I stopped at the beginning of the hallway and looked at John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Jesus. Why did almost every house I had ever been brought to have these pictures? I knew Kennedy was supposed to save the country, and “they” killed him. I knew King was supposed to save the black people, and he was killed. I knew Jesus was supposed to have saved mankind and they, of course, killed him, too. Jesus stared back at me. He looked like a hippie. My family told me to stay away from hippies. They were dirty and they were on drugs. Drugs were what made people not come home anymore and made whoever was left behind cry. I tried to knock Jesus off the wall, but he was way beyond my reach.
The sound of my abuela’s slippered footsteps interrupted my communion with El Señor (literally: “The Man;” figuratively: Our Father, a.k.a. God). She readjusted the Jesus photo I never touched, took my hand, and led me a little farther down the hall, into the bedroom where once I had lived with her. The bedroom smelled of powder, Jergen’s hand lotion, and Tigress perfume: just like any ordinary churchgoing grandma type of a woman.
On top of the chenille bedspread was an ancient-looking cardboard photo album. My abuela sat down, opened it, removed one of the photos on the page, and handed it to me. It wasn’t in black and white or color; it was an artifact in shades of sepia brown, with lines of glue dried along its edges.
A little girl, with short, tight braids that looked like they hurt, stood next to a seated older woman with posture as straight as her chair’s back. Standing behind the two was a younger woman with a flower in her long, wavy hair. She was the only one smiling. My abuela looked at me as if I should know these people. They looked vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t sure, so I said nothing. My abuela waited another second and said, “This is your mother,” pointing to the child with the braids. “This is me,” pointing at the woman smiling. “And this”—pointing to the woman in the chair—“is my mother, your great-grandmother.”
The woman in the chair was not the shriveled thing I had known only from a hospital. A thing with foggy eyes from cataracts and glaucoma and clenched bony fingers that gripped you with otherworldly strength. The only trace that she had once been human was her mane of straight, waist-length, silver blue hair. I used to watch my abuela brush it for her.
I took the photo from my abuela for a closer look. Despite the sepia coloring, you could tell her hair had been jet black. Her hands were not claws, but were long and smooth. Her unblemished skin was the color of a cinnamon stick. Her eyes had a clear, knowing gaze, and she had the highest, sharpest cheekbones I had ever seen. She looked like a princess—or a priestess. She was beautiful.
I put down the picture, walked over to abuela’s dressing table, and knelt on the bench to look in the mirror. My pale, yellow-tinged round freckled face and halo of frizzy red curls made me cry. “Abuelita, I said, “why don’t I look like you…like great-grandma?”
“Como?” she said, shaking her head, because I always spoke English too fast for her to follow.
“Por…que,” I began, “Por que…” The tears stopped and frustration set in. I was angry with myself for not knowing her words and angry with her for not knowing mine. “Por que…yo no look like the familia?”
“Oh, pero, you do,” abuela said. “You have look like mi…como se dice en ingles… mother of…mother of your mother’s padre. Ella tiene pelo rojo tambien y…” She was speaking entirely in Spanish now, but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t understand her—and I didn’t believe her anyway.
A couple of weeks later, my mother, grandmother, titis (aunties), brother, cousins, and I went to the Puerto Rican Day Parade together. We had never gone before. Or at least I didn’t remember ever going to the mid-June, all-day celebration of all things Boricua, Puerto Rican, where the gente march, the musica plays, and the banderas wave.
Cordoned off along the sidewalks stood tens of tens of thousands of varying shades of beige and brown pride crammed cabeza to cabeza, head to head, hombro to hombro, shoulder to shoulder, and nalgas to nalgas, swaying hips to swaying hips, letting New York City know, “Wepa, Boricua! Eso es nuestro dia.” (We are Puerto Rican and this is our day!) Everyone, that is, except for me.
I’d become separated from everyone in my family and meandered down crowded Fifth Avenue looking for the nice policeman my mother told me to find if I ever got lost. The fact that all the policemen were chasing and grabbing at a group of paraders who were shouting, “Arriba, pa bajo, los puercos va a carajo!” (Up, down, all around, pigs go to hell!) puzzled me. Why were these people yelling about pigs? That was stupid. They were all going to be in trouble. I wasn’t. I decided I was going to stand right where I was until the nice policeman came to me.
When he finally came, I told him I was lost and followed him to a bandstand filled with men in white suits, guyanaberas, and straw hats and women in tight pretty dresses and high heels. They were all very nice to me. They bought me a hot dog and a Sun Dew and told me not to worry. They said my family would come, and “Please, sit down.” I obeyed. I was tired from all that walking and waiting.
While I ate and drank with my best manners—because I remembered what my mother always said, “People are watching you all the time.”—a loudspeaker screeched on. I heard names: “Herman Badillo, Geraldo Rivera, Pablo Guzman…” Who were these people? I saw a Good Humor truck and wanted ice cream. Maybe I could get one of those pretty ladies to buy me a Strawberry Shortcake.
Before I had a chance to ask, the voice from the loudspeaker blared again, “Will the family who brought the little redheaded white girl to the parade please come to the Bandshell to pick her up?” Did I hear that right? Wait a minute, I was at the Bandshell. I looked around to see where that poor, unfortunate child who didn’t belong here was, but only saw grownups in suits and dresses looking everywhere but at me. Then it hit me. I was that lost girl.
As I sat there holding my half-eaten hot dog and Sun Dew, I cried for the first time since my abuela showed me the photograph of my great-grandmother. I was not a priestess like my great-grandmother, a little girl in braids like my mother, or a woman in a pretty dress like the women at the parade. I had no idea where my family was, or who I was. I was a fish out of agua.
1
A TALE OF TWO ABUELAS
The first thing you need to know is that the abuela, or grandmother, is an integral part of every Latino child’s life. Abuelas provide moral guidance by dragging you to their place of worship, be it Catolico, Luterano, Pentecostal, or the Way of the Saints. There, they test you by giving you the envelope to put into the collection plate, and when you try to slip their $5.37 into your pocket, tenga cuidado!
They are also valuable sources of medical knowledge and can discern between una monga, a feverish condition that isn’t really a fever, cuerpo cortao, a general disability that isn’t really debilitating, and dolor de los cocotazos, the headache caused by the rap of knuckles against your skull when you are caught placing the oral thermometer under a radiator in order to skip school and watch reruns of Bewitched.
Abuelas are also dispensers of justice, usually in the form of la chancleta, the slipper. Whatever their provenance, all abuelas possess this unique weapon as well as the inherent, expert knowledge of its deployment. Whoever invented the laser pointed weapon must’ve grown up in a Latin household because when an abuela throws a chancleta it morphs into a heat-seeking device with unparalleled pinpoint accuracy that will find you anywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re under a bed, behind a door, or behind your younger sibling, the slipper will hit you square on the forehead, ping!
But abuelas don’t just pass judgment. They also provide absolution. After all, they’ve lived longer than anyone else on their watch and have heard, seen, and, done (or at least wanted to) it all before. If you need someone to predict the future, nadie, but no one, can do it like an abuela.
My