Yam

He opens the fridge and ice cold air blows in his face. He shuts it. Twenty minutes later, he opens it again, expecting something different. There is no rice and stew--a staple in his life.  A sachet of beans and a tuber of yam sit in a  lonely corner of the pantry. His mother wasn’t going to the grocery any time soon. 

A pot of beans is perched on the stove, next to a pot of yam slices.  His stomach is grumbling so he has no choice. Resigning to his fate, he scoops some yam and beans onto a plate then takes a forkful, and is neither satisfied nor cynical—just a learned indifference to this meal. He developed an aversion to it after years of being fed bits of mashed yam as a toddler. His mother would chew the yam until it became a mushy paste, coated with her loving saliva, and slip it into his mouth. He would swallow it with delight.  Now, he ate it only as a last resort.

            No matter the gra-gra of a potato it can never become a yam. The potato is the yam’s American cousin. Potato is to ketchup as yam is to stew, Asaro, egg, eggplant, vegetable soup. Sweet potato and candied yams are distant outsiders. They are confusing to the taste buds—a dessert yet a starch.

        His mother skins yam with the sharp, fast, dexterity of an expert—of someone who has been peeling yams since the age of 5. The rough dark skin unfurls to reveal the glowing white bulb underneath. It slides off in thin slivers.

        Hands softened by moist American soil are not as skilled. They must slice the yam into disks before proceeding to shave off the skin from each one. The crisp slice of a sharp knife through a long bulb of yam is satisfying. She has to hurry and wash the slimy goo off the peeled yam chunks and her hands before they begin to itch.

        You’ll never find yams at a Giant or Shoppers.  It’s much too exotic. You would find it in an ethnic food store-- a cultural bizarre. People from all four corners of the world,  traverse the aisles looking for the perfect addition to their dishes, a spritz of heritage. These stores unite them in their foreignness. They all converge in a single place, for a single purpose: the hunt. For the Nigerian family, it’s the yam. For another family, it might be Samosa ingredients or wasabi.

        An old wise man in a rustic village awaits the new yam festival. If you cut the head off a yam and bury it in the sand, it will produce ten more--more than enough to offer as a bride price.