“Listen, for all your words
you cannot know.
In Salvador, coffee is
red-roofed estates,
high walls crowned with shards of glass.
uniformed servants hurrying over marble
toward a buzzing at the door.
In Salvador, coffee is
trips abroad,
languid Miami shopping;
dewy hands
plunged between
voile and cambric and silk.
You say, but for the golden hope of coffee
few men would get ahead.
I say, when the people harvest,
all they reap is bitter grounds.
In Salvador, coffee is
filled berry baskets
tied around waists;
bloodied fingertips
wrapped with strips of rag;
sisal arms
reaching up again to pick.
In Salvador, coffee left
in tins, pottery mugs, china cups,
never grows cold.
In Salvador, coffee steams while it sits.”
Izalco, El Salvador in 1932 is a place where no savior is in sight. Coffee farmers who have been working on their small farmlands, and whose fathers and grandfathers worked on that same farmland growing coffee, woke up one day being told that the land is not theirs. And so it was in 1932 that Mercedes Prieto left her homestead with her daughter Jacinta. The evening before, Ignacio Prieto, her husband, was brutally gunned down in the finca of Don Pedro to serve as lesson to other coffee pickers who harboured thoughts of overpowering the landowners.
Mercedes would thereafter join the household of Elena Contreras of the finca La Abundancia as a domestic. This would start three generations of women bound to each other as master and servant and ties of friendship but not quite. Mercedes and her progeny knew very well that much as they were valued and loved by their masters, they were still servants in that place - servants who could not go to the exclusive schools where the children of the finca went and who were expected to schedule their child-bearing so as not to skew the activities of their masters.
Interspersed through the lives of the women are the stories of their loves, of long-running radio soap opera episodes whose plots were not much different from their own joys and tragedies, and how coffee has all held them captive in its clutch.
Bitter Grounds end in a note not any less explosive as how it opened. It would take a third generation Prieto, Maria Mercedes, to undertake an action in 1977 which her grandafather Ignacio hesitated to do 45 years before. It would also take that many years to resolve the question which haunted her grandmother and namesake Mercedes throughout her life.
The book ends with the following epilogue: “The story continues, as all stories do until life itself is done. In a country named The Savior, 1980 brought full-scale civil war. By 1992, when peace was signed, 75,000 had died; 300,000 had fled, and 5 million remained, these filled with hope on bitter grounds.”
The book won the American Book Award in 1998.
you cannot know.
In Salvador, coffee is
red-roofed estates,
high walls crowned with shards of glass.
uniformed servants hurrying over marble
toward a buzzing at the door.
In Salvador, coffee is
trips abroad,
languid Miami shopping;
dewy hands
plunged between
voile and cambric and silk.
You say, but for the golden hope of coffee
few men would get ahead.
I say, when the people harvest,
all they reap is bitter grounds.
In Salvador, coffee is
filled berry baskets
tied around waists;
bloodied fingertips
wrapped with strips of rag;
sisal arms
reaching up again to pick.
In Salvador, coffee left
in tins, pottery mugs, china cups,
never grows cold.
In Salvador, coffee steams while it sits.”
Izalco, El Salvador in 1932 is a place where no savior is in sight. Coffee farmers who have been working on their small farmlands, and whose fathers and grandfathers worked on that same farmland growing coffee, woke up one day being told that the land is not theirs. And so it was in 1932 that Mercedes Prieto left her homestead with her daughter Jacinta. The evening before, Ignacio Prieto, her husband, was brutally gunned down in the finca of Don Pedro to serve as lesson to other coffee pickers who harboured thoughts of overpowering the landowners.
Mercedes would thereafter join the household of Elena Contreras of the finca La Abundancia as a domestic. This would start three generations of women bound to each other as master and servant and ties of friendship but not quite. Mercedes and her progeny knew very well that much as they were valued and loved by their masters, they were still servants in that place - servants who could not go to the exclusive schools where the children of the finca went and who were expected to schedule their child-bearing so as not to skew the activities of their masters.
Interspersed through the lives of the women are the stories of their loves, of long-running radio soap opera episodes whose plots were not much different from their own joys and tragedies, and how coffee has all held them captive in its clutch.
Bitter Grounds end in a note not any less explosive as how it opened. It would take a third generation Prieto, Maria Mercedes, to undertake an action in 1977 which her grandafather Ignacio hesitated to do 45 years before. It would also take that many years to resolve the question which haunted her grandmother and namesake Mercedes throughout her life.
The book ends with the following epilogue: “The story continues, as all stories do until life itself is done. In a country named The Savior, 1980 brought full-scale civil war. By 1992, when peace was signed, 75,000 had died; 300,000 had fled, and 5 million remained, these filled with hope on bitter grounds.”
The book won the American Book Award in 1998.
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