The First Time I Ate Okra

Michele Sharpe

Word Count 1134

I sucked in my breath. Like most children, I was suspicious of unfamiliar food. What did “stewed” mean? Was it like beef stew?

My sister and I eyed each other.

As the oldest child, I felt responsible. “Where did they come from?” I asked.

“Some sadly mistaken person bought them,” our mother said, putting our plates down in front of us. “But for God’s sake, they’re just tomatoes. Eat them.”

“Why aren’t you using them for sauce?” I asked, and she humphed at me the way grownups used to do when kids asked questions with obvious answers.

On my plate, lumps of skinned, watery tomatoes with suspicious green bits threatened my sunny side-up egg. I didn’t like one type of food to touch another type. The green bits, I realized, were the deal-breaker when it came to tomato sauce. I speared one with my fork. It looked like it had been sliced from a bigger vegetable, the slice five-sided and almost hollow, with round, white seeds clinging to its insides. It smelled just like tomatoes, so I put the slice in my mouth, ran my tongue over its edges, and chewed. It had a mild, but exotic taste, and a bit of a crunch. I picked up another.

The seeds were bigger than tomato seeds, the size of tapioca, which everyone with any sense despised. But these seeds tasted good, and they popped when you bit them.

 I ate all my stewed tomatoes and green bits. My sister disliked the green bits, so I ate hers, saving one for more examination after dinner.

 “What are these?” I asked my mother, holding out my fork with the green bit I’d saved. She got a little round-eyed at my urgency, an expression I’d later recognize on the faces of people trying to bluff at poker.

“It must be celery,” she said.

“It’s not,” I said, popping the last little green bit in my mouth.

I reached into the kitchen trash and picked out the empty can to read the label. “Ok-ra,” I said, pointing to the list of ingredients. “It must be the okra.”

“Oh,” said my mother. I plied her with questions about the exotic okra but got no answers. When my father came home, okra was still on my mind, so I asked him about it.

“Where does it come from?”

“It’s something people eat down south,” he said. “Wasn’t it slimy?”

“I loved it!”

Luckily for me, this sadly mistaken person had bought more than one can of the stewed tomatoes, so the next time he was coming home late, we had stewed tomatoes with fried eggs again for dinner.

I swooned. There was something about this okra, like it wasn’t even a vegetable. “I love this okra! We should have it every night!” I said.

And I never saw okra again until I was an adult.

Cold weather has never been my thing, even though I grew up in New England. Okra doesn’t care for cold weather either; it thrives with heat, humidity and a long growing season. It’s an immigrant that adjusted well to life in the Deep South.

I’ve been scattered, as many people have, even though I was a child of the 1950’s, romanticized in the USA as the decade of stable Ozzie and Harriet families. But families were broken apart then, as always, by pervasive misogyny, racism, classism, fear, and violence. Some of these were the forces that displaced me from the Deep South, where I was born, to New England. I was sent from poverty to modest wealth, from my single mother to a married couple, from one set of cultural fears into another.

Millions of single pregnant women, many living in poverty and coerced, relinquished their infants to adoption agencies that profited from marketing babies to well-off, married, heterosexual couples who couldn’t conceive. I was one of those infants, and the parents I grew up with were one of those couples. Being infertile was its own kind of shame then, and they worked tirelessly to keep my adoption a secret from me and everyone else.

It was not a secret that I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and that was enough for an investigator to find my maternal blood family, who came from okra and grits and barbeque and hush puppies. I had five brothers and a sister, but our mother had died young of a heart attack and was forever lost to me, and to them. When she became pregnant with me, her first child, she was only fourteen, and she kept me a secret from everyone except the man she married a few months after I was born.

I have yet to discover who my father was. Florida, like most states, keeps original birth certificates secret from adults who were adopted. My father’s name may not even appear on my original birth certificate. Laws and customs exist to protect those who already have power.

Keeping a secret as big as a life—in this case, my life—might feel like you’re always walking on eggshells. Imagining it this way has prompted some compassion for my adoptive mother. Even as an infant, I posed a risk to her. I was the jack-in-the-box, and pressure was required to keep the box around me closed. I imagine her muscular hands in great fatigue.

Maybe okra made my adoptive mother think of the South, and of where I came from.Many things must have brought the secret to her mind, and most are unknowable to me. I don’t know what smells reminded her of the disappointment of not becoming a flesh-and-blood mother, or what dread rose from her gut at any hint of her secret being revealed. And I’ll never know how my flesh-and-blood mother felt when she discovered she was pregnant with me, or how she felt giving me up.

What I do know is my own body: my weak, bony hands, my thick hips, my slim ankles, my extravagant, uppity gestures, the ones I saw mirrored in my brothers. My goofy, full-throated laugh, which startled my blood family because it was a replica of my mother’s laugh, and she was in the grave.

What a pregnant woman eats maintains its taste in the amniotic fluid her fetus swallows. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is protective; being born knowing what tastes good (and isn’t poison) can help babies survive.

Did that laugh pass to me through DNA, or was it a track laid down by vibrations I heard in utero? I hope my mother’s laugh echoed through me many, many times when she and I were still united, when she was still young enough for knee-jerk hope, when the food she tasted was what I tasted, and the voices she heard, our family’s voices, still belonged to us both.

Michele is a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Witness, and Poets & Writers. She lives in North Florida.