— Book Review —

“Secrets of“Secrets of

the Tsil Café”the Tsil Café”

By Rosanne Boyett

Beacon Staff Writer

Editor’s note: Book review articles are available online at

www.cibolabeacon.com/bookreviews.

It’s not easy growing up in the Midwest - especially if

your parentage includes a father with Hopi influences and

an Italian mother.

Their only child yearns to be like his peers but his child-

hood guarantees that Wes will never “fit in.”

Author Thomas Fox Averill takes the reader on a jour-

ney that explores the mix of cultures, personalities, and se-

crets of the Hingler family.

Wes is torn between his mother’s culinary skills, which

feature Old World ingredients, and his father’s kitchen, the

Tsil, where only New World foods are permitted on the

menu.

The battle continues, and Wes grows from a toddler to a

rebellious teenager who finally drops out of high school.

Generations of family help the confused young man dis-

cover his true identity, which leads Wes to become “his own man.”

Domingo, his father’s half-brother, tells Wes, “You need to learn mañana, he told me. It’s the feeling that anything rushed

won’t turn out well.”

From his grandfather Juan he learns gardening and much more, including the importance of family history.

“Having just dug potatoes, I understood. I waited impatiently to dig peanuts, too. Juan and I watched the green leaves begin

to wither one week, die the next.

‘Dig one peanut,’ Juan said the following week. In the earth was a perfectly formed peanut shell, brown and tough.”

The garden becomes a way to share family secrets.

Wes is shocked by some of the stories and amused by others.

“Juan was silent while I weighed the possibilities. Either Juan had impregnated my grandmother or my grandfather had im-

pregnated Conseca, who gave birth to Domingo. The shadows on the ground told the truth,” the author wrote.

The story of two opposing views of food also includes recipes that feature New World foods and a history of specific ingre-

dients.

An example: The sweet potato is from the same family as the morning glory. George Washington Carver demonstrated that

both plants enrich soil that had been depleted by the overplanting of crops such as cotton. The yam is an Old World rhizome

native to the Far East, according to the author.

“When the Spaniards came, potatoes were the best crop. We knew where true treasure was buried. We could always stay

alive,” laughed Juan as he explained potato harvesting to Wes.

After his father’s 50th birthday celebration, the son heard from a lifelong family friend who urged him,

“Wes, don’t apprentice yourself to your father if you don’t want to. Apprentice yourself to food, to the face you’ve been given.”

Weston’s One-World Café on 39th Street in Kansas City was “a place open to everything vegetable, animal and mineral –

New World, Old World, your world, my world,” according to the owner who had finally found his identity in his own kitchen.

The author is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a professor of English and a writer-in-residence at Washburn University, Topeka,

Kan.

Averill is an O. Henry Award winner. He is the author of several books, including “rode,” which is available from UNM Press.