Learning to Drink Black Coffee in Arkansas

I grew up in a house near the Randal Tyson Recreational Complex in Springdale, Arkansas. For sixth and seventh grade, I went to Helen Tyson Middle School, just down the road from Don Tyson Parkway, which would take you to the corporate headquarters of the second-largest processor of chicken in the world, Tyson Foods.

Taking a right onto Cambridge Street, you’re a one-minute drive from my parents’ church, where at 17 I had my first cup of coffee: a 12-ounce Keurig I made in the lobby one Sunday after I’d stopped believing in God. I drank it slowly while Don Elmore, the pastor, preached from the pulpit he might have built by hand in the 1970s. The Dixie cup was a poor insulator, and the liquid was lukewarm in minutes. Maybe Pastor Elmore was teaching from Revelation that day: “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” I didn’t spit the coffee out. It was bitter, painful even, and I drank it till it turned into something close to heavenly.

But I had a vague notion that K-cups were unethical, their plastic casings littering landfills for untold future centuries, the coffee inside probably grown on a faraway plantation by horrifically underpaid farmers. Given all the times I’ve shied away from telling people I’m from Arkansas, maybe I found that unethical or shameful, too. In the spring of 2019, when I was deciding whether to go to state school or to gamble on financial aid on the East Coast, my high school friend Juan (already attending the University of Chicago) pushed me toward the latter: “The aid will be there,” he said. “You just gotta get out.”

Juan said that when you leave Arkansas, how you see the world changes.

He told me this at the Springdale Onyx Coffee Lab, where a drip of their signature blend, Southern Weather, ran $2.50 and tasted like nothing I’d ever had before: fruity but with enough body to still taste like coffee. For the past year, I’d spent hours each day (or night) over cups of Southern Weather, learning from other customers and baristas about how men can also paint their nails and how, even in old age, you can still be wonderfully alive.

I didn’t know that, even then, Onyx was already world-renowned among specialty coffee enthusiasts; for me, it was in large part just a coffee shop close to my high school that served something better than the Keurig at church. But, as a lifelong Christian who’d recently become a nonbeliever, what really drew me was their emphasis on transparency: “[A]s a brand, we try to remain as transparent and natural as possible,” co-owner Andrea Allen writes on their website. Baristas are tasked with explaining the company’s ethics to interested customers. Where were the beans inside each black, sugar-skulled bag from? What’s the difference between natural and honey-processed? How much of the price really goes back to the farmer?

On Onyx’s website, most coffees feature data on their origin, process, growing elevation, and flavor notes. There’s also a section explicitly on transparency, breaking down the “Onyx price” into “green cost,” along with those for transportation and production. Every product has a specially tailored story, and many feature videos in which Onyx trainers walk through the process of making filter and espresso drinks. Meanwhile, drone footage of picturesque, tropical landscapes loops subtly in the background.

Juan said that when you leave Arkansas, how you see the world changes. I moved to New Haven, Connecticut, but still ordered beans to make in my dorm, at least until I couldn’t afford them anymore, or, rather, until my priorities shifted: the five-pound bag from Sam’s Club I split with my roommate became good enough. When I returned to Arkansas on breaks, I still spent at least a fourth of my time at Onyx, splitting the rest around churches (going on Sundays or passing them on street corners during long runs), reading or playing games in my room (against the drone of the living room’s cathode-ray tube TV), holding my tongue (for the safety of us all), and sleeping.

It was always a little painful returning to Arkansas. I’m reminded that the original meaning of nostalgia is a painful return.

The first time I forgot to scrape the polish off my fingernails, I was coming down the escalator at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. My mother, who had been waiting there, hugged me, almost crying as usual. But she grabbed my hand when she saw, and it became hard to tell what was causing the tears in her eyes. Later that night, a bottle of nail polish remover and a cotton swab silently appeared on the bathroom counter. After all, tomorrow was Sunday.

During another break, I packed a shirt I’d gotten from Uniqlo in Berlin: a dark blue short-sleeve button-up made of a fantastically breathable synthetic linen. After a week, I couldn’t find it. I texted my mom asking if she knew where it was, and she said she threw it away, that it was a women’s shirt and she thought I had bought it by accident. I sat in my car outside Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, where I’d just bought a copy of In the Dream House, and cried a little. When I got home, I dug through the bags in the bin outside, the smell of my family’s garbage wafting around me in the dark. But the trash must have run already that week. Mom asked for my forgiveness that night, almost crying again. I said I forgave her.

Peter denied knowing Jesus three times before, as prophesied, he heard the rooster crow and realized what he’d done. When I tell my parents, I know my mother will cry, grieving, and my father will be angry, perhaps because I made her cry. Even though, in large part, it is a grief of her own making.

On each trip back, I increasingly noticed the religious nature of Onyx’s copy: advertisements for pour-over and seasonal “offerings,” merchandise enjoining customers to “join our pilgrimage.”

Onyx’s higher-ups go on “cupping” trips, “seeking quality, truth and accountability in coffee” by visiting farms located in the golden part of this map, which resembles what anthropologist Edward Fischer calls the global “coffee production belt.” This map appeared on a few other Onyx products—a gold-luster mug, a cardboard shipping box—before being retired in 2022. I imagine someone in Arkansas pointing hesitantly to where their youth group went on a mission trip: places where the Spanish fantasized they’d find El Dorado, or maybe somewhere in Ghana, once called the Gold Coast by British colonizers. 

At 16, I went on a mission trip to Ecuador with my parents’ church. It was the first time I’d been on a plane or outside the country. My sister had been to Greece and the Philippines in years prior; this time, I’d finally get to join. For two weeks, I sat in the front of the tour bus, practicing my Spanish with Javier, who drove us to do “mission work” between visiting tourist attractions and then back to a hotel with a chlorinated pool in the center. There was the seed of something in my mind, along with a question no one could answer head-on: why not just give the money we’d spent on flights to the people we saw?

For many in the United States, the word pilgrim brings to mind the puritanical separatists who landed at Plymouth and whose mores are baked into the US national project. But, at its root, a pilgrim is a foreigner, a person or thing from a land beyond.

What Onyx was to me in 2018 and 2019 has disappeared, that place my parents thought was a lavish habit. Honestly, it was, though maybe in more ways than they knew of. It was where I got to know adults who weren’t Christian, like the old man who wore bright suits and earrings and once bought me a 10-dollar pour-over. It was where Dr. Dog and Cosmo Pyke floated out of speakers instead of radio sermons about those people and their lifestyle. It was where it was just me, the summer morning, and a cup of Southern Weather I bought with crinkly one-dollar bills earned from waiting tables at Waffle House the night before.

Onyx sold the Springdale location in the summer of 2020. Some of the baristas had been transferred to the Fayetteville café. Others, like my friend, stared down the barrel of management’s empty promises to move over everyone who wanted to move. In the last month, at the time of writing, named and anonymous Onyx employees have come out on Instagram with accounts of xenophobia, racism, religious hatred, and unfair labor practices. They want what Onyx claims to have wanted: truth, accountability, transparency.

Whenever I became good friends with another boy growing up, my mom would ask if he was gay. I always said no, the small hammer of her question triggering the same reflex. The truth of my response didn’t matter: only her eyes did, searching through me.

Now, the rooster is crowing.