My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  After some years on Callowhill, Obdulia and her girls migrated to Mt. Vernon Street, another Puerto Rican enclave, just north of Spring Garden. It was also lined with old-growth elms and handsome brownstones. These were spacious apartments on well-kept blocks where neighbors, pastors, and grocers spoke Spanish. At the end of the block was a public garden, playground, and ball field—a sanctuary escape amid the urban hustle. Sartorial jobs were walking distance—laminating fabric, manning the sewing machines, being a bundle boy. Softball leagues recruited the buffest mamas in town—they welcomed Ginny’s radiant laugh onto the position of third base. Lassie, Abuela’s life-size statue of a collie, stood at the door welcoming guests with a ceramic grin. With a chipped tongue draped from his open mouth, even the statuary smiled. Shortly after they moved in, a new mural appeared on the corner. It was two stories high, covering the entirety of a row home’s side wall. In it, the Statue of Liberty’s proud face stared at the onlooker, her crown threaded with the Puerto Rican flag.

  Though Boricuas were busy integrating into Philly’s economy, the Fraternal Order of Police hadn’t gotten the memo. The mandate in those years was: if a Hispanic stepped to a white person, round up every brownie you can find. A single-suspect crime might yield fifty or a hundred arrests in one night. The Philly police got prolific: elderly men, preteen boys, any spic in sight. A reverse crime spree. Neighbors developed networks to spread the word quick: All men inside! La policia are doing roundups! Viejas calling viejas, girls running block to block whispering warnings into windows. But still there were boys coming home from ball practice (You’ve got a bat? That’s a weapon), there were viejos coming home from factory jobs (Walking with a cane? Weapon!). Eventually the FOP sweeps galvanized the community. When a roundup took place, the Boricuas raised hell on the precinct steps, drumming pots and pans in a loud two-three clave. The syncopated ruckus continued till news cameras came and detainees were released. Who led many of these party-protests? Tía Toña, the Perez family’s eldest daughter. Abuela’s firstborn hustled for pocket watches and against police brutality.

  Abuela had a softer strategy and never joined the protests. The local beat cops—all white—grew to adore Abuela’s open table. Their lunchtime visits originated the day they kicked in the downstairs door, then banged at her apartment, threatening arrest. For what, Abuela had no clue, until she recognized the word “marijuana” and saw them pointing at her window plants. Abuela didn’t speak a lick of English but somehow made clear: those cops were to sit and eat before any arrest would go down. Using gestures and demonstrating knife skills, she convinced them, correctly, that the herb in her window box was recaito, not cannabis. That’s why the beans tasted so good. Because she smashed the leaves in the pilón with garlic, for sofrito. By the following week her table was their hearth. The rice and beans were always warm during lunch hour. As the cops ate, she taught them bits and pieces of Spanish, rejecting their reciprocal attempts to teach her English.

  On Abuela’s turntable, Héctor Lavoe traded spins with the Doors. But by the time Juan Luis Guerra hit the charts and cassette tapes were ubiquitous, judges and lawyers had taken over the brownstones. The new six-figure residents restored the homes to their original single-family design and the Puerto Ricans migrated deeper north into cramped, cheaper row homes. Poverty, it seemed, followed Abuela from the island and held fast even when she fled the Bronx. Only the flavor of the poverty changed. Their new block on American Street had no playground or murals, nor a single tree. There was no farm out back to harvest dinner from, no roosters to kill when the pantry got bare, and more mouths to feed than ever. Abuela adopted two more grandchildren—their mothers M.I.A. to addiction and domestic violence. Now she was raising Cuca and Flor, plus Mary Lou and later Candi. Virginia shacked up with a white hippie in West Philly, sharing a block with Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and African American families. Ginny moved in next door and the two sisters were the only Latinos in the neighborhood. Ginny’s slate of coursework at Community was short-lived. Like her sisters before her, it was time to earn a living, to organize community gardens in a concrete jungle, and to lay foundations for the next generation—for us.

  Step four: Add water. Hear that sizzle? That’s what you want. The ratio of water to rice is one to one, plus a chilín, a splash extra. “But, Abuela, the bag says use twice as much water as rice.” Her face turned quizzical. “There’s instructions on the bag?”

  Step five: Salt it. Half a handful will do.

  Step six: Stir and cover.

  “Hola, Qui Qui!” As the lid nested onto the caldero, Ginny shouldered the screen door open and threw her purse on the sofa with an I’ll be hanging for a few hours vibe. She inspected my ass—yup, it’s still flat!—and pinched and slapped it in confirmation. Now Abuela passed the baton to her daughter. Waiting for the rice to cook, we drank sodas around the table as Ginny painted her own Philly canvas. Her memories, a generation more proximate, began to mingle with my own, till I couldn’t tell if I had experienced this part of it, overheard that part of it, or built a memory from an old polaroid.

  American Street is where the bloodsickness tapped the Perez shoulder. Ginny, whose fast legs led the family to Philly, discovered health problems in her athlete’s body. They surfaced in the form of an ectopic pregnancy. Her uterus was swollen from PID—her first husband was in the Navy, y ya tú sabes, all those overseas prostitutes…The fertilized egg implanted outside her fallopian tube. When it burst she lost so much blood medics needed three pints to fill her up. The transfusion had been tested for HIV but not much else. Doctors gave her hep C to save her life. Ginny was grateful. If you want your garden to grow, you gotta feed it. Even if some of it is manure, she told me. “We’re losing her! We’re losing her!” was the last thing she’d heard before making peace with the world. And then, she woke up. She woke up.

  Her uterus and ovaries were a jumble after that. Pregnancy was off the table, but Ginny became a sentinel. Woman slept with shoes on. God had other plans, she told people, and she’d be a parent. You just wait and see. So, when addiction ravaged Flor, when it Jekyll and Hyde’d her to an unrecognizable place, when Danito’s skull rang out on the bathtub like our family’s own Liberty Bell? Ginny was downtown the next morning, filling out the foster-care paperwork. In a matter of months Ginny was taking JJ and Danito, her nephews-turned-sons, to Hunting Park and teaching them to throw a softball. Or bringing them to the gardens she’d made of empty lots, where she taught them to harvest calabaza and oregano brujo. (Illegal child labor, JJ used to complain with a grin.) It was rigorous work rooted in her dad’s Taíno methods, and the local gardens she began with her sons continue as nonprofits today. With her legs buckling from base-running, her voice hoarse from calling her sons to home plate, her palms cracked from hoeing and sowing, Ginny would get home late and set the flame on high. Ginny perfected arroz con gandules for her adopted boys, JJ and Danito. Just like mom perfected arroz blanco for Pop. Just like Abuela perfected home cooking for her girls. Indeed, if I swung by Ginny’s late, after dinner ended, she turned the flame high beneath the “empty” rice pot. Then JJ, Danito, and I would hunch over the stove, scraping the burnt stuff from the caldero. Ginny’s pegao was Boricua potato chips—crunchy, salty, fatty, irresistible. Whatever was left after that was placed out back for the stray cats. Not a single grain wasted.

  Step seven: When the lid is tap-dancing from steam, lower the flame.

  Step eight: Watch a telenovela or study a psalm. Maybe call Puerto Rico, see if Tío Jelin’s pneumonia has let up.

  Step nine: Stir to fluff before serving. The rice should gleam.

  Yoruba Vocabulary

  The Norton Anthology slid onto my desk like a pancake from a spatula. I opened the paper brick, fanned its tissue-thin pages, scanned the tiny print of a few random poems. Then wrote my name in number two lead inside the back cover. Above it, in different ink and pencil tones, were the names of stude
nts who came before. It was AP English, senior year. I assumed Dr. Phillips’s bow tie and sweater vest were ceremonial attire, first-day formalities. Soon it was clear—this was his unchanging professorial getup. He was bald, slender, and far more groomed than any teacher I’d seen at Central. He told us to find Wallace Stevens and read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Silence filled the room. After a few lines I grew annoyed. The second reading confirmed my initial response: arrogant nonsense. Wallace Stevens mocked the elegance of Dickinson and Frost. He purposefully eschewed readability. My mind was off at the races, arguing voraciously with Stevens, interrupted only when Dr. Phillips read the poem aloud. In his voice, the words were music. The lines had no logic but soared with cadence. The contradiction disoriented me. How could a poem be harmonious and rude?

  Call the roller of big cigars,

  The muscular one, and bid him whip

  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

  I had not heard a poem read aloud since the horse farm, and Dr. Phillips’s respect for the spoken word rivaled mom’s. He never took a breath mid-line. I had been taught to phrase piano in that manner, lifting my hand from the keys only at a melody’s completion. Dr. Phillips ran out of breath on the longest lines, and still pushed forward gently. Reaching the line break, he inhaled and began anew. He read the poem like he loved the poem, intoning phrases as though they cast spells. In his voice, language was erotic and voluptuous—and he lingered for a moment in delicious places. I thought, I want to belong somewhere the way that stranger’s voice belongs to those words.

  As to fiction, Flannery O’Connor was first on the agenda. Previously I’d been taught to read for plot and theme, but O’Connor was all landscape. I had never been to the South and now here it was, grotesque and monstrous. In her paragraphs the air tasted of molasses and smiling strangers exposed invisible fangs. In O’Connor the devil lurked in all corners, most especially the pious and proper ones. This author wrote blunt and with hell on her mind, odd and unwholesome and bad to the bone. The day of our first exam, the students clumped outside the room before class, whispering of Dr. Phillips’s reputation. Some older siblings had gotten C’s. Dr. Phillips single-handedly ruined kids’ Harvard birthright, consigning them to a fate worse than death: U Penn and Penn State and Temple, oh my! But that was the AP set for you. They talked peace, love, and equality but were dog-eat-dog when discussing college admissions. Test sheets lurked face-down on our desks. I flipped mine over and was astonished to find only two sentences on the other side. “Flannery O’Connor uses the theme of fire in her work. Discuss.” Fifty-three minutes. Go. Extra sheets of paper were at the front of the room. I stared at the test sheet.

  “Flannery O’Connor uses the theme of fire in her work. Discuss.”

  Fire. Mom used candles in her altars. She placed them by clear cups of water and photographs of our deceased. I had lit candles for her and watched, over a week’s time, as the wax diminished and the flame descended.

  Fire. One minute down, fifty-two to go.

  There’s a moment when the pen moves of its own volition. When an outside voice borrows your ink for its own swift work. I shook like I had in Quaker meeting. My hand struggled to steady itself against thunder. Was it an inner scream I had never let loose or some external tempest that tapped me? This was the opposite of un-speaking AIDS, of holding a tongue, of observing from the steps. This felt how Tía Toña sounded at the funerals and rosaries: a wailing, a thrashing, words to knock crucifixes from walls. At my fluorescent-lit desk, a magmatic eruption threaded itself through my pen tip. Minutes passed, lactic acid thrashing my fingers. Vertigo and nausea carouseled my mind. Still my hand would not slow its course. I would later learn I had gotten up eight times, filled eight loose-leaf sheets in fifty-three minutes. I would later learn that I’d trembled so violently that Dr. Phillips approached to check if I was okay. I had nodded yes. When the fifth-period bell rang, I was vaguely aware of being the only one left in the room. I put down my pen midsentence. Having no sense of what I’d written, I handed the essay in like that, incomplete. Afterwards, a friend approached me in the hall. “What was that? What happened to you in there?” she asked. Still caught in the aftershocks, I calmed my breathing sufficiently to answer. “I don’t know,” I said. Central High sounded echoey and underwater. There were my classmates huddling, whispering outrage. What about multiple choice? Where were the short-form questions, the true-false, the vocabulary fill-ins? They had studied the character trees and town locations in O’Connor’s novellas. How were they to demonstrate their mastery in such a loose format? I heard it all through a tunnel. They stood at the mouth, ten thousand miles away, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  I felt subterranean and animal. I had moved the pen despite a mounting resistance. My words were dirty, my sentences stank of gut and had mineral claws. The things I wrote sought no approval or permission. They were raw and disgusting, riots of assertion. I was at last corporeal, like my cousins. I’d always assumed that learning to dance, to move without thought, would be joyous, but no. Sitting in a lefty desk in Dr. Phillips’s essay test, learning to dance was an awful initiation. For years I had felt aggrieved by mom’s Afro Rican path, by her aggressive refusal to assimilate. For years I had wished she would worship a little bit whiter. But now I had accessed the heavier-than-me, the thicker-than-me, the dormant beast. And it had been unlocked not by a drum, not by blood sacrifice or Juan Luis Guerra, but by a southern white woman who wrote novellas and an English teacher wearing a bow tie and sweater vest.

  As senior year progressed, Dr. Phillips had us turn to new pages in the Norton Anthology, discovering new poems in its tissue trove. Each new author was a deflowering. My first Ralph Ellison. My first Dante. Each essay test, I waited for the beast to return, but it proved an unreliable visitor. It came only once—that first time. The rest of AP English was about diligent reading and sustained curiosity, and the humbling realization that others—Dostoyevsky, Coleridge—had grappled with the world in a manner much deeper than I was yet willing to.

  “Mom? Do you have a book about Santería I can borrow?” Though explanations never came easy, mom was a collector by nature. Stacks of Architectural Digest and auction catalogues crowded our coffee table. Secondhand art books whose pages smelled of vanilla piled on our rugs. Mom spent that afternoon searching her shelves, cabinets, and stacks, discouraged to find that her books on Ifá, the Santos, and the Orishas were all in Spanish. They were advanced practitioner’s manuals whose vocabulary exceeded my conversational ability. Like most collectors, mom had a shopper’s appetite. Any excuse for a last-minute drive to Robin’s Bookstore or Garlands of Letters, she’d leap. Plus, my literary habit brought her great pride. Before I began kindergarten she was already bragging about my inevitable college degree. Collector plus shopaholic plus bragging mom. I was aware, when I made the ask, that mom would embrace it as an invitation.

  One day after school I discovered a book on my piano bench. Spine glossy and creaseless. Unwrapped, unmarked. It appeared with no ceremony or announcement, like a stray cat at my sunset door. Unlike with the Norton Anthology, I was the book’s first owner. Four New World Yoruba Rituals by John Mason. I squirreled it to my room with a pen and began to underline, highlight, and star every sentence. The first pages offered an explanation of los Egun, the ancestors. “In constant watch of their survivors on earth…They collectively protect the community against evil spirits, epidemics, famine…ensuring the well-being, prosperity, and productivity of the whole community generally. The spirits could be invoked collectively and individually in times of need.”*1 An army of benevolent ancestors stood at my side, the book assured me. And it was welcome assurance, the notion that Mary Lou and Tico were in my court, had my back in higher realms.

  I wanted to savor each paragraph, to read slowly and let the concepts sink in. So I paused after the introduction, to practice piano. I appreciated the tactile world of fingertip
s on black keys, the familiar lick and slide of Chopin nocturnes. Then I opened the book again, reimmersed in the thick and thorny cosmos of my deep history. Located precisely at this sharp turn, at this hairpin pivot between Chopin and the ancestors, was a place that felt like self. I was home.

  In detailing four religious ceremonies, the book included invocations in their original Yoruba plus translations into Spanish and English. Such blunt poetry. Cadences that cut with linguistic force. “Death give way. Evil move.”*2 “Yes! Salute and touch the ground to transplant his spirit.”*3 “We create the crown of advantage.”*4 Words like a drum, thoughts like a blade. Phrases dripping with intention, meant to enact change upon the speaker and thus the world.

  Weeks later, mom asked if I had read it. I nodded and confirmed that I had. It was our only discussion of the matter.

  One day after practicing piano, I climbed the steps and found a new book on the landing. Placed like a love note at my bedroom door. Its matte cover was smooth to the touch. I fanned it open, sniffed the earthy pages. The Way of the Orisa by Philip John Neimark. The foreword described the tactical genius of those who survived the middle passage. After Boriken’s Taíno population had been enslaved, mass-murdered, and significantly depleted—though not fully eradicated—Spanish colonizers needed a new source of labor. Their Yoruba captives smuggled a system of worship and wisdom to the New World right beneath their captors’ noses. Quiet and secrecy, I discovered, were not always indicators of shame but were proven strategies of resilience and resistance. I saw mom’s altars, and the hush surrounding them, in a powerful new light. She, like her forebears, had taken great risks in her spiritual exploration. Syncretic codes protected such risk-taking.