Did you ever make stone soup in your early schooling days? If you did, your teacher probably told you that the best way of making stone soup taste really, really great is if everybody who plans to eat some brings one little ingredient to share.
If Timmy brings a carrot, and Jamal brings an onion, and Zerlita brings a pepper, and Mikayla brings some peas, and so on and so on and so on, pretty soon, an enormous pot of tasty soup will be bubbling away. When everyone shares what little they have, all of those not-very-filling ingredients add up to a rich and wonderful dish. And it definitely won't taste like a stone.
At the end of The Bean Trees, as Taylor and Turtle begin their long drive home from Oklahoma City to Tucson, Turtle sings a song about vegetable soup. Turtle loves vegetables, fruit, and legumes, and she knows the names of lots of them. She also knows the names of all the people who have been loving and caring for her over the past seven months or so in Tucson, and as she sings, all of those names get mixed up together. Taylor tells us:
"The sky went from dust-color to gray and then cool black sparked with stars, and she was still wide awake. She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest.
"And me. I was the main ingredient." (17.187-188)
Cute, right? So, The Bean Trees makes use of a lot of different symbols and metaphors for community, and Turtle's final vegetable-soup song is one of them. Just like a kindergarten teacher's recipe for "stone soup," Turtle's song points to the "nourishment" that a community of friends and family can provide for a child.
As Lou Ann tells Taylor, no one person can right all the wrongs in the world, but, as The Bean Trees suggests, when a community of people come together to share what little they have, wonderful changes can come about. Now ain't that inspiring!