Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres
Part I
1
Conciencia was born with the map of Puerto Rico on her thigh. The main island and the neighboring small islands of Vieques, Culebra, Desecheo, Mona, Caja de Muertos and over a hundred even smaller islands, islets and cays took the shape of white vitiligo spots on Conciencia’s dark brown skin. Her skin glistened as if she had bathed in a tub of liquid gold. When she gets older, her high cheekbones will give off a bloody red glow. One of her almond shaped eyes had white eyelashes that when she blinked it looked like tiny butterflies were sprinting on her face.
2
Doña Nina got into the foster care system because she cared about children. When Conciencia was presented to her, she knew that she would love this seven-year-old child who looked like she could be her own child.
Things were different in this home. Conciencia did not slam doors or kick chairs. The first day she was sent to live with Doña Nina, she made Conciencia guava empanadas. She looked at the empanadas then at Doña Nina.
“Come, niña. I made them for you.”
Conciencia was hungry and bit into the warm and gooey guava. Mmmmmmm. She had never tasted something so good. Her tummy was filled. Doña Nina gave her another and another until Conciencia fell asleep with her head folded on the table.
Doña Nina may have been overweight, diabetic and had a compromised heart, but she was strong enough to carry Conciencia’s eighty-pound body to the twin bed she had bought just for her. She wiped the guava gel from Conciencia’s cheeks and blessed her before going into her room and praying to the many saints she worshiped.
Conciencia’s hair had been cut to the scalp, like a boy’s buzz cut. The six children in the foster home had gotten lice and cutting their hair was an expected course of action. But even before the lice, Conciencia’s hair had been cut short. Conciencia didn’t like combing her hair and fought when anyone else tried doing so. No one knew how to unknot her hair. But things were different in this new home. Doña Nina boiled onions and used the onion water with coconut oil to massage Conciencia’s scalp. After two months Conciencia’s thick strong black hair began to grow. Doña Nina taught Conciencia to untangle her hair with her fingers while she was in the bath. Every week she deep conditioned it with mayonnaise and eggs. No longer did Conciencia have to feel the knuckles of someone frustrated with Conciencia’s ouch and aii. When Conciencia’s hair was long enough, Doña Nina taught her how to braid her own hair. Conciencia loved this look the most. For the first time ever, at the age of eleven, she looked in the mirror and saw someone pretty. By the time she was twelve, she wore her hair in two thick braids that made her stand out from everyone in the crowd.
Dońa Nina taught her how to cook, how to make the masa for the empanadas. Soon they were making a business out of their home, selling empanadas de queso, de pollo, y de guava y queso. They sold them three for one dollar. Conciencia would do everything to create the masa, made of flour, butter, water and her secret ingredient, brown sugar. She shaped them like a pregnant belly and gave them their forked ridges. Doña Nina would fry them because she did not think Conciencia understood the danger of fire.
Conciencia finally had someone she could call Mamá. Someone with large bosoms to lean against. Someone to bring slippers to. Someone who didn’t have a large voice, instead she said Conciencia’s name the way it was meant to be said, like gentle waves coming from her mouth with a sweetness like her guava empanadas.
One night Doña Nina woke up screaming, “No! No!” and ran to Conciencia’s room and they both knelt down while Doña Nina prayed in a way that Conciencia couldn’t understand. She wasn’t even really praying. She was begging. When Conciencia asked her what was wrong, she shook her head, “pray with me, pray.”
Doña Nina didn’t want her to know that she had dreamt that she carried Conciencia’s infant body to the third-floor window and accidentally dropped her three flights down. She woke up begging, “God no!”
Two days later when Conciencia had just finished eating her oatmeal before going to school, Doña Nina smiled fully and told her, “You’re going to be okay. Last night I dreamt that you were riding the white horse of Santa Barbara. You’ll be okay. There will be forces that will try to destroy you because you are going to be very powerful, but do not worry, Yemaya and Santa Barbara will protect you. Pray to them. Que bueno que Santa Barbara te escogió a ti como soldada fiel. Santa Barbara has chosen you to be one of her trusted soldiers.
3
Conciencia was put into special education classes just a few months into first grade. She was placed in a room with children that threw chairs against walls and favored the word fuck over all other words. Sweet Conciencia, a quiet little girl with her head down and with a side glance was placed with the poster-children for prophylactics, as one teacher put it. Conciencia was kept in this class since the first grade because despite all attempts, she wouldn’t learn English.
“What day of the week are we in?” Her head down.
“Is it raining outside or sunny?” Shrugged shoulders.
“Your name? Conciencia? What mother would name a child that?” The teacher muttered.
It wasn’t all failure or waste of time. By fifth grade Conciencia had learned how to stick her middle finger out, shout, and chase her classmates. Poor Mrs. Neally, the new teacher who came so prepared with her lesson plans and wide blue eyes, tried to teach them what verbs and nouns were. She was the only teacher who truly cared for them. The poor woman spent half of her lunch break crying in the ladies’ bathroom.
Conciencia learned to turn tables upside down, to hide in the wooden closet. She practiced robot dance moves. “Do the pump,” her classmates demanded, and she danced, her chest pounding to the beat of her friends’ fists against desks. Little by little, she learned to speak English and stand with her chest as high as her chin, “Yeah motherfucker,” she told Corey who towered over her, “you have a problem with me, yeah, well fix this problem! You black slave.” And everyone laughed, ha ha! And Corey would respond, “Yeah, spic, take a fucking bath and get some socks. It’s winter. And you blacker than me stupid.”
“Yeah,” Conciencia said, laughing so much she was barely understandable, “I saw a pig fucking your momma.”
“I saw your momma sucking a pig’s dick,” Corey answered back.
They went on and on. There was no fighting. They all stood together in this class. But God forbid someone from another class messed with them. That rarely happened. They had named their class, their crew—The Innocents, because as Corey said, “We are innocent until proven guilty.”
Sandra, who was two years younger than the rest of them, but taller than all of them, was either under her desk or standing on it.
Julio cried for a reason no one could understand. He would hide in the closet to cry and when he came out, he was angry, kicked chairs and fought anyone who would come near him. He sat in a corner of the room, and everyone knew to leave him alone until he was ready to join them.
Angel was put in special education classes because even at the age of eleven, he read as if he had rocks in his mouth, vowels trying to roll over the rocks and consonants drilling holes into them. His long hair covered his sad honey-colored eyes. Because of the way he whisked his hair away from his face, a few boys in the hallway whispered, “is he a faggot?”
There was Melinda who came to school with spray paints and tagged the tables whenever the teacher turned her back. Mrs. Neally would ignore the sound and smell of the spray and kept writing on the board. Nobody told on Melinda. In her long bathroom breaks, with Conciencia as guard, she painted a mural that included flowers, an ocean and the words fuck you in turquoise.
Their classes were relegated to the third floor, the side of the building where the sun shone most. There were swinging doors separating them from the regular education classrooms. Regular Ed students looked through the small square windows on the metal doors to get a peek at students who were just hanging around or sitting on the hallway radiator. Sometimes the smell of cigarettes would sift through the doors. The best days were when they could get a look at a fight or a wooden desk being thrown against the wall.
4
The first time Juanito entered Conciencia’s classroom, they all looked at him as if he were the fish they were trying to bait. A new kid to taunt and beat to see how much heart he really had. He grew his dark hair into a short, tightly curled afro. On his chest gleamed a medallion with the island of Puerto Rico on it. When the teacher left the classroom to investigate the commotion in the hallway Conciencia and Corey, leading the group, surrounded Juanito.
“Hey punk,” Corey said, “you speak English?”
Juanito reached into his right sock and with one quick movement, brandished a shiny blade. Corey looked at Conciencia.
Conciencia told Juanito, “Put that blade away before the teacher comes back in.”
After the three o’clock bell and they were outside, Conciencia told Juanito, “Join us. We’re The Innocents.”
Juanito had more muscles than anyone else. His chest could not help but stretch the buttonholes of his green shirt.
“Why are your eyelashes white?”
Conciencia didn’t answer him. Instead, she asked again, “Well, do you want to be part of us?”
“Who’s the leader?” he asked.
“I’m the leader. This is the last time I will ask.”
They shook on it. They walked home together and realized that they live on the same block.
“There are six rules to follow. You have to memorize them.”
1) No fighting between us.
2) If anyone messes with any of us, we’ll be there to defend our friend and be part of the retaliation, if necessary.
3) All members’ book bags and notebooks will have The Innocents graffitied on it by Melinda.
4) I am the head of the group. If you have problems with someone else in the group, tell me about it.
5) If any of us come to school hungry, then the ones who can will sneak in food for them. You can count on me for guava empanadas.
6) If anyone needs clothes, Sandra’s mom knows how to sew.
“Why are you in charge?” Juanito asked.
Conciencia replied, “Because I can read and write in English and because I can fight.”
5
There was no explanation given as to why the broken window in Conciencia’s class was never fixed or boarded up. The whole rectangular window including the wooden pane was missing. Kids sometimes threw books out there. Sometimes they spit just to watch their saliva go down four flights. Through the frame of the window they could see the block across the street: There were only three buildings there. Two of the buildings were abandoned. One of them looked like it had been sliced horizontally in half. You could only see the first floor and only one window on the second floor of a six-family home apartment building. Next to it was a building missing a roof. Sometimes teenagers playing hooky snuck inside them. The third one did have people living in there. One could tell because a Puerto Rican flag hung from the third-floor window. Surrounding the buildings there was gray rubble, junk yards and dust rising from the rubbish.
6
Conciencia became the best reader of the class. Maybe it was because she had finally found a stable foster home, and more than anything she wanted Doña Nina to be proud of her.
On a day that Conciencia was looking out the window the assistant principal, Mrs. Smith, asked her to follow her to her office.
Conciencia sat in the office and stared at a framed photo of Mrs. Smith’s family. Her children, three of them with blue eyes like their mom’s sitting around a huge Christmas tree, bigger than any that Conciencia had ever seen. Her husband smiled, pointing at the Rudolph nose on his sweater. Conciencia sat on a wooden chair that rocked every time she moved. Mrs. Smith sat behind her desk with papers organized and clean. An office with no window.
“I have good news for you,” Mrs. Smith said with a smile. “You scored on a ninth-grade reading level on your state tests.”
Conciencia, who wasn’t fond of showing emotion to adults, said nothing.
“First though, I have to ask this question. Did anyone help you with the exam?”
Conciencia was taken aback. There was a teacher there the whole time. The seats were spread out so no one would cheat. “No,” she finally answered.
“Ok then, we have decided that we will place you in Mr. Singer’s class, where you belong now.”
“You mean, you’re switching my class?”
“That class will be more appropriate for you. You’re going to love it there.”
Conciencia thought of throwing Mrs. Smith’s family picture against the wall but decided against it.
Mrs. Smith walked Conciencia back to her classroom and asked her to grab her things.
Everyone including Juanito and Corey asked, “What’s going on?”
“Come now, Conciencia,” Mrs. Smith insisted.
“I’m not leaving,” she said, drumming her fingers on her desk.
“My child, you don’t have a choice.”
Mrs. Smith used the phone inside a metal box against the wall to call security.
Mr. Banner, the 6’ 4” gym teacher that most students were afraid of arrived first. “All right, let’s go sweet tart,” he told Conciencia.
She didn’t respond.
“Do you need some help getting up?” he asked.
Conciencia turned her head and looked out the open window. Mr. Banner put a hand on her shoulder. “Get up on your own or I’ll carry you myself,” he shouted, “This is my lunch period.”
Mrs. Neally tried to intervene, “Maybe give her a day to think about it?”
“Take your hand off my shoulder,” Conciencia said through clenched teeth. She looked back at Juanito, who was rubbing his hands together as if he were trying to make fire.
“All right,” Mr. Banner said with a smile. “I guess you’ll have to be dessert.” He yanked Conciencia’s elbow and tried to lift her, but Conciencia had wrapped her legs around the legs of her desk. Her body, chair and desk fell to the floor, her head taking the brunt of the fall.
“Get your hands off her,” Juanito shouted.
The security guard arrived and held Conciencia’s arms, Mr. Banner held her legs.
Juanito asked Corey to repeat rule number two. “If anyone messes with any of us, we’ll be there to defend our friend and be part of the retaliation, if necessary.”
At this, Juanito, Corey, Julio, Sandra, Melinda and Jonathan got up. They grabbed their chairs and began to strike Mr. Banner.
He dropped his hold of Conciencia. Corey took off his belt and struck the security guard in the face with the metal buckle. Mrs. Neally was in the hallway crying for help. The assistant principal was nowhere to be seen. The whole class, except for Angel, got up and pummeled the security guard and gym teacher.
In less than ten minutes, the police arrived and the whole class, even Angel, who had done nothing, were handcuffed, faces against the board, chalk dust painting their skins white.
7
Conciencia prepared the empanadas that Doña Nina taught her to make. She looked forward to surprising her and Doña Nina’s two friends as they returned from Sunday Mass. Conciencia had filled the empanadas with beef and potatoes and on a separate plate her favorite empanadas, the sweet guava and white cheese ones. She used a dish towel to wipe the sweat off her forehead. It was a 100-degree July day. The only thing to cool them off was a window fan that she turned off because it was making the paper napkins flutter across the counter. She focused on creating perfect ridges around the half-moon shape of the empanadas, so focused that she forgot about the oil bubbling in the pan. When she turned around a fire was blazing taller than she was. She knelt, picked up one of her chancletas and tried to put the fire out. Instead, the fire attacked her blouse. Her skin. She dropped to the floor unconscious. The fire spread to the walls.
Juanito was playing handball on the courts on Troutman Street when he saw the smoke rising.
“Conciencia’s house is on fire!” his friend Pito yelled.
Juanito ran fast toward it, his legs felt like rubber.
People covered their noses. “Where are the fire trucks? ¿Donde están los bomberos?” People cried.
Juanito tried to enter from the front wooden doors, lit like logs in a fire pit. Juanito took off to the apartment building to the left where the front doors were never locked and had a basement door that flung freely. He ran down the basement stairs, ran up the stairs that led to the yard, climbed over the yard fence to Conciencia’s yard, jumped on the window ledge and elbowed the window fan till it fell. He could see Conciencia on the kitchen floor. The fire had risen, but saints conspired in whispers and left the ground where Conciencia lay untouched.
He crawled on the ground, grabbed Conciencia by her arms and dragged her over the window ledge. He carried her body down the basement stairs and out of the building. Once outside he yelled, “Help, help, help me!”
There was smoke. Coughs. Men, children and women crying. Another building caught fire.
People sliced the air with their hands as if cutting cane, shouting, “Where the fuck are the fire trucks? ¿Dónde está la ambulancia?”
Juanito knelt over Conciencia’s body, “Wake up Conciencia.”
The flesh of her chest was exposed like a pink carnation. There was a smell like burnt pork, burnt hair and another foul smell Juanito had never experienced before. One of the neighbors, Indio, got his car and helped Juanito carry Conciencia’s body into his car. “We’re taking her to the hospital ourselves,” Indio yelled.
Juanito sat in the backseat with Conciencia on his lap. “Wake up, Conciencia.” His chest heaved like a wrath filled wave. He checked her wrist for a pulse the way he had seen on TV. He was sure he could feel one. He held Conciencia gently in his arms. He bathed his head in the smoke rising from her body and chanted, “Let the smoke cleanse my mind. The most important thing right now is that Conciencia lives. If she lives, I will stop smoking, stop stealing, stop fighting, stop skipping school, dear God, dear Lord Jehovah or Jesus, God. Ven, ven, Papa Dios, aquí. Ven, Papa Dios. Curala, Señor, curala.” He sobbed in the mist of her body.
At the hospital, she was left on a stretcher in the hallway. Above her, a gap in the ceiling, powdered dust on her body. Cockroaches zig-zagged across the floor. When Juanito screamed at everyone in the emergency room, an attendant screamed back, “We are doing the best we can!”
If it hadn’t been for Juanito, Conciencia would’ve perished. The firemen had been busy putting out a fire in the neighboring community of Ridgewood, where historic brownstones stood and Puerto Ricans weren’t welcome. By the time the fire trucks finally made it to Bushwick, four buildings and the old lady on the third floor of Conciencia’s building, who never left her apartment, had been consumed by the fire.
Conciencia for the rest of her life did not grow breasts. Instead on her chest blossomed a black orchid, a shield that protected Conciencia’s heart from any further suffering.
* * *
Part II
1
“What do Puerto Ricans have to be proud of anyway?” Mr. Heitman asked our seventh-grade class. He was mad because he got caught in traffic yesterday because of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. “Name one thing?” My heart beat fast and my face got hot. None of us said anything even though almost all of us were Puerto Rican. We all got quiet. “That’s what I thought,” Mr. Heitman muttered. We were quiet for the rest of the day. We didn’t even play with each other during recess.
Mr. Heitman wrapped Sandra’s long ponytail around his big hands and pulled it real hard just ‘cause Sandra poked her head inside his classroom. With tears and snots, Sandra told her teacher, Mrs. Rubenstein, what Mr. Heitman did. Mrs. Rubenstein gave Sandra tissues and told her that maybe Mr. Heitman pulled her hair because her hair was so pretty.
Mr. Heitman turned the lights off and locked the door in the room me and Sandra were in. The Science teacher asked us to get folders from him. Since the room was in the basement with no lights, we couldn’t see anything. We asked him to turn the lights back on, but he didn’t. He didn’t say a word. We didn’t know where he was in the room. “Turn the light on,” Sandra said in her tough voice. I stood still. I didn’t know if he was coming to us. I thought I heard him tiptoe. I grabbed Sandra’s hand. Was he going to hit us? Was he going to touch us? Somebody said he got a student pregnant, but he was still in the school. “I’m not scared of you,” Sandra said.
I squeezed Sandra’s hand. I whispered in her ear, “if you keep talking, he’ll know where we are.” Since Sandra was bigger than me, she put herself in front of me to protect me. Mr. Heitman then turned the lights on and laughed. “Why were you so scared,” he laughed again. “What did you think I was going to do?”
2
Corey has an uncle who owns a pet shop named Malik’s Bushwick Pet Shop. It’s right underneath the J train on Broadway. Ever since the fire me and Mamá have been living on the second floor of the pet shop, which until then, Corey’s uncle, Mr. Malik, had been using as storage space. There’s a basement too, but no one is allowed there, except Corey’s uncle and his friends. Corey’s uncle has a lot of friends. They usually come in groups and they’re always calling each other brother and sister. They’re the ones who brought up a bed and other furniture for me and Mamá or Doña Nina as everyone else calls her. They wouldn’t take the money Mamá tried to give them for the furniture and help. “Ellos son gente buena,” Mamá told me. Even though they wouldn’t take Mamá’s money, they couldn’t say no to the tray of hot empanadas she made for them.
I love the pet shop. I go there to watch and play with the animals. The pet shop has frogs, bunnies, gerbils, a lot of fish, snakes, some baby cats and a lot of baby rats. Mr. Malik forgot to take a female out of the cage and now they are multiplying. Most of the time, Corey’s uncle is reading The Amsterdam News newspaper or listening to the radio. He made Corey and me go quiet, “Shhh,” he said, “Malcolm X is talking.” Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your nose? That made me think of Mr. Heitman. I heard him say to Mr. Simon that he would give me a five out of ten. He would’ve given me an eight, he said, if it wasn’t for that big nose. It’s bigger than her face, they laughed. They didn’t know I was listening. Mr. Simon rated Sonia a ten because of her green eyes. They said I had a nice body, but that nose. I think Mr. Heitman wants me to hate my nose.
Corey’s uncle is always asking me and Corey what we learned in school, especially history. Corey and I are in different classes, but we have the same teacher. Mr. D sits behind his desk reading the New York Post or Daily News. We tell Corey’s uncle we are learning about the Civil War and how Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
Corey’s uncle’s face grew angry. “He didn’t free us,” he told us, “We freed ourselves. They just don’t want you to know how powerful you are.” I also told him that Mr. Heitman said that Puerto Ricans have nothing to be proud of and said I had a big nose. Corey’s uncle’s eyes bulged and he slammed his right fist into his left hand. “You’re beautiful Conciencia,” he said, shaking my shoulders with so much force that I felt like he was waking me up from a bad dream.
Mr. Malik has a Puerto Rican girlfriend, Diosa. She wears wide bell bottoms, short blouses and has a short afro. She is a poet. She likes me. I can tell because she reads me some of her poems. A lot of them are about Puerto Rico, fighting for justice and some are in Spanish. “You don’t have to use periods or capital letters?” I ask her. “No,” she tells me, “In poetry you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” Next time she sees me, she says, she will bring me a journal and pen so that I can be a poet too.
I think Mr. Malik may have told Diosa what Mr. Heitman said about my nose because she sketched me and wrote the word beautiful around my nose. She also talked to me about community and how Puerto Ricans and Blacks are a community. How we look out for each other, how friends and family are community. That made me feel real good to know that I was part of a group that was about love.
3
When I was in eighth grade my classroom teacher told me that my grades were the highest in the school and that I was going to be the valedictorian. I had never heard that word before. I was sent to the head of the English department, to Mrs. Fitzgerald to help me with my speech. My teacher said, “Write something first, a draft, something that will inspire your classmates and then Mrs. Fitzgerald will help you polish it.”
This is the draft I read to Mrs. Fitzgerald:
My message to you is that community is important. You need to find people and friends that care about you and love you. Like my mom, Dona Niña. She took me in when I didn’t have a home and because of her I am standing here today. I got good grades because I wanted to make her proud of me. She taught me, “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.” Tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are. That’s true. I walk with Corey, Juanito, Sandra, because they have my back. I am part of my community. So my message is for you to find a community, people and friends that will make you feel loved.
When I showed Mrs. Fitzgerald my speech, she shook her head and said, “No, this is not a valedictorian speech. And you can’t write it in Spanish. No one is going to understand you.”
I grabbed my speech, in case she had planned to tear it up. “I had a feeling,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “that this would be hard for you so I’m helping you with this. Here read this aloud. I wrote it for you. I’m still trying to think of a quote to start you off. Quotes are good ways to start a speech.”
I took what she had written in fancy script and read aloud, “As we climb the ladder of success and wake to a new dawn…”
She stopped me before I could read further. “The word ‘the’ does not start with the letter d, it’s not ’duh’ say ‘the’ again.” I said ‘the’ again, but she shook her head then buried her head in her hands. She looked up, “Look at my mouth,” she said, “look at where I place my tongue. My tongue does not hit the back of my two front teeth. The tongue is underneath the teeth.” Her tongue brushed the bottom of her two straight front teeth from side to side. “Next,” she said, “let there be a little space between the teeth and tongue, and you let a little bit of air slip out between the teeth and tongue. Like this.” A little of her spit landed on my cheek. “Look at my tongue,” she said again. Her tongue was flappy, and I couldn’t help but think of the dogs that were set loose on the children of Alabama when they protested segregation. Corey’s uncle showed us a 1963 newspaper clipping of that day, of white policemen siccing German Shepherds and water hoses on black children like me, my age, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s tongue was like a whip in the flesh. I wonder who would win a fight between a dog and me. If water hoses were attacking me too I would die, but maybe if I had a knife or scissors, I could cut the tongue out of those dogs. I might win.
4
On graduation day, I wore a beautiful white dress that Mamá made for me. Many people went to Mamá for special occasion dresses. They would come with magazine clippings of fancy dresses that cost over a hundred dollars and Mamá would make it for a lot less. Mamá also made me two thick braids with red ribbons intertwined in them. She chose the colors. She told me that she wanted me dressed in Santa Barbara colors. I looked in the mirror and imagined having a sword like Santa Barbara. I wasn’t sure if on a day like today, I would need to raise the sword in war or dig it in the ground for peace. The white of my dress, peace, the red in my hair, fire.
Once we got to the school, I had to be patient because a lot of grown-ups talked. When Mamá wanted me to translate something, I did, but it was all boring.
My hands were a little sweaty from holding the index cards with the speech Mrs. Fitzgerald wrote for me. The quote she chose for me to start my speech, Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country, by John F. Kennedy.
When I made it to the podium, I turned the index cards to their backsides where I had written my own speech with my own handwriting. I knew it was good because Mr. Malik and Diosa told me it was perfect and to not change a thing. “You’re a poet,” Diosa said to me.
5
My Valedictorian Speech:
Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres dice Mamá
tell me who you walk with and i will tell you who you are
i walk with Mamá because she loves me and kept me
i walk with the The Innocents because they have my back
i walk with Juanito because he saved my life
i walk with Corey and his uncle because they gave us a home after the fire left us on the streets
now i will tell you who NOT to walk with
Malcolm X says who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?
who taught you to hate your nose?
maybe someone has told you that you do not know how to think
that you that you do not know how to write a speech
or insult Puerto Ricans because of the way we speak
maybe they stick their tongues out until you feel saliva sting your cheeks
maybe a teacher has told you that Puerto Ricans have nothing to be proud of
or that abraham lincoln freed the slaves
he did not
we freed ourselves
maybe they’ll turn water hoses on you or even sic german shepherds on you
tell me who has made you weak or scared
was it mr. heitman? mrs. fitzgerald?
what about our classmate who is pregnant and was not allowed to be here today?
she has told us that mr. heitman got her pregnant and yet nobody believes her
i believe her
why isn’t anyone asking us
what we think?
what we’ve seen?
what we’ve felt?
as valedictorian i demand an investigation into mr. heitman
we demand that no teacher put their hands on us again
we demand African history classes
we demand that you not humiliate our parents
The Innocents have written a petition with our demands and now we will see who you walk with
i walk with gente buena, good people
Malcolm X says
we love everybody who loves us,
but we don’t love anybody
who doesn’t love us
The End
6
We hear it first as a big gasp of air, then a deep moan, then a high screech voice, then we hear him knocking things down. Somebody help he screams. Mr. Malik has helped us lock Mr. Heitman in the school basement room. We see the little rat feet trying to get out from under the door. But the rats can’t get out so they scurry back inside the room, where Mr. Heitman is now crying. Rats are not violent by nature, but because Mr. Heitman started throwing boxes at them, their survival instincts kicked in and they climbed his legs, past his private parts to his stomach, to his mouth, where he had been eating peanut butter and they took little bites of his lips and tongue. They drank the salt of his tears, they took many, many bites from the tip of his big nose so when Mr. Heitman was discovered in this room two days later, he had a missing nose tip. The tip of his nose is pink now and now we know who Mr. Heitman walks with. He walks with the rats.
“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.
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Image by Giorgio Trovato via Unsplash
