When you’re married, you hear your spouse repeat things. The more original a statement sounds, the more often your spouse will repeat it. Lately Felipe has been telling everyone about the taste of pawpaw, an obscure fruit native to the southeastern United States. “You can only compare it to what you know,” he hints.
To me, pawpaw looks and tastes like banana pudding. Yellow, almost artificially sweet, best eaten with a spoon. Most of the pawpaw-eaters I know agree. That is, my neighbor with white hair brightening the darkness of his nostrils agrees. The little girl wearing a candy necklace at the farmers’ market agrees. The craft brewer who has converted a mechanic shop into a tap house agrees.
Felipe’s first spoon of pawpaw made him sway. “It’s graviola! ” he said, naming one of his favorite fruits from Brazil. He continues to spring this knowledge on other people whenever he has a chance. Graviola. It’s graviola.
Pawpaws are not graviola, but they are more closely related to graviola than banana pudding. The pawpaw is the northernmost member of the Annonaceae family, the only member commonly found in the United States. Other Annonaceae species include a peck of tropical fruits with names you won’t find on American grocery store shelves. Atemoya, cherimoya, graviola. If you’re lucky, you might find a can of guanabana juice in a Latin market, somewhere between the confirmation dresses and the corn husks.
Felipe, who grew up in Brazil, calls the names of the pawpaw’s southern relatives in a buoyant voice reserved for old friends, but the pawpaw’s name, scattered throughout early American records, has been largely forgotten by those of us who grew up in pawpaw country. The pawpaw fruit, sweet, nutritious, and hardy, has disappeared from our diet. And though there are stirrings of a pawpaw revival in small towns along leafy roads, the pawpaw is emerging in our collective consciousness not as an old friend but as an exotic debutant, a botanical eccentricity, a hipster conceit. Lately when I taste pawpaw, I’ve started to taste paradox. I wonder what the story of the pawpaw’s disappearance can tell us about American identity: the things we claim and the things we discard. It might seem like a large question for a small green-skinned fruit, but when I taste pawpaw, I ask.
EARLY MARCH 2024. Felipe and I are driving to visit the Kentucky State University Research Farm, which has acted as the USDA gene bank for Asimina triloba (the common pawpaw) since 1994. More specifically, Felipe is driving, and I am scribbling in a floppy notebook: miles of black fence surrounding horse pasture, grackle calling, creekwater winter blue—too cold for algae. Felipe and I have lived in Kentucky for a year, so the landscape is becoming familiar. Felipe likes to tell people Kentucky state law requires all fences to be painted black (because black blends in with the shadows of the landscape? because white paint gets dirty too quickly?). Every time I see a black fence, my imagination gallops along it.
Gradually, the black fences give way to barbwire and honeysuckle. We turn at a sign for the research farm and coast towards a green-roofed barn with three neat cupolas. In the parking lot, we’re met by a pair of horticulturists, Jeremy Lowe and Sheri Crabtree, who lead us to the pawpaws. The trees are grown in rows on a hillside; valleys are to be avoided, since they could act as bowls of shadow, water, and frost, chilling young pawpaws. Up on the hillside, the tree trunks are painted with white latex to protect them from sunburn. Translucent irrigation lines droop from tree to tree, ready to combat summer droughts, but for now, the orchard is cool and damp. I’m a biologist, not a professional journalist. After a moment of gazing at the trees, I fold my notebook inside out and say, “So, tell me about your pawpaws.”
The pawpaw tree, Asimina triloba, has been evolving in North America for hundreds of thousands of years. The ancestral pawpaw stalked glaciers as they melted, froze, and melted again. Eventually, this game of glacial cat-and-mouse shaped out a territory for pawpaws that spanned from northern Florida up to Pennsylvania and west to Texas. Other members of the Annonaceae family stayed behind in the balmy jungles of Central America, so the pawpaw found itself alone in a new country, its oversized leaves standing out in forests of oak and maple.
The pawpaw’s Ice Age history is still apparent today, if you know where to look. The pawpaw is the largest native fruit in the United States. One pawpaw will fill your palm; three will be difficult to carry without a basket. Embedded in the pawpaw’s custardy flesh are numerous large seeds. Because of its large size, sweet taste, and heavy aroma, the pawpaw is often categorized as an “anachronistic fruit.” A fruit stranded in time. The pawpaw clearly evolved to be eaten, its seeds nurtured in the guts of a large herbivore and dispersed in rich piles of dung, but at present, there are no large herbivores around to do the job. Of course, during the last Ice Age, there were mastodons. Pawpaw researchers have rallied behind the hypothesis that yesterday’s pawpaws were dispersed by these ghostly giants (although one entertaining paper dissented when a pair of Asian elephants, acting as “analogs” for the extinct mastodon, turned up their trunks at the pawpaws offered by graduate students).
The pawpaw displays additional cold-climate adaptations. The pawpaw is one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring, a precaution that protects leaves from killer frosts late in the season. Interestingly, the pawpaw is more willing to gamble with flowers. When Felipe and I visit the KSU research farm, the leafless pawpaw branches are decked out with black, velvety buds. The outlines of the three outer petals that gave the pawpaw its species’ epithet, triloba, are already visible. “Pawpaws flower in waves,” Jeremy explains when I worry aloud about the buds and the cold. Because their flowering period is extended, pawpaws are less susceptible to crop failure than short-flowering fruits like apples, cherries, and peaches. If a killer frost gets the early flowers, pawpaws have more buds waiting to replace them.
Pawpaws were well known to Native Americans. The website for Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, the oldest known site of human habitation in North America, advises visitors to look out for pawpaws, one of the native plants that fed Meadowcroft’s ancient people and, today, “enhances the visual beauty at Meadowcroft.” In his definitive book, Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, Andrew Moore notes that the Iroquois, the Creek, the Caddo, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Shawnee, the Seneca, the Miami, the Osage, the Santee, and the Powhatan people all have names and uses for pawpaw. Pawpaws were eaten fresh, dried, baked into breads, and added to stews. Fibers from pawpaw bark were woven into sandals, belts, baskets, and blankets.
Appropriately, my first encounter with a blooming pawpaw takes place in April at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington D.C. The pawpaw stands just where Jeremy and Sheri told me it would, lifting wrinkly, maroon flowers up to a sky full of mare’s tail clouds. A few feet away from the tree, a line of food trucks does a brisk business selling hamburgers and hotdogs to tourists. No one looks at me as I jump up and down, trying to catch a branch of the pawpaw tree so I can sniff a flower. I’ve been told pawpaw flowers have a faintly unpleasant smell, a hint of rot that attracts pollinating beetles and flies, but all I detect outside the National Museum of the American Indian is a heavy odor of ketchup.
On this particular weekend, most of the tourists in D.C. have come to see the Cherry Blossom Festival. Three thousand eight hundred cherry trees are planted along a two-mile loop. Children are dressed in light pink to match the trees. Dogs bend to sniff the ground and raise their heads with petals stuck to their noses. The cherry trees decorate the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the Washington Monument. Cherry petals swamp the corners of the fountains at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. Nearby, a stone inscription quotes Roosevelt: “Among American citizens, there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races.”
The cherry trees, Prunus x yedoensis, native to Japan, are undoubtedly beautiful, but I can’t help grieving a little for the pawpaw holding its sturdy, bell-shaped flowers above a street corner five blocks outside the festival. The pawpaw: invisible to passersby, race forgotten. I wonder what a Pawpaw Blossom Festival would look like or if pawpaw flowers were once greeted with as much exuberance as today’s cherry blossoms. The promise of pawpaw fruit must have been meaningful to generations of Americans. Following the native people’s example, explorers and colonists readily brought the pawpaw into their diets. Jefferson sent pawpaw seeds as diplomatic gifts. Audubon painted the yellow-billed cuckoo in a pawpaw tree. On their return journey, Lewis and Clark noted that their men were “entirely out of provisions” but “appear perfectly contented and tell us that they can live very well on the pappaws.” Malnourished Civil War soldiers wrote home about the saving grace of the pawpaw. Enslaved people supplemented their diets with pawpaws, and conductors on the Underground Railroad planned routes through pawpaw groves. In the Progressive Era, several magazines held nationwide contests to find the largest, firmest, sweetest pawpaws and press them into cultivation. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, families fell back onto the pawpaws they could collect among the dry leaves of the forest floor.
Shortly before leaving D.C., I call my grandfather, who remembers dark nights without electricity, winters when butchered hogs could be packed in ice with no fear of a thaw, to ask if he remembers eating pawpaws as a boy. No, he says, but he remembers a song from school. Before I can ask, he sings the words for me: “Pickin up pawpaws, put em in your pocket. Pickin up pawpaws, put em in your pocket. Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.”
Given their prominence in early American culture, historical documents can answer most questions about pawpaws. Who ate them, where did they grow, how valuable were they? But one great mystery remains in the pawpaw’s story. Why did America leave the pawpaw behind?
The most popular explanation is industrialization. Pawpaws are not easily mass produced. The pawpaw fruit doesn’t change color as it ripens. Without a color signal, timing a harvest can be difficult. The only way to know a pawpaw is ripe is to climb a ladder and give it a gentle squeeze; often, a single pawpaw requires several checks before it can be picked. Once harvested, pawpaws have a short shelf life. In the time it takes to transport a crate of pawpaws to a grocery store, many of the pawpaws spoil. They arrive brown and sickly sweet. The coup de grâce to pawpaw production is the fruit’s tender flesh. Even if a harvest of perfectly ripe pawpaws could be delivered to a grocery store, they could not be packed into regular shipping crates. Pawpaws bruise too easily. At the KSU research farm, Jeremy tells me, “Some people have tried hanging nets under pawpaw trees to let the fruits ripen and fall on their own, but the fruits are too soft. They end up with the pattern of the net bruised across them.”
In a culture where fruits are collected by children as they cut through the woods on their way to school, or eaten by hunters squatting under a tree in the morning mist, or picked at the edge of the yard and carried to the kitchen inside a mother’s apron, the pawpaw flourishes.
In a culture where fruits are selected from anonymous piles under fluorescent strip lights, the pawpaw teeters, tips into obscurity. This is the culture most Americans live in today. We live in a landscape of choice carved by industrial giants. The foods we eat are the foods they can produce most efficiently and sell for the highest profit. The paths we travel are the flattest, straightest lines that can be drawn in asphalt. If we’re not careful, the things we love are decided by industry too. We begin to give our love not to things we encounter once, serendipitously, in the wild but to things industry shows us again and again. Slowly, whether we realize it or not, our love becomes tethered to money.
FELIPE HAS LIVED in the United States for ten years. Paltry compared to the pawpaw’s hundred thousand. In the early years of our marriage, he was full of anachronisms, relics of the country he left behind. He wore flipflops in the shower. He suggested we cover all the mirrors in the house when there was a chance of lightning. He promised to be home by “midnight thirty.” But Felipe is an adaptable person. In time, I began to tease that he was more American than me. Since receiving his green card, Felipe had been working for a tech company based in San Francisco. His salary was extravagant. His promotions came with extra stock market shares and packages of honey pistachios mailed to our doorstep. He bought fancy sneakers and began running marathons, then he bought a matte black bicycle with dime-thin tires and began cycling for sixty miles, one hundred miles. He tracked all his activity on an app and commented on his friends’ routes. He posted a picture of himself in his helmet, one hand holding up a box turtle, the other hand split into a peace sign. At least I am faster than this guy!
Despite his cushy job, Felipe dreamed of starting his own business. Not any old business. A passive income machine. He attended entrepreneur meetups at craft breweries where he ordered cider because he couldn’t stomach beer. He watched Shark Tank and read books with titles like Million Dollar Weekend and Never Split the Difference. He was always introducing me to old white guys named Bob or Rich.
Felipe was approaching the economic switchpoint where an immigrant goes from being other to being the most American American of all. He was a picture of self-made success. He brought to mind the Statue of Liberty, the American Dream, the Melting Pot. People waxed romantic, entrusting him with stories of great-great grandparents who came over from Italy or Ireland. Their message was clear: you are one of us.
The United States has strong economic incentives to embrace immigrants. In 2020, 29% of full-time science and engineering faculty working in the US were born abroad. [1] In 2021, one in five physicians were born and educated outside of the United States. [2] Thirty-six percent of US patents filed since 1990 can be attributed to immigrant inventors. Forty percent of Nobel Prize winners living in the US are immigrants. [3] Without the contributions of immigrants, the United States would not have the reputation for scientific leadership it currently enjoys, nor the supersized economy and all it offers.
I once asked Felipe to name the most American thing about him. I suggested his mastery of my grandma’s potato salad recipe or his habit of mowing the lawn twice a week. At first I thought he was joking when he said, “My social security card.” Then he explained, “My social security card gives me access to my job. My job gives me access to my salary.”
In other words, his money makes him American.
Not all immigrants fall into the same income bracket as Felipe. In 2019, one-third of the 44 million immigrants living in the United States qualified as “low income.” [4] Low-income immigrants are more likely than other immigrants to live in ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods that US-born Americans nickname “New Havana,” “Little Italy,” or “Chinatown” to emphasize their otherness. Low-income immigrants are less likely to speak English than other immigrants; many US-born Americans are quick to complain about the languages immigrants do speak, despite the lack of a federally designated language in the United States. Low-income immigrants are less likely than other immigrants (or US-born citizens) to vote. [5] Eligible adults might choose not to vote because they are unfamiliar with the voting process in the United States or because they are anxious about encountering language barriers. They might choose not to vote because they lack time off work, child care, or transportation to the polls. They might choose not to vote, as one friend whispered while we sat in the bleachers watching her daughter’s basketball game, because their spouse is undocumented and they fear any interaction with the government which might draw attention to their household. They might choose not to vote because they have lost faith in a political system which consistently frames immigrants as a problem.
Without representation at the polls, the concerns of low-income immigrants continue to be left out of government policy. Worse, low-income immigrants become targets for politicians who wish to attract voters by pointing at the threat of an outgroup. The day after former President Donald Trump was found guilty of thirty-four felony charges, he held a press conference filled with blistering anti-immigrant rhetoric. Hours after the press conference, Trump’s campaign broke records for small-donor financial contributions. His supporters were eager to put their money where his mouth was. Eager to say: you are not one of us.
If, in America, immigrants who secure high incomes are romanticized and immigrants who work for a low income are marginalized, then the disparity between these two groups—both immigrants, both seeking acceptance—may reveal the true measure by which America grants “Americanness” to its citizens. America identifies those who have or make money as American. Those who do not have or do not make money remain Other.
In the summer of 2023, shortly after ChatGPT3 sent shockwaves through the tech industry, 226,000 workers were laid off by tech companies. [6] Felipe was among them. I’ve always told friends Felipe has a Zen personality. He didn’t panic during the first month he was unemployed, or the second, or the third. When he was turned down for an interview during his sixth month of unemployment, he went straight to the grocery store. He came home an hour later with an assortment of products I had never seen him buy before: dried tamarinds, wafer cookies, and a Virgin of Guadalupe prayer candle. The next day, he dug a colorful hammock he had brought from Brazil out of the closet and hung it up on one side of his office. He swung in the hammock inches above the floor. It was as if he needed a break from the pursuit of money. He needed a break from being American.
BEFORE VISITING the KSU research farm, I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen a pawpaw in the wild. I asked Jeremy, “How are the pawpaws doing out there? Should I be worried about pawpaws and climate change?” His answer was surprisingly optimistic. Wild pawpaw populations are stable. They have lost some ground to habitat destruction, but they are abundant in places where forests have regrown or been maintained. The chaotic freeze-thaw cycle brought on by climate change has caused a few years of crop loss. The KSU research farm has lost three crops in the last few years, compared to two crops in the prior twenty years. But, Jeremy points out, pawpaws don’t actually depend on fruit to reproduce. “You might be standing in a large pawpaw patch without realizing it if you’re only looking for fruit,” he tells me. “Pawpaws also reproduce clonally.”
During clonal reproduction, new pawpaw trunks shoot up from a wide network of roots. To the casual observer, each trunk looks like an individual tree, complete with its own flickering canopy, its own frost scars, its own swallowtail cocoons. But all the trees are genetically identical. Biologically speaking, they belong to one monolithic organism. I was shaken by the idea of clonal pawpaws. I had begun to fashion the pawpaw as a folk hero in my mind, a model of resistance against conformity and commodification. But, as is so often the case, nature’s truth was more complicated.
The benefits of clonal reproduction have been documented in several tree species, including willow, redwood, and aspen (as in the quaking aspens of Pando, a collection of male clones that have, together, been dubbed the largest living organism in the world). By producing a large, reliable stock of new shoots each year, clonal reproduction reduces the impact of predation on young trees. The subterranean connections between clonal organisms also allow them to support each other by exchanging resources and chemical messages.
Healthy clonal patches of pawpaw can go years without producing fruit. Pawpaw clones are incapable of pollinating each other. Unless an insect wanders through the clonal patch carrying pollen from an outside tree, the flowers bloom and wither, leaving nothing behind. In some ways, a year without fruit is a good year for a pawpaw tree. Rather than pouring energy and nutrients into fruit production, the tree can put out roots, branches, and leaves, making itself stronger for years to come. Yet, if pawpaw trees never produced fruit, they would never have the opportunity to introduce new genetic variants to the population. Without genetic diversity, the pawpaw population would have difficulty adapting to changes in their environment. They would all be susceptible to the same diseases, all limited to the same thermal range, all reliant on the same pollinators. Fruits, with their unique genes and traits, are the pawpaws’ protection against an uncertain future.
To find fruit, Jeremy suggests I visit the Frankfort Cemetery, where he knows a group of genetically unique pawpaws exchange pollen and produce fruit each year. Felipe and I take our dog one hot morning in June. She’s excited to be in a new place. She pulls hard on her leash and snuffles, a little too curiously, around the graves.
In the middle of our pawpaw search, we come upon the most famous residents of the Frankfort Cemetery: Daniel and Rebecca Boone. The Boones rest under an obelisk on top of a hill overlooking several bourbon distilleries. Each side of the obelisk is carved with an image from the Boones’ life. On the front, Daniel Boone stands with his foot on top of a native person he has just killed, his musket pointed towards his next victim. In two other carvings, Boone is seen orienteering or overseeing the construction of a cabin. Rebecca graces one side of the obelisk, where she milks a dairy cow. The Boones’ remains were exhumed in 1845 and moved from Missouri to Frankfort, where their presence would help sell expensive plots in the park-like cemetery designed for Kentucky’s capital city. Even in death, the rich and white would be placed together.
And so, when I see the long, tear-drop shaped pawpaw leaves in the corner of the Frankfort Cemetery and Felipe points at a cluster of green fruit, I feel I am witnessing something radical. The pawpaws could replicate themselves a thousand times and overrun the cemetery, but instead, they have chosen to invest in something new, a blend of self and other that might fail in the harsh world or might thrive in unexpected, brilliant ways.
My dog selects a twig from a snarl of debris. She drops onto her stomach, wraps her paws around one end of the twig, and chews patiently. I watch light shift across the pawpaw’s young skin. I wonder, What does it mean when national identity is defined, primarily, by money? What does it mean when we forget old friends who cannot be turned to profit? When we turn away new friends because they come to us with light pockets?
I think, by basing our identity on money, we estrange ourselves from so much of our nation’s beauty. The most beautiful things in America—white gleam of a nuthatch bouncing up a tree, laughter from a friend, pulse of samba through the dusk—are free.
AFTER EIGHT MONTHS of unemployment, Felipe is settling into a new job. His salary has returned to its pre-AI-revolution level, but the hammock still hangs in his office. Red, orange, green, black. We’ve hung a few album covers from João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso on the walls. Yesterday, I found Felipe crouching in the driveway with a citronella candle. He was stenciling tiles to match the Portuguese colonial church where his grandmother used to go to mass.
I have marked my calendar for the third Thursday in September, when the Kentucky Pawpaw Festival will bring hundreds of pawpaw fanciers to Louisville. I’ve been told to expect tree grafting workshops, pawpaw icecream, pawpaw beer, pawpaw and spiceberry pie. The staff from the KSU Research Farm will be there, giving away seedlings of the cultivars they hope might do well in grocery stores someday. Pawpaws bred for firmer flesh, pawpaws bred to ripen early so the season can be extended, pawpaws bred to change color when they’re ready to eat. If the history of other commercialized plants can be used to predict the future of the pawpaw, the pawpaws of tomorrow might look very different from the wild pawpaws of today. I’m not sure if the possibilities excite or sadden me.
Like most true stories, the story of the pawpaw is ambiguous. In one way, though, it gives me hope. I imagine the first person who came across a pawpaw. Someone found a bruised fruit among the leaves and twigs and broken husks of nuts. When they tasted the fruit, they found it strange and sweet, so they brought it along with them into a life of want, need, hurry, and love. This too is human nature. Someone found a pawpaw, and they said, “You belong.”
[1] National Science Foundation, “Foreign-born Students and Workers in the U.S. Science and Engineering Enterprise,” 2020 Science and Engineering Indicators, 2020.
[2] Stacy Weiner, “1 in 5 U.S. physicians was born and educated abroad. Who are they and what do they contribute?”, Association of American Medical Colleges, 2023.
[3] Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade, and Beatriz Pousada. “The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants To Innovation In The United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022.
[4] Julia Gelatt, Valerie Lacarte, and Joshua Rodriguez, “A Profile of Low-Income Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, 2022.
[5] Sam Fulwood, “Why Young, Minority, and Low-Income Citizens Don’t Vote,” Center for American Progress, 2014.
[6] Inspirys Solutions, “Tech layoffs in 2023: Causes, Consequences and Affected Companies,” LinkedIn, 2024.
Mallory Miles is an environmental biologist and creative writer from southern Appalachia. In her writing, she looks for ways that natural phenomena inform (and sometimes quietly parallel) human identity. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Diagram, The Ex-Puritan, and the Stringybark Anthology.
