Eighteen hours of traveling nearly 1,500 miles from New York, and sleep was all that I could think about during my journey; that was until I reached my destination and all I could think about was food. I was thirteen then. It had been 11 years since I had seen my family or this tropical green rock called the “Nature Isle.” In order to finish college back in the city, my mother had sent me to live with my grandparents in Dominica a few months after my birth. I am apart of the first generation to be born in the United States in my family.

Inside the three-story house that had taken my grandparents decades to earn, I gazed at photos of myself sucking on a pacifier while I sat on my grandmother’s lap and others of my first day of pre-school. I felt numb. I had no solid memories of my early childhood, and the snapshots told those stories for me. Then I took in a scent coming from the hallway leading to the stairs to the kitchen downstairs. It was rich and earthy and held an aroma of garlic and onions; it was familiar. Walking into the kitchen, a sense of déjà vu came over me as I saw my grandmother standing over an enormous pot, stirring large seeds with a long wooden spoon.

“Eh eh. Look at how big you get,” she said, having noticed me despite my failed attempt to enter the kitchen quietly.

The older I became, the less she got to know who I was and the more distant we became. I believe that even after so long, she expected to see to the two-year-old child that clung to her foot in that same kitchen while she washed dishes. I think that was the last time she genuinely smiled at me.

Breadnuts grows in tropical regions of the world, mostly in the West Indies.

Since I can remember, breadnut seeds have held the key to my only happy memories of Dominica, among the bad memories of my family’s past that plague my life. Every other homemade dish has reminded me of what we have become; basically, strangers to one another.

I never questioned the history of what I was eating or fully understood exactly what it was. Breadnut only grows in certain West Indian countries. These nuts are twice the size of hazelnuts with a soft starchy center. Like many modern popular foods and snacks in Dominica, roasted and boiled breadnut seeds were discovered during slavery.

Nearly 150 years after the abolishment of slavery, in the late 1970s, my grandmother and grandfather sold legumes and provisions like yams and breadnuts in the local market near the road. Coming home from pre-school, it never occurred to me that sometimes it was the only thing available to eat in the house that day. After years of planting breadnuts and an array of other fruit and vegetable seeds on inherited land, my grandparents now own a large fresh produce and livestock business, raising hundreds of animals and growing nearly every fruit type of fruit and vegetable on the island.

The older I’ve grown, the clearer the history of my family has become. The reasons that my cousins went to school with holes in their shoes, that three-people-to-a-bedroom was not a choice, but a necessity.

Despite their success and all the disagreements that have separated us over the years, my grandparents still greet me with a plate of boiled breadnuts when I visit home. Though the last time I visited, I did not feel as welcome as the times before, the breadnuts begged to differ.

Amanda Williams