While we had tea, I announced it was time for me to go to St. Vincent with her. As a child I swore to her that once I was an adult and had actual paychecks, I would purchase us airplane tickets if she promised to show me around her home. Jennie agreed and less than a year later, our trip was booked. At 4:30 a.m. on the day of our trip, Jennie—my consummate caretaker—called to make sure I was awake to meet her at the airport in time for our flight. That I was an adult, had been living on my own in Manhattan for a few years, and had already been traveling extensively for work didn’t faze Jennie—apparently the night before she had called my mother promising to “take care of our baby.”
Jennie was so entwined in my background that I often wondered, especially as I got older, about hers, about where and from whom she came. All of a sudden I was there, meeting her sister, her mother, her brothers and nephews, aunts, and most everyone else it seemed. Even when we walked through the outdoor fruit market, seeing coconuts piled high on the back of trucks and plantains ripening in the afternoon sun, Jennie couldn’t get down the street without having someone stop her to say hello. I realized, then, that I wasn’t alone in my adoration of Jennie.
I felt that each meal we ate during the trip was an opportunity to better understand where Jennie comes from. We drank tall glasses of cold, fresh passion fruit juice and lots of Mauby, a sweet beverage brewed with tree bark—it reminded me of the Mauby Jennie used to make from scratch when I was a kid and the jars she kept slowly brewing in the back of my parents’ kitchen cabinet. At her friend Annette’s house, we ate breaded, fried okra, plantains, and codfish, along with white rice and callaloo —a green that’s earthier than spinach and sweeter than kale. We continued to be fed and taken care of by Mrs. George, the mother of one of Jennie’s closest friends, at her home, where we stayed. In the mornings, Mrs. George piled her breakfast table high with toasted hot dog buns, boxed milk, cereal, fried eggs, sliced tomatoes, a bowl of margarine, and a plate of chopped iceberg lettuce. In the evenings she told us to help ourselves to the contents of her pressure cooker, filled with what seemed like a bottomless amount of heady chicken broth with small, dense dumplings.
We ate mangoes everywhere we went. Scraping the caramel-sweet, unbelievably lush fruit from the skin with my teeth, I was sent back to my parents’ kitchen, where Jennie and I would regularly share a mango after school. I never knew until I went to St. Vincent, though, what a mango could truly taste like. I realized then that the flavor I never knew about was probably the same flavor that Jennie longed for all those years trying to find a ripe one at the bottom of the pile at our New York grocery store. Jennie introduced me to new tastes, too, including the addictively sweet-and-sour combination of tamarind pulp mixed with sugar, as well as plum roses, a fruit with the crunch of an apple mixed with the flavor of rosewater and plum.
Everyone in Jennie’s life was warm and welcoming, eager to meet me after hearing about me for so many years. In its own sweet way, my handful of days in St. Vincent was a kind of homecoming. An opportunity for me to connect with Jennie’s community, traveling to St. Vincent allowed me to see precisely where her values and customs—the same ones she passed along to me—come from. I got to grow up with someone who modeled self-respect and devotion to her family; someone with the courage to pursue an independent life. Someone with an unabashed capacity for tremendous laughter. In taking myself out of my home and into hers, I better understood Jennie. And with that, in a way that was almost automatic, I better understood myself.
Julia Turshen coauthored Spain: A Culinary Road Trip with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow, assisted Paltrow on her book My Father’s Daughter, and worked on the PBS show and companion book Kimchi Chronicles with Jean-Georges and Marja Vongerichten. She has written for Epicurious, GOOP.com, InterviewMagazine.com, and Food & Wine.
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