My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  For our demo, he enlisted a childhood friend from deep Southwest, by Grays Ferry, on bass. They came up playing church together. Day of the session, Erik comes in with a mass of gauze where a hand should be. He looks ready to spar, not jam. Living it up Hawaii-style with the Roots, he caught a wave on his jet ski and it threw him. Next thing he knew, lava rock found the knuckle bone. Erik duct-taped a drumstick to the gauze, counted off, and began. His stick grazed the high-hat. A touch that was more breeze than beat, like ninjas in bamboo, barely rustling leaves. His drumming was all pizzicato violin and tiptoes. But he kept a pocket backbeat. I played low chords on the ones—deep, spacious, sonorous. A few takes and we had a track on our hands, but Erik’s gauze had soaked through with red, horror-flick stuff. Session over.

  A few days after the rough mix, my phone rang. “Erik said I should take a listen. Swing by tomorrow.” Larry Gold was a Philly legend. Came up in local schools, dropped out of the Curtis Institute—top orchestral pedigree—to become an R&B cellist. The Roots or Floetry might be banging up his recording studio’s foosball table any random day. I arrived to discover a miniature white dude with a shiny bald spot and long silver rattail. He had forty years on the youngsters around him. On nice leather couches, musicians slouched, laid, splayed, and listened. The way Gold held forth, man’s lisp had authority. Plus, he let players light up in the booth, so young cats stayed hours beyond session time. Gold played for the Delfonics back when the Philly Sound was in pampers. Tales of Teddy Pendergrass and Hall and Oates sprinted off his tongue. He was walking history. He gestured for me to join the sofa audience. His Erykah Badu track was fresh out the oven. “It’s a rough mix.” He hit play. Gold’s bowed lick anchored Badu’s meandering rasp. He played cello percussive as a cajón.

  The couch crew was unanimous: the track was ice cold. Even the master was happy for the praise. Then he shooed them away for some one-on-one time. Let’s hear what you got, kid. I sat at the white baby grand, played the slow jam Erik and I had recorded, plus two more he’d been too bloody to play through. They were sensual neo-soul rock grooves with watercolor poetry. As if, from proximity, the Roots and Okayplayers’ seductive world might reveal my own.

  “Here’s what I propose. We record two songs here. If I like it, we’ll talk about making a whole record. If not, then you got a free demo and off you go. You got this Carole King vibe. Let’s see.”

  The two tracks we laid down were lifetime benchmarks. Down grooves, dreamy Rhodes pads. They were satin sheet jams, dripping with the lust of a cheap West Philly walk-up where two young lovers were finding their way. I came home and played them after another Sixers victory, so the boy was already happy. The songs set a mood, as did the success they hinted at. Our clothes were off before we made it through the bedroom door.

  “What would you say your music’s about? If you had to put it in words?” Larry Gold was once again waving people away for a one-on-one. It was nearly a month later. After finishing the demos, he had stopped returning my calls. Now I was back on his couch for the moment of truth.

  “Wow. Yeah. That’s a good point.”

  “It’s not a point, it’s a question.” I figured sitting in silence would allow the right answer to materialize. This was a test, I was good at those. But seconds into my hesitation, Gold spoke. “You don’t know. I can hear it in the songs. Stevie knew what he was about. Floetry knows, that’s why she gets my studio keys for a month. I knew. I was the cello guy. That’s something to build a life on. Ya kinda gotta know, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m trying to get your take, but you’re looking at me like I’m supposed to provide the answers.”

  I stopped nodding, just sat there motionless.

  “Maybe you’ll figure it out. Most don’t. You’re smart, and so are a million other people.” He snuffed out his Kool. “Anyhow, that aside, my professional opinion: you’re not good enough. You’re almost, it’s close, but you don’t cross the line that makes a musician special.” I shook his hand. Put on a brave face. Stood tall and pushed my way out the studio’s heavy door. But as I moved through the empty parking lot and beneath the 95 underpass, I had the chastened hush of a kid who’d been caught in a lie.

  * * *

  —

  The Tin Angel called. Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls had played between those exposed-brick walls. The club was indie-folk heaven. “Your demo’s good. It’s been on my desk for months, waiting for the right moment,” the booker said. “Want to open for Gil Scott-Heron?” I ran to Tower Records, found him in the bargain CDs, and discovered an unacknowledged source of half my urban idioms. The revolution will not be televised? Gil Scott-Heron’s words. I had heard him but never heard of him, quoted him without the proper citations.

  After soundcheck, I joined the old poet in the back room. There was time to kill before the house opened. The room was dim and derelict, with stuffing clouding out the sofa. Heron’s unkempt silver afro and old leather blazer spoke of a guy whose ups and downs had blended into a cohesive whole. His hips were too narrow for his jeans, cheeks too gaunt for his beard. He rolled a joint, toked deep, and passed it to his conga player then flautist. He always requested local kids to open his shows, he said. They kept him current, often sampling his work on future tracks.

  He held a toke, then spread his lips and let it swirl out naturally. “So, what’s your story?”

  “West Philly, born and bred.”

  “Right on. And what are you about? What’s your story story?” His players nodded, approving the question, waiting for their minds to be blown or simply to meet a fellow traveler. But I sat there like “story” was a vocab word I’d never bothered learning. As though I had no name, let alone one that broke its own rules, let alone one that meant revolution masked as happiness. My brain felt Men-in-Black zapped. This cat had lost his following, his weight, and some teeth—poetry didn’t pay much—but he never lost his story, the about attached to his bones. So who are you, Quiara? Who Qui Qui is? Quien eres? How Qui Qui be? Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Grade-school shit, and the half-breed Ivy Leaguer had nothing.

  “You’re up, hon.” I took the stage. Applause occurred. Keys were pressed. Notes emanated from vocal chords. But I felt hollow as a tree trunk with upturned roots. I listened to my songs like an operating room specimen, a spirit hovering above the bright lights, looking down at her anesthetized body. What characterized my chords and lyrics, I pondered, other than a general pleasantness? Life is nice. Sometimes a bit hard. Romance feels good. That was the thesis written all over my music: agreeable and undisruptive. My songs were a pantomime, a picket fence.

  Applause happened again. A body shaped like mine left the stage. Next up, put your hands together…A conga guy perched and slapped a groove. A flautist stood and looped a hook. The old poet looked at the Black, Brown, and white faces between brick walls. His disheveled leather blazer brushed against the mic.

  “A rat done bit my sister Nell / with Whitey on the moon

  Her face and arms began to swell….”

  He was funny, if salt in the sugar dish made you chuckle. He was real in a world that liked dress-up. Poor in a city of new glass towers. Unpleasant before a camera that said wave and smile. It bordered on embarrassing, the old poet’s lack of adornment. Words that poked fingers in the American socket. Zap, char, spark—you been burned.

  The old shame was at me again. The one that visited when I was asked if I believed in god. The one that choked me when ice cubes went clink and I smiled and nodded about the Inner City Problem. The old shame that loved my silence, that embraced me when I clammed up, warming me like a partner in bed. I wanted to be done with it, to venture out on my own. But without shame’s evergreen love of my silence, would I speak out and freeze to death, alone in America, with no blanket to warm me?

  This is not some rags-to-riches tale. If you skip ahead to the final chapter,
you will not find me knocking on Larry Gold’s studio door, announcing how wrong he’d been to reject me. This is forty-something Quiara issuing an internal storm watch. This is my warning lobbed right at the mirror: that if you ask for an audience, you best have something to say. That if you have something to say, the clock is ticking on the hours left to say it. These are notes to self on a memoir I am drafting at my desk at 1:48 p.m. It is a late-October afternoon, gray and rain greet me through the window. And I type a writer’s prayer with you, dear reader, as my witness: May silence, that evergreen seductress, not turn these pages too palatable. May I stand alone beneath the stage lights, honest and embarrassing as an old poet.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m bored.” I didn’t mean it in a Victorian way, a parlor problem sighed from a chaise. I meant it like a tickle in my throat, a lump in my breast. Symptomatic of bigger problems.

  “Bored? That’s unlike you.”

  “Dad used to say ‘Then go read a book.’ ”

  “How is your father? Have you heard from him recently?”

  I shrugged. We were in mom’s new kitchen. She had moved from my childhood home during college to a historic stone farmhouse. She grew impatient with my slow potato work and snatched the peeler from me. “You’re bored with the music? Well, what’s your end goal? You’re playing with the best of the best. Where do you see yourself taking it?”

  “Beats me. Haven’t a clue. That’s the problem.”

  “Let me ask you something.” Now she put the peeler down and rinsed potato dirt from her hands. “How come you never took writing seriously? Why didn’t you pursue it for real?”

  “I write all the time.”

  “I mean professionally. Coño, hija, from the time you came up to my knee, I was sure you’d be a writer.” She poured uncooked rice into a colander and handed it my way. I lifted the faucet handle and raked my fingers through the grains, searching for stones and un-threshed bits. “That musical, Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean, that was deep shit, man! Nobody is doing stuff like that. Why did you drop it and move on?”

  She was right. On closing night we had struck the set, and I breezed on to the next day, skipping-stone quick. Then the next day, then the next, until I’d built myself a haven: Philly jams, the boy, and proximity to Gabi. And yet, there were questions of self that no sonorous melody or tight groove could address, but that syncopation and dissonance—and words—had once drawn me toward. I still believed, despite Larry Gold’s rejection and Gil Scott-Heron’s question, that I could forge a life out of music if I worked at it. Music had, after all, rescued my younger self in crisis, dragged me from shipwreck to shore. But had it, would it ever, bring me closer to myself? Can a haven, in fact, ever do that?

  “You have a story to tell, Quiara. And with that Yale degree, you got the means to tell it. Which is more than most get.”

  “I never considered it possible. To be that. A writer.” And why should I have? I’d never been assigned a single Puerto Rican author, not in the burbs, in Philly public school, or at Yale. Aside from one or two Christmas gifts from mom, Puerto Rican writers might as well have been unicorns.

  “Recuérdate a Forest Lane. You spent all day in those woods reciting poems to the trees. Telling your stories to the ferns.” And now she plunged her palm beneath the running faucet and grabbed my hand from the rice so that water bound us together. The sudden intimacy annoyed me, but she only gripped more firmly when I tried pulling away. “If I had one favor to ask you, Quiara…It’s not my place to ask my daughter, who has been the blessing and affirmation of my life…After all you’ve given me, I have no right to ask for anything.”

  “Ask, mom. Please.”

  “Don’t you know how badly we need you? So much history will go to the grave with Abuela. She doesn’t have many years left. This is stuff that’s not written anywhere, Quiara. Y recuerdas que, if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. Didn’t I always say how much power a library shelf holds?”

  She let go, returned to the potatoes, peeling fast. Having laid it bare, her wish for me, she seemed embarrassed, even chastened. I continued rinsing rice as she wiped tears on her sleeve. Mom had never asked for much. I was the artsy adventurer, the straight-A student, self-motivated and self-disciplined without need of outside guidance. When she caught me as a teen smoking pot and being promiscuous, she had hardly even scolded me—the shame of being caught was enough to right my ship. Now, there was no unvoicing the ask. Her subtle call to arms that bent inward to something personal.

  Mom was asking me to break a silence I had lived with all my life. Society’s silence and her own—and her sisters’ and mother’s. Silence had been armor for my elders, emotional preservation through public scorn and in the face of deep-seated shame. Mom kept the Orishas secret so her faith could thrive without persecution. My elders kept AIDS quiet, a machismo that ensnared even our radical matriarchy. The addiction was quiet, too, performed offstage like a redacted scene. As was the illiteracy. But perhaps I didn’t need their old silences anymore. Perhaps mom’s survival had paved the way for my articulation. Perhaps I, of the next wave, faced new burdens and battles, including the struggle to push into the light. Underground, mom had built magnificent thrones. Could I build a throne made of visibility?

  I stood at the kitchen sink, a cascade of water blanketing my hands and the rice. In my mind’s eye, images appeared: snapshots from a childhood behind eighty-eight keys. Playing along to Champion Jack Dupree before my feet even touched the ground. How kind Bach had been to let me learn that minuet in G, and how he’d pushed me with harder works: fugues, sarabandes. Tuesday visits to Dolly Kraznapolski as she hammered my fourth finger into agility. Aunt Linda four-handing the Dvořák Slavonic Dances on her baby grand—the boom of the propped-open lid. Uncle Rik and me at Tower listening stations, swapping headphone discoveries. Copying vocal charts for Wynton Marsalis. The unaccompanied solo I wrote for Evan Ziporyn, the great clarinet experimentalist.

  I now felt childish for loving something so unironically, for savoring a meal with no censure or temperance. Music, my first love, my self-indulgence, my life raft—it was, in one breath, no longer enough. Mom had pointed out the slow leak in my vessel; I had to jump ship.

  The images gave way to sounds. My first Coltrane. A Love Supreme, O holy prayer, O insistent openness. Clumsy mistakes while learning Chopin—dissonances that pulled me around new bends, that became opening notes of my piano preludes. Adimu Kuumba’s strong thumbs on a kalimba made of garbage.

  Each musical memory blinked before me, a ceremonial kiss, then nodded farewell.

  When all the images were gone, a profound stillness stood in their wake. The charge of the air when the storm has passed. A thirsty atmosphere, waiting for its lightning bolt. It was a calm as whole as any I’d known. In a breath I had abandoned what I cherished most, and now a vast nothingness spread before me. My ears opened themselves to silence. Faintly, I heard something. Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t? That forgotten question blinked open like a flower. Could this be the same question that once roared, monstrous, at my throat?

  “Mija, the rice is clean,” mom said. I looked down at the grains. They were rinsed, and then some. The removal of stones and flawed grains, a step I usually skipped altogether, had been thoroughly executed. I tilted the colander above mom’s cheap caldero, yellowed and browned from a million meals cooked, and scraped the grains into the hot oil. They hit the pan in an explosive sizzle, a sound that, as any Boricua chef can attest, means a meal is well on its way.

  Part IV

  Break Break Break My Mother Tongue

  Writing’s a Muscle, It Gets Stronger

  “Hellooo, can I please speak with Quiara?” The unfamiliar voice cut a friendly slice of mischief.

  “This is she.”

  “Did I say that right? Quiara?”

  “Ye
s, thanks for asking.”

  “It’s Paula Vogel.”

  I paused. Took a breath. Only months ago, deciding to be a writer and realizing I had no training and was woefully underread, I figured some instruction was in line. While researching grad programs, I had read Vogel’s plays and been floored. Her characters were misbehaving women with messy hearts and a freewheeling lack of shame. They were suburban moms who wrote porn to subsidize back-to-school clothes. They were slutty sisters who lost film noir brothers to AIDS. They were agnostic dykes and temporary asexuals. She wrote these fallible females with humor, precision, and a structural creativity that felt like a big middle finger to Arthur Miller’s self-important patriarchs. Now, I loved Arthur Miller. But I was not against giving the man the middle finger. Vogel’s characters were stupendous contradictions, women with complicated, sometimes monstrous bodies, who fucked, had fun, and put a twisted spin on integrity. She’d been rewarded for such protagonists with a Pulitzer Prize and a professorship at Brown. I could hear in her voice, just from that initial phone greeting, the spark of joy.

  “Wow! How are you, Ms. Vogel?”

  “Please, you have to call me Paula. Is that okay?”