As I watch these tomatoes sprouting up from the ground, I hear Lupe’s song in the background. The one where he says, “Like a Phoenix, from its ashes, we will rise. . . .” Let me tell you the story of my tomatoes that rose from the ashes, and then I will tell you why, like those tomatoes, we will rise—maybe.
This year I planted our tomatoes in a large container. Not so much for the convenience, but due to the fact we’re in what I consider temporary housing and I didn’t want to dig up the yard. The sister who owns the place had given her OK, but sometimes your gut tells you to stick to the original script.
Somewhere along the line my tomatoes contracted bottom rot. It’s what happens when tomatoes receive uneven watering. I can thank my children for that one, and myself for my lack of attention as to what they were doing and not doing to that particular container. With much regret, I removed all the “bad” tomatoes and just tossed them to the side. Didn’t think much more about them.
A couple of weeks later, my husband is out mowing the yard and he calls me over. The “bad” tomatoes, which I’d given no more thought or concern to, had begun to germinate. On their own. With no help from us in the way of watering or fertilizing. Right there in the red-clay Georgia soil. So, instead of plowing them down with the rest of the grass, we decided to let them have their way. If they could survive on their own, we’d let them do their thing. We simply agreed that we wouldn’t commit to watering them.
Sounds mean, I know, but we just had to see what they were capable of. Call it human curiosity. Well, these tomatoes not only proved to be survivors, rising up from the ashes, but they thrived, growing bigger than any of my potted tomatoes or any tomatoes I’ve ever grown. And I do mean ever.
The only watering these tomatoes receive outside a fleeting interest of the children to shoot the hose in their general direction is from what’s already in the soil and rainfall. If my potted tomatoes were to face the same fate, well, you already know how that story would end. There would be no Phoenix rising from the ashes.
I think you know where I’m going with this story, so I’ll cut to the chase. Like the Phoenix, black people have been burned, by themselves and by others. Like those tomatoes, they’re going to need a spirit that doesn’t give up. That is able to take the little it has and work with it. That can keep up the backbreaking labor so that it can take root.
Black people, like those tomatoes, have to dig deeper until their roots are so well intertwined into the earth that they cannot be so easily ripped out and discarded. And that even in being discarded by one element, it doesn’t mean it’s over. We have a chance, like the Phoenix, like those tomatoes, to create a new life from the old, burned-out one. And if we can do that, we will rise up.
Bet you never thought you could learn so much from a tomato.
Leave a Reply