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The Secret Life of Sweet Potatoes
by Rachel Clement, '08, Biology Major
On this campus, there are many whose creativity thrives and surprises--like the biology major who writes a dream vision. That is not something I expect. And I never expected to know what a sweet potato experiences nor what its creative process feels like. Rachel Clement takes us into that world, not from above but from within.
- Kate Chandler,
Associate Professor of English
We've been developing robustly till now in our dark warm soil, sipping up the irony earthy juices and growing very steadily, very contentedly. We never knew we were destined for metamorphosis like the grubs that eat us, but we are beginning, now, to understand transformation.
We could have guessed our destinies when we first smelled the acrid scents of fruit being picked from the neighboring cherry tomato vines, or heard the snapping of the zinnia stems on our other side as the hands cut off their vibrant heads. We live at the mercy of free-moving hands. Nurturing hands but dangerous hands that breathe our breath but cannot photosynthesize.
The same hands that picked the zinnia flowers and the tomato fruits gave us water, joyous rain when the forests surrounding us thirsted. The same strange, soft hands pulled our competing plant neighbors out by their invading roots, the roots that were harming us, taking up our dirt, our nutrients, our homes. They were very different from us, those pestilent, conniving nightshades and morning glories and saw grasses and stray melons. But they are gone and cannot hold us back anymore! We've been leaping to occupy their old haunts with our own roots and sugar sinks, filling up the spaces with our gorgeous bodies of stored sun-energy. Under here, we coexist with the crawlers, the caterpillars and grubs.
Our leaves, until now, have also been flourishing. They are a darker, richer green than those of other rooted creatures who grow near us; we need chlorophyll to create our thick network of underground treasure houses. Chlorophyll density is key to our lives. We convert. Green to orange. Green to orange. Green to orange. As sun streams, we grow. We produce. We store. We connect.
We are still umbilically connected to our mothers' composting bodies, all of us sweet propagules. Because we grow up intricately connected to our mothers' genetic sequence lines, we know how to shoot up stems, how to shoot down roots, how to anchor ourselves into the soil, how to take what we need and release what we do not want. The hands that planted our mothers underground are also the same ones that have cared for us since we began growing rootlets, leaflets, and many starch-storing treasures.
We've never known older sweets living within our cultivar . . . the grasses and willows nearby tell us our plots are impermanent, that our soil has not always been home for others like us. They whisper of sunflowers, of squashes, of turnips, of trellised snap peas. We have never grown near these cultivated green cousins, but we've received airborne plant signals talking of blackbirds, insects, and mineral booms from creatures who have those names.
We grow, we grow, we grow! Our roots arch like the constellations that watch us when the sun leaves, our leaves become tough, and our orange flesh becomes thick and full of our lifeblood. As we grow, the cradling soil softens with our threading rootlets. We swell and our space and nutrients become scarcer. We do not guess at what our futures will be, although our mothers could tell us were they not offering themselves as fuel to the bacteria and many-legged soil-creatures which sustain us, giving us oxygen and nitrogen and therefore life.
Now, violently, we are being unearthed. Sharp metal hackers, wielded by the same caressing hands which planted and watered us, chop our roots and cut our stems, take our leaves into buckets, our vines into carts, and our orange bodies into large black crates which bruise our skins when we are jostled too harshly. The earth-breaking metal is dangerous, but we are trapped as it comes nearer . . . we can only send chemical soil-signals of danger to those around us, alert them that they, too, will soon be divided into color-coded parts, cut and cut and cut. Our soil is rended, overturned, mashed. Our leaves are stolen far away. We cry, in loud chemical tones, but we can do nothing. This must be what death is like.
Once our bodies are in open air, exposed to light and dried, we are no longer connected. I am now an I. You are a you. We are sisters but separate, though our skins touch in these soil-less scrubbed piles. We are no longer connected by roots and vines. My skin toughens in the streaming autumn sun that only my leaves used to know. I am a chrysalis. Thus I begin to dream of a new life, after cutting, after second birth. Umbilical cord, all ties cut, and my need for anything but what exists within me cut. Now I begin to look inward, and as the hands that tore my rootlets from me now wash off my dirt and place me (there is a feeling of tenderness here) in a cardboard box, I begin to understand how the sunlight I absorbed while living underground gives me the ability to exist without every part of myself I had desperately needed.
My dark rich green leaves are within my orange flesh, waiting to be formed. So are my stretching vines, my deepening roots, my power to create. I could become a mother now. In this dark I wait, without sun, till I am planted again. Not in the soil I came from, but in a newly turned earthy space, fresh from grasses and old snap pea plantings. I will learn to grow eyes, to create new lives from my own stores. I am still alive, although new in form. After mourning, I am reborn.
There are those of us, I have heard, that are taken away to be piled under bright lights in cold places. They wait and wait to be carried in bags, three here, four there. Others are killed by heat, consumed by the same nurturing hands, before they have the chance to create more life from within themselves. They live not within the dark, creative womb-space of a dirt cellar but are burned by the bodies the hands belong to, heated and swallowed and transformed to different species of life. Life that can move. Life that grows hands.
But that is not my place. My place is as a propagule, a sweet potato, continuing my line, spreading my message. My sun-love. My soil-connection. My deep green. My bright orange.
