My Mama Loved Mangoes. When She Died, I Learned to Love Them, Too

In Miami, a writer recalls her Jamaican mother’s love for the tropical fruit, and the city’s inextricable connection to it.

Published on May 8, 2025

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston writes of her protagonist: “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” I think my mother was the same, but hers was a mango tree, heavy with ripe and unripened fruits, and dawn and doom were in the pit.

Among her many gifts, Hurston understood the connection between Black women and the fruit trees that beckoned them. Like Hurston, I am a mystical writer from Florida, though like any true Miamian, I distinguish myself as being “from Miami” as if it were a completely separate state. We do things differently here, where speaking English is optional and following traffic rules is discouraged. In the constant clash of language and politics, poverty and privilege, we live in a strained harmony. Miami’s mango culture is no different. It is as complicated as the city itself, the wild, sensual fruit both exalted and resented, beloved and bemoaned.

My own mango journey began with my mama, who friends and family called Sistah Sonia. Watching mama eat a mango felt like reading her diary, the parts she never shared with me about growing up in those misty mountains in her small village of Craighead in Manchester Parish, Jamaica. First, she never peeled a mango with a knife. That was sacrilegious, not to mention un-Jamaican. Sometimes she peeled the fruit with her teeth, and sometimes she bit right into the skin, her small lips lost in the sweet, raving orange flesh. Then she’d eat it like a chicken leg, chewing and biting until the meat was gone, sucking the pit like a bone.

It was during mango season on the first day of summer in 2014 that Sistah Sonia died. In the North Miami home where she lived for almost 40 years, I watched her give up her ghost, and even in that moment longed to make her proud. When Hurston lost her mother, she wrote in her autobiography, “Mama died at sundown and changed a world.” My world changed, too. Mama was never really satisfied with me—her only daughter who she worked hard to provide with a private school education, the first-generation American who secretly went to Howard University to study journalism instead of law (and then dropped out). Unmarried and child-free, this was not the life Sistah Sonia imagined for the child she named Dinkinish (also spelled Dinkinesh), an Amharic word meaning “you are marvelous,” or as mama said, “you are a surprise.”

In November 2023, nine years after mama died, I received a surprise. NASA reported that Dinkinesh, “a small asteroid located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,” had a small moon, which explained what the organization described as “odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness.” When I saw the moon, I was struck by its shape: round at the bottom, a little pinched at the top, like a mango. The asteroid was discovered in 1999—right around when I was starting my career as a journalist in New York—and was named Dinkinesh after the fossil found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. Also known by the English name Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old collection of bones remains one of the most critical discoveries in human evolution.

In the days and weeks following her death, mama’s bones were everywhere—I excavated dried mango pits from the depths of her purses and from in between couch cushions; I found them scattered in the car and on her nightstand. When I was younger, I didn’t catch mama’s mango fever, much to her horror. “Dinkinish, yuh mus’ eat mango,” she exclaimed with Holy Ghost fire, kissing her teeth in disapproval. “Iz yuh culchah.” But after she died, as if by magic, I started craving the fruit, peeling them with my teeth, tearing through the flesh, sucking the pits. Mangoes followed me everywhere. Strangers offered them to me in parking lots and in the aisles of department stores. Once, a supermarket manager who had countless mango trees in his backyard slipped a bunch into my shopping cart, relieved to be rid of them.

In Miami, mangoes are inescapable. That’s why Roger Horne, a farmer, sustainable landscaper, and co-founder of Urban GreenWorks, a local food security nonprofit, doesn’t bother to grow them. For 12 years, Horne has presided over Cerasee Urban Community Farm in Liberty City, a marginalized Black neighborhood in Miami. Originally from St. Vincent Island, Horne has his own way of eating mangoes: “We squeeze it and make it soft until the mango is like a smoothie,” he says. “Then we make a nipple and squeeze everything out.” Apparently, how you eat a mango can reveal a lot about where you’re from.

In 2022, a section of Coconut Grove, Miami’s oldest neighborhood, was officially designated as “Little Bahamas.” The labor and ingenuity of the Bahamians who came to Miami in the early 1900s were critical to the building of the city, and among their many contributions were the mango seeds they brought from home and planted. But as the neighborhood gentrified, Horne adds, "developers cut down a lot of the mango trees Bahamians planted."

Even so, mangoes are one of the few things in Miami that aren’t marginalized. Ingrid Robinson, a resident farmer and senior community outreach liaison for Urban GreenWorks, grew up in Coconut Grove and remembers the bounty. “You never went hungry ’cuz there was always mangoes,” Robinson says. Today, their season is a kind of Christmastime among Caribbean communities. Friends leave bags of mangoes hanging on doors and sitting on verandas. In churches, members share them as offerings.

This mango fever can encourage a degree of mischievousness, too. The fruit is a famous aphrodisiac, and in this season of excessive heat, sensitivity is high and hormone levels are even higher. Neighbors and passersby grow bolder, regularly sneaking into people’s yards to steal their fruit. I have memories of mama’s covert operations to intercept a thief who had been raiding her trees for years. Missions were always at dawn, and the culprit turned out to be her sister.

But not everyone is so crazy about them. “My daughter hates mangoes,” says Jen Karetnick, a poet and cookbook author in Miami. From 2000 to 2019, she lived on a historic Miami Shores property called The Mango House. It was built in the 1930s as part of a plantation, and the house itself was initially one large room built for the mango pickers, who were likely Bahamian or Mexican. Karetnick tended 14 mango trees then, and her children hated the mango jams and salsas she’d make and the smell of mangoes rotting on the ground. Her daughter was also alarmed by the falling fruits’ nocturnal sounds: “When they were big and ripe, they’d crash on the deck and driveway and drainpipes,” Karetnick says. “She was treated to falling mangoes all night long for months on end.”

One summer, Karetnick gifted me two full bags of mangoes. A new family had moved into the unit next to me, so I knocked on the door and handed a bag to the husband as a welcome gift. It was just the sort of thing Sistah Sonia would have done. But shortly after, I noticed the wife stopped saying “hola” or “buen día” to me when she passed by. I wondered, had I done something wrong? Then one night, as I came out of the parking lot that we shared, the husband appeared, sticking out his tongue and wiggling it at me suggestively. The mangoes’ mischief had struck again, and my neighborly gesture had gone completely left.

Somewhere under the full moon, the Holy Ghost kissed her teeth, and mama did, too.