The walkway to Dona Rosa’s front door is overgrown with roses. At first, I think I’ve come to the wrong place. But the tile inserted into the high stucco wall overrun with bougainvillea and geraniums, says 12 Rua do Jardim in bright blue enamel. That’s the address José gave me. I look up and down the street before I open the wrought iron gate, painted white and rusting at the joints and along the handle. No one is coming.
“Look at me! Look at me,” the flowers seem to scream, “just don’t hurt me.” I lift their blooming, heavy heads out of my way. Maybe Dona Rosa will let me cut some roses for her, even let me take a few home with me. A pink one for Dorys’s dinner table. A white one for Violeta’s altar. A red one for Claudio’s, well, everything.
The home is smaller than I expected, and not new like the others on this street, reminding me of my granny’s one stubborn baby tooth in the front of her mouth that refuses to budge. Andrea lives over in this new development—her family is hosting Chris, the other American exchange student with the surf punk hairdo—and Claudio’s cousin lives over in this part of Little America too. They have live-in maids but the Bissacos just have Dona Lucia who comes a few times a week and goes home at the end of the day.
I guess I was imagining something more like the old Ford Mansion back home in Akinville where George Washington stayed the winter before we beat the British. Or the big house on the sugar plantation just at the edge of this city’s limits where I was invited to a party the first week I got here, four months ago already. Drinking Guaraná on the patio, I was reminded of why Washington picked Akinville for his winter camp. From its mountain views, he could see the British coming on the river below. The big house, too, sits above Little America looking down on everybody—subject or enemy.
A huge confederate flag hangs inside the front window. I roll my eyes. It’s not supposed to affect me, because, people say, it doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does back home. The screen door is closed, so I call out instead of using the doorbell the way Ana Cásia does when we go to visit her grandparents or the way Andrea does when she comes to invite me to her house for a swim.
“Boa tarde, Dona Rosa,” I say into the blackness beyond the metal bars and the mesh screen. A sudden breeze sweeps across the porch into the tree pressing against it, sliding out a whistle from between its leaves. I shiver. The tree feels familiar. Being from the Garden State, I feel like I should know what it’s called, but I can’t think of its name. I do however know the smell wafting out from the house. Cornbread. My great-granny’s was the best. She made it with buttermilk, let it cool on her speckled countertop, and before I could even ask, she’d slide me thin slices of it that I ate right from the knife’s blade.
A high creaking voice calls from the back of the house. “Boa tarde. Quem é?” Has she forgotten that I’m supposed to come? Or did she just forget my name?
“It’s Deenie, the exchange student,” I say. “The one staying with José and Dorys, the Bissacos?”
A silver-headed woman emerges from the back of the house, leaning hard on a cane, a multi-colored crocheted shawl sagging from her thin shoulders. She unlocks the screen with a key and grabs my hand with a tight squeeze, then gives it a swing instead of a shake. “Boa tarde, minha filha. Boa tarde. I wasn’t expecting someone who could speak Portuguese.” She touches my cheek with her damp crumpled hand and calls me “Sugar,” sounding just like my New Orleans family, and I feel proud, then bashful, and immediately want to please her.
I straighten the collar of my sleeveless shirt and speak in my best Portuguese pronunciation before she can show me to her little sitting room where teacups, cookies and cornbread wait on flowered China plates and saucers.
“Que ótimo, Dona Rosa to learn about the history of Little America from a real American Brazilian. Excelente!” This tickles Dona Rosa until her spotted face turns bright pink and she works herself up to a coughing spell, then collapses into a high back chair to recover. I offer to get her some water from the kitchen, but she says no. She wants to feel the heat of laughter on her face and in her lungs.
“Senta-se. Senta,” she commands, batting at the air until I sit down in a chair that matches hers. She pours us cups of tea, gives us each a cube of brown sugar, then pops a square of the cornbread into her mouth. I do the same which makes us both happy. The house itself may be played out, but everything in it seems priceless for all the care that someone, Dona Rosa or the maid, has taken with it. The China gleams and the picture frames shine silver with none of those black streaks that always stain my family’s few pieces until we have company. And the cornbread is perfect—browned on top and golden inside.
There is silence while she pours and I realize this would have been the proper time to present her with a lovely bouquet of roses, like the ones taking over her yard. I take the stick pin from my pocket with the Akinville town seal on it and set it on her mahogany coffee table. “Dona Rosa, that’s just a little something from my town, Akinville, New Jersey,” I say. I give the raised bump on my shin a quick rub. Either the ointment or my jeans rubbing against the Band-Aid make it itch.
“Deixa ver,” she says and holds out her hand. I place it there gently, to make it seem like it’s more valuable, more precious than it really is and she brings it up close to her face, gives it a long hard look and then holds it up to the single stream of sunlight filtering into the room. She coos over it while she twirls it in the sun ray, tells me she’s so happy to have it and that Akinville must be a beautiful place. “I want it on my shawl,” she says, “so I can show it off.” I stick it there between some of the more tightly knitted pieces of yarn and wonder whom she has to show it off to.
“How do you like our town?” she says, and I say fine, but my eyes wander over to the confederate flag covering the window, then the picture on the wall next to it.
“Real Americans like you and me,” Dona Rosa says, pointing to the picture. “Bring it here.” I retrieve the picture from the wall and see Dona Rosa and a bunch of people dressed in hoop skirts and confederate uniforms smiling for the camera, crumbling tombstones jutting out of the grass behind them.
“This was at the Festa Confederada last year.” She rubs her crooked index finger over the picture and leaves a smudge across the faces of the Americans. “Que saudades,” she says and I wonder who in the picture has left her, who it is that she’s now missing.
Common Sense Rule #19. Nostalgia for home is to be expected. Write letters to family and friends often to keep the blues at bay.
I miss my magenta bangs—mom made me cut them before I left. I miss rehearsing for the spring musical—I would have had a real chance for a lead, not just the chorus, now that I’m in eleventh grade. I miss the cornbread and ham my family will have next week for Thanksgiving. But mostly I miss Emma, the way I could tell her anything. That night last year after rehearsal for Anything Goes, I called her, crying and hyperventilating into the phone. I was one of Reno Sweeney’s Angels and I had made the mistake of telling my mom I was nervous that we were going to each have a little part to sing solo. That got my mom going on her high school days, how popular she was even though she was the only Black girl in the whole place, how she was all set to be a famous singer. Over spaghetti and meat sauce for me, three glasses of Gallo wine for her, Mom told me that she never really wanted children, and that my father had talked her into “domesticity.” Then, she held my hands like we were girlfriends and said, “Don’t let anyone steal your dreams, Deenie.” That’s when I decided to get the hell out of that house, that town, that country—all places that demanded my gratitude and appreciation even though I never asked to be there. I never asked to be at all. Emma didn’t judge me when I said I couldn’t wait to be rid of them all. The night of the knife, Emma still didn’t judge. I was just trying to defend my mom since it was partly my fault that she’d been forced into something she didn’t want and I felt sorry for her. Still, Mom found a way to blame me. Not Emma. She just said her family goes crazy sometimes too and it was probably good to get some space and some time away. Now it’s been a season since I last saw my parents. I guess I kind of miss them too even though I came here to get away from them, the mess of their marriage, their total disinterest in me and all of our… misunderstandings. But here in Brazil—the only one of the twenty-three International Exchange Club countries that would have me—I wonder. Have I really escaped anything?
Dona Rosa lightly pats my knee. “You’ll come this year. It’s a wonderful celebration. The whole town participates and we Confederados dress up in our American clothes and eat our American food.”
I blow at my tea and picture her and the other Confederados out in an open field surrounded by hamburgers and hot dogs, apple pie and milk. It was my second day in the country when Ana Cásia told me about them and so they were the first thing I wrote down on my list of New Portuguese Words. Confederados: The US southerners who came to southern Brazil after the Civil war and founded Little America, São Paulo.
“What kind of American food do you make, Dona Rosa? Do you bring this delicious cornbread?”
“Obrigada, filha. Yes. That’s my grandmother’s recipe. We have cornbread, watermelon, fried chicken, vinegar pies,” she says and I smile to myself at how what she calls American food is really Southern food, soul food, and I like that she is as proud of her “Confederate” heritage as I am of my New Orleans roots.
“It’s some party. All the newspapers come and sometimes the TV stations. And of course the mayor,” and she raises her palms at his name, like he’s an obligation she has to suffer, the way I imagine she did when the International Club phoned to say another American exchange student would darken her door. “We even had an American president once. But he wasn’t president then. He was just a governor from Georgia. Somebody he was related to was buried at the Campo Cemetery.”
With the cornbread all gone, I take a sip of tea to wash down the stale biscoito, victim of the relentless heat here or the air conditioning—I haven’t discovered yet which is the culprit spoiling baked goods overnight. “Jimmy Carter?”
Dona Rosa looks up quickly. “How did you know?”
I shrug my shoulders and don’t mention how obsessed I was with Amy Carter having that entire white house to play in, or how my parents were always talking about how finally there was a real God-fearing man running the land.
“Que bom,” she says, tapping her finger on the side of her head before pointing at me. “Smart girl.”
I don’t know about smart. It’s more that I pay attention. How else to stay safe? I wonder, but don’t ask if Dona Rosa has ever voted.
“Was it hard to live under military government, Dona Rosa?” She laughs hard again, but stops short of coughing.
“They’re in control, filha just like any other government, just like your so-called democracia.” She nods her head at me now, like she’s caught me in a lie. “Oh yes, that nice man from Georgia was the only American president to tell our government he didn’t like the way we were doing business, torturing the subversivos who spoke against the military, running the military presidents out of the country when they were no longer useful. All the other presidents before him, they liked our military government just fine. To me, they’re all the same. Maybe with Tancredo, God rest his soul, things could have changed, but with this guy now, Sarney, he used to be with the military too. How’s he any different?”
I get quiet the way everyone does here whenever the dead president Tancredo Neves is mentioned. He was to be the first democratic president after 20 years of military government, or as Dorys likes to say, he was a little bit of gold after all those anos de chumbo, but he dropped dead the night before his job was supposed to begin. His funeral lasted for days.
Dona Rosa waves a fly away from her head and lets out a sigh. “Democracia, ditadura, what does it matter? I go on breathing either way. Only God has the power to take my breath from me.”
She kind of reminds me of an old white version of Violeta except, instead of God, Violeta gives all power to her ancestors. She prays to them, leaves special food for them, lights candles for them, and awaits their guidance. It’s the ancestors, according to Violeta, who will have the last word.
Dona Rosa pushes the dish of cookies closer to me and I take a small piece of a broken one. “Did you make these? They’re delicious.”
“Ai filha, I stopped cooking when I was 85. These are from the store.”
I take one more small bite and perch the rest of the broken cookie in my saucer since she didn’t make them.
“I used to cook all the time, especially for the festa. I used to make a pecan pie to honor meus pais,” she points to the ceiling, then spreads her fingers the way women in my church do when they are particularly pleased with something the pastor is saying or to catch the spirit bouncing off the choir. “My father lived on a pecan farm in Louisiana before his parents came here. He was only four when they left, but he remembered it. It must have been beautiful.”
“I don’t believe it, Dona Rosa. My father lived on a pecan farm too, in Mississippi. My Grandpa says it was beautiful, too.”
Dona Rosa grabs my hand and pushes herself to the edge of her chair, her arm trembling in my grip. “I miss that place like it was my own, filha, like I grew up there, too, but I never laid eyes on it. How can I have saudades for something I never knew?” She rubs a tear from her eye, and then claps her hands together. “What was your farm like?”
I stammer, because I never laid eyes on our farm either, because I too have saudades for a place I never knew. But I can see that she needs something from me, so I try to give it to her. “It was right on the Mississippi Gulf,” I say, “and the pecans would fall from the trees.” Dona Rosa nods like she can see it, like she knows this make-believe place that I’m talking about. I realize I don’t even know what a pecan tree looks like so I tell her one of the stories that Grandpa passed down to me.
“Nobody could believe how far my grandpa could throw a pecan. Grandpa played baseball for the Negro League and he used to catch for Satchel Paige, who according to Grandpa was like the best baseball player ever.” I turned down my mouth at this when Grandpa told me because with his bad eyes he couldn’t see me do it and because I’d never heard of this Satchel Paige so I didn’t see how he could be the greatest anything. I try to describe for Dona Rosa a pecan soaring toward the Gulf of Mexico, skipping through the foamy waves like a rock on a pond.
“The house they lived in was enormous so they used to rent the rooms out to families and the tenant’s children liked to cheer my Grandpa on.”
They’d see me up front whippin’ those pecans, just whippin’ ‘em so far you couldn’t see them land. No sir. Them chillren be runnin’ toward the Gulf screamin’ ‘Mr. Grant done thrown a pecan past the ocean.’ That’s how Grandpa told the story, but I leave out the slang when I tell it to Dona Rosa.
“So your grandfather was a pecan farmer,” Dona Rosa says, “like my grandfather. Did you see my pecan tree?”
I guess I did without realizing it. I guess I had what Violeta is always trying to get at her altar, a talk with my ancestors but I wasn’t even trying.
I try to picture Grandpa younger, stronger. He was handsome for sure. I wonder if he would have been Dona Rosa’s type, if they’d have gone to a ball game together.
“No, he wasn’t a pecan farmer. His grandfather was the pecan farmer. It was his grandfather’s plantation. His grandmother was his grandfather’s slave.”
I’ve never said these words out loud before and they drop with a thud in the cloaked room, heavy under that suffocating flag. His grandfather, the plantation’s owner, didn’t have any white children. That’s how Grandpa got to live there. The plantation just got passed on to his black heirs when he died.
Grandpa never came right out and told me this. He never said the word “slave.” I had to piece it all together from the time period, the place where they lived, that one unit on the Civil War in seventh grade, but mostly from Roots. I just worked backwards like Columbo.
But I don’t tell Dona Rosa this part since she didn’t ask, since she’s still nodding curiously to make as if she understands but I’m not altogether convinced that she does, so I try to get both our minds to another spot and I make up a lie about how the trees were so dense sometimes kids would get lost playing hide and seek in them and Grandpa’d spend most of his time retrieving frightened children from the property.
“Oh and the house”—now this part is true—“Grandpa said it was beautiful like something in a picture book or in a dream. It was a big old white house with tall shutters and wide windows, only they had to keep those boarded up because of the storms. A long wooden porch ran the length of the front of the house, and the patio off the master bedroom upstairs gave the best view of Ocean Springs. ‘Pecan trees everywhere you looked,’ Grandpa had said, ‘that big ole white house right in the middle of `em.’”
“Have you been to the house?” Dona Rosa asks.
“No. Our family lost it,” I say. Dona Rosa furrows her brow at me and corrects my conjugation.
“How did they lose the house?”
I look into my half empty teacup and let my thumb trace a path around its cool fine edge.
When I asked Grandpa that same question, he sat back and turned his face toward the sun streaming through our kitchen window and hitting the back of his head. He was facing the wrong way if he was looking for Mississippi, but after sitting like that for a long time, the rest of the story seemed to find him. He cleared his throat and took a soiled napkin and patted underneath his glasses.
“I told you I played baseball, didn’t I. I could throw a pecan. I could catch a pecan. But I couldn’t farm no pecan. Taxes on that big ole place was more than even all them tenants could pay. Your daddy sure did love that house.” Grandpa turned away from the sun and got a smile on his face. “But New Orleans, now I got some stories from outta there.”
Dona Rosa nods, like she’s heard some stories from outta there too. Then, she sits back in her chair. She seems tired. “You really are like my child, you know that? We’re from all of the same places.” Her eyes still hold a soft green hue despite their age and her skin is still fair even under this penetrating sun. I want to share her belief in our kinship, but it seems unlikely. Even though Grandpa is paler than she is, a shade that would never be confused with morena or even mulatta the way people sometimes call me here, he and I have the same wide forehead, the same accusatory lines across them when we don’t believe what we’re hearing.
“In that sideboard, in the drawer, there is something for you. Go get it.”
I don’t move. “Dona Rosa, I can’t take anything more from you. I only brought you that pin.” I have to search hard to find it, its humble metal overtaken and easily absorbed by all the bold colors and textures of her shawl.
“I didn’t plan it, child, but now that I know you, I want you to have this.”
Inside the drawer, there is a thick confederate flag with faded colors and yellowing stars unlike any I’ve seen before. Instead of a red background with a blue cross through the middle, this has a blue square in the left hand corner, like our real flag, and a ring of stars in the square surrounding one bigger star. Then there are three wide stripes, two red and one white. It’s sealed up in thick plastic, as precious as The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I pick it up to look through the rest of the drawer for the present, but only find some books of matches and used candles.
“In your hand. That’s it,” she says. “Be careful with it and bring it here.”
I grip the flag tighter and smile without showing my teeth, so Dona Rosa can’t see my anguish and grief.
She holds her hands out and I drop the flag into them like we’re playing hot potato. “Cuidado,” she says, slowly opening the casing and slipping it out of the sheath. “This thing is older than me.”
“That’s too valuable, Dona Rosa. Your flag belongs with your family or in a museum.”
“There’s only me now. No children, not even sobrinhos. But you… I laughed so hard before when you said ‘American Brazilian’ because that’s not a word. We Confederado kids, we’re American and Brazilian. We were brought up speaking English at home, we all went to church together and we were even encouraged to go out together, to hold onto our first home. But I didn’t ever feel that place before, not truly, not what it means outside of this place. This flag was the most American thing about me, until today. You made me feel my other country like I never did before. Watch over this for me.”
She places the flag in my lap, its heavy tightly woven fibers weighing her arms down, and pets at it like it’s a poodle, or John Travolta stuck in his bubble, or a sleeping child. “The cotton in Louisiana was so good. That’s why the Portuguese wanted us to come here and bring our cotton seeds with us so they wouldn’t have to buy it from the Americans.” She sits back in her chair again like she’s just seen the end of a pretty dream. “Meus pais always told me that if it weren’t for us Americans, this town would have no industry – no Bissacos textile company, no private schools either. The American women started those so their children could receive a proper education.” She taps my hand lightly with her own, then lets her hand lay there, like she doesn’t have the energy to pick it up again. “You don’t see too many of these confederate flags, querida. This was made during the war, before they made that one up there.” She points to the window, but I don’t look. I feel the same embarrassed rash rising from the collar of my shirt that I get every time Violeta tries to talk to me about “our ancestors” and black solidarity. “Why don’t you want my gift, filha?”
I still can’t look at her, because I can hear the hurt in her voice. I can hear that she wants to please me as much as I wanted to please her when I first walked through the door. I think of the stupid macaroni necklace my Grandpa gave me, the same day he told me about the pecan farm and how happy I was to have it even though it was ugly. Its ridged shells felt cool and strong between my fingers and I rolled the necklace around for a long time, trying to imagine how Grandpa got the string through the middle, how he dyed the shells all those different shades of green, orange and purple, how they treated him over at the Senior center where he’d made it. “I do want it, Dona Rosa, it’s just that…”
“Do you know how many American kids have come through that door, have seen my old flags and clothes and wanted to pry them from my fingers? Never mind the Confederado descendants and the historians.”
The one bold ray of light in the parlor has shifted and we are almost in complete darkness except for some cockeyed beams splashing in from the kitchen. The forced blockade of all the light keeps the house nice and cool, but it also casts a heavy shadow on the atmosphere. It’s like we’re entombed, like there is no way out of here. I sink my fingers into the roots of my hair (I’ll need to straighten them soon) and try to figure out something to say.
Chris never has this problem. She just says whatever comes into her half shaved strawberry blonde head and never gets in trouble for it. When that guy at our monthly international club meeting kept “accidentally” grabbing her butt, she had no problem calling him a dirty old pig in front of Jose and some of the other club officers. She hangs loose with her anger, rides it like a wave and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. But that never works for me.
Common Sense Rule #11. As an International Exchange Club ambassador, you must at all times behave in a manner which will reflect credit upon you, your family and your country.
“I don’t think I could give your gift the proper respect, or the same respect… it doesn’t mean the same thing to me, or my family… I don’t think my parents would be too happy to have it in their home.” I rub my sore shin again even though it’s not itching.
“Por que?” Dona Rosa lifts her chin slightly and looks out at me from under her glasses. I hear it now for the first time. The difference between asking “why” and answering “because” is a silence between two syllables. For what. I scratch the back of my ear and picture the blonde guy from the Dukes of Hazzard slipping through the window of that fast orange car of his. I didn’t watch it much, because Daisy Dukes’ tight jean shorts made me mad and I wanted Bo Duke to come up with something better to say than just Yeehaw. But when I did watch it, I don’t recall the big confederate flag painted on the roof of the car bothering me. It only bothered me later, when I was old enough to know that those kinds of things were supposed to bother me, but I can’t remember who explained to me the ins and outs of my indignation.
“Dona Rosa, to people in the US a confederate flag means that the person flying it is happy about the confederacy, the way it was before slavery ended.” I stroke the flag and try to determine if it’s made of cotton or wool, try to remember how I learned that escravo means slave. “It’s like saying slavery is a good thing.”
She clicks her tongue. “Ai que pena,” she says like it’s a shame for me that I can’t get what she gets from a blue x encrusted with 13 stars on a piece of red cloth. She shifts her weight in her chair and I feel her eyes on me, mine on the big white star in the middle of the 12 littler ones on the itchy flag in my lap. Dona Rosa sticks her yellowing nail into my arm to make me look at her. “What do you see when you look at this flag, that I give to you, that my grandfather gave to my father who gave it to me?”
I see myself smacking the glasses off that girl from my old neighborhood a few years before we moved to Akinville because she spent the whole bus ride from school cracking your mama jokes on me and since I didn’t want a demerit for fighting, I waited until we were alone on the street and left her groping on the gravel for the broken frames.
I see myself at the Ford Mansion school trip, new to Akinville, without any actual friends yet, going from bedroom to bedroom, the ceilings so low that one girl had to practically bend in half to keep her Jheri curl from brushing against it and I wondered who took care of all those rooms and kept the fires going in each of them at night while Washington and everybody slept. Where did the fire keepers sleep and why didn’t the guide mention them? I wanted to know but I did not want to look stupid in front of the other students or “fresh” to the teachers, as my mother had very clearly warned me not to be.
I see myself putting two and two together about my grandfather’s grandparents, and why grandpa’s skin and my dad’s skin were so light even though they were black men. It was sex. Grandpa’s grandmother was like Kizzie in Roots—the master’s sex thing.
I scratch at my sore like crazy now more to make the affection I feel for this woman, rather than my imagined itch go away, and to inspire some stinging hatred to boil up in its place. I mumble, “My parents wouldn’t want it in their house.”
Dona Rosa chuckles like she just solved a riddle. “Slavery was a good thing, for people who owned slaves, people like my grandfather, but not good for people like your grandfather or his father. Okay. But I’ll tell you something, filha, I still want you to have that flag because of what it means to me. When I see this flag, I see our pecan farms. I see what makes us like real family.” Dona Rosa yawns.
I should tell her that we’re not real family, that I already have a grandfather from the south, and that his pecan farm was swallowed by the stormy gulf, that New Orleans didn’t offer promises to him the way Brazil did to her family and that nothing is exactly what he got. Anyway, real family inflicts the realest pain. If Grandpa were here, I think he’d spit on her flag, which makes me doubly mad at myself because I still want to please her.
“You’ll come with me to the Campo Cemetery this year when we have our Festa?”
“Claro,” I say, trying to hide my repulsion for the flag in my hand, and my excitement at the idea of walking over all of her relatives’ graves.
“We’ll take some roses from my garden and I’ll introduce you to my parents and my grandparents. They’re all there.”
“It will be my pleasure.”
“I’m a little tired now, filha, but come again next Sunday.” She takes the flag and tries to put it back in the bag, but doesn’t have the dexterity, so she just leaves them both on the coffee table where the tea cups and the cornbread were. “I’ll take you to my church, the Baptist church my family started when they came here. Everything was Catholic then.” She laughs and closes her eyes. “Everything still is.”
I gather up the dishes, bring them to the kitchen and set them on the counter. A pair of garden shears hangs from a nail on the side of the cabinet and I close my eyes and picture my new flag, try and see what it means to me. My mother’s angry face staring me down while I dance around the kitchen to Elvis comes to mind. That, and my New Orleans cousins’ laughter when I visited them the summer before I entered high school and asked them if we had slaves in our family.
“I’ll be happy to go to church with you, Dona Rosa and I’ll trim those flowers for you too if you want.” But my mangled face in the reflection of the shiny blades doesn’t look happy. I look as livid as I felt the day I kicked that girl’s ass or on the day I huffed out of the Ford mansion with half a story.
“Just leave the dishes,” Dona Rosa calls back. “The maid will be here soon to serve the almoço. She’ll clean up.” I lick the tip of my finger, dip it into the empty plate of cornbread, then suck down the crumbs until the plate is clean. I can never seem to satisfy the Bissaco’s maid, Dona Lucia. She’s Italian, like the Bissacos, like a lot of immigrants in this part of São Paulo. No matter how hard I try to pick up after myself and not leave dirty dishes in the sink, I can tell from the way she looks at me that she disapproves of me. I just can’t figure out why, if it has to do with my color or my country. I peek out of the kitchen and see Dona Rosa, still with her eyes closed, her hands folded on her lap, flag folded on the table.
“Is it okay if I cut the flowers and bring you some for your coffee table?”
“Next time, when you come for church. We’ll do it together.”
I return to the parlor just in time to see Dona Rosa in the middle of a moment of clarity that brightens her face. “I think you’re right. This flag isn’t just mine, it’s history, our history. I should share this gift with the people. They’ve been talking about building an Immigration Museum…What a fine day we’ve had,” she says.
I wonder what half stories that new museum will tell. I wonder what it would be like to walk around in my grandfather’s story all of the time and offer it up to anyone who couldn’t understand me. She holds her arms out to me, but I grab them like we’re about to do a dozy do so I don’t have to feel them around me. I kiss her three times on her cheeks, her skin limp under my lips, and I wonder how hard those loose cheeks would shake if I slapped them, if her lips would quiver if I shook my finger in her face for not giving me the damn flowers, the only things I wanted.
She goes to pat my face again but I back away from her out of her reach, hold my breath so I don’t have to smell any lingering cornbread aroma, then grab the flag at the last moment since maybe it will be worth money someday. She calls after me, “Wait, filha, wait. The flag—it’s for the museum,” and I scream from the other side of the door that I’m late for almoço with my familia verdade.
“De verdade,” she screams from behind the screen door, but I don’t bother to look back at her or her pecan tree. I don’t bother to lift the roses from my path this time and the thorns leave thin gray scratches along my arms. One from a hefty rose near the ground catches on the hem of my jeans. I go to shake it loose, but it’s good and snagged so I snap the rose from its tangled bush. I snap a few others loose too and the thorns make a bloody tic-tac toe board on my palm and stain my shirt—another thing that the Bissaco’s maid will hold against me.
Tortura. The second entry on my New Portuguese Word list. I knew what it meant the first time I heard it on the news, but like in a dictionary way. I needed to know what it meant for real. So I asked José one night after dinner, but he said he’d tell me later. When I asked Ana Cásia, she said it was too hard to explain. I didn’t bother to ask Claudio because I like the way things are with him and I don’t want to do anything to make that change. Only Violeta was straight with me. Only she mentioned the blood, the people no one’s ever seen again, the history. I think I’ll give her the whole scraggly bouquet. Maybe she’ll know what to do with this flag. Or, if she doesn’t, maybe the Ancestors will.
* * *
Image by Colin + Meg via Unsplash
