The poem “Snapping Beans” by Lisa Parker is about a granddaughter who goes from a tradition southern life up to a north city life and fears telling her religious grandmother that she has changed. Through thoughts and emotions, Parker shows the fear the teenager faces when trying to tell her grandmother. Although the granddaughter doesn’t want the grandmother to know, the grandmother has a secret that is revealed at the end of the poem.
The granddaughter is back home from her school up North which implies she is from the south. In the southern area many people based their life off of tradition. One of the traditional things that is shown in the poem is “snapping beans”. The grandmother and the granddaughter are snapping beans while sitting on “splintering slats of the porchswing”. The description of the seat signifies how old it is and how long they have been doing the tradition. While they are there the grandmother hummed “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. The song implies that the grandmother is a religious women and being religious tends to cause people to have certain beliefs and views on life. When the grandmother stopped humming the granddaughter felt “the soft gray of her stare against the side of my face”. The gray of her stare implies that the grandmother had a question that she wasn’t sure if she wanted the answer to. The color gray represents the grandmothers frozen like body, as if she was holding back when she asked “How’s school a-goin”.
Not only was the grandmother scared to ask but the granddaughter feared answering. After the grandmother asked the question, she cupped the granddaughters “quivering chin”. Her quivering chin shows that she was shaking with fear, nervous to tell her grandmother of things that she experienced in school. She wanted to tell her grandmother that “the evening star” was actually a planet and that “her friends wore nose rings