Mango Maker

MANGO MAKER

by Cleopatria Peterson

Content Warning: food, generational grief, colonization

People always ask me how we got here and I always tell ’em it started with a mango.

I'm sure somewhere, someone has said that isn’t how it starts. They’re right. It took all kinds of fruit to get here. But for me, it started with the mango.

We all love a good mango. They’re a versatile fruit, after all. Salad and juice, cook it with your chicken, mix it with some tea. Eat it just as it is. See, my daddy taught me how to eat a mango with my teeth. There were no knives for cutting—nothing fancy. Just me and my mouth; the hunger and the sweet juice of it over our kitchen sink. 

I couldn’t speak to my daddy anymore, but that doesn’t mean he stopped talking to me. I hear him every time I dig my teeth into that skin and strip it back, strings of ripe flesh stuck against my gums and threaded between my incisors. Teeth are the communion.

I hear my daddy speak to me, his mother and father, abuelitas and abuelos so old it takes three or more digits to count their age. I hear them calling, real close to my ear. They tell me how to find my way forward. They tell me how to make the world new again.

See, every mango is an instruction on how to get it right and what can happen when it goes wrong. Have you ever had a bad mango? That’s a betrayal no one wants. So I listen, and I take notes. Because me and a mango, that's the only way I've ever heard my ancestors speak to me. I was so far from home for so long, I lost a language and unlearned the land—this was the only way I could get it back.  

I tell you it took a lot of mangos to get this right. My family was pretty patient with me, until my daddy finally told me – consume the pit.

Seems like a fool’s errand to me; but who am I to ignore my daddy? When I try to bite it, teeth scraping, my abuelas laugh like little bells. Whisper, no mi hija, you must swallow it whole. 

Now. That's a problem I'm not sure I can solve, but my tios say they know the trick. They make me laugh so hard that the mango's seed just slides straight down my throat, deep into my belly. I feel the ghost of a hand pat my back, softness over spine.

It takes time, all things worthwhile do. The connection builds inside of me, the magic of it, until it bubbles up past my lips and out into the world. Little phrases slip out of me, the warm comfort from my mother tongue I thought I’d never wield. I only knew the common words and curses, my Rs too heavy and unrolled, awkward in my mouth. This didn’t feel awkward. My tongue doesn’t tremble over letters anymore. Now it traces out a story with ease. No, a history, or no. No, it is memory. Memory deep from the rivers of my own veins. 

This, this is a birth. Only possible through their mouths and hands that had done the same as me. Over sink, sweet toothed, messy. We are connected and always have been. That’s what they had been trying to teach me. That I don’t have to go back, only forward. I just have to listen to the land woven into my body and the tongue of all our mothers combined. It is the mango that captured the sweetness of our lives and passed it down to us, juice spilled over our lips and hands.

Now I hear my ancestors everywhere, but I still like to listen to the mango best.