Don’t Burn The Plantains

I wrote this in 2019

My mother would fry plantains twice a day, almost every day. A batch with breakfast and a batch with dinner. Sometimes they wouldn’t make it to dinner, but they were always at breakfast alongside our eggs and bacon, or ackee and salt fish, or cereal. A Jamaican mother’s breakfast staple, packed with iron, sweetness, and cultural significance. But I didn’t understand that back then. I just knew they were there, I knew my mother loved them, and I knew I loved them. I would race downstairs in the mornings to snag a few off the paper towel covered plate they rested on, leaving oil spots behind as evidence a slice had been prematurely consumed. I just wanted to make sure I had my fair share since my little sister also loved the plantains.

I realize now as I stand in my own kitchen, slice the ends off of a speckled plantain, and run the tip of the knife down it’s side to peel back the unsightly skin to reveal the yellow sweetness just below, that my mother wasn’t just making plantains because she loved them. She was holding on to a past life, her upbringing on the sweet island that was decorated with the flavor of colorful fresh foods, and a connection to those who came before. Here in foreign as it is often called, the plantains every morning were her attempt at sharing that sweetness with her yankee children. Each serving a prayer that her past would pass through to them. That that the sweetness of the island would sustain them. Little brown people in this foreign land, in need of some island sun and sweetness.