Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: 1. Genesis Summary & Analysis

Looking back on her childhood, an older Jeanette writes that “like most people,” she lived with her mother and father for a long time. Her father enjoyed watching wrestling, and her mother was, Jeanette says (metaphorically), a wrestler—no matter what Jeanette’s mother was up against she was “in the white corner,” or, in other words, always felt that she was right.

Jeanette’s mother had a clear list of friends and enemies. Enemies included the Devil, sex, the family next door, and garden slugs. Friends were God, the family dog, Charlotte Brontë novels, and the poisoning gardening pellets used to kill slugs. Jeanette says that she herself was also on her mother’s list of friends “at first,” after having been adopted into the family “to join [mother] in a tag match against the Rest of the World.”

It wasn’t that Jeanette’s mother was unable to bear children, but rather that she didn’t want to, and so she adopted Jeanette. As a child, Jeanette was always told that she was special, and that this specialness derived from her mother’s evangelical beliefs. On Sundays, “the most vigorous day of the whole week,” Jeanette and her mother sat and listened to the BBC World Service news broadcast on the radio to record the progress of their church’s missionaries who had gone out into the world.

On Sundays, Jeanette’s mother prayed alone and standing up in the parlor until ten in the morning. Of her mother’s unusual prayer stance, Jeanette says that she believes her mother’s relationship with God “had a lot to do with positioning.” Jeanette’s mother was Old Testament “through and through,” and her approach to religion reflected the scorched-earth, unforgiving nature of the Old Testament God; Jeanette’s mother ended each Sunday morning prayer by calling upon God to smite her enemies.

Jeanette often sat in the kitchen while her mother prayed in the next room, and Jeanette knew when her mother began praying for vengeance that it was time to boil tea and get ready to turn on the radio. Jeanette’s mother would frequently quiz her on facts about the Bible to prepare her for the Bible quizzes that took place in church, and Jeanette’s mother would grow angry if she did not know the answers to her questions.

During the World Service on the radio, Jeanette was tasked with writing down notes for her mother, who was the Missionary Secretary at their church. According to Jeanette, if the Missionary Report on any given Sunday was good, her mother would cook a delicious meal for lunch. If the news was bad, and the church’s missionaries were struggling or dying out in the world, Jeanette’s mother would spend the rest of the day listening to the radio, making only boiled eggs for lunch. Jeanette writes that her father was “depressed” by the paltry meals served when the news wasn’t good, but that he wasn’t allowed to cook, as Jeanette’s mother believed she was the only person in the house who knew her way around the kitchen, and would not be told otherwise.

In the afternoons, after prayers and lunch, Jeanette and her mother would take the dog for a walk. While passing the house next door, Jeanette’s mother would denigrate their neighbors, calling them drunks and insulting the fact that they shopped for their clothes at Maxi Ball’s, a warehouse full of cheaply-made clothes.

Jeanette’s town was “a huddled place full of chimneys and back-to-back houses with no gardens,” surrounded by rolling hills. The town was a “fat blot” on the landscape, and Jeanette’s family’s house sat on the top of a sloping hill, which enabled her to look down on the rest of the village “like Jesus on the pinnacle.”

Jeanette recalls travelling to a viaduct behind a tenement building to purchase black peas from the “gypsies” who’d set up shop there. On one such trip, a gypsy woman grabbed Jeanette’s hand, looked at her palm, and foretold that Jeanette would never marry and would never be able to stay still. Jeanette ran home without paying for the peas, unable to understand what the gypsy woman had meant; she’d never even thought about marriage before.

Jeanette knew only two women in town who didn’t have husbands. They ran a paper shop and often gave Jeanette sweets with her purchases, and once invited her to go to the seaside with them. When Jeanette told her mother about the women’s offer, Jeanette’s mother firmly told her no, but would not explain why. Jeanette was not allowed to return to the shop again, and, weeks after the incident, Jeanette overheard her mother telling a woman from church, Mrs. White, that the women at the paper shop “dealt in Unnatural Passions.” Jeanette, hearing this but not understanding what her mother meant, wondered if the women had put chemicals in the sweets they sold.

On their Sunday walks, when Jeanette and her mother got to the top of a hill on the outskirts of town, Jeanette’s mother would begin telling Jeanette stories of God’s wrath, as well as stories of sinners’ miraculous conversions. Often Jeanette’s mother told Jeanette the story of her own conversion, a story which Jeanette considered deeply romantic.

One night, by mistake, Jeanette’s mother had walked into Pastor Spratt’s Glory Crusade, which had been set up in a revival tent. Mesmerized by the handsome Pastor Spratt’s tales and demonstrations of healing miracles, Jeanette’s mother joined his flock, and soon recruited her husband to join the congregation as well. For the remainder of the tent revival, Pastor Spratt had stayed with Jeanette’s parents, and had extolled the glories of missionary work to Jeanette’s mother. Jeanette suspects that her mother was propelled toward religion by “all the things she couldn’t be,” and the fear of not knowing what else to do with her life.

The narrative switches over to a story of Jeanette’s invention. She tells of a princess who was so sensitive that even the deaths of insects left her despondent for weeks. One day, wandering in the woods, the princess came upon a hunchback, who warned the princess that she was in danger of being “burned by [her] own flame.” The old hunchback woman, skilled in magic, confessed to the princess that she was old and wished to die, but could not because she still had so many responsibilities on earth. The hunchback asked the princess if the princess would take over her duties caring for the people of a nearby village. The princess, forgetting all about her life in the palace and the sorrow she once knew, agreed to take over the hunchback’s duties. The old hunchback thanked the princess and then, at once, died.

Jeanette imagines her mother out walking one night after attending the Glory Crusade, and devising a plan to get a child and dedicate it to the Lord. Sometime later, Jeanette speculates, she was adopted, and become her mother’s “vision.”

One night, Jeanette and her parents go to church. There is a visiting speaker, Pastor Finch, who delivers a “terrifying” sermon about how easy it is to become possessed by a demon. The sermon leaves all of the congregants “uneasy.” After the church service there is a banquet. Pastor Finch asks Jeanette how old she is, and she tells him she is seven. Pastor Finch tells her and her mother that seven is a blessed number—but also a cursed one. The best can become the worst, the pastor says, and a demon can return “sevenfold.” He warns Jeanette’s mother—and all the congregants gathered around her—that her “little lily could herself be a house of demons.”

Jeanette, feeling awkward, retreats to the Sunday School Room to play with the children her age. She begins making a piece of felt art inspired by the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, and soon Pastor Finch comes back to the room to check on Jeanette. He notes that in her felt art, the lions are eating Daniel, when in the true story Daniel escaped. Jeanette insists she merely got mixed up, and Pastor Finch helps her to rearrange the felt. Jeanette leaves the room, and when she returns to the banquet hall a member of the congregation, Miss Jewsbury, asks where Pastor Finch is. Jeanette tells her that he is with the children playing with felt, but Miss Jewsbury tells her that she’s being “fanciful.”

Jeanette and her mother leave the banquet with Jeanette’s mother’s friends Alice and May. Jeanette thinks of how horrible Pastor Finch is, and feels badly for his wife. She remembers the gypsy woman’s words—“you’ll never marry”—and thinks that perhaps that won’t be so bad.

As the women continue their stroll home through a bad neighborhood, Factory Bottoms, they pass an open pest control shop run by a woman named Mrs. Arkwright, who calls the women in to say hello. Mrs. Arkwright complains that business is bad, and hopes for a hot summer that’ll bring some vermin out so that she can have some customers again. Mrs. Arkwright gives Jeanette a few empty tins as a present, and then the women go along on their way.

Back at home, Jeanette heads to bed, but knows her mother will stay awake for hours—Jeanette’s mother never goes to bed until four in the morning. When Jeanette is up in the middle of the night needing water or having had a nightmare, she and her mother often sit in the kitchen reading the Bible together.

This, Jeanette says, is how her education began: with her mother teaching her to read from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible. Jeanette’s mother teaches her many things about the world that are plainly incorrect: that rain is caused when clouds collide with a tall building, and that everything in the natural world is a symbol of the struggle between good and evil; for instance, snakes can outrun a horse over a short distance, but will never stay ahead for long. Jeanette asks her mother to teach her French, but Jeanette’s mother refuses, stating only that French was nearly her downfall and that, one day, she will tell Jeanette the story of a man named Pierre.

One day, Jeanette asks her mother why she isn’t allowed to go to school. Her mother often calls school a Breeding Ground, a term which, like Unnatural Passions, Jeanette does not understand. Her mother only tells her that school will lead her astray, and then refuses to say anything more. As her mother continues educating her, Jeanette helps her mother with the gardening and learns to interpret “signs and wonders”—a skill she will need, her mother tells her, when she becomes a missionary one day.

One morning, an envelope is dropped through the letter box. When Jeanette’s mother opens the envelope, she becomes upset. Jeanette asks her mother what the matter is, and her mother tells her that it is time for Jeanette to be sent to school. Jeanette, full of excitement, runs to the outhouse out back to be alone with her glee: she is going to the “Breeding Ground” at last.