Chicago at four a.m. smells like two hundred years of dirt and one hundred years of oil and gasoline spilled on pavement and then congealed in the dew before daylight. About that time on Saturday mornings, our 1979 Mercedes truck pulled into the high school parking lot at 29th and King Drive, thirty miles from our Indiana fields, and eight of us would tumble out into the darkness, throw open the rear roll-up door, and set to work unloading our wares.
The cabbages were in fifty pound boxes that, try as I might, I could not heave off the back of the truck by myself. The beans were in square wooden crates, the green onions in fancy waxed cartons with pictures on them. We bought the green onions from our neighbors, the DeJong brothers. They sold us radishes, too, because we didn’t quite have the space or the dirt or the patience to grow them ourselves, as prone to pests and in need of constant looking after as radishes are. The tomatoes, however, were ours, and kept in cardboard that cushioned their soft red flesh. The spinach was ours, too, packed into bushel baskets with lids held in place by wooden slats secured under metal handles.
The beets, the carrots, the turnips, the corn: load by load, we paced the lot from the rear of the truck to unmarked spots on the pavement, arranging these boxes and bushels on the blacktop where their contents would be displayed once the sun was up and the community emerged. While we worked, a handful of people would stray past, illuminated beneath the streetlights the last ones to sleep and the first ones to wake. They’d wish us good morning, or stop to tilt their heads and watch our efforts.
Brother Al was one of this handful. He always appeared long before darkness had melted from the sky, with hair that looked like an old Brillo pad and gray coveralls that smelled like sweat and dust.
“You got any butta’ beans, Baby?” he’d ask me.
I’d shrug. “I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know yet?” he’d tease with a grin and a gentle elbow jab.
“It’s too early,” I’d tell him with a scowl.
“Too early for what? How old a’ you?”
“Eleven.”
“You just a baby.”
“The truck isn’t all the way unloaded yet,” I’d say, mad. “So it’s too early for me to know if there are any lima beans today.” Then defiantly under my breath: “I’m not a baby.”
Our vegetable stand was the most primitive at the South Side farmer’s market. My father and his brother had purchased canopies from a man with a fancy welder who lived a few towns over. The man had cut one-inch metal pipe into long pieces that served as beams and short pieces that served as rafters. These made sturdy rectangular frames once fitted into welded steel corners that looked like hollow-limbed spiders. We’d bungee gray tarps over two such frames and then erect them, three medium-length pipe legs on each long side of a rectangle.
Beneath the tarps we balanced old doors on tall, conical bushel baskets that arrived from southern states packed tight with pole beans and purple hull peas. The doors had come from deep in the junk stocks of our farm where they’d congregated for years, gathered two and three at a time from dumps and construction sites and neighbors who were remodeling. There is room on a farm for all manner of almost-garbage—car carcasses and plywood scraps and retired traffic signs—and always the sense that one day, hoarded odds and ends will fall precisely into place in the puzzling mill of farm projects.
The doors and baskets had found just such fruition, and once they were lined up in long skinny rows, we piled them with produce picked from our fields in the days before. Yellow squash next to zucchini, leaf lettuce next to green peppers, pickles next to tall stalks of dill. The melons arrived on their own flatbed truck and were too heavy to arrange on our rickety doors, so we’d line up from truck to table front, tossing Millionaires and Sangrias, Saticoys, muskmelons, and honeydew one man to the next, arranging them on the pavement until handsome foothills of fruit girded the walkway beneath our gray tarps.
To the left and around the corner from us in the line-up of vendors was Lyon’s Orchards, whose apple cider is still the best I’ve ever had. Tom Lyon—a dashing football player of a farmer’s son with wavy black hair slicked back from his forehead—enjoyed harassing me as much as Brother Al did. He’d throw rotten fruit at me from time to time just to watch me get mad, which I always did in spite of myself.
Don the flower guy was to our right. His sandy blonde hair stuck out in wings beneath his green seed company cap and hung in a thick mustache under his nose. He chain-smoked from open to close, a cigarette dangling between his lips while he handed out change or put bouquet stems in plastic bags so as not to drip mud and water onto paying customers. He gave me leftover bunches of baby’s breath at the end of the day.
“Here comes trouble,” he’d always say when he saw me approaching.
At the far end of the parking lot, across a wide expanse of gravel and cracked pavement, were two vegetable growers—our competition. They tried to outsell us by offering cheap produce bought in bulk from California, or so the farmer rumor went. I squinted my eyes in their general direction whenever I had a moment to spare and assumed that they squinted back.
It was my job to scout out the nature of these competitors to make sure we were on level playing fields. After setup, I’d nose around their fancy, store bought display tables and bright blue tents, memorizing the price per pound of everything I could, and then present the information, along with note of any dubious products, like red peppers in June, to Uncle Butch, my boss. He’d sigh and heave a bit, then say, “Good work, Laura. We couldn’t do this without you,” and send me off to sell melons.
Melon prices were always set on dollars and quarters, so one could conduct sales and dig change from the green money-apron pockets without the need for plastic bags or proper scales or speed in simple math.
“Muskmelons are two for a dollar,” I’d tell those who stopped to sniff at the alligator skin of the fruit.
“Mush melons?” people would snarl in disgust.
“No, muskmelons. They’re just like cantaloupe.”
“Got any half-price melons?”
“Not yet, Brother Al. Come back later and I’ll have some set aside for you.”
“Come back later?” he’d chuckle. “You just a baby, but I’ll see if I can’t come back after lunch, get me some melons and butta’ beans. What about okra? You got any okra today?”
“I think I saw some halfway down the table,” I’d say and point timidly, knowing that if I was wrong, further harassment would ensue.
Brother Al would snort with a smile and pat my shoulder before ambling off into the crowds.
By the time I turned twelve, I had graduated from melons up to the greens table. I was shocked to learn of its existence. Unbeknownst to me, somewhere hidden deep in its flat acres, our farm produced endless bushel baskets of turnip greens, curly mustard greens, slick mustard greens, collards, and kale. Unlike the rest of the vegetables at our stand, these items had never made an appearance at our dinner table. I’d never even heard of them, and yet they were significant enough to require a sizable display and separate staffing. Fortunately, my lack of knowledge mattered little. The greens went like hot-cakes no matter who was selling them.
“Now,” my uncle instructed, joining me briefly on my first day behind the greens table where two bushels of each variety were pushed up against each other in haphazard showcase, “when one basket is almost empty, you dump the last few handfuls into the other bushel of the same kind and then put a new one up on the table. Got it? I’ll come and check on you in a while.”
Within moments of him leaving my side, women crowded in to claim five pounds or five bushels, stuffing handfuls of leaves into plastic bags that we bought at discount because they’d been misprinted. “Tank you!” smeared in red, four times across white bags engorged with produce. “Fred’s Discont Grocer,” “Mike’s Meaatts Welcomes You!”
The misprints didn’t matter either. The women jabbered together and rolled deep laughter over their purchases as they planned for good food and family. Then, while still scrutinizing the spread as if they might have missed a perfect handful of leaves in a bushel basket not yet considered, they’d absent-mindedly hand me their bags to be weighed.
“Baby, how much I got there?”
I’d place the bag on top of the scale and then drag my finger right across the price table, which calculated from fifteen cents a pound all the way up to a dollar twenty-five.
“Four pounds at fifty cents a pound . . .” I’d figure to myself. “Two dollars.”
“What d’you say, Baby?”
We had to pay for our scales to be reckoned and licensed. A man in a nice button-up shirt would come with a briefcase full of weights on the first day of market each summer and examine the front and back panel of the display windows as he gingerly placed two pounds, five pounds, ten pounds in the pan on top. Without fail, he’d renew our machines with an official sticker slapped onto the front. He’d smile, shake hands with us and take our money, gone within moments of appearing, yet the event always caused a nervous stir in my Uncle Butch, which infected me even though I knew that we would never deliberately cheat anyone. My family was raised in the tradition of John Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism; vigorous moral standards were part and parcel to the ins and outs of days. Short-changing people on their vegetable purchases was almost as bad as rejecting the church, and this religious intentionalism was only enhanced by an existence that hinged on the wiles of the earth.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I knew. There were floods and droughts and there were perfect warm springs and fields made rich from the old swamps of Lake Michigan. There were years with too many locusts, with lightning storms and early frosts that burnt whole fields of tomatoes, but there was always enough food to keep our family far from hunger, so we were in a position to do the giving and not the taking away.
The scales, though, were prized and pricey possessions to be handled with extreme care. Drop them once and they were ruined, rejected by the man in the button-up shirt, thrown irrevocably out of whack, the glass cracked, the mechanics jarred so that no more than half a pound could be correctly ascertained. Sometimes Uncle Butch would shove a screwdriver into the metal guts of an ailing machine, but the prognosis for such a procedure was generally grim. I was therefore not to pick up the scales when they were loaded on and off the truck, my arms too flimsy to be trusted with the weight and investment of the things.
I was allowed only to take bags from customers, place them on top of the scale, figure the weight, and then state the price. “Four pounds. Two dollars.”
“Four pounds? Gimme ‘notha bag. I need more than that. Got the pastor’s family comin’ over for dinner tomorrow after church! Phew! Pastor loves those curly mustids. You ever try those?”
“No.”
“Well, why not? Here, try one. Take a bite.”
I shrugged slightly at the challenge, the picture of nonchalance, then reached into a bushel basket, grabbed hold of a leaf and wiped it off on my money-apron.
“Little dirt won’t hurt you none,” the woman said, watching with a mischievous grin on her big, brown lips.
I nodded and bit down, grinding the green between my molars for a moment with disinterest, but when the taste spread over my tongue I didn’t try to hide my shock and disgust. The woman broke into giggles and those at her elbows looked up to see what was going on.
“Curly mustid,” she said by way of explanation as she nodded at me, and then everyone was chuckling.
“Got a little bite, don’t it?” another one said with a knowing flop of her wrist.
“Yeah,” I said, examining the curly mustard as if to gain a better understanding.
I never imagined that a frilly leaf colored such a happy shade of green could have so much heat and pepper coursing through its veins. This was almost as mean as feeding jalapeños to my younger cousins, but the ladies loved me for my innocence. I was the scrawny farm girl with glasses and freckles and a limp brownish ponytail straggling over ratty work clothes, selling greens, easily coerced into taking big bites of fire leaf. They came back every weekend for years, knowing me as I finished junior high and started high school, knowing me as the girl who sold the mustids and took the food stamps.
“How you doin’, Baby?” they’d say every week. “Mm-mm-mm, look at these greens! I need six pounds. You got any butta’ beans today?”
The markets stretched out across the summer, starting in mid-June when the asparagus and rhubarb and peas were just in, and ending with the last days of October. As the months passed, more and more doors were balanced on bushel baskets and covered with the burgeoning harvest until the frosts set in and the fields went brown. By then, days were so cold that I would wear four pairs of pants to work, making myself sick with all that elastic squeezing at my middle, and five layers of warmth on top so my movements were slow and padded. I despised the taste of coffee, acidic and bitter, but I started drinking it to warm my insides and keep my fingers from freezing on those mornings at the greens table, when I scooped up the leaves myself so the ladies didn’t have to get their hands out of their gloves and make them wet and dirty and cold.