Beanfields

I am not exactly certain what was the itch that needed scratching that led to my again picking up John Nichols’s novel The Milagro Beanfield War. The last time I had read and studied the book was in the late 1980s when I wrote my dissertation on the radical novel in America. I was attempting then to redefine the radical novel that had last been formally studied in the 1950s by Walter Rideout in his book, The Radical Novel in America, 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. He had defined the genre, sometimes referred to as the proletarian/socialist novel, as constrained in scope and complexity by a politics that was philosophically steeped in Marxist and socialist ideas. By reputable critics these novels had been soon dismissed as naively propagandist and they relegated them to the remaindered shelves. Then, at a Leonard Cohen concert I had attended at Town Hall in New York City during the years of the Reagan administration, as Cohen sang “First We Take Manhattan” I wondered by some oblique connection what had happened to the political novel now that in the present moment some resistance movement seemed so necessary. In the dissertation subsequently published as Anonymous Toil, I offered a theory that addressed the 20^th century concerns then permeating modernist writings narrated the development of individual consciousness occurring within a social environment that the protagonists struggled to resist and overcome in order to achieve individual autonomy and personal freedom. The literature the critics valued portrayed the effort of the self to achieve maturity and independence in rebellion from that society. Individual growth occurred in isolation and in the singular personal consciousness. I argued in my study, however, that the radical novel explored how individual consciousness developed the individual joined with the community and its social struggle. Or, as Woody Guthrie sang, “You can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union.” Hence, the radical novel as I interpreted it concerned the coming to consciousness as a result of joining community in the struggle. In union there was the opportunity for political and personal strength. I believed my work had a new perspective on literature; I thought my thesis possessed validity and its theory was sound.  Alas, Walter Rideout’s book is still very much in print, but I believe I and a few dear friends yet own the last few available copies of Anonymous Toil that sit awaiting lonely on my bookshelf. 
            It was back then that I studied The Milagro Bean Field War and identified it as a radical novel. Through the presence of that tiny beanfield belonging to Joe Mandragón the town of Milagro united and declared war on Ladd Devine and company and the entire governmental apparatus that enabled the greedy, money-making schemes organized by Devine and company that was busy destroying their homes and livelihood to satisfy their greed. the beanfield united the often quarrelsome community of Milagro. Actually, it had been on impulse that Joe Mandragón had decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents’ west side home to “grow himself some beans.” Irrigating his field required that he cut a ditch and divert water that had been made unavailable by the Company’s ownership of water rights. Originally, as the community gathered to protect the beanfield, Joe sulked, “Just leave me in peace about my beanfield. People start helping me, sure as hell it’ll get screwed up.” But some of the old timers remembered that in the old days “people were more together.” Joe had something to learn from his beanfield. Amarante Cordova, who refused to die despite recurrent announcements sent out by his daughter Sally to his family members announcing his imminent death and requiring their immediate presence, demanded of his daughter to “tell all the family” of Joe’s beanfield and the help that required their immediate presence. But upon hearing this last request Sally burst into tears crying she would not send out one more notice of Amarante’s impending death that would not occur! But Amarante said to her, “But we have to tell everyone what José has done. They must see this thing and take part in it before they die. Tell them the shooting is about to start—" That tiny beanfield required a large community to protect. Even without Joe’s encouragement, the town began to unite around the beanfield. One day when Joe had come to stand guard of his field he found Amarante already on duty. seated by it carrying his ancient rifle. Joe Mandragón suspiciously asked Amarante what he was doing at Joe’s beanfield bearing a loaded rifle, and Amarante winked and laid a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Handing over the guard, Amarante left and said to Joe, “I’ll be back soon . . . I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of this field.’ And Joe responded, ’You and me together, friend, we’ll keep those bastards at bay, qué no?’ Joe was learning. In the course of the novel he will come to understand that it was the whole community of Milagro that protected him and his beanfield. “I love these people,” Joe exclaimed. Though at the beginning Joe thought “it was his field, his bunch of crummy beans; he loved them, he loved enchiladas and burritos, and he would fart a lot because of these purebred Milagro beans.” But when he’d planted them he had not really known what he was doing, and he had certainly not anticipated the particular consequences that had occurred . . . now that this officially was not his beanfield anymore.”

But if it was a spontaneous act of frustration that originally led Joe to illegally cutting a ditch and redirecting water to irrigate his beanfield on the little more than seven-tenths of an acre of land that he owned from his family, then “soon after the initial euphoria wore off, he had begun to wonder if his beanfield might be such a great thing after all,” There was a great deal of fighting and contention arising over it, sometimes with lethal weapons. These ongoing and escalating encounters, like the battle at Concord Bridge, were the opening skirmishes of the Milagro beanfield war. As the community gathered around Joe and his beanfield that beanfield became the focus for resistance to the community. The coyote angel said to Amarante guarding Joe’s beanfield, “Listen cousin, the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you little screwed -up underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that’ll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.” There would be freedom and an end to oppression. But first Joe Mandragón and other Milagro citizens had first to understand themselves as members of that community, had to realize that his beanfield had united the citizens of Milagro against the powers that had stolen from them their land and water rights. Ruby Archuleta produced a petition that would organize the town into an association protesting the land appropriation and the grasp of water rights by the capitalists and government officials who stood to profit from these robberies and veritable enslavements of the citizens. Slowly as community formed around the beanfield more citizens signed the petition. Ruby recognized that the whole town “would have to harvest his beans in a symbolic manner, every person who signed the petition picking a handful of beans. They would harvest them the same way churches had been built in the old ways, with every family contributing some adobe bricks and pitching in with labor so that it was a symbolic labor of all with a part of everyone’s earth in it.” For a brief moment Milagro had become united and the war of the small against the large was won. Joe and his beanfield had created a united and committed community to improve the lives of all citizens of Milagro. The war had been won.

Beanfields and my dissertation had been on my mind because down here in Lotus Land I had been rereading Thoreau’s Walden, and again been drawn to the chapter “The Beanfield.” I wondered about my own beanfields. Down here I considered writing a book entitled tentatively Walden on the Pacific and which would be structured mirroring the chapters in Thoreau’s book. The beanfield was for me an important chapter. Thoreau’s cultivated his bean-field, albeit one a great deal more extensive than that of Joe Mandragón. Thoreau wrote, “Meanwhile, my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed . . .” I believe that seven miles would produce a great many beans, though ironically, unlike Joe, Thoreau did not eat beans! Thoreau commented, “Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice . . .” So, the question arises: why did he grow beans in the first place?  Indeed, he ponders this question himself: he wonders, “But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows . . . What should I learn of beans or beans of me.” In the effort to care for his beans he would learn something though of course at the beginning he did not know exactly what that might be. He insists, “I was determined to know beans,” 

I wondered why beans and not rose bushes? And in one sense I do not believe that there is an exact answer to this question, why beans? And I recognized that if not beans, then it would have been something else. The effort was all part of the experiment that his life at Walden was meant to try. Thoreau wrote, “We may try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earth like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes.” I think that the care he took to grow his beans must have taught him a great deal about beans and gardening and himself. It was the process and not the product that drove Thoreau to his rows of beans. If he were to realize a crop, then he had to make the effort. Of course, by the time these lines were first written in his journal in 1845 and then as part of Walden, Thoreau had long left his cabin and no longer planted beans and probably still had not taken to eating them. But that is one answer to the question “Why plant them?” Every activity became part of his experiment at Walden Pond, to assess what exactly he needed to live—life is so dear—and what he could do without. In “Economy,” Thoreau had written, “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge . . . “ Beans were part of his personal experiment: “to make the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work.” 

But after that first summer Thoreau did not ever return to planting beans. There was something else he sought that he could not realize from his effort in the garden. This was the conclusion at which he had arrived from his experiment: “This further experience I gained. I said to myself I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me . . .” Feeding the body was important but it was not enough; his life needed more. Those virtues more than the beans and the corn must be the yield from his morning’s work. If he had wanted his beans to grow, then he had had to make the effort: it was his morning work! But those other seeds were not as easily nurtured as were the beans and corn; mistakes were made and the virtues did not grow. “Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.” We are not all we hoped to be and sometimes it would seem we are too subject to the gravity of another object and we crash into it and sometimes break apart. To the gravity of what object had Thoreau gotten too close? Down here in Lotus Land I think I believed I might be safe from the fierce pull of another’s gravity, but I was a fool to think so. I have to acknowledge that wherever I go I have to take me with me. “By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free (italics added), of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed . . .” I believe that in this way our seeds are made barren, have lost their vitality, and will not yield any crop. Beans brought Thoreau not merely into contact with history but with a universality of which he was a part. “As I drew still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of the modern day.”  Though he loved his solitude, the beans suggested continuity and community. 

But I don’t mean to identify the two beanfields as identically motivated or even politically aligned, though there is certainly a politics behind Thoreau’s morning work in the beanfield. Thoreau does offer another motive for growing beans. His life, after all, was always an experiment and as in any scientific work it demanded a conclusion. “Why should I raise them,” he asks and then answers, “perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.” That exclamation gives meaning to the chapter that has itself become now a parable: a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. Here in Lotus Land far from my home during the wintry Midwest and now choosing to reside here for a considerable stay, I can often be found hoeing my beans as I write on the computer or read my Walden in my chair. But as Thoreau exclaims of his beans, “These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The true husbandman (sic) will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.” I sometimes hear in Thoreau’s last sentences in “The Beanfield” Marx’s utopian decree, “From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs.” Thoreau’s beanfield promised a world without regret, failure or want. 

As for those other seeds, . . . well, I am still struggling to grow them. 

Oh, yes, Joe Mandragón’s beanfield had created a community but it did not last. Maybe next summer Joe might plant such seeds as sincerity, faith, innocence and they like. However, in the present, bested by VISTA volunteer Herbie Goldfarb in breaking Charley Bloom’s bucking horse, Sunflower, that Joe had not been able to stay atop  at the rodeo, Joe walked up to the beaming rider and punched “that smart-ass East coast son of a bitch right in his prissy little nonviolent mouth.” Ah, but if the seeds be not lost . . .

 

Food, Glorious Food

In the midst of an episode of his hypos sometimes he would take himself out for a walk, not to saunter which is free and undirected but to search for himself. On one such recent walk an event from the early 1970s rose as a result of an itch. Maybe it was the weather that had begun to winter and he had pulled his coat tightly about him, but as he walked he recalled having purchased a pea coat at Canal Jeans on lower Broadway in the area called SoHo, a New York City acronym for south of Houston. That east/ west cross street is not to be pronounced Hewston, as in the Texan city, but articulated as Howston. The Texas city was named after Sam Houston, a general and statesman, but the New York City Street was named after William Houstoun, who, according to Wikipedia, served as a delegate from Georgia to the Continental Congress from 1784-1786 and then to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Houston married Mary Bayard in 1788 and Mary’s father, Nicholas, named the street after his new son-in-law. As his mother might have said, “I should be so lucky!” 
           In the early 1970s SoHo was crowded with factories that catered to the clothing trade; it was also an area that entertained a somewhat vibrant countercultural vibe, though perhaps that word didn’t belong on any airwave then. There were inexpensive rat-infested lofts occupied by hungry artists and writers: he aspired to be one of the latter but alas, he always he got hungry. He longed to enter the bohemian artist life, but he had neither the courage nor the skill. Instead, he worked rather dejectedly in one of the many clothing manufacturing factories in the area and looked with envy at the fogged windows in which he imagined the creative folks lived and worked. The factory floor on which he worked stretched through an entire block from Broadway west to Mercer Street. The ten rows of sewing machines at which sat mostly underpaid women of color filled the front half of the factory floor; towards the rear of the floor were the steam presses, the hanging racks, and the packing boxes and for finishing the manufactured clothes and preparing them for delivery. An extensive side room that ran about half of the size of the manufacturing floor was used for rolling out large bolsters of cloth that would be cut into patterned shapes. To him it was a dreary, odious place where the work was mind-numbing and for minimum wages. Sometimes he joined them in the deadening activities preparing products they would never be able to afford.
           It was the early 1970s and for his lunch break everyday he would put on his winter jacket, ride down what he imagined was the slowest elevator in the world and exited onto a somewhat lively Broadway where others, too, were either moving between work spaces or seeking a quick bite to eat. Usually, two slices of pizza and a soda would have satisfied him but that day he was suffering his hypos, and he chose to saunter and he set out to the north. He walked up two blocks and turned off Broadway onto Prince Street and walked west one block to Wooster where he came upon an artist run hippie restaurant simply named FOOD. He had not known this place had existed; inside he saw people whom he wanted to look like, and without hesitation he opened the door and joined with the quiet crowd. He ordered a bowl of soup that were sizzling in huge steel pots; along with the soup was included two thick slices of anadama bread and three slabs of butter. He had not before heard of this type of bread nor had he ever tasted anything so delicious. In his home Wonder Bread existed as the only baked dough. Despite the crowded floor he found a seat and in calm and comfort enjoyed this respite from the work, dirt and noise of the factory companioned here by artists and hippies who, too, had found a respite from the mundane and maybe from their hypos.  

          After lunch he headed back towards the shop floor. But first, with the time yet remaining . . . Across the street from his building’s entrance was a large clothing emporium, Canal Jeans, an establishment on the east side of Broadway about two or four blocks south of Houston Street and four or so blocks north of Canal Street. Canal Jeans was a cavernous space filled as he remembered with rough-hewn, large wooden tables piled high with jeans and shirts. Along the walls were wooden shelves into which shirts and other apparels were stacked. These were not the stuff that would be found at Macy’s or smaller and fashionable clothing stores. Here on the floor and lining the walls were the outfits fit for the hip hippie set. To prolong the satisfaction he had enjoyed at dining at FOOD, he walked into the store. On the display tables he saw pairs of painter jeans in a variety of bold colors: sun-yellow, sky blue, summer green, sunrise orange. He recognized this fare as statement jeans, and he imagined what they might be saying, what he might be saying and to whom he might be speaking. He picked up two pair. Then, looking about on the rough, unfinished walls of Canal Jeans were hung outerwear,—overcoats, jackets and vest—some that had even been previously worn. The idea of second-hand clothes was certainly not something of which his mother would approve but to which he was for some reason attracted. He remembered that once at college he had exchanged with a friend a perfectly fine sweater that had been purchased recently as a gift for a different one that sported a prominent tear in the elbow and which he the wore proudly.  
            On those crowded walls was where he found the pea coat hanging and to which he was instantly attracted. It was not a traditional Navy-issued garment, though it looked like one. Down Broadway and on Canal Street an Army-Navy store did business, but it was the Vietnam War era and he would not enter a military-establishment. His hypos pulled him to the pea coat hanging; he took it off the wall and put it on. When he had entered the establishment, he didn’t even know that he was looking for an item such as this or even that he had need of one. He recognized in the mirror who he thought he was or perhaps the image was who he wanted to be. Without another thought he purchased the coat and for several years he wore that coat—until one day he didn’t. At some point that he no longer remembered he lost contact with that garment, and with that loss he lost some version of himself. But now on this walk in the present, fifty-five years later wearing a more contemporary and even fashionable winter garment he came to appreciate that in his life since he had been looking about for that coat. And perhaps reaching for that man who had worn that garment.
            Thoreau had cautioned him to beware the enterprise that required new clothes and not a new man to wear those clothes. The man knew that clothes do not make the man, but perhaps it is that clothes may fit the man. Clothes existed that were the external expression of the self, and he thought that perhaps many spend their lives seeking out those garments. Yes, he knew that the self develops and changes, and it must continue to dress itself into the world. He considered that when shopping there seemed to be at least two options: to purchase the clothes that when worn will impress the world with the image, or conversely to acquire the garments that when worn expressed the self. Alas, though he had purchased a great many outer covers, on this walk he reflected that in his shopping for clothes he had rarely found that iteration of the pea coat—or eaten his lunches at establishments such as FOOD.