Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  After the sumptuous Sunday dinner, Judith's father rubbed his eyes, and in a drowsy voice, gazing at the güiro, he began to reminisce about fishing in a Puerto Rican river at night with lanterns and machetes, about hunting birds with a bow and arrow as a boy in Juncos.

  One day after school, Chris stood in the parking lot putting her bags in her car, and heard from behind her mingled shouts and a few shrill cries. She turned. Over on West Street, the northern boundary between the school and a no man's land of vacant lots, she saw a large circle of children. It bulged in one spot, then in another. She knew right away that it was a fight. Chris left her car door ajar and ran toward the children.

  She wore a pair of slip-on, flat-heeled shoes, so she had to run stiff-ankled, like the boys with their unlaced sneakers. But she didn't go nearly as fast. She felt like a figure in a dream, making lots of furious motion but little headway. The children saw her coming. The circle broke and the children ran, too, in a more or less concerted mass, down across the vacant lots and to the edge of the dingy red apartment blocks, which marked the beginning of the residential Flats. Down on the corner of Center Street, the circle re-formed and the fight seemed to resume.

  Panting, Chris stopped at the edge of the curb beside West Street. She didn't feel safe going farther. She didn't feel she had any real right to. It is often hard for a teacher to know where her responsibilities should end, but at this moment West Street defined the limits for Chris, both of her authority and knowledge. She stood at the curb, and shading her eyes from the bright sunlight, she peered toward the Flats and the fight that was far away now, down on that corner.

  Every now and then in uptown Holyoke, Chris got into an argument that went something like this: Some white acquaintance would say, "Goddamn Puerto Ricans." Chris would answer, "Look, I teach them. There are no more goddamn Puerto Ricans than goddamn anyone else." She'd describe radiant Puerto Rican children, such as Judith and Arabella, and the usual response was: "Yeah, but she's an exception. She's a good one." Chris felt uncomfortable in those arguments.

  The ignorance of some of her townspeople appalled her. An angry parent visited Kelly School the first year of desegregation and declared, "Look, they even got the Puerto Rican flag here." In fact, the unfamiliar flag he had spotted was that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Earlier this year a white parent stormed into Al's office complaining that his child was being taught some Spanish. While her own blind spots were not as large, Chris knew that she had some. Out in the city alone, she occasionally felt her mind close. In her car, passing by a group of young Puerto Rican men who stood on a street corner on a spring midafternoon, she felt uneasy, as she did sometimes driving to church. She knew that those men might work night shifts, and that most Puerto Ricans who stand on corners are not looking for trouble—for many, especially ones of agrarian backgrounds, conversation outdoors is infinitely preferable to seeing friends in a cramped living room. But Holyoke was Chris's city. She wasn't a latter-day, out-of-town VISTA volunteer coming down to the Flats to do her part for Democracy. She knew, of course, that a few vandals, and not Puerto Ricans in general, were responsible for the graffiti on buildings and on boarded-up storefronts. But she hated the graffiti and the signs of decay and disorder in neighborhoods that had once seemed safe and well kept. And through a car window it was easy to connect sights like those with Puerto Ricans. Driving through a once familiar neighborhood such as the one where her father grew up, she felt like a stranger in her own hometown. She would have felt uneasy getting out of her car.

  Chris was born too late to experience any disadvantage from being Irish in Holyoke. She couldn't imagine how she might have felt if marked as "a shanty Irish girl" in the Yankee Highlands. Last year, though, on the class field trip, she imagined she got a taste of what it must be like to live in a world of hostile looks. Her class had arrived at an exhibit at the same time as an all-white class from a Boston suburb and some elderly white tourists. The white children from the suburb were rude and noisy. Her kids were very well behaved. But those elderly tourists smiled at the white children, and when her gold-skinned Puerto Rican students asked questions, the tourists recoiled, exchanging heaven-help-us glances. She could read their minds. "Ugh, Puerto Ricans. What are they doing here?" Her students didn't notice. Something of that maternal instinct that makes a she-bear dangerous swept over Chris, and for just a moment she was Puerto Rican, too. Oh, she would have liked to scold those bigoted old fools. "Look at these kids from Arlington you look at so fondly. They're terrible, and they're lily-white," she imagined herself saying. But the tourists didn't actually say anything overtly insulting, maybe because of the looks she gave them. The experience was new for her. She felt glad afterward to have discovered such angry, righteous feelings in herself.

  Chris spent her first years as a teacher in a small uptown neighborhood school. Back then she had taught white children, some poor, some fairly well-to-do, many from working-class families like her own. She could easily imagine those children's lives outside school. She always knew some of their parents. She could look out the huge, old-fashioned windows of her classroom and say to some of her students that she saw their mothers hanging up laundry and might go outside right now and have a word with them if those children didn't shape up. She pined sometimes for that old school. These days, Chris would stand at her classroom window in the afternoon, especially on the afternoons before a vacation, and watching her walkers amble away across the playground, she would think, "I don't even know what I'm sending them back to."

  And yet in the intimate setting of her classroom, the facts that half her classes nowadays were of Puerto Rican descent and more than half were poorer than she'd ever been did not seem like insuperable barriers. Unlike white parents, Puerto Rican ones tended to bring their children to the scheduled conferences with Chris, and to bawl out their children or praise them right there on the spot. When Chris entertained Puerto Rican parents in her room, no differences seemed much larger than that. She didn't find it hard to talk to Puerto Rican parents, even if an interpreter was needed. They wanted to know about their children's schoolwork and seemed especially interested to know if their children showed her proper respect. The word "respeto" means good manners practiced for their own sake. That was the general meaning Chris had in mind when she talked about respect.

  She already knew Felipe's father, Eduardo, slightly. She had taught Felipe's sisters, who were good students. She thought Eduardo and his wife must be marvelous parents. Her first conversation this year with Eduardo, at her classroom door, had not altered her opinion. Eduardo had asked her—Felipe was standing there—how the boy was behaving. Chris had said, "Well, Felipe has his ups and downs." Eduardo had gazed sternly at Felipe, who had bowed his head and watched himself shuffle his feet.

  Many teachers thought the Flats too dangerous for a gringo to go walking in, but children, including white children, walked back and forth across it every day to school, and dangerous incidents were very rare. Walking home made Judith and Arabella nervous, but not Felipe. He knew all the nooks and crannies of the Flats.

  Felipe liked to gaze at the old brick factories, especially the abandoned hulks down near the river. "I just like the way they look," he said. The back sides of the Flats are an industrial boneyard, a greener, weedy world hidden from the streets and full of disused railroad spurs with rusty tracks to balance on, intricate aqueducts to study, concrete walls and steel contraptions to climb. Felipe recycled them, as it were, into playground equipment. He knew a stream bank under the old South Hadley bridge, where he sometimes found shopping carts and remains of campfires. Felipe called that spot "kind of like an adventure." He had a clubhouse—a pair of discarded clothes lockers lying on their sides behind the karate parlor, alongside one of the canals.

  Felipe lived in the renovated northern section of the Flats, in an apartment building that had a clean, functioning elevator, carpeted hallways, fire alarms, and an outer door that locked. His parents didn't have to worry a
bout thieves or addicts loitering in the hallways or the elevator. In the afternoon, women stood talking inside the entry door. They'd smile at Felipe and let him in. In the late afternoons, he did his homework on the kitchen table of his family's apartment—very clean and brightly adorned with red curtains—while his father cooked supper. His mother came home from work a little later. His father sometimes taught him Spanish in the evenings. Pictures of Felipe's Puerto Rican ancestors hung on the walls. There was also a snapshot of the infant Felipe in a baseball uniform, his father kneeling beside him, looking at his son as if enraptured and holding him erect gingerly, as if cradling a frail bird. In Felipe's household, as in the one where Chris grew up, youthful ambition was honored. Recently, a few days after his hamster Ralph died, Felipe awoke to find a new one in the cage and a note lying on the table, which read, "My name is Ralphie. Please take good care of me, and when you are an astronaut, I will help you in space."

  "I think my father wrote it," said Felipe with a crafty smile.

  Before heading home, Felipe almost always said goodbye to Mrs. Zajac, even if he felt angry with her—and Chris realized that his parents had taken pains with his manners. On his way home, Felipe stopped at the drugstore on Center Street and bought two copies of the Transcript-Telegram, one for his father and the other for an elderly lady in his building. He stopped, that is, if he had remembered to bring his two quarters to school. If he had forgotten the quarters, he went home, got the money, and returned to the drugstore. More often than not, he had to make the two trips, but he liked doing it. In his mind, going back to the drugstore became a journey. He cast himself in the role of his father as a boy, climbing the hillside to the family farm in Puerto Rico. He had gone there only once, as a baby, riding on his father's shoulders, and he did not actually remember the place. But he imagined it, as he imagined castles in the burnt-out hulks of factories. "My father says he used to walk six miles to school and back," Felipe said. "And he used to get water. He used to get water after school. And it kind of reminds me of getting the newspaper."

  Felipe's father, Eduardo, had returned several times to his ancestral farm since it had been abandoned. On winter nights Eduardo would lie on his couch in the apartment in the Flats reading the Transcript-Telegram, and sometimes he would drift off and return to the farm in his memory.

  It would be February, the orange maga in bloom. The two-faced leaves of the yagrumo, green on one side and whitish on the other—Puerto Ricans sometimes call hypocrites yagrumos—would be fluttering in the warm breezes. In his mind, Eduardo would be back in the outskirts of Cayey, in the gorgeous Cordillera Central, climbing on foot up to the farm. The way to it led up a dirt road, past a huge rock where, Eduardo had grown up believing, a lady, a fantasma, would sometimes appear, holding out a cup of coffee. He never saw the ghost himself, but as a boy he always used to run past that rock. The road turned into a dirt path and then into the memory of one, choked by bamboo and ferns, out of which butterflies floated. The overgrown path went up past banana trees, mango trees with orchids in the crooks of their branches, orange trees, the ortiga that made the skin itch, tamarindo, eucalyptus, coffee, and royal palm trees, the palma de yaguas—its broad, scoop-like fronds had been Eduardo's tropical sleds for sliding down the hillsides.

  On a patch of level ground stood the farmhouse itself, empty, still owned by the family, and still straight and square, but half engulfed by banana trees and ferns and rotting at its footings. The farmhouse was made of wood and was therefore, in Puerto Rican parlance, una casa humilde, houses of concrete being much preferred on the island. Eduardo's father, Felipe's grandfather, had built it himself, in large part out of nearby trees—a small, one-story house on stilts, about the size of a two-car garage. The family had cooked, with charcoal that they made themselves, on a fogon—a wooden table with stones inlaid on its surface, which was still intact. Eduardo's mother and father had lived in the farmhouse until the early 1970s. Modern times had never really touched that place.

  When Eduardo remembered the farm, he remembered his father—a proud man with green eyes, which his children would not dare to look at when he was angry. One of Eduardo's sisters ran off with a boy. Eduardo recalled the evening when her transgression was discovered. His father picked up a set of tableware—a plate, a knife, a fork, a spoon—and threw them one by one out the door, saying, when his wife asked him why he did that, "We don't need these anymore." That sister never entered the farmhouse again. When she encountered her father in the city, she would say, " Bendición" ("Bless me," the request that dutiful Puerto Rican children make of their parents and that dutiful sisters also make of their older brothers). Eduardo's father would answer, in Spanish, "May God bless you," and walk on. Otherwise, he never talked to her again until, when the old man was very ill and Eduardo's mother had died, the wayward and long-repentent sister took him into her own house and nursed him. Even then, she didn't think her father forgave her. "Pero no me quería"—"But he didn't love me"—she kept saying as she told the story. At the funeral, she said to Eduardo with deep admiration, "But he was tough, wasn't he? Oh, he was tough!"

  Eduardo shared her admiration. His father was a true jíbaro, one of the last of a line of thoroughly self-sufficient islanders, who had lived by a strict, old-fashioned code. Eduardo claimed the title, too, but he was a jíbaro only by birth and not by practice anymore. It wasn't easy, for a Puerto Rican of Eduardo's generation and experience, straddling not just two cultures but something like two different centuries, to figure out exactly who he was.

  According to the only full-fledged history of Holyoke, early Irish immigrants, fleeing the horrors of potato famines, brought pieces of Irish sod with them as keepsakes. In Chris's family, legend did not reach that far back. (The only vestige was a story Chris's mother told about one of her own grandmothers: someone told Chris's great-grandmother that she looked like Queen Victoria, and with some heat the elderly woman said, "Don't ever say I look like her") But Chris had read a little about the Irish immigration. She knew firsthand about homesickness. Immigration for her ancestors, she thought, must have resembled migration for Puerto Ricans.

  In the quarter century following World War II, about 750,000 Puerto Ricans, nearly one-third of the population, left the island for the mainland, the majority going to New York City but enough to other places for the emigration to rank as a diaspora. The U.S. Marines had taken the island from Spain in 1898. They secured the ground for American corporations. The American-style colonization that supplanted the Spanish had everything to do with Puerto Ricans leaving home. The United States transformed the island, not exactly into an image of itself but, it seems fair to say, into a servant of mainland interests. American rule brought a declining death rate but also, in the long run, the sort of selective, capital-intensive development that destroyed small farming, to name just one important sector of the old economy. The population began to soar, and so did unemployment rates.

  After World War II, both the federal and Puerto Rican governments encouraged people to leave the island. Chris's teacher friend Victor Guevara remembered jeeps with loudspeakers that advertised jobs on the mainland driving down the streets of his little coastal hometown when he was a boy. Of course, the advertisements didn't say that many islanders who followed the call would end up working for the minimum wage and living in tenements in places that have winters. For mainland employers, especially in agriculture and in the hotel and garment industries, Puerto Rico became a source of inexpensive, unorganized laborers, the more powerless because they were in a strange place and didn't speak the language. And the Puerto Rican government was only too glad to see depart a class of citizens who might otherwise have drained the island's resources and stirred things up politically.

  A Puerto Rican who lived near Chris in Holyoke explained the migration to her this way: "We shoved out the people least equipped to deal with the hardships of immigration." Accounts of the Puerto Rican diaspora maintain that most emigrants were poor, had little scho
oling, and had not been trained for industrial jobs that paid decent wages.

  At times of high unemployment on the mainland, significant numbers of Puerto Ricans have, at least in the past, gone back to the island. In Puerto Rico, poverty has not traditionally been regarded as a sin. The island doesn't suffer from a racism anywhere near as widespread or virulent as the mainland's. Emigration is easily reversible, because of numerous and inexpensive airplane flights to and from San Juan and because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Going back, however, doesn't look realistic or inviting to many of the children and grandchildren of immigrants.

  Holyoke's first five Puerto Rican families came to town in 1958. The men had contracts to work on Connecticut River Valley tobacco farms. They lived together in the Flats. A fellow parishioner and friend of Chris's was a member of that tiny incipient community. She remembered her first years in Holyoke as very hard, at least as hard as Florida had been for Chris, but unlike Chris's short exile, hers was enduring. "It's awful when you come to a place for the first time," Chris's friend said. "For a week I was crying. 'Take me home.' I still find I'm not welcome here. You never feel like you're at home. Even people from South America, they can't understand our culture. It's something that you miss so much. People look at you and make a judgment about you. It's something you always have to fight and always have to lock inside you. And the children lose their identity. They don't know they're Puerto Rican, and they don't feel American."