The Bean Trees

The woman who would become Taylor Greer started life as Marietta Greer, though everyone called her Missy. She grew up in Pittman County, Kentucky, a place where poverty ran so deep that most children never escaped it. Their futures were already written: girls got pregnant young, boys farmed tobacco, and everyone stayed put.

Missy's mother raised her alone, teaching her two things. First, she always expected the best from her daughter. Second, no matter what Missy accomplished, her mother acted like she'd just hung the moon in the sky and plugged in all the stars. This combination of high expectations and unconditional support gave Missy something rare: the confidence to believe she could leave.

The event that sealed her determination happened at the local hospital, where she worked as a laboratory assistant. One day, two people she knew from school were brought in. Jolene Shanks had a bullet wound. Newt Harbine was already dead.

Newt had been like Missy in many ways. They were both poor, both scrapping to land on their feet. But Newt's father had been injured when a tractor tire exploded from overinflation, and the family never recovered. Newt got Jolene pregnant, dropped out of school, and started farming tobacco. Then, in a moment of violence, he shot Jolene and turned the gun on himself.

Standing over Jolene in her lead apron, Missy saw herself as Jolene must have seen her: a butcher holding down a calf on its way to becoming meat. She was doing her job, following procedure, staying numb. Everyone at the hospital did the same. They kept working like it was just another day. But it was high noon, and Missy realized that something that terrible had happened in broad daylight, and the world just kept going.

She decided then that she would not end up like Newt and Jolene. She would not let poverty and circumstance trap her.

Missy saved every penny from her hospital job and bought a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle with no starter. Her mother taught her to push-start it on hills and change her own tires. Then Missy drove out of Kentucky with a simple plan: she would go as far as her car could take her without breaking down, and that's where she'd settle.

On the road, she ran out of gas near a town called Taylorville. She looked at the sign and decided that was her new name. Taylor. Not Marietta, not Missy. A name she chose herself, though she admitted there was enough destiny in it to satisfy her.

Taylor's car carried her across the country until it finally broke down on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. She didn't like the flat, sad landscape. As she looked around, she thought about how the government had forced the Cherokee people onto this land, and it seemed to her that the whole intention was to get them to lie down and die without a fight. She spent half her money fixing the car so she could keep moving.

At a roadside bar, Taylor bought food and prepared to drive through the night. She noticed a woman covered in a blanket sitting with two men. When Taylor left, the woman followed her to the car and gave her a baby. She said no one would miss the child, that the baby belonged to her dead sister. Then she walked away.

Taylor drove to a motel, terrified that the silent child might be dead. She bargained with the owner for a free room, offering to change all the beds in the morning. Alone in the room, she bathed the child and discovered two things: it was a girl, and she had been physically and sexually abused. Taylor nearly vomited. Then she wrote a postcard to her mother, saying she'd found her head rights—the Cherokee term for belonging—and that she planned to keep the baby.

She named the child Turtle, because of the way the little girl clung to everything with a tight, desperate grip.

Now Taylor had a car that barely ran, almost no money, and a traumatized toddler who wouldn't speak or move. She kept driving west until a flat tire forced her to stop in Tucson, Arizona. The first place she found was a tire shop called Jesus is Lord Used Tires. The mechanic was an older woman named Mattie, who gave Turtle apple juice and peanut butter crackers.

Taylor was impressed to see a woman working on cars, but the tires themselves terrified her. Every air hose reminded her of the tractor tire that had exploded and destroyed Newt Harbine's family. She stayed in Tucson anyway, because she had no money to go further, and because something about the desert landscape felt like a place where she could start over.

She found a cheap hotel downtown and began searching for work. But every job she tried fell through. She quit the fast food restaurant when the manager demanded employees dry-clean their own uniforms. The medical labs wouldn't hire her. She was running out of money fast, with a silent child who needed care and a car that needed repairs.

The only bright spot was Mattie's tire shop. Behind the shop, Mattie had a garden full of beans and tomatoes, growing in the middle of the desert. It seemed impossible, but there it was: food pushing up through the dry dirt, proving that life could thrive even in harsh conditions.

Taylor didn't know it yet, but Tucson would become her home. The people she would meet—Mattie, a woman named Lou Ann Ruiz, and two Guatemalan refugees named Estevan and Esperanza—would become the family she never knew she needed. Together, they would face poverty, danger, and the cruelty of a world that often ignored those who suffered most.

But first, Taylor had to figure out how to survive. She had a child to raise, a fear of tires to overcome, and a future to build in a place she'd never planned to be. What she didn't know was that the very things she'd been running from—motherhood and responsibility—would turn out to be the things that saved her.

How does a woman who values independence above all else learn to rely on others? And how does a child who has been broken learn to trust the world again?