Annabelle Tometich’s ‘The Mango Tree’ a Florida story of motherhood
Annabelle Tometich’s irresistible memoir opens with a scene that sounds right out of the Weird Florida files: the first court hearing for a Fort Myers grandmother arrested for shooting at a guy who stole fruit from her mango tree.
Most of us would read the news brief, or maybe just the headline, chuckle and shake our heads, then forget about it. One more Sunshine State punchline.
But Tometich, a Fort Myers native and Florida journalist, tells us the story behind it, and it’s a tale both hilarious and heartbreaking, and always big-hearted.
The book’s title is “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony,” but it’s really the story of the author and her formidable mother, Josefina Tometich, whose life is much bigger than that fruit-triggered potshot.
Annabelle is the oldest of three children of Jo and Lou Tometich. Her father came to Fort Myers after growing up in Massachusetts, the only child of doting parents who grew up to be “on permanent vacation,” intermittently employed but mostly supported first by his mother and father and then by his wife.
Jo seems like an unlikely match for Lou. Born in Manila, the oldest daughter in a large family, she raised her siblings while excelling in school and earning a nursing degree, then emigrated from the Philippines to the United States. Where Lou is laid back and frankly pretty lazy, Jo is exacting and always working, at the hospital and at home.
And, Tometich reminds us, Lou is white and Jo is brown, and the knowledge that she’s biracial shapes their daughter’s life in profound ways.
Even as a little girl, she learns that from her mother, who refuses to teach her kids to speak Tagalog (although they pick up the curse words) and whose bedtime ritual includes pinching their noses to try to change their wide shape, a giveaway of their Filipino heritage.
Some of Tometich’s childhood memories are warm and lovely, like a family expedition to a mango orchard on Pine Island at harvest season. She writes, “We drench ourselves in mosquito spray, tiptoeing over the sandy hills of fire ants that dot the weedy parking area like land mines,” and haul home bags and bags of the sweet juicy fruit, feasting on it until their hands are stained yellow, as practical Jo processes the rest for later.
When Tometich is 8 years old, her parents buy a house on an upscale street in Fort Myers. Theirs is the smallest and least posh home on the block, but they put down roots, including literal ones — Jo finally has a place to plant her own trees, a mango first, and later more mangoes, and avocados and much more.
But life is not all sweetness. Jo and Lou fight ferociously and physically, sometimes so much so the neighbors call the cops.
And then, in a brief period of time, three deaths in the family — including Lou’s — shatter the family’s world.
Tometich heads into adolescence with an overlay of grief that intensifies her own sense of anger. Teenage girls typically resent their moms, but when Jo takes up mowing the lawn while wearing Lou’s old cowboy boots, a muumuu and a sombrero, Annabelle tells friends she’s the maid.
She also finds that, with Lou gone, she’s becoming her mother’s sparring partner: “Fighting, I am learning, is as essential to our mother as breathing. It is her cardio.”
But Jo finds a way to soothe her children’s sorrow and bring them back together: a challenging but ultimately glorious trip back to Manila, where they’re engulfed in family and food.
Tometich recounts her high school and college years with wry wit and sharp details. A circuitous career path takes her eventually to the Fort Myers News-Press, where she’s hired part time as a clerk, becomes an award-winning sportswriter and eventually lands a job she’s thought about since she and her dad read restaurant reviews together when she was a little girl: assuming the mantle of the paper’s pseudonymous restaurant critic, Jean Le Boeuf.
“This is the dream I never thought to dream,” she writes, “a life so patently unimaginable as a fatherless, mixed-race kid growing up with a manic-depressive Filipina mother in Robert E. Lee County that the mere possibility of it makes my head tingle.”
There’s more, including her own marriage and motherhood and Jo’s somewhat eccentric but loving performance as a grandmother, all of it leading to that courtroom and what really happened.
Like the rest of this warmly funny, poignant book, it’s not what you expect.
The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony
By Annabelle Tometich
Little, Brown and Co., 320 pages, $30
