My mother never gave me the family recipe for candied yams, so I gotta figure it out myself.
Everyone else already has a Sunday dinner to do: Melvin and the boys got the meat, Loretta is making the bread pudding, Norris and Maryann are on collards, and Vita—who says she’s from Jamaica, but I don’t believe her—is doing rice and peas. Which, she’s made clear, does not have actual green peas, but rather uses red beans, and is one of the staple foods of her Jamaican homeland.
I assume an authority I don’t feel. I grab one of our dull paring knives and a basket of our freshly harvested sweet potatoes and get to work, like I know what I’m doing. At least peeling the potatoes is an obvious first step.
The knife almost skims the skin off my thumb, but right before I go squeamish, I see Wanda rounding the corner of one of the motor homes, humming, of all things, “I Got A Woman.” She’s bouncing her little shoulders to the beat, in what could be called a dance if I’m feeling generous. I nearly forget what I’m doing as she gets closer, swaying her hips in those orange shorts I like, bouncing and humming until she sits on the tree stump next to me. We’re a few inches apart. I can’t sing like her, but I join in the best I can.
She smiles. “Whatchu know about that?”
I smile too. “I know Ray. Everybody knows Ray.”
She shrugs. “Not everyone knows what he’s talking about, though. You’ve heard the words? He said, ‘I got a woman, way over town, that’s good to me.’” Her legs scrape against the compacted dirt as she moves them out in front of her. “Well, I got me a woman that’s good to me, too. Whatchu know about that?”
I go back to peeling, cocky now, but playing it cool. “Your woman, huh? She there to love you day and night?”
“Mm-hm. She never grumbles or fusses, always treats me right.”
I drop my peeled potato in a large bowl and reach to grab the next one. I don’t let myself look at her, even as she leans into me. Her afro tickles my ears, and our thighs stick together in the heat—it’s summer, and it’s abnormally hot for New Jersey. “That’s some woman.”
Her shoulder brushes mine. “Hey. You.”
The second I turn my head, she’s kissing me, and now I feel a different heat. I can’t help it; even the lightest of her kisses makes my skin hot. I blame it on her voice; no one with a voice like that could have anything but heat in her lips.
“Aye, that ain’t what y’all supposed to be doing!” Melvin calls from across our little camp. When Wanda’s grandmother died in her sleep two months ago, we finally said yes to Melvin From Church and his small but fiercely loyal band of freedom fighters, joining them on their endless route to nowhere. “Doing something by doing nothing” was the idea, because can’t everybody be a King or an X or a Parks. Some of us can only be, and shit, we deserve it. Melvin’s famous words. Some call it a manifesto. I don’t know what I call it, but I guess I agree with him.
Melvin pauses his work on the meat and, instead, he’s tinkering with our crappy little radio again. That little old hunk-a-junk hardly picks up anything but static.
“Twiddling your fingers over that useless piece of shit ain’t what you supposed to be doing neither!” Wanda hollers back. She wins a few chuckles from everybody, even the ones who looked at us sideways when we joined the group back in May. Even the coolest of hippie radicals need some time to understand two women like us, I guess.
Melvin shrugs. “I’m trynna see what’s going on with Dr. King! I think he got arrested again.”
That’s when Wanda turns back toward me and sighs. The whole point of this group, she’s always reminding me, was to get away from all that for a while. Just a little while. We’d all go back to marching and planning and hoping in due time.
She peeks into the bucket at my feet and smiles. “They got you on yams?” She grabs one, smacking the dirt off the skin like it’s a bad kid she’s whooping. “We’ll never eat at the rate you going. I’ll peel, you cut.”
I concede the paring knife gratefully. Chopping feels like less of a hazard than the blade coming straight for your thumbs—and yet, of course, Wanda is slicing through that skin almost subconsciously as she supervises my chopping. “Those slices seem too thin, right?”
I hold up one coin-shaped slice of sweet potato. “Probably.” All that authority I was faking strains away, and I confess. “My mother never shared the recipe.”
“Mine neither,” she mutters. A potato plunks into the bucket, and she reaches for another. Her shorts, I realize, are the same color as the potatoes she’s shucking. It’s a detail I would have smiled at, if not for the sobering mention of our mothers. They aren’t all too far; the funny thing about our odd little group is that secretly, none of us want to be that far from home—just far enough to make it all seem different. Our world, but a better one, maybe. I could hop in a car right now and get to my house on Orange Street in two hours if I wanted to.
Orange, like sweet potatoes. I’d asked my mother to teach me the recipe the morning before New Christ Baptist’s Christmas Day service, the year I turned seventeen. Wanda’s family invited us to her house for dinner after that, saving us from the unpredictability of my father. We should make the yams, I suggested. It was my mother’s specialty. Sweet, syrupy, and if you’re lucky, a few glaze-hardened bites in there too, where the potato meat resists your teeth.
The problem was that I craved more than one sweet, syrupy thing that day. That Christmas was the first time I heard Wanda sing during service, really sing. I’d always heard her humming and practicing and making up tunes, but never had I heard the sweet, full volume of her voice. I couldn’t have imagined it—she seemed too small, too innocent in her swept-back-and-pressed church-girl up-do. What grown woman had tucked herself inside my friend, forcing her way out whenever a microphone got too close?
I should have known what was coming—we’d shared a brief and unspoken-about kiss during a sleepover a month before, apologized, and then turned around and went to sleep. But this time, that voice had riled something in me. That something was there as we all drove back to her house. It was there when our mothers got to work in the kitchen. It was there when we went to Wanda’s room, where she wanted to take off her pretty red and white church dress before the kitchen grease mucked it up. And then she shucked that dress off, as quickly as she’s shucking those potatoes now, and told me she wanted to kiss me again. It felt too good to feel wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if what rattled my mother so much was seeing us in action. She’d peeled off her oven mitts and ascended the steps to Wanda’s room, and there we were, bold enough to do it on top of the blankets.
It’s one thing to suspect your daughter’s tendencies. It’s another to witness her naked body pressed against another young woman’s. Ma was kind enough to close the door, kind enough to carry on with Christmas dinner, kind enough to pass the peas. And for the months that followed, she was kind enough to slip me a few dollars when I needed it. Kind enough to not tell my father. Kind enough to cook dinner every night and leave enough for me.
And yet that May, I returned home from my last day of high school to find every item I owned stuffed into: the box our new Crockpot came in, a broken wooden drawer my mother had never thrown away, my wicker laundry basket, my suitcase and matching duffel bag, and even a few empty, family-sized Fruity Squares cereal boxes. And there was one 30-gallon black trash bag, the kind you wonder what-the-hell an average family would use them for. Turns out, they’re great for packing away all of your daughter’s clothes, including, ironically, the ones you had begged her to wear and insisted she’d look so pretty in. Including, unexpectedly, the hand-me-down t-shirt she’d received from you, on her sixteenth birthday, that you thought was so special because now you could both share this garment—except now, it was tainted by her disgusting body and you didn’t even want it anymore. Including, of course, the dress your daughter had been wearing on Christmas Day five months ago, when she’d puddled the dress to the floor and joined her naked best friend in bed, gladly and unashamedly.
I found myself thankful she’d at least packed it all for me, even if I could only fit about a third of it in Wanda’s car. And I moved in with Wanda and her gramma, who didn’t much care what we did together as long as we ate all the food on our plates. Wanda and I fucked every chance we got, in celebration and rebellion and sadness. And by the time Christmas rolled back around and every single one of my calls home went to voicemail, Wanda’s gramma got sick, and we knew our good fortune was running out.
Christmas remains bittersweet.
When we have enough orange coins to feed everybody, Melvin throws together a fire for us and hands me one of the largest, heaviest pieces of cast iron cookware I’ve ever seen. I take it and heft it onto the fire like I was expecting it, but only Wanda knows better. I’m out of my league, and even worse off when Melvin starts chucking ingredients at me. “Cinnamon, right? A little nutmeg, too, is how my Gramma did it. Butter. Water. Some brown sugar, some molasses, maybe?”
He looks at me, eyebrows raised.
Molasses doesn’t sound right. “No,” I say. “That’s not the way I do it.”
He chuckles and throws his hands up in surrender. “Hey, this is all you right here. Don’t let me get in your way.”
Wanda and I stand by the fire and that cast iron skillet in silence, waiting for Melvin to get far enough away before we whisper: “Why’d he give you so much water? You supposed to add all that water to them?”
“You know I don’t know the answer to that.” I can’t be the person who messed up the yams, but my memories are fuzzy. How could I see my mother cook it, years and years in a row, and still have no idea how she did it?
We throw everything in there. How much?—I don’t know, however much looks right. Water first, then the butter, and when it melts, we add all the spices and the sugar. The sun is hot—no better word for it, but I’m too focused on tapping in nutmeg to supervise the sweat leaking from my forehead. I’d rather taste sweat than not-enough nutmeg. Gotta have enough nutmeg, I remember my mother saying once. I always agreed with her. Or sometimes, she’d say: Blood, sweat, and tears. Can’t have a good meal without it.
Or: I’ll take an overcooked meal instead of an under-seasoned one any day. The terrible thing over the mediocre thing, any day. And it is through her that I learned that sometimes, the worst that could happen doesn’t outweigh the kinda-bad, the subtle difference, the disappointment.
It isn’t until thirty minutes later, when the potatoes are supposed to be done, that I worry. “Way too much water,” I mutter. The potatoes are swimming when they aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to be syrupy and caramelized. They’re supposed to sizzle. They aren’t worth it if they aren’t tanned and syrupy and sizzling. When I break off a piece and try it, the flavor is dull.
Wanda chews on her thumbnail. “Well, do they still taste good?”
I don’t respond. I grab the spoon I’ve been using, a big old wooden thing with burn marks on the handle, and begin scooping the sugary, buttery water out, letting the brown stuff slosh to the ground, where the ants and the bees will most certainly swarm within the hour. I don’t care. We’ll be on the move again soon, anyway, to some other corner of the state, inching further from everything that pushed us away in the first place.
Wanda chuckles at my violent sloshing until she realizes I’m serious. She leaves my side for a moment and comes back with another spoon. There we are, silently splatting the ground with spices and sweetness and hoping that no one glances over and notices the failure of our notcandied yams. My notcandied yams.
When we all sit down for dinner on our usual menagerie of blankets and quilts, everybody nods their head at the food, congratulating the cooks on the flavors and tenderness.
“These yams, man,” Melvin says, smiling at me. “We got to put y’all on the fire more often.”
Wanda leans into my side, but she knows better, and everyone else should know better too. Something is missing. Something is off. The yams don’t taste quite right.
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