miércoles, 29 de enero de 2014
American History Judith Ortiz Cofer
American History
Judith Ortiz Cofer
I once read in a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” column that Paterson, New Jersey, is the place where the
Straight and Narrow (streets) intersect. The Puerto Rican tenement known as El Building was one block
up on Straight. It was, in fact, the corner of Stra
ight and Market; not “at” the corner, but the corner. At
almost any hour of the day, El Building was like a monstrous jukebox, blasting out salsas from open
windows as the residents, mostly new immigrants just up from the island, tried to drown out whateve
r
they were currently enduring with loud music. But the day President Kennedy was shot, there was a
profound silence in El Building; even the abusive tongues of viragoes, the cursing of the unemployed,
and the screeching of small children had been somehow
muted. President Kennedy was a saint to these
people. In fact, soon his photograph would be hung alongside the Sacred Heart and over the spiritist
altars that many women kept in their apartments. He would become part of the hierarchy of martyrs
they prayed
to for favors that only one who had died for a cause would understand.
On the day that President Kennedy was shot, my ninth
-
grade class had been out in the fenced
playground of Public School Number 13. We had been given “free” exercise time and had been
ordered
by our PE teacher, Mr. DePalma, to “keep moving.” That meant that the girls should jump rope and the
boys toss basketballs through a hoop at the far end of the yard. He in the meantime would “keep an
eye” on us from just inside the building.
It w
as a cold gray day in Paterson. The kind that warns of early snow. I was miserable, since I had
forgotten my gloves and my knuckles were turning red and raw from the jump rope. I was also taking a
lot of abuse from the black girls for not turning the rope
hard and fast enough for them.
“Hey, Skinny Bones, pump it, girl. Ain’t you got no energy today?” Gail, the biggest of the black girls, had
the other end of the rope, yelled, “Didn’t you eat your rice and beans and pork chops for breakfast
today?”
The
other girls picked up the “pork chop” and made it into a refrain: “Pork chop, pork chop, did you eat
your pork chop?” They entered the double ropes in pairs and exited without tripping or missing a beat. I
felt a burning on my cheeks and then my glasses fo
gged up so that I could not manage to coordinate the
jump rope with Gail. The chill was doing to me what it always did: entering my bones, making me cry,
humiliating me. I hated the city, especially in winter. I hated Public School Number 13. I hated my sk
inny,
flat
-
chested body, and I envied the black girls, who could jump rope so fast that their legs became a blur.
They always seemed to be warm, while I froze.
There was only one source of beauty and light for me that school year
—
the only thing I had ant
icipated
at the start of the semester. That was seeing Eugene. In August, Eugene and his family had moved into
the only house on the block that had a yard and trees. I could see his place from my window in El
Building. In fact, if I sat on the fire escape
I was literally suspended above Eugene’s back yard. It was my
favorite spot to read my library books in the summer. Until that August the house had been occupied by
an old Jewish couple. Over the years I had become part of their family, without their knowi
ng it, of
course. I had a view of their kitchen and their back yard, and though I could not hear what they said, I
knew when they were arguing, when one of them was sick, and many other things. I knew all this by
watching them at mealtimes. I could see the
ir kitchen table, the sink, and the stove. During good times,
he sat at the table and read his newspapers while she fixed the meals. If they argued, he would leave
and the old woman would sit and stare at nothing for a long time. When one of them was sick,
the other
would come and get things from the kitchen and carry them out on a tray. The old man had died in June.
The last week of school I had not seen him at the table at all. Then one day I saw that there was a crowd
in the kitchen. The old woman had fi
nally emerged from the house on the arm of a stocky middle
-
aged
woman, whom I had seen there a few times before, maybe her daughter. Then a man had carried out
suitcases. The house had stood empty for weeks. I had had to resist the temptation to climb down
into
the yard and water the flowers the old lady had taken such good care of.
By the time Eugene’s family moved in, the yard was a tangled mass of weeds. The father had spent
several days mowing, and when he finished, from where I sat I didn’t see the re
d, yellow, and purple
clusters that meant flowers to me. I didn’t see this family sit down at the kitchen table together. It was
just the mother, a redheaded, tall woman who wore a white uniform
—
a nurse’s, I guessed it was; the
father was gone before I got
up in the morning and was never there at dinner time. I only saw him on
weekends, when they sometimes sat on lawn chairs under the oak tree, each hidden behind a section of
the newspaper; and there was Eugene. He was tall and blond, and he wore glasses. I
liked him right
away because he sat at the kitchen table and read books for hours. That summer, before we had even
spoken one word to each other, I kept him company on my fire escape.
Once school started, I looked for him in all my classes, but PS 13 wa
s a huge, overpopulated place and it
took me days and many discreet questions to discover that Eugene was in honors classes for all his
subjects, classes that were not open to me because English was not my first language, though I was a
straight
-
A student.
After much maneuvering I managed to “run into him” in the hallway where his locker
was
—
on the other side of the building from mine
—
and in study hall at the library, where he first
seemed to notice me but did not speak, and finally, on the way home after s
chool one day when I
decided to approach him directly, though my stomach was doing somersaults.
I was ready for rejection, snobbery, the worst. But when I came up to him, practically panting in my
nervousness, and blurted out: “You’re Eugene. Right?” he
smiled, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and
nodded. I saw then that he was blushing deeply. Eugene liked me, but he was shy. I did most of the
talking that day. He nodded and smiled a lot. In the weeks that followed, we walked home together. He
would li
nger at the corner of El Building for a few minutes, then walk down to his two
-
story house. It
was not until Eugene moved into that house that I noticed that El Building blocked most of the sun and
that the only spot that got a little sunlight during the d
ay was the tiny square of earth the old woman
had planted with flowers.
I did not tell Eugene that I could see inside his kitchen from my bedroom. I felt dishonest, but I liked my
secret sharing of his evenings, especially now that I knew what he was rea
ding since we chose our books
together at the school library.
(page 1)
One day my mother came into my room as I was sitting on the windowsill staring out. In her abrupt way
she said: “Elena, you are acting ‘moony.’” “Enamorada
” was what she really said, that is
—
like a girl
stupidly infatuated. Since I had turned fourteen . . ., my mother had been more vigilant than ever. She
acted as if I was going to go crazy or explode or something if she didn’t watch me and nag me all the
ti
me about being a señorita now. She kept talking about virtue, morality, and other subjects that did not
interest me in the least. My mother was unhappy in Paterson, but my father had a good job at the
bluejeans factory in Passaic and soon, he kept assuring
us, we would be moving to our own house there.
Every Sunday we drove out to the suburbs of Paterson, Clifton, and Passaic, out to where people mowed
grass on Sundays in the summer and where children made snowmen in the winter from pure white
snow, not lik
e the gray slush of Paterson, which seemed to fall from the sky in that hue. I had learned to
listen to my parents’ dreams, which were spoken in Spanish, as fairy tales, like the stories about life in
the island paradise of Puerto Rico before I was born. I
had been to the island once as a little girl, to
Grandmother’s funeral, and all I remembered was wailing women in black, my mother becoming
hysterical and being given a pill that made her sleep two days, and me feeling lost in a crowd of
strangers all cla
iming to be my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I had actually been glad to return to the city.
We had not been back there since then, though my parents talked constantly about buying a house on
the beach someday, retiring on the island
—
that was a common topic
among the residents of El Building.
As for me, I was going to go to college and become a teacher.
But after meeting Eugene I began to think of the present more than of the future. What I wanted now
was to enter that house I had watched for so many years.
I wanted to see the other rooms where the
old people had lived and where the boy spent his time. Most of all I wanted to sit at the kitchen table
with Eugene like two adults, like the old man and his wife had done, maybe drink some coffee and talk
about bo
oks. I had started reading Gone With the Wind. I was enthralled by it, with the daring and the
passion of the beautiful girl living in a mansion, and with her devoted parents and the slaves who did
everything for them. I didn’t believe such a world had eve
r really existed, and I wanted to ask Eugene
some questions since he and his parents, he had told me, had come up from Georgia, the same place
where the novel was set. His father worked for a company that had transferred him to Paterson. His
mother was ver
y unhappy, Eugene said, in his beautiful voice that rose and fell over words in a strange,
lilting way. The kids at school called him “the Hick” and made fun of the way he talked. I knew I was his
only friend so far, and I liked that, though I felt sad for
him sometimes. “Skinny Bones and the Hick” was
what they called us at school when we were seen together.
The day Mr. DePalma came out into the cold and asked us to line up in front of him was the day that
President Kennedy was shot. Mr. DePalma
, a short, muscular man with slicked
-
down black hair, was the
science teacher, PE coach, and disciplinarian at PS 13. He was the teacher to whose homeroom you got
assigned if you were a troublemaker, and the man called out to break up playground fights and
to escort
violently angry teenagers to the office. And Mr. DePalma was the man who called your parents in for “a
conference.”
That day, he stood in front of two rows of mostly black and Puerto Rican kids, brittle from their efforts
to “keep moving” on a
November day that was turning bitter cold. Mr. DePalma, to our complete shock,
was crying. Not just silent adult tears, but really sobbing. There were a few titters from the back of the
line where I stood shivering.
“Listen,” Mr. DePalma raised his arms
over his head as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. His
voice broke, and he covered his face with his hands. His barrel chest was heaving. Someone giggled
behind me.
“Listen,” he repeated, “something awful has happened.” A strange gurgling came fr
om his throat, and
he turned around and spat on the cement behind him.
“Gross,” someone said, and there was a lot of laughter.
“The president is dead, you idiots. I should have known that wouldn’t mean anything to a bunch of
losers like you kids. Go ho
me.” He was shrieking now. No one moved for a minute or two, but then a big
girl let out a “Yeah!” and ran to get her books piled up with the others against the brick wall of the
school building. The others followed in a mad scramble to get to their things
before somebody caught
on. It was still an hour to the dismissal bell.
A little scared, I headed for El Building. There was an eerie feeling on the streets. I looked into Mario’s
drugstore, a favorite hangout for the high school crowd, but there were on
ly a couple of old Jewish men
at the soda bar talking with the short
-
order cook in tones that sounded almost angry, but they were
keeping their voices low. Even the traffic on one of the busiest intersections in Paterson
—
Straight Street
and Park Avenue
—
see
med to be moving slower. There were no horns blasting that day. At El Building,
the usual little group of unemployed men was not hanging out on the front stoop making it difficult for
women to enter the front door. No music spilled out from open doors in t
he hallway. When I walked
into our apartment, I found my mother sitting in front of the grainy picture of the television set.
She looked up at me with a tear
-
streaked face and just said: “Dios mío,” turning back to the set as if it
were pulling at her eye
s. I went into my room.
Though I wanted to feel the right thing about President Kennedy’s death, I could not fight the feeling of
elation that stirred in my chest. Today was the day I was to visit Eugene in his house. He had asked me
to come over after s
chool to study for an American history test with him. We had also planned to walk
to the public library together. I looked down into his yard. The oak tree was bare of leaves and the
ground looked gray with ice. The light through the large kitchen window o
f his house told me that El
Building blocked the sun to such an extent that they had to turn lights on in the middle of the day. I felt
ashamed about it. But the white kitchen table with the lamp hanging just above it looked cozy and
inviting. I would soon
sit there, across from Eugene, and I would tell him about my perch just above his
house. Maybe I should.
In the next thirty minutes I changed clothes, put on a little pink lipstick, and got my books together.
Then I went in to tell my mother that I was
going to a friend’s house to study. I did not expect her
reaction.
(page 2)
“You are going out today?” The way she said “today” sounded as if a storm warning had been issued. It
was said in utter disbelief. Before I could answer, she came toward me and h
eld my elbows as I clutched
my books. “Hija (daughter), the president has been killed. We must show respect. He was a great man.
Come to church with me tonight.”
She tried to embrace me, but my books were in the way. My first impulse was to comfort her,
she
seemed so distraught, but I had to meet Eugene in fifteen minutes.
“I have a test to study for, Mama. I will be home by eight.”
“You are forgetting who you are, Niña (girl). I have seen you staring down at that boy’s house. You are
heading for humi
liation and pain.” My mother said this in Spanish and in a resigned tone that surprised
me, as if she had no intention of stopping me from “heading for humiliation and pain.” I started for the
door. She sat in front of the TV holding a white handkerchief t
o her face.
I walked out to the street and around the chain
-
link fence that separated El Building from Eugene’s
house. The yard was neatly edged around the little walk that led to the door. It always amazed me how
Paterson, the inner core of the city, had no apparent
logic to its architecture. Small, neat single
residences like this one could be found right next to huge, dilapidated apartment buildings like El
Building. My guess was that the little houses had been there first, then the immigrants had come in
droves, an
d the monstrosities had been raised for them
—
the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, and now us,
the Puerto Ricans and the blacks. The door was painted a deep green: verde, the color of hope. I had
heard my mother say it: verde
-
esperanza.
I knocked softly. A
few suspenseful moments later the door opened just a crack. The red, swollen face of
a woman appeared. She had a halo of red hair floating over a delicate ivory face
—
the face of a doll
—
with freckles on the nose. Her smudged eye makeup made her look unreal
to me, like a mannequin seen
through a warped store window.
“What do you want?” Her voice was tiny and sweet sounding, like a little girl’s, but her tone was not
friendly.
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