Essays & Stories

Potatoes

The quiet but insistent ping of the “Fasten Seat Belts” warning woke Perdie from her doze. In minutes the plane would touch down on the summer-hot tarmac of the Valparaiso airport. Her stomach was sour from too many tequila sunrises, but she counted on the lingering alcohol effect to keep panic at bay while she faced the customs officers’ inspection of her papers. It helped that her visa recorded her occupation—ethnobotanist—and a perfectly legitimate research project on the horticultural economy of a local village.

They would see, she hoped, another Norteamericana with stringy, fine hair and rumpled Banana Republic khakis. They would notice, without judgment, that her privileged position as a scholar exempted her from the requirement to keep up appearances in this wilting heat. They would focus instead on Nilda, her companion, who had once been one of them—you could tell by her coarse black hair, her wide forehead, tan skin, and slightly flattened nose. Little burbles of resentment might arise in them, so quick and quiet they would have no conscious awareness of them, resentment over this native woman’s language and bearing and five-hundred-dollar suit. Nilda, with her dangling gold earrings and jangling gold bracelets, needed no visa, no excuse to return to her native land.

This trip was only Perdie’s second foray into foreign travel, and she was not sure whether it was foolhardy or bold. Either way, it seemed inescapable. The Rio trip had been the first. When her friends and colleagues made their plans to attend the alternate conference on the environment there, they had simply assumed that she would plan to go also. Hadn’t she become, over the last decade, the repository of stories about the old ways? Wasn’t she passionate, not only about preserving them, but about spreading them, recovering them for moderns? Of course she would take the opportunity to connect with other keepers of that vision, to enhance its power.

Of course, she had thought bitterly. How were they to know what she had so carefully kept hidden all those years? How were they to understand that the very name they called her was a fabrication, and that to submit her documents in application for a passport would be to risk the whole life she had cobbled together for herself? True, it was a crippled life of relationships that never got too intimate and a kind of destructive restlessness that kept her always at the edge of poverty, sustained with the assistance of too much wine. But it worked, after a fashion, and had so far always seemed preferable to the alternative, which was capture and, she thought, sure death.

In the end, she had risked it. The weight of her friends’ expectations had been too much. What would she have left if she lost them? Their support and respect were her mirror. If all they saw was a second rate academic who talked a good story but could never manage to do anything about it, wouldn’t that, then, be the truth? And wouldn’t her whole life just be a lie, a stupid waste?

She had applied for a rush passport and lived through the days of nail-biting tension until it arrived in the mail and did not bring the FBI with it. She had joined the thousands of government officials, UN experts, activists, and scholars that thronged the customs counter at the Rio airport, safe in the overwhelming crush, numbed in an alcohol glow. Once caught up in the weeklong round of panels, arguments, agreements, and action plans, she knew there was no going back. She had crossed into a new phase of her life, a phase of greater danger, no doubt, but also of a kind of truth without which she had been slowly dying.
It was at the panel on global agribusiness’s patenting of traditional plant stocks that she had met Nilda. Newly intoxicated with the possibility of a life of active purpose, she had agreed to join Nilda on this trip to the island of Nilda’s birth. Together, they hoped, they would persuade Nilda’s people to join the lawsuit against the multinationals.

Tomorrow at dawn they would ride a charter boat to the island. Tonight, though, as a last fortification against the prospect of facing the kin she had left behind twenty years earlier, Nilda had booked them into a luxury hotel and hooked them up with a couple of old law school pals for a night of the Valparaiso club scene.

The customs official stamped their passports, passed their luggage, and turned equally mindlessly to the next people in the long line. The two women gathered up duffel bag, suitcase, briefcase, and laptop. They made their way out of the terminal into the noonday sun and climbed into a waiting taxi.

Perdie thought she was prepared for the potato plots. She had been taught by the Hmong immigrants, by the Hopi, the Seneca, and old women white and black in Georgia. She had studied countless videos and photographs of the gardens of horticultural peoples, noted the seriousness of their work on the plots of land that comprised their whole food supply. She had admired their attention to beauty, as well, in regularity of pattern and the blending of colors.

When Nilda had told her that the people of this island grew fifty kinds of potatoes, she had dropped that information alongside the ridiculous and redundant variety of green bean strains offered in the seed catalogues that made up her winter reading. Variety, she knew, did not really have to measure anything. But nothing she had ever encountered could have prepared her for the view that opened before her as she and Nilda rounded the last curve of the path to the gardens. Low to the ground creeping plants with fuzzy purple-tinged leaves; gangly upright stalks with a sparse scatter of deep purple leaves; squat brushy plants with leaves of shiny dark green. Heaps of freshly dug potatoes, pink, pale gold, and purple, some round as golf balls, some long and fat as two fingers, lay on the damp, dark earth waiting to be loaded into the gathering baskets.

Nilda picked up a couple of purple ones. “We’ll eat these tonight,” she said, “mashed with some really tangy goat cheese and some onions, then fried. My favorite. Those yellow ones are like butter in your mouth, smooth and warm. Down there, some of the ones we dig last taste like the earth itself. I remember one year when it was dry, dry all summer and lots of the others failed. But not them. All that winter I felt like I was eating nothing but dirt. Then finally it was time to dig new potatoes, these pink ones. They’re so white inside, and so sweet and clean. The taste of them just washed away the dullness of that winter.

“There’s a little patch over that way, of some my grandmother developed. She never would grow very many. She said the taste would seduce you into their world and tempt you to sell your soul so that you could stay and eat them forever. When I first tasted white truffles in Italy, it was like a visit back home to that patch.”

“What about the spot where the vines look almost dead?” Perdie asked.

“My sister told me it was very wet this spring, and the cold stayed long into the growing season. They got the disease that comes with the rain.”

“Why don’t they just pull them out?”

“They might recover now that it’s hot. They produce very heavily, basketsful from every plant, if they survive. The years that those grow, no one ever goes hungry. We have some that can live through weeks of frost, too. Hunger is a terrible thing, Perdie. Thanks to the potatoes, my people almost never suffer it.”

“How could you leave?” Perdie demanded, aware dimly that somewhere deep inside her were tears for her own people and her own leaving, tears she would not cry but instead would churn into anger at this peasant woman turned hotshot lawyer. “How could you just go away from this and never look back? How could you not talk about it? It’s so beautiful.”

“It wasn’t enough for me. Or at least it didn’t seem like it. Other worlds were opening up, worlds of books and ideas, of a different kind of power. Digging potatoes is hard work, and it doesn’t buy you silk, or gold. I wanted those beautiful things. This—this just looked like dirt to me. And once I lived in that world, there was no way to talk about this one. No one to talk about it with.

“Then in the Pinochet years, all we ever talked about was fashion and weather. If you go on like that long enough, the spirits are dead and there’s nothing more to talk about. That’s why I have to help them fight this Monsanto thing. The genetic material in these potatoes belongs to my people. The Monsanto men came here, and my people shared with them. That’s the way we are. They were proud of what they’d grown. They should be. I can’t let Monsanto steal that. If anyone is going to get rich from licensing the so-called intellectual property of these potato strains, it should be the people of this island.”

For the next two days, Perdie worked in the potatoes with the people, learning how they rotated other crops into the plots to keep the earth healthy and how they fallowed different plots each year to restore fertility, but mostly just restoring herself with the ancient rhythms of hoeing, gathering, hauling. Nilda, meanwhile, made the rounds of all her relatives, endured the awkwardness of restoring connection after her long years away, and tried to sell her people on the idea of the lawsuit against Monsanto. On the second night Perdie and Nilda sat with Nilda’s sister and uncle at the table in her sister’s home. An old woman dressed in too many clothes for the hot summer night sat silently near the front door. Nilda called her the Old Mother in a tone that was part reverence and part fear, and stayed well away from her. Nilda translated for Perdie as her uncle spoke of the people’s consensus.

“The potatoes do not belong to us,” he began. “How could we want money for what was not ours?”

Nilda started to protest, but he silenced her with his raised hand and said in his quiet, confident voice, “Hear me out. You live in that time and place now, but we still live here, on our island. Do you think we could not go over there and live in that world also? We are not stupid. We work hard. If we wanted what you have, we would have it. We have lived here, lived this way, since the beginning. Empires have come to our shore before. They offered trinkets of their gold to some of us so we would turn against our cousins and make them slaves. We should help enrich the things they called cities and temples and priests, they told us.

“Those empires came and went, and this one you want us to get money from will go someday also. You think they own these potatoes? Marks on paper, that is all. Less than a duck’s mark in the mud, which the next rain washes away. The potatoes own themselves. They have been gracious and generous with us. We believe that if we respect them, they will continue to share themselves with us.

“So no, we do not want your Monsanto money. But we do want your help, to free the potatoes they have enslaved. We want to share the potatoes with anyone, anywhere, who wants to grow them. Let those Monsanto men spread them for us if they want. Then let your friend Perdie show people what the potatoes really are and how they should grown them.”

“That’s just hopelessly naïve,” Nilda objected. “They have their own police, their own law courts. They can go anywhere and stop people who try to grow the potatoes without paying. They can destroy crops, maybe even take the land!”

“You have grown very far from us, indeed, if you believe that marks on paper, and law-talk, and thugs in special clothes are stronger than the spirits of the potatoes.”

“It can’t be done,” she replied, sullen now.

“It is the only thing worth doing, Nilda. The potatoes will endure. Help us. Use your law-talk to free them, not to make us part of the destroyers of their spirits. That is all we have to say. Good night.”

As Nilda’s uncle made his way out the door, the old woman stood up abruptly and spoke to Nilda in a voice surprisingly regal before going out the door also.

“She wants you to follow her, Perdie,” Nilda said. “She wants to speak to you.”

“How will I understand her?” Perdie protested.

“She is an Old One. She can talk to anyone,” Nilda replied. “But be careful of what she gives you to eat or drink. It can be very powerful. Remember that the boat is coming for us in the morning. I don’t want to have to go searching for you in the forest somewhere.

“Just go,” she persisted as Perdie hesitated. “She is the Old Mother. We have to do what she says. It’ll be okay. You don’t have to be afraid.”

Surprised at this expression of docile obedience from her thoroughly modern and usually defiant friend, Perdie followed the old woman into the night.

The old woman and Perdie faced each other across the wooden table. Perdie sipped a steaming brew from a heavy clay mug. She guessed it contained a mild stimulant, for which she was grateful after the exhausting day of fieldwork and the tension between Nilda and her kin. This old woman wanted something from her, she was sure. She was alert for a trap, though how an island ancient with a face like locust tree bark and eyes milky-blind with cataracts could be a danger to her she could not imagine.

The old woman blew out acrid smoke she had inhaled from her cob pipe and said, “Are we going to keep pretending, or are we going to talk about who you really are and where you really come from?”

Perdie’s stomach lurched. In a decades old reflex she scanned the close, dark shack for a back door, for shadow police waiting to jump from the corners to throw her to the ground and—what? The next step in this scenario of fear was never clear to her, but that it would end with ignominiously dead she never doubted.
The old woman cackled. “No, no, no. I am not talking about that other story where you come from the city on the plains at the foot of the mountains. I am not talking about the names you think of as your secrets. Those are just puffs of air. They are no more who you are than this Perdie who traveled here with Nilda to bring us the story of why we should turn modern.”

This last word she fairly spat out as she leaned far over the table and gripped Perdie’s wrist. “Will you really waste your life so? Will you throw away every act of love and care the Old Ones spent in your preparation? Will you turn your back on what you know and go instead to travel in carts made from the very bones of the earth, burning up her blood till you have fouled the air with its stink, laying down ribbons to crush the living things under the weight of your smooth-riding comfort?”

“Shut up! Shut up, you crazy old woman,” Perdie shouted as she struggled to free her wrist from the hag’s impossibly strong grasp. How had this witch seen through her, straight to her soul? Sobs choked her. Tears and snot smeared her face.

“What do you want from me?” The face before her seemed to melt and re-form over and over, now a Siberian, now a Semite, now a Frank, a Goth, an Ashanti, an Athabascan, a Maori, a Zulu.
“We are everywhere,” the old woman hissed, “and you are one of us. Go on and poison your dreams with drink. Make so much noise you can’t hear your own voice inside. Live in places where you think magic cannot reach. We will sing in your bones. We will ferment in your blood. You cannot get away.

“I don’t know why you would want to.” The old woman’s shoulders sagged; spittle dripped from the corner of her mouth. Her pipe had gone out, ignored on the table. She loosened her grip on Perdie’s wrist, cupped Perdie’s chin for a moment in her bony hand.

“Come home, girl,” she whispered. “Come home.”

The old woman gathered her shawl around her and picked up the pipe. Slow, heavy, arthritic, she shuffled to the door. Perdie heard two hesitant steps on the porch, then nothing. Coming out on the porch herself, she saw only the empty yard in the dim light of almost-dawn, and the cob pipe in the dust. At a sudden whoosh she started, her heart raced, her blood pounded in her ears. But it was only an owl—although “only” was perhaps the wrong word for the five-foot span of wings that had swooped down to seize a field mouse and was gone faster than an eyeblink. So fast you could almost wonder whether you had seen anything at all.

Perdie returned to the cabin and lay down in the mold-smelling hammock strung in the corner. She was tired, tired to death. In a few hours she and Nilda would walk down to the landing, board the boat for Valparaiso, and fly back to the States. They would admit that the miasma of the island and the intransigent conservatism of its whole population had beaten them. And Perdie was not sure the islanders were wrong. All except the old woman, of course. She was just plain crazy.

She fingered the pipe she had stuffed into her pocket and rocked herself gently as she waited for the day. One tear squeezed itself from the corner of her left eye and rolled down to tangle itself in her hairline. Nothing, she knew, would ever be the same again.

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About Katherine Power

I didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government….

Recent and Upcoming Appearances & Publications
3/12/19 Peace, Justice and Transformation, Parallel Conference to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 777 United Nations Plaza, NYC
11/13/18 A Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother, Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative, Temple Shir Tikva, 141 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778
10/10/18 Provincetown Women’s Week Reading from Doing Time:Papers from Framingham Prison, AMP, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
4/6-9/2018 The Nature of Change, Radical Imagination Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
1/15/2014 Complexity and Social Change, Occupy Radio
10/31/2013 Surrender, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
10/25/2013 Surrender, Taos Community Theater, Taos, NM

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