Somehow it pisses me off for her to claim to be Indian. So many Americans claim to be Indian, but I don’t see them volunteering to assist their natural brothers on the reservation.
It might be the canvas sack collecting horse caquita under the horse’s tail, or it might be the story she’s telling, but my caramel sundae starts tasting like horse manure.
After I’ve had enough, I finally speak up and say, “Well, we’re Indian too!”
She twists around from her seat in front of the carriage and says, “Oh yeah?” in a smart-alecky tone, and then, just like the U.S. Census, she asks, “What tribe?”
“What tribe? Well, I don’t know,” I say. “Our families fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. But all you have to do is look at our faces.”
My sister-in-law is the color of coffee with not enough milk, my brother and I the color of café con leche, the child the color of a cappuccino. My brother, his wife, their child, and me, we look like Mexicans, Arabs, Jews, Moors, Sicilians, American Indians, East Indians, Turks, Greeks, Palestinians, Roma, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis. We look like what we are.
And who the hell knows what that is.
—
Aunty shrieks like a parrot when I tell her why I’m calling. She calls the woman and the daughter both esa chamaca, that youngster. All the characters in her story are esa chamaca, ese fulano, este ratero, esa sinvergüenza. That youngster, that so-and-so, this thief, that shameless one. I’m not certain if she’s talking about the mother, the daughter, an older daughter, the man the mother took up with, or the man my natural sister ran off with.
“Now wait a second, Aunty. Who stole what money?”
“She robbed me,” Aunty goes on without answering. “I’m certain por Dios Santo she was not your father’s daughter. How could he be the father if he was in Korea when she was pregnant?”
Then she goes on: “La chamaca Luz…”
Luz! My memory was right about the mother’s name.
“She was a clubfooted servant…”
Funny, I hadn’t remembered her clubfoot, but, yes, I do remember now the little polka of her gait, the way she labored under the tin bowls of wet laundry.
“…a good washerwoman, excellent, but she did not wash her own body. How could a man as delicate as your father take up with a woman who was dirty and smelly?”
My aunt calls the washerwoman mugrosa, dirty, and apestosa, smelly, but I saw her as dusty and worn out from labor. I suppose if you had to hobble about washing clothes and pulling loads through a wringer washer on the rooftop in the summer heat, you’d be smelly too.
“She had two girls, an older one, Teresa, from another man, of course. And a younger girl whose name I can’t remember. Because they were the kind of women who would get involved with anyone.
“Yes, she had a fellow who lived up there on the roof with her. But after the younger one was born, the sinvergüenza left them, and your grandmother would find her work. Your grandmother was just trying to be kind. Do you think she would’ve had her around had she known the gossip?”
“But I remember the girl, and she looked just like my father, only darker.”
“What are you saying! She didn’t look like your father! She went with us to Acapulco. You have photos of her.”
I’m astounded. In Caramelo I invented just this scenario. I thought I made up several parts of my novel, but later someone tells me that this, and other things too, really happened. The things I think I imagined are true, and the things I remember as truly happening…? But maybe it’s the older girl who was my father’s daughter. After all, my father came home periodically on leave.
Family trip to Acapulco, c. 1964
Aunty goes on with her story, still talking about the younger girl. “Somebody put the idea in her head about your father. That girl tried to get money from us after you’d all gone back to Chicago, and when she couldn’t, she robbed us. I didn’t call the police because of her mother. But let me look for the photos of Acapulco. And the letters from your father in Korea. I’ll look and we’ll set this all straight.”
Is it only a good story, not a true one? And if it is true, is it too ugly for fiction, made dirty with theft and accusations, blackmail and bigotry, the same prejudices one class, one race, has about another?
Then Aunty proceeds to unravel another family secret, one she thinks I don’t know. I do, but I want to hear how she will tell it. It’s about when “the grandfather” was a colonel in the Mexican army, stationed on the coast at Tampico. He had a mistress there who was el amor de su vida…But this is my version of the story, not Aunty’s.
“Mamá moved us there for two years to keep an eye on him. One day Little and I discovered that so-and-so talking to Father at the barracks. We chased her with sticks all the way back to her door, so she would leave him alone. Father was so mad he sent us back to Mexico City after that.”
Aunty chuckles with pride over her victory over la fulana even though it happened more than a half century ago.
I want to ask her about her father. Didn’t she think she should’ve beaten him up too? But I don’t bring up this detail since she seems so pleased with herself.
Poking under the bed, all I’ve found is other people’s dirt. Everyone has told me something I didn’t know, or that they didn’t know I knew.
I wonder, Are all stories like this? The natural events much more complicated than the artificial story each of us weaves where we are the heroes, in the center of the universe.
Aunty tells me, “I went to visit your father at the hospital at the end and told him. ‘Look, you’re not the father of that girl. When Luz was pregnant, you were in Korea. The dates don’t coincide. So there!’ ”
And then, as if she knows how I feel, Aunty adds to me, “You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
“And then?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did Father say when you told him?”
“Nothing. That’s the end of the story. What else could he say?”
Then it’s my turn to say nothing.
A Girl Called Daydreamer
For decades the only childhood report card that survived my nomadic wanderings was the one from fifth grade, a testament to shame and sorrow. This uninspiring collection of marks at least allowed me to tell a good story as a successful writer, since I used it often as a visual aid in my lectures to younger audiences, many of them fifth graders themselves with dull report cards. Other school evaluations would float up from the wreckage of my mother’s shoe-box archives and attest to academic improvement later. But at the time I wrote the following, my terrible fifth-grade report card was all I had to remind me of my childhood panic of school. I remember I’d wake up sick with fear, often bleating, “Ma, I don’t want to go to school today.” “So don’t go,” she’d say without a “How come?” or “You better.” God knows why she was lenient with me. Maybe she intuited my unhappiness. I felt susto, terror, from third grade through sixth. This memory is so strong, it overwhelms me every time I visit an elementary school to speak even now. Thankfully, it wears off once I start talking.
This lecture was first delivered at the downtown San Antonio Public Library in October 2007 to an auditorium of middle and high school students. The occasion was the second San Antonio reunion of los MacArturos, the Latino MacArthur fellows. Our first MacArturo event had happened a decade earlier. I shared the program this time with the president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Baldemar Velásquez, a great oral storyteller, and that P. T. Barnum of booksellers, Reubén Martínez, who made our jaws drop when he gave away a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the student who could remember the name of the library director. I learned a lot from Reubén about making an unforgettable impression.
When I was in fifth grade, my teacher, Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High, asked to see my mother. This was a big deal. It meant I had done something awful. But I couldn’t remember what awful thing I’d do
ne.
“Now what?” Mother said, disgusted. Dinner would be late. She would have to walk over to my school and walk back, and I’d have to go with her. My two older brothers would be ordered to take care of the four younger; the last time they’d done that, the twins had wound up at the police station, and they were only five years old. Father would come home from work tired, hungry, and with his feet throbbing. Mother, in a terrible mood, would hurl words at anyone who got in her way. Thanks to me, the world was thrown into chaos.
The complaint from Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High was this: “Your daughter is a daydreamer.”
What could I say? It was true. When my teacher called on me, I seldom knew where we were. But it was also true that the class was a mix of forty-seven noisy kids from a mix of grade levels, too much for one tired teacher to deal with. Often in a day there were moments when you could drift away on a daydream, and often I took that route, staring out the window at a cloud, a coral geranium petal, or at Salvador, the boy who sat in front of me, whose wrinkled shirt and dirty collar made me wonder why his mama didn’t take better care of him.
I thought and thought about Salvador a lot back then and imagined he lived with a family of little brothers, and maybe these little brothers made his mama too busy to send Salvador to school in a clean, pressed shirt. I imagined Salvador getting up early to help with the babies. I was sure I knew where Salvador lived, over on Western Avenue near Flournoy Street, in a Chicago neighborhood worse than ours, near my aunt Timo, who, like the woman who lived in a shoe, had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
And just when I could imagine Salvador tumbling out of bed and dressing himself in his wrinkled shirt, helping his mama feed the babies cornflakes from a tin cup, combing his hair with water, rushing to get to school, this was exactly when the teacher would call on me. I don’t remember much else about that fifth-grade year except things I wish I could forget. “Daydreamer.” A word worse than a stick or a stone. It broke more than bones.
I felt ashamed to raise my hand for the rest of the school year, until, by Divine Providence, our pipes froze the following winter and we had to move to another neighborhood, another school, one with kind, compassionate lay teachers and nuns who discovered I was an artist and writer. But before that bright eureka, I hid inside myself and drew and wrote in secret, never volunteering an answer in class because I assumed if I thought of it, it must be wrong.
My fifth-grade report card
It’s funny, with all of the moves in my life, that horrible report card from fifth grade survived to remind me who I used to be. I have only to look at the constellations of Cs and Ds to remember how others saw me, and how I once saw myself. Too bad there was no grade for art, or I would’ve gotten an A. Too bad there was no credit for the seven or eight books I borrowed every week from the public library. Who knew this was important to bring to the attention of someone like Sister Mary Regina Immaculata of the Holy Ghost Most High?
In the fortieth year of my life, I received a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius grant, which is like an Academy Award for the story of your life. (That’s how I explained it to my mother, who didn’t understand at first.) What it finally made me realize was this: I have always been a daydreamer, and that’s a lucky thing for a writer. Because what is a daydreamer if not another word for thinker, visionary, intuitive—all wonderful words synonymous with “girl.”
A House of My Own
Credit 32.1
To write this introduction for the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first book, The House on Mango Street, I knew I had to search for a photo from that time. If I stared at it long enough, I’d have my story. But who was that woman in the photo? She wasn’t me, I wasn’t her. It was as if I were writing about someone else, and this inspired me to write in both the third and first person. I also wanted to set straight many biographical facts. Thus, the specific addresses where I’d lived. I was surprised my mother appeared in the writing. But how could she not? I finished it on May 26, 2008, less than a year after her crossing. Her spirit was still nearby.
The young woman in this photograph is me when I was writing The House on Mango Street. She’s in her office, a room that had probably been a child’s bedroom when families lived in this apartment. It has no door and is only slightly wider than the walk-in pantry. But it has great light and sits above the hallway door downstairs, so she can hear her neighbors come and go. She’s posed as if she’s just looked up from her work for a moment, but in real life she never writes in this office. She writes in the kitchen, the only room with a heater.
It’s Chicago, 1980, in the down-at-the-heels Bucktown neighborhood before it’s discovered by folks with money. The young woman lives at 1814 North Paulina Street, second-floor front. Nelson Algren once wandered these streets. Saul Bellow’s turf was over on Division Street, walking distance away. It’s a neighborhood that reeks of beer and urine, of sausage and beans.
The young woman fills her “office” with things she drags home from the flea market at Maxwell Street. Antique typewriters, alphabet blocks, asparagus ferns, bookshelves, ceramic figurines from occupied Japan, wicker baskets, birdcages, hand-painted photos. Things she likes to look at. It’s important to have this space to look and think. When she lived at home, the things she looked at scolded her and made her feel sad and depressed. They said, “Wash me.” They said, “Lazy.” They said, “You ought.” But the things in her office are magical and invite her to play. They fill her with light. It’s the room where she can be quiet and still and listen to the voices inside herself. She likes being alone in the daytime.
As a girl, she dreamt about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamt of their weddings. Instead of collecting lace and linen for her trousseau, the young woman buys old things from the thrift stores on grimy Milwaukee Avenue for her future house-of-her-own—faded quilts, cracked vases, chipped saucers, lamps in need of love.
The young woman returned to Chicago after graduate school and moved back into her father’s house, 1754 North Keeler, back into her girl’s room with its twin bed and floral wallpaper. She was twenty-three and a half. Now she summoned her courage and told her father she wanted to live alone again, like she did when she was away at school. He looked at her with that eye of the rooster before it attacks, but she wasn’t alarmed. She’d seen that look before and knew he was harmless. She was his favorite, and it was only a matter of waiting.
The daughter claimed she’d been taught that a writer needs quiet, privacy, and long stretches of solitude to think. The father decided too much college and too many gringo friends had ruined her. In a way he was right. In a way she was right. When she thinks in her father’s language, she knows sons and daughters don’t leave their parents’ house until they marry. When she thinks in English, she knows she should’ve been on her own since she was eighteen.
For a time father and daughter reached a truce. She agreed to move into the basement of a building where the oldest of her six brothers and his wife lived, 4832 West Homer. But after a few months, when the big brother upstairs turned out to be Big Brother, she got on her bicycle and rode through the neighborhood of her high school days until she spotted a second-floor apartment with fresh-painted walls and masking tape on the windows. Then she knocked on the storefront downstairs and convinced the landlord she was his new tenant.
Her father can’t understand why she wants to live in a hundred-year-old building with big windows that let in the cold. She knows her apartment is clean, but the hallway is scuffed and scary, though she and the woman upstairs take turns mopping it regularly. The hall needs paint, and there’s nothing they can do about that. When the father visits, he climbs up the stairs muttering with disgust. Inside, he looks at her books arranged in milk crates, at the futon on the floor in a bedroom with no door, and whispers, “Hippie,” in the same way he looks at boys hanging out in his neighborhood and says, “Drogas.” When he sees the space heater in the k
itchen, the father shakes his head and sighs. “Why did I work so hard to buy a house with a furnace so she could go backward and live like this?”
When she’s alone, she savors her apartment of high ceilings and windows that let in the sky, the new carpeting and walls white as typing paper, the walk-in pantry with empty shelves, her bedroom without a door, her office with its typewriter, and the big front-room windows with their view of a street, rooftops, trees, and the dizzy traffic of the Kennedy Expressway.
Between her building and the brick wall of the next is a tidy, sunken garden. The only people who ever enter the garden are a family who speak like guitars, a family with a southern accent. At dusk they appear with a pet monkey in a cage and sit on a green bench and talk and laugh. She spies on them from behind her bedroom curtains and wonders where they got the monkey.
Her father calls every week to say, “Mi’ja, when are you coming home?” What does her mother say about all this? She puts her hands on her hips and boasts, “She gets it from me.” When the father is in the room, the mother just shrugs and says, “What can I do?” The mother doesn’t object. She knows what it is to live a life filled with regrets, and she doesn’t want her daughter to live that life too. She always supported the daughter’s projects, so long as she went to school. The mother who painted the walls of their Chicago homes the color of flowers; who planted tomatoes and roses in her garden; sang arias; practiced solos on her son’s drum set; boogied along with the Soul Train dancers; glued travel posters on her kitchen wall with Karo corn syrup; herded her kids weekly to the library, to public concerts, to museums; wore a button on her lapel that said, “Feed the People Not the Pentagon”; who never went beyond the ninth grade. That mother. She nudges her daughter and says, “Good lucky you studied.”