingsolver’s characters tug at the heart and soul.”

— KAREN FITZGERALD, MS. MAGAZINE

“An astonishing literary debut. … For a deep breath of fresh air, spend some time in the neighborhood of The Bean Trees.”

— COSMOPOLITAN

“This is the story of a lovable, resourceful ‘instant mother,’ one who speaks, acts, and learns for herself, becoming an inspiration to us all.”

— GLAMOUR

“A lively first novel … an easy book to enjoy.”

— THE NEW YORKER

“An extraordinarily good first novel, tough and tender and gritty and moving, with a wonderful particularity and tart Southwestern bit. Kingsolver’s heroine is little short of magnificent.”

— ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS, AUTHOR OF HOMEPLACE AND PEACHTREE ROAD

A spirited, warm book, wry and at the same time refreshingly guileless, full of jarry insights which are often jarringly funny. Barbara Kingsolver is obviously a writer of much talent and originality.”

— ELLA LEFFLAND, AUTHOR OF RUMORS OF PEACE

“A lovely, funny, touching, and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.”

— KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This funny, inspiring book is a marvelous affirmation of risk-taking, commitment, and everyday miracles … an overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.”

— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“As clear as air. It is the Southern novel taken West, its colors as translucent and polished as one of those slices of rose agate from a desert shop.”

— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“The work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.”

— LOS ANGELES TIMES

“So wry and wise we wish it would never end. … The down-home audacity of Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable first novel hooks us on the first page.”

— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Idealistic and exhilarating, The Bean Trees is a book that combines the most careful craft with a moral code that is loving and expansive.”

— PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

— MARGARET RANDALL, WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS

“A major new talent. From the very first page, Kingsolver’s characters tug at the heart and soul.”

— KAREN FITZGERALD, MS. MAGAZINE

“An astonishing literary debut. … For a deep breath of fresh air, spend some time in the neighborhood of The Bean Trees.”

— COSMOPOLITAN

“This is the story of a lovable, resourceful ‘instant mother,’ one who speaks, acts, and learns for herself, becoming an inspiration to us all.”

— GLAMOUR

“A lively first novel … an easy book to enjoy.”

— THE NEW YORKER

“An extraordinarily good first novel, tough and tender and gritty and moving, with a wonderful particularity and tart Southwestern bit. Kingsolver’s heroine is little short of magnificent.”

— ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS, AUTHOR OF HOMEPLACE AND PEACHTREE ROAD

— ELLA LEFFLAND, AUTHOR OF RUMORS OF PEACE

“A lovely, funny, touching, and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.”

— KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This funny, inspiring book is a marvelous affirmation of risk-taking, commitment, and everyday miracles … an overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.”

— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

READ EXCERPT

Chapter 1: The One to Get Away

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I’m not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn’t dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire. Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what Newt’s whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Before that exact moment I don’t believe I had given much thought to the future.

My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. But that was the general idea.

Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you could have pegged us for brother and sister. And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can’t say we weren’t, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides. But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose, just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet. You couldn’t have said, anyway, which one would stay right where he was, and which would be the one to get away.

Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward. Miss Marietta and later on just Missy.

The thing you have to understand is, it was just like Mama to do that. When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb, and the way Mama would carry on you would think I’d caught the famous big lunker in Shep’s Lake that old men were always chewing their tobacco and thinking about. “That’s my big girl bringing home the bacon,” she would say, and cook those things and serve them up like Thanksgiving for the two of us.

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you’d see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.

By the time I was in high school and got my first job and all the rest, including the whole awful story about Newt Hardbine which I am about to tell you, he was of course not in school anymore. He was setting tobacco alongside his half-crippled daddy and by that time had gotten a girl in trouble, too, so he was married. It was Jolene Shanks and everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him. Nobody expected any better of a Hardbine.

But I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife. Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.

It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event. Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize. You’d made it that far. By senior year there were maybe two boys to every one of us, and we believed it was our special reward when we got this particular science teacher by the name of Mr. Hughes Walter.

Now him. He came high-railing in there like some blond Paul McCartney, sitting on the desk in his tight jeans and his clean shirt-sleeves rolled up just so, with the cuffs turned in. He made our country boys look like the hand-me-down socks Mama brought home, all full of their darns and mends. Hughes Walter was no Kentucky boy. He was from out of state, from some city college up north, which was why, everyone presumed, his name was backwards.

Not that I was moony over him, at least no more than the standard of the day, which was plain to see from the walls of the girls’ bathroom. You could have painted a barn with all the lipstick that went into “H. W. enraptured forever” and things of that kind. This is not what I mean. But he changed my life, there is no doubt.

Excerpt from The Bean Trees, copyright © 1988 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers.