Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  In Puerto Rico, for instance, 80.5 percent of the population checked the “white” box on the 2000 census, a sharp increase from 1899, when the island became a U.S. territory and 61.8 percent chose “white.” In 2010, 75.8 percent of the population of fewer than four million checked off “white,” marking the first drop in over a century.

  In the United States, it’s just as complicado. Most Latinos across the country do not look like, say, their favorite euro-friendly telenovela stars, but over half of the approximately 50.5 million living in the United States identified themselves as white and no other race in the 2010 census. I think we may have been duped into believing that completely assimilating, even at the cost of suppressing parts of ourselves, is the key to success in America.

  The issue may be that the census forms are just really, really confusing. Many Latinos view ethnicity not only in a cultural context but in a racial one as well. When asked if she’s Black or white, my Ecuadorian-American comadre in New York City replies, “I’m Ecuadorian.” The same can be said for Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and so on. Therefore, when you read, “Hispanic origins are not races,” it leaves many scratching their heads, like, “¿Qué? Say what?”

  According to the 2010 census, about one third classified themselves as “Some Other Race” alone, as opposed to the 40 percent who classified themselves as “Other” in the 2000 census, the latter representing 95 percent of the 15.3 million of the folks who did so. In 2010 a tiny percentage of Latinos identified as being nonwhite alone—3 percent checked “Black,” for example—and 6 percent of Latinos, including me, reported as being of multiple races.

  In the future, as further ancestral DNA studies are done and the easy-to-use kits become more affordable in this sucky-ass economy, I suspect there will be a rise in the number of Latino-Americans reporting to be of multiple races. Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

  * * *

  I pull up to Arquimedes’s house after a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Santo Domingo. I wait for him in the receiving room at the front of the house for a few long minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a receiving room. I can see the Cepeda patriarch, his arms burned as brown as a tobacco leaf, gently rocking back and forth while reading a newspaper on his chair. A lot of planning went into this day. I bought an outfit back home just for this occasion: a matronly tent of a floral dress that covers my tattoos and knees. I don’t want to risk the chance of coming off disrespectful by showing too much skin or accentuating my figure. I’ll donate the dress as soon as I get back home.

  The Mrs. greets me first. I immediately recognize her from the neighborhood back home. She must have been a beauty when she and Arquimedes first met. Time has been kind to her attractive seventysomething-year-old face. “Bienvenida,” she says in a slightly tremulous voice. “We just moved here because it’s easier to manage.” She makes one excuse after another for a mess that doesn’t exist in this tidy home.

  “Gracias, señora,” I reply. I’m really embarrassed for never stopping to greet her back home. I promise myself that today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’ll start making amends with the universe by kissing this woman’s ass for the duration of my stay. “Please, take all the time you need to get ready. I will sit right here until Don Arquimedes is ready to talk to me.”

  The Mrs. gets up and whispers something in her husband’s ear.

  “Hola, come in,” Arquimedes says. His voice is gravelly, and his Dominican accent is mad heavy. “Funny, you’re not as dark as I thought you’d be, not for a Cepeda.”

  I don’t know how to respond to the man without being a smart-ass. “Thank you for agreeing to talk to me about my father’s family,” I say, smiling nervously.

  Arquimedes looks like his mother and nothing like his green-eyed brother Ismael or Dad. “You and your father may be the lightest people I’ve seen in our entire family,” he says. I smile, thinking of how I’m going to explain and convince him to give me some of his deoxyribonucleic acid.

  A morbidly obese little boy with a really big butt runs out of a room in the back. His complexion is dark and smooth, like polished obsidian. His hair is cropped into a short ’fro.

  “Is that boy your caregiver’s son?” I ask the Mrs., trying to make small talk. The lady shoots me mal de ojo from the kitchen.

  “No, he’s our daughter’s son,” Arquimedes says.

  His daughter walks in a few minutes later from work. She is shorter than her parents and exactly the same complexion as me, except her hair is fried straight, courtesy of a desrizado. “This is my nephew’s daughter from New York,” Arquimedes says, introducing me. She looks at my voice recorder and smiles, retreating into the back room never to be seen again.

  “Let’s begin, shall we?” I ask. I don’t notice just how bad my Spanish has gotten until I press myself to be proper. I struggle to say usted instead of tú, the customary way of addressing older people, and all the other words that have gotten mauled when put through the American grinder. I wish I could speak our dialect as well as I could read it and speak it when I was a kid. I feel off-kilter, somehow a bit less Dominican.

  Arquimedes sits in a large wooden chair by the hallway and says nothing for a few minutes. He’s wearing the same distant expression Dad did when he revisited his past, though this old man doesn’t look blue. For Arquimedes, evoking the past is clearly a bittersweet journey, a pleasant throw he can drape around himself on those rare cold nights on the island. “Oh yes, let’s begin,” he says, halfway smiling.

  “What can you tell me about the Cepedas?” I ask.

  “Well, my grandfather Juan Cepeda was not as black as, say, an African but very dark indio.” Before that, Arquimedes says, “he used the last name Marmolejo until he got married in 1927.” Turns out his father had not legally recognized him, so he had to drop his paternal surname. “To confuse matters,” Arquimedes says, “my father, Apolinar, traded in his mother’s, Emilia Jimenez Moya’s, paternal surname, Jimenez, for his dad’s new matrilineal surname, Cepeda.” My head is spinning as I try to keep up with it all. Ismael also used the last name Jimenez because he was born before his parents were officially married.

  Apolinar Cepeda married Casilda Romano, and together they had ten kids. Like way too many Dominican men, he was a mujeriego, fathering an additional eight children with different women. Casilda used her mother Natividad’s last name, which was Romano. Arquimedes rocks back and forth a bit before settling into a position that makes him look regal, like a king on a throne. “My mother’s mother was a very tall and very dark woman from nearby La Torre, with hair in between bueno y malo.” Casilda’s father, whose last name was also Jimenez, left Natividad and their children for another woman. Arquimedes never met him.

  Before becoming a housewife, Casilda—who was raised in an El Seibo campo out east—cultivated tobacco in her conuco, a Taíno word that means a small plot of land. After having kids with Apolinar, she resettled to Santo Domingo so the kids could receive a city education.

  Do you remember Ercilia? I ask. “I barely knew her, but the limited time I was around her, she was quiet and sad.”

  A glassy-eyed middle-aged man appears from the hallway, stomach first, and stands next to Arquimedes. The guy looks like him but with less hair and more weight. He stands there next to his father for several minutes, listening and making sucking noises with his teeth. He doesn’t say a word, just stares at his mother, then father, then me. He does not smile.

  Arquimedes, still rocking back and forth in his chair, continues. “I met Ercilia on April 6, 1944, at 85 Barahona Street in the Villa Francisca section of Santo Domingo—I should say Ciudad Trujillo, because the city was named after that tyrano back then.” He looks out the back window. “I remember my sister Felicia and I were interrogated for three days straight by the regime for our anti-Trujillo ac
tivities. I didn’t think we’d get out, but thanks to a family friend, Cucho Alvarez, we did, and our lives were spared.”

  When Arquimedes met Ercilia, she and Ismael were recently married with a newborn daughter and my one-year-old father, both born on the same national holiday, February 27. Even back then Ercilia’s religious fervor and passive demeanor were as intense as when I met her decades later.

  Arquimedes’s description of Ercilia’s parents is nothing like how Rocío’s side of the family painted them. Ercilia’s mother was described as being “very black” and her father as “very white” by Antonio and Mama. Arquimedes’s account is quite different. “Ercilia’s mother, last name Prandis [or Brandis]—she claimed her father’s male ancestors were English—was originally from Baní and had a golden-brown complexion and average looks,” he says. “And Don Pedro, a musician originally from San Pedro de Macorís, was darker than his wife.”

  I wonder if he knows anything about Ercilia possibly being adopted.

  “Ariel, that’s my nephew’s daughter, you know her,” Arquimedes tells his son, still standing silently next to him. Ariel, I’m told, is a doctor. He gives me a once-over before extending his hand.

  “Hello, I’m your father’s cousin,” he says, lowering his voice. “I saw you in a magazine here a while ago. You look a lot better in the paper than in person.” I doubt the Mrs. or Don Arquimedes heard him. Arquimedes is looking off, surely traveling back through his mind’s eye to some another time. Much like the Mrs., his face is still handsome. I can’t believe that this fat balding man or the short obese woman in the back room could be their progeny. No one says anything. The caregiver, making lunch in the kitchen, smiles.

  I think back to the Dalai Lama quote I had up on my refrigerator for years, which read in part: “We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences.”

  I decide not to respond to the son. “Thank you,” I reply, smiling.

  He raises his voice, presumably so his parents could catch what he was saying. “It’s good what you’re doing, asking about those times,” he says.

  I turn my attention back to Arquimedes. The Mrs. sits close by in a rocking chair. I don’t notice when Ariel leaves.

  “Did you ever hear that Ercilia was adopted?” I ask. “She has always maintained that she was.”

  “Yes, I heard the same thing,” he says. “I heard she was of Arabic ancestry and lived in San Pedro de Macorís in an extremely poor family who eventually gave her to a well-off family. It was a resounding rumor, to say the least.”

  “Speaking of Arabic ancestry, after I had Dad’s direct paternal ancestry tested for my project, the results came back being Arabic or, more likely, Berber,” I say.

  Arquimedes laughs. “Well, I guess one never knows, but I have to accept it, because science proved it.”

  “Señor, I’m interested in finding out some more information about the ancestral origins of your mother’s mother’s side of the family,” I say. I take out the test and assure him and the Mrs. that no blood will be shed in the process.

  “We’re Dominican,” he says, “but I’m happy to give you a sample if there are no needles involved.”

  “Two more things,” I say. “How did Ismael lose his fortune by the time he came to New York City, and how did he die?”

  Ismael’s weakness was women. He loved them more than life itself, more than the children whom he shipped off to his mom after remarrying and having a new set of children with the next woman, Fulana. He loved women even more than money and his spiritual gifts.

  Nobody knows what exactly happened between Ercilia and Ismael—he never talked about it—but when Fulana stepped into the picture, Ismael lost his head. “He began obsessing over her schedule, her every move, until losing his fortune to bad business,” Arquimedes says. “They moved to New York City, where he lost everything—including Fulana, to a younger man.” After that, Ismael began drinking.

  When their divorce was final, Ismael moved back to the Dominican Republic to live with Arquimedes. “Fulana is my comadre,” he says.

  “Is?” I ask. “Does that mean she’s still alive?”

  “Yes, she still lives on Long Island, and you know, Fulana was never easy and isn’t, but—”

  “I hear she was wicked to Dad and his sisters,” I say.

  “I don’t know. We have distance between us, she’s always been nice to us and—”

  “I’m almost positive Fulana named one of her daughters Raquel, too,” says the Mrs.

  My heart races. This bitch is why Dad suffered so much as a kid and, in turn, repeated the cycle with me.

  “What happened to him here?” I ask.

  “He fell in love with a really ugly negrita from our town, Los Peladeros, who was our live-in help. They had a kid together who moved to the States.”

  I’m dumbfounded.

  “He became obsessed with her, too. One night they had a terrible fight, and he woke up the next morning grave with high blood pressure. It never went down, and he died within a few days,” says Arquimedes. “My brother died of a broken heart.”

  * * *

  I catch a late bus back to la capital after politely turning down an offer to spend the night in Santiago. Had the elderly couple been alone, I would have probably stayed and listened to Arquimedes tell stories about his clan for as long as he could.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Paradise Gone

  Until lions have their historians, the tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB

  “LISTEN, RAQUELITA, IF WE ARE GOING TO TALK ABOUT OUR ANCESTORS, I want to explain something to your first, something about your mother,” says Paloma in her white pickup truck. “I just don’t want you to harbor hatred for her, because it’s cancerous for you, spiritually and physically.”

  Paloma looks like a thicker, silver-haired version of her older sister. Today Paloma is a Taoist and devout student of Chinese medicine, which might be the reason why she’s so calm and coolheaded. The aunt I knew as a little girl was as wild as the howl of a laugh that spilled out of her like a volcano. I clearly remember stalking her as a little girl in Paraíso. I waited for her outside the bathroom, where she’d appear with her dark locks twisted and pinned up and her face lathered with all sorts of homemade beauty masks, as if she needed to be any more magnificent than she already was. Her fucked-up teeth only added whimsy to her stunning looks.

  “I do not hate Rocío. I don’t really feel anything for her,” I tell Paloma. “I have to tell you she and Dad are two reasons why I prefer ancestral DNA testing over genealogy—history is easier to digest than people who consistently challenge you to stay in character by creating, as the Dalai Lama says, ‘unpleasant experiences.’ ” I recount my trip to Santiago and meeting Ariel as an example of my efforts to keep a cool head. Paloma lets out her roar of a laugh. Her eyes slant almost completely shut, which would not have scared me had she not been driving so fast down the streets of Santo Domingo.

  “Ay, Dios, Raquelita,” she says, still laughing and trying to catch her breath. “So, what do you have to tell me about our maternal ancestry? Those tests are becoming quite popular here, especially with people finding out they are Jewish, but also so many other things.”

  I tell Paloma we descend from West Africa on our direct maternal line, in a country now called Guinea-Bissau. Paloma smiles. “I think it’s great, and I’m not surprised, though I thought we’d be Taínos,” she says. “So, how did Mama take that noticias?”

  “She laughed,” I say. “Mama doesn’t believe in any of it.” I ask Paloma what she knows about her father’s side.

  “On Papa’s paternal side, I don’t know where his grandfather’s male ancestors ultimately came from—maybe it was Spain—but I do know his grandmother was from Haiti and had the last name Durán.” The Mancebo clan hails from Neiba, a town close to the Ha
itian border on the southwestern side of island, so that makes sense.

  I’ve enlisted the help of a local genealogy and ancestral DNA enthusiast to help me navigate the extremely tricky terrain of Dominican genealogy. Arquimedes’s account of the Cepeda clan’s flip-flopping surnames sent the red flag up higher than the towers dotting the streets.

  Paloma tells me that my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, Dr. Jose Dolores Valdez, was a celebrated figure in his town of San Juan de la Maguana, a historical Taíno stronghold located in the west, near Haiti. Dr. Dolores Valdez was one of San Juan de la Maguana’s first doctors and pharmacists and, in 1885, was elected into the town’s government. Back then, official appointments were traditionally given to highly respected people in the community. It’s amazing that el doctor found time to accomplish anything, much less manage to procreate at least fifty-two children with a rainbow coalition of women.

  The picture said it all: The black-and-white one Mama gave me was of an older Dr. Dolores Valdez. The Vietnamese folklore passed down through generations in my abuela’s family could be bought just by looking at his brown face, almond-shaped eyes, and high cheekbones. He looks African, with an Asian varnish. Looking at his picture reminds me of something Lynne Guitar said to me at lunch when I asked her what Taínos looked like.

  “Based upon their skulls . . . think of a modern-day Vietnamese, and that’s what the Taínos look like . . . They had skin the color of a lion, [a] golden color, high cheekbones, almond eyes, straight black hair—small but very, very well built and strong.” That’s only the second time I’ve ever heard the word “Vietnamese” on this island.