THE MANGO TREE: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, by Annabelle Tometich
When her 64-year-old mother was arrested in 2015 for shooting a BB gun at the truck of someone who she believed had stolen fruit from her Florida property’s mango tree, one of Annabelle Tometich’s colleagues called to check in.
Because Tometich worked at The News-Press, a daily newspaper in her hometown, Fort Myers, this colleague had more than her well-being on his mind. “You have to write something, huh?” she asked, pausing to take the call outside the courthouse where her mother, Josefina, had just appeared. But Tometich knew the answer: A story is a story, and this one had a Floridian ripeness no local reporter could deny.
A writer’s loyalties, Tometich also understood, exist in tension with a hunger for story — which is to say, her need for coherence, a means of control. Tometich’s nonfiction debut, “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony,” bears out this tension. In reclaiming Josefina from the mug shot and clickbait headlines that followed her arrest, the author opens the door to something even more lasting, and possibly more severe: a daughter’s unflinching gaze.
For the better part of “The Mango Tree,” that gaze belongs to Tometich as a shy, recessive child, a girl whose longing for “normality” — a consuming wish to belong — is spawned by her eccentric, tumultuous family, but comes to extend well beyond it.
In large measure this wish is a product of Tometich’s biracial identity: Josefina, who left her family in the Philippines to work as a nurse in the United States, married a privileged, white American man.
Though both sought to escape their families of origin, they were bound to them in opposite ways: “Dad lived off his parents most of his life,” Tometich observes. “Mom supported hers until the days they died.”
The early chapters are haunted by the presence of Josefina’s mother-in-law, Josephine, a sickly and increasingly horrid woman who refers to Josefina as, among other slurs, “that Mongoloid.”
Using the present tense to convey her preteen and adolescent perspectives, Tometich adopts a tone of tart remove, a mix of knowing and wide-eyed intrigue. This is a narrator who notices that although her mother is strong and capable while Josephine is frail and weak, “Gramma is white” — and whiteness entails a greater proximity to power, if not the thing itself.
Keeping us close to the child’s-eye view of her formidable mother and the tragedies that befall their family — including her father’s sudden, mysterious death when Tometich was 9 — yields moments of unexpected humor and stinging truth.
She writes scene and dialogue with the metronomic precision of a seasoned broadsheet reporter, her ledes and kickers often bearing a sly, precocious slant. “Tito Gary’s funeral falls somewhere between Dad’s and Gramma’s in terms of attendance,” she begins one chapter, following her uncle’s suicide in their home. To the 10-year-old narrator, this latest death makes even less sense than the others: “Why would anyone want to leave America? We’ve got liberty and justice for all.”
Later, when Josefina takes her children on their first trip to Manila, Tometich’s initial alienation from her extended family — and their poverty — cedes to a creeping admiration for her mother, who appears poised and self-assured in her native element, able “to shame her siblings into doing her bidding with the mere tilt of her head.” Unlike her daughter, Josefina does appear to have “a place where she is normal. A home where she belongs.”
Occasionally, Tometich will slip out from behind her child’s perspective to let us know, for instance, what she believes now about the unresolved circumstances surrounding her father’s death. These moments are brief, and grow more conspicuous as the story progresses. Few scenes depict Josefina and her adult daughter together: We learn in a stroke that Tometich didn’t see her mother for the six months between the shooting, which shattered the rear window of the plaintiff’s truck, and Josefina’s sentencing hearing.
Increasingly strange in her habits and behaviors (at one point Tometich refers to her mother as “manic-depressive”), Josefina remains a staunch but elusive figure, remorseless about the felony charge for which she served five years of probation.
Tometich’s reclamation of the mother whose jailing she fantasized about as a child hinges on a dawning sense of her own internalized shame. “The justice system does not see her as a whole person, worthy of leniency and redemption,” Tometich writes, late in the book, of the harshness of Josefina’s punishment. “And up until this point, neither did I.”
The reader clamors for a sense of what has proceeded from that reckoning, a story as yet untold.
THE MANGO TREE: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony | By Annabelle Tometich | Little, Brown | 320 pp. | $30
