The father wants his daughter to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies. She doesn’t want to be a TV weather girl. Nor does she want to marry and have babies. Not yet. Maybe later, but there are so many other things she must do in her lifetime first. Travel. Learn how to dance the tango. Publish a book. Live in other cities. Win a National Endowment for the Arts award. See the northern lights. Jump out of a cake.
She stares at the ceilings and walls of her apartment the way she once stared at the ceilings and walls of the apartments she grew up in, inventing pictures in the cracks in the plaster, inventing stories to go with these pictures. At night, under the circle of light from a cheap metal lamp clamped to the kitchen table, she sits with paper and a pen and pretends she’s not afraid. She’s trying to live like a writer.
Where she gets these ideas about living like a writer, she has no clue. She hasn’t read Virginia Woolf yet. She doesn’t know about Rosario Castellanos or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga are cutting their own paths through the world somewhere, but she doesn’t know about them. She doesn’t know anything. She’s making things up as she goes.
When the photo of the young woman who was me was snapped, I still called myself a poet, though I’d been writing stories since grammar school. I’d gravitated back to fiction while in the Iowa poetry workshop. Poetry, as it was taught at Iowa, was a house of cards, a tower of ideas, but I can’t communicate an idea except through a story.
The woman I am in the photo was working on a series of vignettes, little by little, along with her poetry. I already had a title—The House on Mango Street. Fifty pages had been written, but I still didn’t think of it as a novel. It was just a jar of buttons, like the mismatched embroidered pillowcases and monogrammed napkins I tugged from the bins at Goodwill. I wrote these things and thought of them as “little stories,” though I sensed they were connected to one another. I hadn’t heard of story cycles yet. I hadn’t read Ermilo Abreu Gómez’s Canek, Elena Poniatowska’s Lilus Kikus, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, Nellie Campobello’s My Mother’s Hands. That would come later, when I had more time and solitude to read.
The woman I once was wrote the first three stories of House in one weekend at Iowa. But because I wasn’t in the fiction workshop, they wouldn’t count toward my MFA thesis. I didn’t argue; my thesis adviser reminded me too much of my father. I worked on these little stories on the side for comfort when I wasn’t writing poetry for credit. I shared them with colleagues like the poet Joy Harjo, who was also having a hard time in the poetry work-shop, and the fiction writer Dennis Mathis, a small-town Illinois native, whose paperback library was from the world.
Credit 32.2
Joy Harjo in Iowa City
Little-little stories were in literary vogue at the time, in the ’70s. Dennis told me about the Japanese Nobel Prize winner Kawabata’s minimal “palm of the hand” stories. We fried omelets for dinner and read García Márquez and Heinrich Böll stories aloud. We both preferred experimental writers—all men back then except for Grace Paley—rebels like ourselves. Dennis would become a lifelong editor, ally, and voice on the phone when either one of us lost heart.
The young woman in the photo is modeling her book in progress after Dream Tigers by Jorge Luis Borges—a writer she’d read since high school, story fragments that ring like Hans Christian Andersen, or Ovid, or entries from the encyclopedia. She wants to write stories that ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between highbrow literature and children’s nursery rhymes, between New York and the imaginary village of Macondo, between the United States and Mexico. It’s true, she wants the writers she admires to respect her work, but she also wants people who don’t usually read books to enjoy these stories too. She doesn’t want to write a book that a reader won’t understand and would feel ashamed for not understanding.
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Dennis Mathis and me in Iowa
She thinks stories are about beauty. Beauty that is there to be admired by anyone, like a herd of clouds grazing overhead. She thinks people who are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don’t have much time and are often tired. She has in mind a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or comes after.
She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible. So that the sentences are pliant as branches and can be read in more ways than one.
Sometimes the woman I once was goes out on weekends to meet with other writers. Sometimes I invite these friends to come to my apartment to workshop each other’s work. We are black, white, Latino. We are men and we are women. What we have in common is our sense that art should serve our communities. Together we publish an anthology—Emergency Tacos, because we finish our collaborations in the early hours before dawn and gather at the same twenty-four-hour taquería on Belmont Avenue, like a multicultural version of Hopper’s Nighthawks painting. The Emergency Tacos writers organize monthly arts events at my brother Keek’s apartment—Galería Quique. We do this with no capital except our valuable time. We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.
The young woman in the photograph gets up in the morning to go to the job that pays the rent on her Paulina Street apartment. She teaches at a school in Pilsen, her mother’s old neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a Mexican neighborhood where the rent is cheap and too many families live crowded together. Landlords and the city take no responsibility for the rats, trash that isn’t collected often enough, porches that collapse, apartments without fire escapes, until a tragedy happens and several people die. Then they hold investigations for a little while, but the problems go on until the next death, the next investigation, the next bout of forgetting.
The young woman works with students who have dropped out of high school but have decided to try again for their diplomas. She learns from her students that they have more difficult lives than her storyteller’s imagination can invent. Her life has been comfortable and privileged compared to theirs. She never had to worry about feeding her babies before she went to class. She never had a father or boyfriend who beat her at night and left her bruised in the morning. She didn’t have to plan an alternative route to avoid gangs in the school hallway. Her parents didn’t plead with her to drop out of school so she could help them earn money.
How can art make a difference in the world? This was never asked at Iowa. Should she be teaching these students to write poetry when they need to know how to defend themselves from someone beating them up? Can a memoir by Malcolm X or a novel by García Márquez save them from the daily blows? And what about those who have such learning problems they can’t even manage a book by Dr. Seuss, but can weave a spoken story so wondrous, she wants to take notes? Should she give up writing and study something useful like medicine? How can she teach her students to take control of their own destiny? She loves these students. What should she be doing to save their lives?
The young woman’s teaching job leads to the next, and now she finds herself a counselor/recruiter at her alma mater, Loyola University on the North Side, in Rogers Park. I have health benefits. I don’t bring work home anymore. My workday ends at 5 p.m. Now I have evenings free to do my own work. I feel like a real writer.
At the university I work for a program that no longer exists, the Educational Opportunity Program, that assists “disadvantaged” students. It’s in keeping with my philosophy, and I can still help the students from my previous job. But when my most brilliant student is accepted, enrolls, and then drops out in her first semester, I collapse on my desk from grief, from exhaustion, and feel like dropping out myself.
I write about my students becau
se I don’t know what else to do with their stories. Writing them down allows me to sleep.
On the weekends, if I can sidestep guilt and avoid my father’s demands to come home for Sunday dinner, I’m free to stay home and write. I feel like a bad daughter ignoring my father, but I feel worse when I don’t write. Either way, I never feel completely happy.
One Saturday the woman at the typewriter accepts an invitation to a literary soiree. But when she arrives, she feels she’s made a terrible mistake. All the writers are old men. She has been invited by Leon Forrest, a black novelist who was trying to be kind and invite more women, more people of color, but so far, she’s the only woman, and he and she the only coloreds.
She’s there because she’s the author of a new book of poetry—Bad Boys from Mango Press, the literary efforts of Gary Soto and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Her book is four pages long and was bound together on a kitchen table with a stapler and a spoon. Many of the other guests, she soon realizes, have written real books, hardbacks from big New York houses, printed in editions of hundreds of thousands on actual presses. Is she really a writer, or is she only pretending to be a writer?
The guest of honor is a famous writer who went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop several years before she got there. His latest book has just been sold to Hollywood. He speaks and carries himself as if he were the Emperor of Everything.
At the end of the evening, she finds herself searching for a ride home. She came on the bus, and the Emperor offers to give her a lift home. But she’s not going home, she’s got her heart set on a movie that’s showing only tonight. She’s afraid of going to the movies alone, and that’s why she’s decided to go. Because she’s afraid.
The famous writer drives a sports car. The seats smell of leather, and the dashboard is lit like an airplane cockpit. Her own car doesn’t always start and has a hole in the floor near the accelerator that lets in rain and snow, so she has to wear boots when she drives. The famous writer talks and talks, but she can’t hear what he is saying, because her own thoughts are drowning him out like a wind. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. She is just young and pretty enough to feed the famous writer’s ego by nodding enthusiastically at everything he says until he drops her off in front of the cinema. She hopes the famous writer notices she is going to see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alone. To tell the truth, she feels miserable walking up to the box office by herself, but she forces herself to buy the ticket and go in because she loves this movie.
The theater is packed. It feels to the young woman as if everybody is there with somebody, except her. Finally, the scene where Marilyn sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The colors are cartoon-wonderful, the set deliciously campy, the lyrics clever, the whole number is pure old-style glamour. Marilyn is sensational. After her song is over, the audience breaks into applause as if this were a live performance, though sad Marilyn has been dead years and years.
The woman who is me goes home proud of having gone to the movies alone. See? It wasn’t that difficult. But as she bolts the door of her apartment, she bursts into tears. “I don’t have diamonds,” she sobs, not knowing what she means, except she knows even then it’s not about diamonds. Every few weeks, she has a messy crying jag like this that leaves her feeling shipwrecked and awful. It’s such a regular occurrence she thinks these storms of depression are as normal as rain.
What is the woman in the photograph afraid of? She’s afraid of walking from her parked car to her apartment in the dark. She’s afraid of the scuffling sounds in the walls. She’s afraid she’ll fall in love and get stuck living in Chicago. She’s afraid of ghosts, deep water, rodents, night, things that move too fast—cars, airplanes, her life. She’s afraid she’ll have to move back home again if it turns out she really isn’t brave enough to live alone.
Throughout all this, I’m writing stories to go with that title, The House on Mango Street. Sometimes I write about people I remember, sometimes I write about people I’ve just met, often I mix the two together. My students from Pilsen who sat before me when I was teaching, with girls who sat beside me in another classroom a decade before. I pick up parts of Bucktown, like the monkey garden next door, and plop it down in the Humboldt Park block where I lived during my middle and high school years—1525 North Campbell Street.
Often all I have is a title with no story—“The Family of Little Feet”—and I have to make the title kick me in the behind to get me going. Or sometimes all I’ve got is a first sentence—“You can never have too much sky.” One of my Pilsen students said I said this, and she never forgot it. Good thing she remembered and quoted it back to me. “They came with the wind that blows in August…” This line came to me in a dream. Sometimes the best ideas come in dreams. Sometimes the worst ideas come from there too!
Whether the idea came from a sentence I heard buzzing around somewhere and saved in a jar, or from a title I picked up and pocketed, the stories always insist on telling me where they want to end. They often surprise me by stopping when I had every intention of galloping along a little further. They’re stubborn. They know best when there’s no more to be said. The last sentence must ring like the final notes at the end of a mariachi song—tan-tán—to tell you when the song is done.
The people I wrote about were real, for the most part, from here and there, now and then, but sometimes three real people would be braided together into one made-up person. Usually when I thought I was creating someone from my imagination, it turned out I was remembering someone I’d forgotten or someone standing so close I couldn’t see her at all.
Norma Alarcón
I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor the story, gave it shape so it had a beginning, middle, and end, because real-life stories rarely come to us complete. Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad, are mine.
—
I meet Norma Alarcón. She’s to become one of my earliest publishers and my lifetime friend. The first time she walks through the rooms of the apartment on North Paulina, she notices the quiet rooms, the collection of typewriters, the books and Japanese figurines, the windows with the view of freeway and sky. She walks as if on tiptoe, peering into every room, even the pantry and closet, as if looking for something. “You live here…,” she asks, “alone?”
“Yes.”
“So…” She pauses. “How did you do it?”
—
Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. Moving away to go to graduate school. Traveling abroad. Earning my own money and living by myself. Posing as an author when I was afraid, just as I posed in that photo you used on the first cover of Third Woman Magazine.
And, finally, when I was ready, after I’d apprenticed with professional writers over several years, partnering with the right agent. My father, who sighed and wished for me to marry, was, at the end of his life, much more gratified I had my agent, Susan Bergholz, providing for me rather than a husband. “¿Ha llamado Susan?” he asked me daily, because if Susan called it meant good news. Diamonds may do for a girl, but an agent is a woman writer’s best friend.
My literary agent, Susan Bergholz, in front of Danny López Lozano’s Tienda Guadalupe Folk Art shop, San Antonio
I couldn’t trust my own voice, Norma. People saw a little girl when they looked at me and heard a little girl’s voice when I spoke. Because I was unsure of my own adult voice and often censored myself, I made up another voice, Esperanza’s, to be my voice and ask the things I needed answers to myself—“Which way?” I didn’t know exactly, but I knew which routes I didn’t want to take—Sally, Rafaela, Ruthie—women whose lives were white crosses on the roadside.
At Iowa we never talked about serving others with our writing. It was all about serving ourselves. But there were no other examples to follow until you introduced me to Mexican writers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. The young w
oman in the photograph was looking for another way to be—“otro modo de ser,” as Castellanos put it.
Until you brought us all together as U.S. Latina writers—Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marjorie Agosín, Carla Trujillo, Diana Solís, Sandra María Esteves, Diane Gómez, Salima Rivera, Margarita López, Beatriz Badikian, Carmen Ábrego, Denise Chávez, Helena María Viramontes—until then, Normita, we had no idea that what we were doing was extraordinary.
—
I no longer make Chicago my home, but Chicago still makes its home in me. I have Chicago stories I’ve yet to write. So long as those stories kick inside me, Chicago will still be home.
Eventually I took a job in San Antonio. Left. Came back. And left again. I kept coming back lured by cheap rent. Affordable housing is essential to an artist. I could, in time, even buy my own first house, a hundred-year-old home once periwinkle, but now painted a Mexican pink.
Two years ago my office went up in my backyard, a building created from my Mexican memories. I am writing this today from this very office, Mexican marigold on the outside, morning-glory violet on the inside. Wind chimes ring from the terrace. Trains moan in the distance all the time; ours is a neighborhood of trains. The same San Antonio River tourists know from the River Walk wends its way behind my house to the missions and beyond until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. From my terrace you can see the river where it bends into an S.
White cranes float across the sky like a scene painted on a lacquered screen. The river shares the land with ducks, raccoons, possums, skunks, buzzards, butterflies, hawks, turtles, snakes, owls, even though we’re walking distance to downtown. And within the confines of my own garden there are plenty of other creatures too—yappy dogs, kamikaze cats, one lovesick parrot with a crush on me.