by Edgardo Vega
She recalled two years prior being in a restaurant in New York City with her mother and overhearing a black couple talking about a book called Roots in which a black family was separated. Coming home on the train, she asked her mother if she had the book. Elsa said the book was probably in their library. As soon as she entered the house she went to the library of the very well-kept Santiago López-Ferrer home, fifteen spacious rooms spread over three floors, and searched until she found the book. She kicked off her white Reeboks and curled up in Barry’s big leather chair and read until Mrs. Alvarez came for her to eat supper. She couldn’t stop reading the book, so she brought it with her and read while she ate at the kitchen table. When she was finished she took the book up to her room and continued reading until she fell asleep in her clothes. Around eleven p.m. she woke up, got into her pajamas, and went to sleep.
That night she dreamed that she was traveling in a canoe down a wide river. On its banks African people were waving at her to come ashore, but no matter how much she paddled she couldn’t make it and soon the current of the river became swifter and she was going faster and faster until the canoe turned over and she was being submerged and tumbling, over and over, in the rapids. When she finally came to a stop in a calm pool, her skin was a shiny, ebony color. In the morning she felt ill and got up to look at herself in the mirror, expecting to find herself transformed. She didn’t go to school that day but instead remained in bed, reading what she now called “the African book.” When she was finished reading Roots, she was outraged and couldn’t understand how so many injustices could be perpetrated on the characters in the book. When she told her mother about it, her mother laughed.
“Mom, Kunta Kinte was in his home in Africa. He went out to get a log to make himself a drum and they captured him, brought him to the United States, and made him a slave.”
“The book is fiction, baby,” her mother said.
“No, it isn’t, Mom,” she replied, indignant, her hands on her hips. “It’s real. It really happened to Mr. Haley’s family.”
“He made it up,” her mother said. “That’s what most writers do.”
“No, he didn’t. I bet you haven’t even read it,” she shouted.
“No, I haven’t,” Elsa said.
Vidamía ran out of the kitchen and into the woods behind the house, where she sat in her special place under the pines and cried and everything in her was mixed up. She had never given much thought to Marjorie Green or Juanita Dell in her class. They were black girls who smiled shyly at her and always said hello, but hurried off as soon as school was over and even at lunch stayed by themselves with other black girls. She wondered now if Marjorie or Juanita felt like the characters in the book. Were Marjorie and Juanita descended from slaves? Perhaps they weren’t at all shy, because at times she saw them laughing brightly and talking animatedly with each other, their speech filled with a language all their own, like she and Elizabeth Wright had, with their words for the seasons and directions and times.
“It’s not fair,” she argued after class, when she stayed to speak to her teacher about the book. Elizabeth had stayed with her since Mrs. Wright was picking them up. Ms. Robertson listened attentively, nodding politely. It appeared, however, that she hadn’t read the book. She kept looking at her watch. She said Vidamía was absolutely right and perhaps she ought to read more about slavery and the subject of African-American contributions to society, and that, by the way, there had been a television miniseries based on the book. This idea spun around in Vidamía’s head, and when Mrs. Wright came to pick them up—it was the day of the week when both her mother and stepfather stayed in New York late and Vidamía slept over at the Wrights’—Vidamía couldn’t stop talking about the book and the characters in it.
Mrs. Wright had read the book and seen the television series, and said they were both wonderful, beautifully dramatic examples of Americana. Mrs. Wright spoke like that. She used phrases like “dynamic in scope,” “vast in its humanity,” and “metaphorically tragic.” It annoyed Elizabeth, but Vidamía loved listening to her—even though sometimes she didn’t understand what Margaret Wright was talking about. Mrs. Wright drew delicate, pastel landscapes for a greeting-card company, and everything about her was like thin crystal, delicate and fragile.
“Do you think they’ll show it again, Mrs. Wright?” Vidamía had asked.
“Well, if they don’t it would be regrettable, because it is simply breathtaking in illustrating the plight of the Negro in America.”
“Black, Mom,” Elizabeth corrected.
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Wright had said. “Thank you, dear.” They had stopped at a light, but when they were moving again she made a suggestion. “Perhaps you ought to write to the network and ask them to retelevise the series. I believe it was the American Broadcasting Company. My friend Helen from college works there and perhaps I can get the name of the person to whom you should write. I think it would be a wonderful project for the two of you to work on.”
“ABC, Mom?” Elizabeth said, hooking a question mark on the end of her reminder to her mother that she need not go into such painful detail about everything. “And it’s Vidamía’s project?”
“Very well, then I will make sure that Vidamía has all the necessary information so that she can write to the powers that be.”
The girls looked at each other and shrugged. When they got upstairs they rolled around on the floor of Elizabeth’s room, laughing and saying the phrase over and over, until, exhausted, they came downstairs, and Elizabeth asked her mother who “the powers that be” were.
“Oh, my,” Mrs. Wright said as she patted the lettuce dry. “The powers that be are the people who make the decisions.”
“Shouldn’t it be the powers that are?” Elizabeth said. “It makes it sound like Mrs. Washington. She says things like that. ‘Who it be gonna pick up you room when you be married, Lizabef? Who it gonna be?’” Elizabeth said, imitating their cleaning woman.
“Elizabeth!” Mrs. Wright said, turning to face them. “I will not have you making light of other people’s ways of expressing themselves.” And then she apologized to Vidamía: “I’m very sorry, dear.” And then back to her daughter: “Mrs. Washington is a kind woman who loves you very much. I will not have you ridiculing her or demeaning her person.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Elizabeth said.
“That’s quite all right,” Mrs. Wright said, back to her cheery self. “Now, go and wash up. Your father went to pick up your brother from basketball practice. They should be here any minute and then we’ll have supper.”
Vidamía wrote the letter to the American Broadcasting Company and they wrote back, addressing her as “Ms. Farrell,” thanking her for her wonderful suggestion and informing her that in the very near future they would consider rebroadcasting the series. She was ecstatic and brought the letter to show Ms. Robertson. The entire matter had been perfect and reassured her that being American was a most wondrous thing. She wrote back and thanked the network and asked if it was possible to obtain copies of the tapes. They replied that it was not. She was despondent, and then Barry said he’d see what he could do. Three weeks later he walked in with a box full of videotapes. When her mother asked Barry how he’d managed to get the tapes, he replied that at ABC there were all manner of Riveras, Pabóns, Colons, Rodríguezes, Lópezes, and even Santiagos running around doing one thing or another.
Vidamía didn’t understand much of the interchange, but she was grateful for the opportunity to see the series. She and Elizabeth watched nearly twenty-five hours of the epic. As she saw each segment, she again cried, as she had when reading the book, everything so realistic that she was irate at the injustice, angered over the treatment of black people, shaken with rage. They were Americans and they were treated so awfully. How could it be? Maybe they would’ve treated her the same way because she was Puerto Rican.
But she was American—just like anybody else, even though she spoke Spanish and was Puerto Rican in a way, a
lthough that part was a little vague. From observing her mother and stepfather she absorbed that being Puerto Rican was something special. Even though her mother and Barry were born in the United States they spoke proudly about the island and their identity. As she grew up, she understood that their pride was a mixture of knowledge acquired through education combined with a need to be distinct from other Latinos and perhaps even from blacks, embracing their culture as both a social and a political statement. Barry often spoke about his firm being the largest Puerto Rican-owned accounting firm in the United States, employing more than six hundred people, and with an impressive list of clients.
She went to Puerto Rico with her mother and Barry when she was ten, just after her Roots experience, and loved the beaches with their turquoise waters. She marveled at the distant mountains—then you were on them, the car climbing higher and higher and the perfumed wind hitting you in the face and making your hair dance away from your ears. She stared in amazement at the small houses perched on the sides of the hills, sometimes supported precariously by long stilts; the people, rendered doll-like by distance, climbing the hills on ribbon-like paths of red clay; the car traveling on the narrow roads so that there were times when she looked out the window on her side and all that she could see was a precipice and below it a valley with a river snaking in and out of the land, appearing and disappearing, the mountains in the distance dark green and the air smelling of flowers and fruit.
They had gone up into the mountains to her mother’s uncle’s house, so far up that sitting on the porch of the big house—there was an Indian cave on the cliff on the other side of the narrow, two-lane road—she had begun yelling that the fog was coming. Her uncle said that it wasn’t fog but a cloud, and that if she remained sitting as the cloud passed the house she would feel the rain within. She sat there unbelieving as the cloud approached and enveloped everything in gauzy moisture so that even the inside of her nostrils and ears became moist and the dormant rain made her skin tingle. Her mother’s uncle, Bernardo, said the Indian spirit of Yukiyú traveled in the cloud and now that it had touched her, she was a real Puerto Rican. He also told her that if she saw the elusive coquí, the diminutive tree frog that filled the evenings and nights with its chirping cry, it meant that she would return to the island again and again.
During the week that she was there, she searched day and night with her cousin Ileana, crawling through the undergrowth and lifting leaves, at night the coquí’s cry so close she was certain she would find it but always coming away disappointed, not believing it was possible to see one. The evening before they left she came outside after supper and sat on the porch swing, moving the seat ever so slowly, the night air carrying a slight chill and the sky above brilliant with stars. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it. The tiny tree frog had jumped and attached itself to the louvers of a closed window, the porch lights making the yellow skin translucent. She moved her head ever so slightly and saw how truly small the animal was, perhaps no bigger than half of her thumb. And then the coquí emitted its two-tone cry once, and then again and in a prodigious leap gained access to a hibiscus bush more than a dozen feet away. Dazzled by the sight, she went immediately to where the tiny tree frog had jumped but saw nothing. She then ran inside, ecstatic, yelling, “Lo vi, lo vi. Vi el coquí. I saw it. I saw the coquí.” After her return to their home in Tarrytown, for weeks she woke up hearing the island birds and in the evening the tree frogs and at times she heard the surf as it struck the shore.
She was aware that she was Puerto Rican, but she was Irish as well. Above all she was American. Not Italian or Irish or Spanish or black but American. This meant a great deal to her growing up, because she didn’t have to explain much about herself. In spite of the fact that Farrell was an Irish name, it was also from across the ocean, from the British Isles, and as she had read, linguistically the name was Gaelic, Celtic, and therefore more connected to English than, let’s say, her mother’s name, which was Santiago, which she was equally proud of. Sometimes she wished people in the United States carried both parents’ names like they did in Spanish-speaking countries. In Puerto Rico she had seen houses that had signs on them stating the names of the family: Pantoja-Ramos or Díaz-Linares. One house had Vizcarrondo-Vizcarrondo and her cousin Ileana, who was eight years old, had asked if a brother and sister had gotten married, and her mother had called her a boba, which meant dopey, and explained that the husband and wife’s families both had the same last name. If she were living in Puerto Rico or Spain or anyplace where they spoke Spanish she would be Vidamía Farrell Santiago, carrying both the father and the mother’s name, which was sort of cool. But in the United States people didn’t understand. She liked Farrell, though. It sounded American, and that’s what she was. And yet there had always been something missing, like when someone is speaking and you missed it and ask the person to repeat what they’ve said and the person’s forgotten and you’re left wondering what it could’ve been. Like that. Something not quite stated about her life. She thought it could be the fact that she’d never known her father.
The day that Officer Arnold Tyson brought her to O’Hanlon’s, when she was twelve and she met Maud Farrell, would sustain her forever as a moment that gave meaning to her life. No matter what happened afterward something wonderful had taken place then, so that when she returned to Tarrytown and her mother asked her, “How was the museum?” she said confidently that the museum was fine, feeling entirely justified in her deception because under what category other than museum could she file going back and discovering her past? But at dinner that night, while they were having dessert, not tormented by guilt but, buoyed by the pride of her accomplishment and her wish to have it noted, she told Elsa and her stepfather that instead of the museum she had stopped off in Yonkers and found her grandmother.
“Grandmother? What grandmother?” Elsa said.
“Grandma Farrell,” Vidamía said. “My father’s mother.”
Elsa got a very odd look on her face, much as if someone had insulted her and she didn’t quite know how to respond. Without the least preamble, she informed Vidamía that as far she was concerned her father didn’t exist and that she ought to be grateful that Barry was willing to serve in a surrogate function as her father, which she should realize, even though she was only twelve and didn’t understand about such things, was quite important in the social development of children. Vidamía responded that she was grateful, but that she still wanted to meet her father, and there was nothing wrong with wanting to do so. She said that even though she was only twelve and had no right to understand such things, hadn’t Elsa said how important it was to a healthy ego to be able to make decisions that were beneficial to one’s life?
Elsa Santiago López-Ferrer sat stunned, not wanting to admit to herself that Billy Farrell would have proved a burden to her and that she could never have achieved all she had if she had taken care of him. There was no way she’d sacrifice herself like her mother. She knew she had made the right decision back then. She looked to Barry for help, but all he did was shrug his shoulders and say, more out of a wish to help a child for whom he’d always felt affection, that he thought Vidamía was right and she ought to meet her father, and she could decide where to go from there.
“I can’t believe you’d say something like that, Barry,” Elsa said.
“What?”
“That she can just go off on her own like she did and you condone it. How do you know where she’s been?”
“If you didn’t make such an effort to keep her father out of her life maybe she wouldn’t have had to do what she did,” Barry said, rising from the table.
“Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome,” Barry said, and left the dining room. Elsa sat, her face turned to the windows as if she were searching for something in the night outside.
“I’m sorry,” Vidamía told her mother. “I had to find out.”
“Well, you could’ve asked me,” Elsa said, turning back to her.
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“I did, and you said it was none of my business, Mom,” she replied.
“I most certainly did not,” Elsa countered, then thought a moment and reconsidered. “I was upset. I’m sorry.” She paused again and finally asked if she’d met her father.
“No, Grandma Farrell … I mean, she’s going to let me know when I can,” Vidamía replied, and then hesitantly asked what had happened. “With him, Mom? How did you meet him?”
“I really don’t want to discuss that right now,” Elsa said. She removed the napkin from her lap, dabbed her lips, got up from the table, and went upstairs. Vidamía finished her dessert alone and then sat in the kitchen while Mrs. Alvarez cleaned up. She told the housekeeper about her other grandmother, smiling as she spoke in Spanish as well as she could, describing Maud Farrell as an abuelita rubia, a blond grandmother, telling her how she was going to meet her father and how upset her mother had been. Mrs. Alvarez listened carefully and then asked her if she wanted another slice of cherry pie with ice cream. Vidamía looked around to check that no one was coming, because she wasn’t permitted seconds on desserts, and nodded happily. Una celebración, Mrs. Alvarez called the treat.
Mrs. Alvarez said it was wonderful that she had found her father. She then sat down and told her that once there had been a beautiful young woman by the name of Pilar Fernández in the town of Buenaventura on the Pacific coast of Colombia, where she was from. This girl had fallen in love with a young man by the name of Alonso, a sailor from a Chilean ship, who promised that someday he would return and marry her. One year went by and then another and then a third one and Alonso still hadn’t returned. Every ship flying the Chilean flag brought new hope, but as she stood waiting for the sailors to come ashore, Alonso was never with them. When she showed the other sailors Alonso’s picture and asked if they knew him, no one knew who he was.
