Since there were no African Americans living in Southern Colorado, the KKK had to hate someone, so they hated us. They actually called it their mission to rid this part of the United States of America of all us. They didn’t care if you were Spanish or Mexican or Indian or a mix of them, which I am. They only cared that you weren’t them.
“Hurry, mijos, get all that stuff in the back,” my dad said. “Get it all in. We need to go. We need to go now.”
“Why are those people wearing those hats?” I asked. “I think they look like stupid idiots.”
Children of the Klansman ran up and down the lines of men. Their little legs carried them in and around their fathers and uncles and brothers and grandfathers, weaving like birds around tree branches. It must have been the way the men walked or carried themselves, but all the children knew who their family members were, even though they were covered in those stupid clown outfits. They would run up to them and hold their hands as if they were in some kind of Thanksgiving parade.
The women, too. They walked with their men. They carried pies like it was Easter. They wore their Sunday best. It was a family event. They smiled like they were going to have a cake walk afterward.
It looked kind of fun, just like any other parade, really.
They smiled and waved and held banners that said KEEP THIS COUNTRY PURE. KEEP THE SPICS OUT. KEEP AMERICA CLEAN. MAKE AMERICA GREAT. Children’s faces were smeared with chocolates, and the women were smiling with pride. The men were young and old. The size of their midsections told this truth. The ropes around the waists of the young men tightened against flat stomachs, and the excess rope fell down nearly to their knees. The ropes of the older men stretched out along their frumpy waists and got caught up between the bottom of their bellies and the top of their thighs. They dangled only a few inches down from the curl of the round knot that clung to them like a barnacle doing its best to not lose the side of a boat when it swayed over a portly wave.
“Look, the fat ones look like marshmallow treats,” I said loudly.
“Della, callete,” my dad whispered. “Shut it, Mija.”
There was laughing and singing. The tossing of candy. Dogs running around. The sheriff of the town sat on a step outside his office. He too, somehow in the Depression, had to spread his legs in order for his belly to find room to hang down when he sat there. He reminded me of a mom giving birth, his belly the baby and the stairs below him, the stirrups. He just smiled and watched the parade go by. Bygones be bygones, I could imagine him saying in his mind, the butts of rifles sitting in the arms of some of the men like babies in the arms of their mothers. It was a goddamned family picnic.
They smiled until they saw my small family hurriedly packing our things in the back of the truck.
“Why are they staring at us?” I asked.
Two men at the front of the parade pointed toward us. Three other men walked in unison toward my family. Two wore jeans and work boots. The third wore slick, black slacks and shiny, black dress shoes. That’s all that showed, except for the popping veins in their white hands and the thick black hair on the backs of their wrists.
My father put all of us behind him with one sweep of his arm.
One man put a wheat bag from the back of the truck onto his shoulders and then threw it at Ernesto, hard enough to knock him back but not hard enough to force him to the ground. This pissed the man off. He picked up a shovel that had been lain on the ground to take home with us and swung it at Ernesto’s face. Ernie ducked, and the shovel hit one of his companions instead.
That gave Ernesto his chance. My older brother ran back toward us, ducking another punch that had been thrown at him, and stood next to my father. Within a minute, five of the men who were left standing, the sixth still bleeding on the hot blacktop on main street, circled our family.
And I saw it. Fear.
Their eyes peered out from behind the eyeholes in their hoods. We scared them, somehow. Somehow, the six of us, even the littlest of our family, scared these men.
The sheriff at this point had gotten up off his step and moved toward us.
I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye. He placed his hand on the butt of his gun that sat in its holster around his waist.
Like we had become celebrities, the crowd gathered around us.
I lifted my fist up to the first man whose eyes I could see.
I unraveled my middle finger from the middle of my folded knuckles, “Chingate.”
The man’s eyes changed from fear to anger.
He raised his hand to slap me down.
My father’s arm swung out in front of my face to block the man’s open-faced hand. Then his friend, seeing the opening, hit my father’s arm, the one extended out in front of me, with the butt of his gun.
I heard, simultaneously, the break of a forearm and the deafening echo of the sheriff’s gun that had flung a bullet into the sky.
Chapter Six
John
1930
MY DAD WAS PROUD OF HIS CAR. HE WAS REALLY PROUD. HE loved his car almost as much as his chilies.
Nobody who worked in the mines and who had dark skin had a car. But he saved up for it, not telling my mom what he was doing, and drove it home one Friday afternoon.
He pulled it around the garden and right up to the front door and parked it in front of the tiny kitchen window to make sure my mother saw it. When Manuel realized who it was, he flung open the front door, sprinted to the car, and silently, in pious admiration, ran his fingers along the long, smooth curve of the fender, hovered over the front tire, and swooped his hand down the side toward the back tire.
“I worked out a deal with my foreman. I slipped el jefe two dollars a week for years to buy it, Flora. It’s ours,” dad said. “I only had to smell myself all the way home,” he laughed.
He waved his hands over the Auburn 5 Passenger Brougham.
“We don’t need a car,” my mom said. “Jesus didn’t have a car. He had a mule. All we need is a mule. I think this is too much. It’s greedy.”
“In Trinchera’s history,” he said, “I am the first Mexican miner to own a car. Hell, I am the first Mexican to own a car, I think. And I don’t care! It feels wonderful. Does anyone need anything from town? I can drive us there.”
“This smells like pride to me, honey,” my mom said. “You smell like pride. Pride never leads to anything good.”
“I worked hard, Flora. This was not a gift. This was not luck. I worked hard to earn it. I have pride in my hard work, thank you, Jesus,” my dad said.
He leaned across the front seat and opened the passenger-side door, nearly hitting Manuel in the head, and then leaned back and opened the driver’s side door. I jumped in. Manuel, within a second, squeezed next to me on the back bench seat, leaving room for Maria to slide in next to him and shut the door behind her. The three of us sat snuggled up behind my father whose hands draped over the very large steering wheel, still caked in the thick layer of earth that he lived under for four days a week.
“Get in, Flora, and bring the baby boy. Let’s go to town,” he said.
He waited patiently while my mom threw off her apron and grabbed Paulo by the hand. He wiggled in her grasp, but she shoved him into the front seat next to my dad, placing a hand over his whining mouth to quiet him.
She smiled.
Once the door was shut, my dad pushed his foot down hard on the spatula-sized clutch, wrapped his hand around the black stick shift, and crammed the Auburn into gear. The transmission ground into movement. And my family, for the first time in my life, rode in a car together. Feeling the machine move around us, its thin tires kicking up the dust of the clay earth into the low sky, felt powerful, like we were in control of our world, like we—one of the poor families on the edge of a gold mining town—were a part of something new, no longer the riffraff on the outside.
About twenty minutes later, we pulled into Trinidad. My dad stopped at an intersection when a flying bottle flew toward the car and broke on
the side the thick metal.
“Get out of here, spics!” a man in a white mask yelled toward us. A parade of white masked and hooded men walked through the streets of our town. The parade seemed to consume the whole street like white caps on the edge of a river, bursting and bobbing and ready to slam into anything it could.
A giant chicken head slammed bloody against our front windshield.
My father slammed on the gas, spinning out his tires on the gravel road.
“Pride, you see, Tomas, pride put us here!” my mom said.
“Wait, Papa!” I yelled. After a wave of men passed us and the blood from the chicken thinned as the head slid down the glass, I saw Della. Men in white hoods surrounded her family. I wanted to cry out, but Manuel beat me to it.
“Papa. It’s Ernie and Della’s family!” Manuel yelled. “We have to help them.”
Paulo cried in my mother’s arms, and Maria opened the car door to run to them. She was always brave without thinking about it.
“Stop her,” my father yelled. “Stop your sister.”
Manuel pulled her back and slammed the heavy metal door behind her.
A group of men in hoods walked toward the Chavez family. The sheriff got up off his step. One of the men threw Ernie backward, but he did not fall.
“Chingate!” Della yelled. I could hear my friend’s voice across the expanse of the dirt road.
One of the men swung down toward her, but her father blocked the blow with his arm.
“Tomas!” my mom yelled.
“Okay,” he said.
The sheriff’s gun went off.
“I got an idea,” my father said.
Again, he slammed on the gas. This time he pointed the car directly in Della’s direction like he planned to hit her entire family.
“Tomas,” my mother yelled.
He drove the car closer and closer at a speed that made me sweat. At the last moment, before slamming into Della’s truck and her family, he yanked the wheel and then skidded to a stop. He placed the car between the KKK and Della’s family. The Chavezes did not hesitate. They jumped in their truck, leaving their tractor behind, the kids crowding in the empty truck bed. They too spun out on the gravel and drove toward home, spitting up hundreds of tiny rocks in the masks of the men on the road.
We followed, a dead and bloody chicken head on the front of my father’s new car, staining it permanently.
Chapter Seven
Della
1930
WE HAD ONLY BEEN HOME A COUPLE MINUTES WHEN JOHN AND his family knocked on the door of our home after the showdown with those stupid, hooded assholes. My mom acted weird. She stood with her arms wide open and greeted each one of them with a hug. She began with Flora, then Tomas, then Manuel, Maria, and then my friend John. When the littlest of them all came in, she scooped him up and hugged him tightly.
I’d never seen her do this with anyone before. It was like she had been taken over by some crazy white lady.
“Della, take John outside. Ernie, you and Manuel, go and light the fire in the pit. The rest of you, sit here,” she said. Then she reached toward Maria and gave her another hug, “Aren’t you beautiful?”
My dad shook Señor Garcia’s hand.
“Can you help me with this?” he asked. He pointed to his broken arm that had fallen limp below the elbow.
“Of course,” Señor Garcia said.
John didn’t say anything. He was probably thinking about his chilies.
“I’ve seen this a lot,” Tomas said. “People break things in the mines every day. We fix them up until they can see a doctor.”
“Go outside, kids,” my mom said, this time ushering every child outside the front door.
“I think I’ll stay,” I said. “I want to see.”
“Della, get the hell out of my kitchen before I toss you out,” my mom said. She smiled at Señora Garcia, a glance that said, “Kids, they never listen, especially this daughter of mine.”
“Della, go outside, mija,” my dad said.
“No, I think I’ll stay,” I said. I knew that my mom would control her temper with our guests there, the ones she hugged too tightly. I could probably say “shit” and “damn it all to hell” and “shit the bed” and survive without a smack to my head.
But I felt a tiny squeeze above my elbow. John had wrapped his hand around the bottom of my triceps and whispered, “I’d like to see your apple tree, Della. Can you show it to me?”
My dad looked at us both and smiled.
“Take your friend to see your tree, Della. I’ll be here when you’re done,” he said.
I led John outside and then poked my head back in through the kitchen window to watch.
“Stay here, Ernie and Manuel. I’m going to need you to grab that bottle of whiskey and hold Francisco’s legs and body,” Mr. Garcia said.
“I can hold something,” I said though the window. “I can hold something good. I can hold that son-of-a-bitchin’ arm.”
My mom shot up from her chair and walked toward me.
John moved his body between us just like his father had moved the car between us and the KKK, the same slow, non-aggressive slide of a foreign body between us.
“Let’s go, Della,” he said. “Show me the tree.”
“Fine, goddamn it!” I yelled.
Señora Garcia looked at me. Her chin dropped down to her neck and her brows hung heavy over her thin eyes. I had used the Lord’s name in vain and crossed a line.
This time, I grabbed John’s arm and led him to the tree without looking back at my mother. Maria had corralled her little brother and my little brothers near the pigs. They fed them scraps of food that had fallen away from the edges of the fields. The little boys laughed hard when the piglets rolled over each other to get the food.
John and I stood under the apple tree when I heard my father scream out in pain. His cry rang across the ranch and had to have scared the coyotes away.
I turned to run back to the house, but John grabbed my arm, this time with a bit more force.
“Let go, chile boy, let go,” I said.
John never talked back to me. He always did what I said.
“No,” he said. “If you go in there, your mom is going to slap you silly. I don’t want that. Sit with me here under the tree.”
The fire inside of me, the one that roared through me when I heard my dad cry out, had somehow been softened by my friend.
We sat for another ten or fifteen minutes to make sure there were no more cries until my mom yelled out to us, “Get your asses, I mean, butts back in here and start cooking the corn. Della, grab some apples to cut up for dessert.”
John and I gathered up apples and ran toward the house with our arms full.
He beat me. He was fast. It really made me angry, so I threw an apple at his feet to trip him, and boy, did it work. His foot rolled over the apple and his body flew forward. His head crashed against the hard, dry earth, and blood shot out from his lip.
I felt bad for hurting him but also proud of my aim.
“Sorry, John,” I yelled. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I reached down to pick him up.
“It’s okay,” he said. “That was a good throw. I am fast though. That’s how I can carry your backpack to the truck after school and then make it to the truck that picks us up every day to take us home. I bet you thought I missed it for you every day, didn’t ya? I like you, but I’m not gonna miss the truck home for you.”
He smiled and then sprinted to the house and through the front door.
Chapter Eight
John
1930
I RAN TOWARD DELLA’S FRONT DOOR AFTER FALLING OVER THE apple she threw in front of me. I thought it was funny, but I could see that she felt bad. I’d tripped on a million things in my life. My friend throwing an apple at me did not hurt my feelings one bit. It’s exactly what my sister, Maria, would have done if I tried to beat her to the house.
I opened the door, the first
of all the kids to come back in, and saw Señor Chavez on the ground. Ernie lifted the bottle of whiskey to his lips. My dad wrapped a piece of cloth around his arm from shoulder to wrist, a sling to hold the broken bone in place. Della’s dad squinted, and Manuel stood next to Señora Chavez and helped her lift her seasoned cast-iron pot up onto the stove. She didn’t even look over at her husband, just dumped lard into the pan and asked my brother Manuel to help her light the wood in the stove.
“John,” Señor Chavez said, announcing my arrival in a quiet, kind way, “Did you fall? You got dirt on your knees and elbows.”
“Della threw an apple at my feet to trip me,” I said.
“Della Benita Chavez!” Her mom announced her arrival in a loud, shrill voice.
“He didn’t care, mom. Look, he’s okay. He’s not a wimp. See, look at him,” Della said.
She smiled at me, a little grin that she hoped she could hide from her mom.
A wooden spoon flew from the kitchen to the doorway. “Trip on that, Della,” Señora Chavez said. She laughed. I laughed. We all laughed.
“He’s clumsy,” Manuel said. “You could have thrown a tiny pebble within ten feet of him, and he would have found a way to trip on it.”
“Get in here and get cooking, Della,” her mom said. “Start the corn. Start the pork fat. Heat up the beans.”
The men hoisted Della’s dad up, placed the whiskey in the crook of his arm, and then sat him down on the sofa. The men found their way to seats, leaving me, the only boy left in the house, standing next to Della.
“Can I help you cook?” I asked her.
“You can do it all if you’d like. I think I’ll just have a seat and relax,” she said. She wedged her body between her father and Ernie.
“Della Benita Chavez, get up off of that godforsaken chair and help,” Señora Chavez said.
My mom winced. I could see the strain in her. She raised her hand up to her chest and squeezed her crucifix and did a small sign of the cross that no one noticed except for me. Using the Lord’s name in vain was one of the worst commandments to break. It was right up there with murder to my mom. Then, after the tiny sign of the cross, she said, “Can I help too?’
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 4
