Yes! I know it’s been roughly 200 years since I wrote a new Bob! That’s why I keep dishin’ up these leftovers. Here’s one about corn, which I’ve got a lot of nerve writing because I never grow it anymore. It’s all that crap you read about having to pick it the minute it’s ripe, then eat it as soon as it’s picked. I couldn’t stand the stress.
CORN: A MARVELOUS STRANGE PLANT
By Robin Ford Wallace
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There is something about corn that drives people crazy.
I noticed it the first time I raised corn, when I was a young sharecropper in Atlanta. I’ve already told the story in this space, but I’ll repeat that my friend Mary Hart and I were helping a couple in their 80s grow a garden. They had a post-juvenile-delinquent son named Jimmy who was 60-odd and still lived at home. He had always been peculiar but it was the corn that drove him over the edge. He fussed over it and brooded over it and guarded it like a dog, and finally he began accusing us of stealing it.
But what stands out in my memory is planting the corn that spring. It was close to sunset. Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows as the dew began to fall, dropping in the seed corn. Jimmy followed close behind us, breathing noisily and pouring fertilizer on top. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something intrinsically nasty about the whole thing.
Now I’ve been reading the most interesting book, The Story of Corn, by Betty Fussell, and I’ve learned that that sort of thing has been going on for 10,000 years.
American Indians were crazy about corn. They ate it green, ripe, dried, roasted, fried, ground and pickled. Girls made a powder of it for their faces. Timekeeping methods developed around its growing season.
Indian religions evolved around the great central fact that it was corn that kept people alive. The Taino word “mahiz,” from which “maize” and the scientific name for corn, Zea mays, were derived, means “life-giver.”
So there were corn gods and corn goddesses. Peaceful North American Indians had their Green Corn Dance, and cannibalistic South American tribes ritually snarfed their enemies with a sacred side of corn. “Corn maidens” and “corn kings” participated in what were presumably fertility rites, but after the thing with Jimmy I skimmed over that chapter.
Anyway, that’s nothing. The Maya were so crazy about corn they used human sacrifices as their preferred organic plant food. In the book there is a particularly gruesome Mayan drawing of a prisoner tied to the altar, his stomach cut open, out of it growing a stylized stalk of guess what.
When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they had never seen anything like corn. In his 1619 A New Herbal, Henry Lyte wrote: “This Corne is a marvelous strange plant, nothing resembling any other kind of grayne, for it bringeth forth his seede cleane contrarie from the place where the Floures grow.”
Actually, corn has the peculiar arrangement of two sets of flowers, one male and one female, separated as starkly on the plant as anything you will find in the Arab world. The “Floures” Lyte was referring to were the male set, located in tassels on top of the plant. These produce pollen. The female flowers are found along incipient cobs about halfway down the stalk, and they mature into kernels after receiving pollen from the males.
Every kernel-to-be is fertilized separately, and this occurs by means of one individual filament, or silk, each sends up through the thick sheath that encloses them to catch a grain of pollen. So each kernel is a separate fruit and may have a different daddy from its neighbor on the cob, which explains how corn ears may contain different-colored kernels in the same row.
And that daddy might well be from another variety of corn. The corn silk filament is a tiny target to aim for, and the male flowers make up for it via the shotgun approach, producing about 20,000 times as much pollen as needed to fertilize each kernel. This pollen travels on the wind, and is eager to get there, so when you plant two kinds of corn anywhere near each other and expect them to produce true to kind, it is like landing a shipful of lonely sailors on a Polynesian isle populated by maidens with blue-black hair and coconut bras, and expecting them to exchange nothing but recipes.
Ironically, though corn is so good at pollinating itself, it can’t grow at all without human intervention. The kernels are too solidly sheathed in the husk to germinate.
Well, it’s a crazy kind of plant.
Anyway, the wheat-eating European settlers arrived to find ancient America built largely on corn, thought for a minute, and then built modern America entirely on corn. You will now find corn products in mayonnaise, soap, paint, insecticide, shaving cream, embalming fluid and beer.
There is a quote I read somewhere by beat poet Allen Ginsberg in which he dismissed any notion of the loftiness of human communication with: “We’re just meat talkin’ to meat.” The book points out that meat is corn, too
There are corn products in the car you drive to the grocery store, the cart you push through it, the store building itself and every product you buy there with the possible exception of fresh fish. Which means that we’re corn, too – with the possible exception of those of us who live exclusively on fresh fish.
Well. We seem to have very little room left to discuss actually growing corn, which is fine because I don’t. Everything you read about corn says you have to pick it at the exact moment it’s ready, then race it to a pot of water you already have boiling, or else the sugar starts turning to starch and it’s ruined. So when I’ve grown corn, that’s what I’ve tried to do.
It made me crazy.
But if you like corn, by all mean go ahead and plant it. Ignore the experts who give you the crap about sprinting to the boiling pot, and ignore me raving about the sacredness and smarminess of corn. What do we know?
We’re just corn talkin’ to corn.
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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