Call Me Maria

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  I was reminded of this story when you wrote to me about the game you play called Instant History, where you try to invent people’s lives as you watch their feet walk by the window of the basement apartment, or just from observing them at a distance. You seem to believe that you may be violating people’s privacy by imagining their lives and enjoying your fantasies. No, María. The world is a feast for the senses. ¡A saborearlo!

  Abrazos y besos,

  Mami

  arroz y habichuelas

  arroz con gandules

  arroz con pollo

  arroz con salchichas

  arroz blanco

  arroz amarillo

  bananas, green, boiled and salted

  plátanos, maduros, sweet and soft or

  verdes, fried into thick crunchy chips.

  Mangos, breadfruit, y aguacates

  flown in and delivered by FedEx

  right to the bodega.

  Sí, we have some bananas today,

  my father sings

  when the blue truck pulls up

  to Cheo’s. And we are

  right there to watch

  the brown arms

  of one of Cheo’s daughters

  place the Island soul food

  in the store window,

  bringing us who shiver

  in the chill northern morning,

  the memory

  of warm breezes,

  of trees heavy with fruit,

  of ourselves

  as a perfectly happy tribe,

  under perfect blue skies.

  When the sighs

  begin to roll

  through the small gathering

  of mango worshippers

  outside the bodega,

  it is time for my father

  to strum his guitar,

  and begin his repertoire

  of national anthems

  for the homesick,

  time for me

  to run into Cheo’s

  and choose the ripest plantains,

  the plumpest mangoes, while Papi

  leads the other customers

  in a sad tribute

  to our fertile little Isla.

  He sings of a paradise

  awash in neon colors

  where the sun always shines

  and flowers

  bloom forever.

  My father, the barrio pied piper

  sings of an island

  that exists

  only in their dreams.

  In my mind,

  I too carry images

  of tropical flowers

  in bright colors,

  azul, rojo, verde, amarillo —

  but my flowers grew

  in real soil, in a real place;

  flowers that blossomed

  and wilted, real flowers

  that need the rain

  as well as the sun

  to live.

  I have the colors

  of my Island

  tattooed inside the walls

  of my head.

  And that is one

  of the ways that Island

  and the mainland Puerto Ricans

  are not exactly the same,

  we carry different islas

  inside us, yet it is

  the same Island

  that we love, and

  we love it

  in the same way.

  Hair wild as hurricane winds over the Caribbean.

  Skin, a bright new penny.

  Eyes, black, ebony, three A.M. on a clear night black;

  deepest part of the ocean black, almond-shaped

  black mirror. “Look into my eyes, María,” Whoopee talks me

  out of my black moods and my dark days. “Follow me,

  María.” She pretends to be Whoopee the Magnificent,

  Sorceress and Mistress of the Universe. I pretend I am

  being propelled out of my sadness

  like a sleepwalker, controlled by eyes

  like two black laser beams. I follow Whoopee

  into the sunlight

  where she opens that mouth,

  painted Puerto Rican red, and lets out

  a glass-shattering Tarzan howl, or maybe

  it is a sort of yodel from the Swiss Alps.

  It is a song too,

  a wordless scatting song half jazz, half salsa,

  intended to wake me out of my apathy,

  and everyone on the block out of our boring lives.

  Sometimes her call is high pitched, other times

  soft and mournful like a dove. Whoopee

  is a one-woman band, mainly horns, trombones,

  sometimes a flute. Other people whistle or hum,

  Whoopee belts out musical notes. The sadder

  Whoopee is, the angrier Whoopee is,

  the louder she yodels. Whoopee

  sometimes sings so long and so hard

  that her voice sounds like a rusty hinge on a door.

  She moves like a cat,

  she is built low to the ground. She stalks

  and pounces on life, takes steps two at a time.

  I have seen Whoopee

  leaping from rooftop to rooftop

  in my dreams. I have seen her stop bullets

  from a drive-by shooting with her bare hands,

  Whoopee the Magnificent! I have seen her

  stop the woman who just moved in our building, the one

  with the wild look in her sunken eyes, from hitting

  her little girl. Whoopee,

  The Puerto Rican Superhero,

  I have heard her send her powerful voice

  up from the street and into the crying child’s room.

  I have heard her call out a warning

  to the wild-eyed woman, “You will spew toads

  and worms if you say ugly things to your child,

  and you will turn into a warty frog yourself

  if you hit your little daughter

  ever again.”

  Whoopee, my best friend and my hero

  fears nothing and no one. My friend Whoopee

  fears nothing in the world except mirrors in her path.

  She turns away from her own reflection. Whoopee

  fears herself. She is afraid

  that if she does not make us laugh

  we will laugh at her.

  She does not see her own beauty.

  She performs for us. She gives us herself

  as a clown. This is her gift and her secret

  sadness. Whoopee does not know

  her beauty. She thinks we will not love her

  unless she is louder, faster, and stronger

  than anyone else. Whoopee

  does not know

  her own beauty.

  If Whoopee could go back in time

  and walk by Frida Kahlo on a street

  in Mexico, in a place where her brown skin,

  wild black hair, and small solid body

  were like those of goddesses and queens

  sculpted into the sides of temples,

  she would be immortalized in a painting called

  Girl with the Black Pearl Eyes.

  Niña de los ojos

  como perlas negras.

  Doña Segura is nearly blind, but she embroiders like an angel in patterns her fingers remember. For every birth, baptism, and wedding, she has a gift that cannot be bought at any store. She does it now because she wants to. For forty years, she worked in factories to support her five children and put them through school. She is almost blind from that work, collecting a small pension and sitting in a corner of her daughter’s apartment working on her art by touch. When she calls out a color, amarillo, azul, verde, rojo, one of her granddaughters threads her needle.

  I tried to buy a handkerchief from her, and she asked me what the occasion was. I said none and she would not sell it, but she did ask me when my birthday was and she did not forget. On that day, many months after we had talke
d about it, I found a package at my door. Doña Segura had gotten her daughter to address a box to me. To: María Alegre, El Basement. Her needlework is magical. On a pillowcase, she had embroidered an orange sun either setting or rising over a blue horizon or blue waves. I lay my head on Doña Segura’s dream catcher every night. It reminds me of the Island women before Mami, before me. Doña Segura’s threads connect me to my Island, the colors enter my sueños reminding me to dream in Spanish so I never forget where I came from. Amarillo, azul, verde, rojo, I say to myself as I fall asleep.

  Uma is from India and lives on the first floor above us. She and her mother, a widow, are learning to dance salsa from tapes. They both want Puerto Rican husbands, American men who look like Indians. I hear their feet above me, little bells and tiny cymbals keeping time, and a male voice above the music, “It’s all in the hips, it’s all in the hips.” They are drunk on American freedom. Barefoot, dancing salsa steps with undulating Ganges-hips, daughter in red-and-gold sari, mother in widow white, they wear bells on their ankles, it’s all in the hips, all in the hips. But Indian hips want to belly dance. I have seen how those Indian hips just want to make a circle when a mambo wants you to stop halfway and bring it back.

  Some of the Latinas in our building complain about the pungent aromas of Indian spices that have permeated the plaster on the old walls in our building, weaving in and out of our apartments like saffron threads, rising through cracks and inside pipes, through vents and old bullet holes, so that even as we swallow our arroz y habichuelas, our pollo frito, and our tostones, all we are tasting is curry, curry, curry. It is all in the spices, the women say, all in the spices. It does not bother me. I dream to the aromas of India. I am taken by my nose and imagination to cities of hammered gold-and-blue many-armed goddesses by my nose: Nepal, where the beautiful god Vishnu-Narayana lives, Bombay, silk saris, palaquins, maharajahs and a trip to Katmandu — when you don’t how far some place can be, you are going to end up in Katmandu. I also know about the three sacred rivers. There are the Ganges, the Jamuna, and the Saraswati — names like songs sung in a foreign tongue in the map I have looked up.

  Uma trades Indian secrets about beauty, men, and sex, and gives me prints of gods and goddesses making love in exchange for American history lessons she comes to get like cups of sugar, facts she must collect for their citizenship test. She also brings me rudrashka beads and bangles, and tonight an iridescent cloth I can wear as a skirt or scarf, or even hang on the wall. Uma of the bronze skin, nose ring, turquoise sari, carries her U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization manual like a holy book in her hands.

  Beautiful Uma knocks softly on my door at study time, when she knows I will have my schoolbooks in a circle around me on the floor, my father will be at his dominoes game at the bodega, and her mother will have her veil pulled over her head, kneeling in solitary meditation. Study-time Uma puts her long-fingered palms together, bows her head slightly in greeting. She has many questions for me: George Washington and Washington D.C., civil rights and the Civil War; the Constitution and the colors of the flag; and how do Puerto Ricans make rice appear orange? I tell her about the capital city, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the many uses of achiote in Puerto Rican cookery. Achiote wins as the theme for her lesson. We look it up and find out that the Indians of the Caribbean used the spice to decorate their bodies. This excites Uma who wants me to know that our cultures have something in common. She tells me about henna and we draw designs on our hands and feet with our black ink pens.

  Do I look Latina? Uma wants to know. Do I look Indian? I ask her.

  Lesson One:

  “Everything I will say will be in declarative sentences,” declares Mr. Golden.

  There are more than one million words in the English language.

  All the poems yet to be written are contained in the dictionary.

  A poem is made by choosing the best words and putting them in the best order.

  Words are weapons.

  Words are tools.

  Mr. Golden hands us a list. “Make declarative sentences from these words,” Mr. Golden declares.

  contains a universe

  sand, concrete, horizon

  I dream

  blue, clear

  My brain contains a universe.

  I dream in Spanish of white sand beaches.

  The ground I walk on is hard concrete,

  but between the tall buildings, on a clear day,

  I can still see the blue horizon.

  “María, you are a poet,” declares Mr. Golden.

  Lesson Two:

  Mr. Golden’s eyes look tired today. He works as a singer in a band after school. He sang at assembly last week. His voice is like chocolate ice cream, like warm honey, like the golden light of the sun at the end of a winter’s day.

  “Class, these are imperative sentences,” says Mr. Golden.

  Sit up straight, Raquel.

  I will have to see you after school, Miguel.

  Do not use such language in my classroom, Michelle.

  Speak up, María.

  Look at me, Chanté.

  I demand silence in this room!

  Lesson Two-and-a-Half:

  The Imperative Rap

  Mr. Golden is out in the hall, reprimanding Rickie “the Papi-lindo” Moreno for manicuring his nails in class, and Whoopee decides it is time to entertain us. Taking Mr. G.’s place in front of the class, she raps to today’s lesson:

  Look here, this here

  is an im-pe-ra-tive.

  You there, I’m givin’ you a sentence:

  ten to twenty, no chance o’ parole.

  Look here, this here

  is an imperative.

  The class gets into it, chanting this here is an imperative, no chance o’ parole. Whoopee is about to go into a second verse when we hear a deep voice joining in. It is Mr. Golden, grinning as he shuts the classroom door.

  Go on, Ms. Dominguez. I’m going to ask you to take over the class for today. And he sits down at Whoopee’s desk.

  I believe you left off with no chance o’ parole. Mr. Golden joins in the rapping, tapping out a beat on the desktop. Look, here, this here … Mr. Golden’s deep voice is like a wave we are all riding. I see that almost everyone is moving with him (Papi-lindo is fuming in his back-row seat, pretending that he is interested only in his nails, which he is examining one by one). Even Uma joins the song, no chance o’ parole, giggling at the silly words, winking at me as she points to Whoopee, who is now whirling as she sings, and soon Mr. Golden will have to say, Whoopee Dominguez, stop!

  Uma, Whoopee, and I are walking to the bus stop. We will go to the mall today. Uma is wearing what looks like blue pajamas. She laughs when Whoopee tells her she likes her pj’s. It is called a salwar-kameez — Uma explains — what Indian women wear when they want to be comfortable.

  “The sari is a very complicated garment,” Uma tells us.

  Whoopee is in her most comfortable shopping clothes too — neon-green vinyl skirt, Puerto Rican–flag T-shirt, and her favorite red high-top sneakers.

  “So why wear complicated?” Whoopee asks Uma. “Why, can’tcha?”

  “My dear Whoopee,” Uma explains patiently, “in India clothes are a statement about who you are. What you wear tells people where you are from, what dialect you speak, who your people are….”

  “Girlfriends, look at me.” Whoopee steps in front of us, does her imitation of a model, twirling and showing us her front side and her backside. “What you think o’ my statement? Can’tcha tell where I come from?” She points to the flag of Puerto Rico on her chest. “Where I’m coming from?”

  “We know everything about you from your clothes, Whoopee,” I tell her, taking her hand while Uma grabs the other hand (the bus is about to leave without us), “including what language you speak!”

  “You call it Spanglish, María. I call it American. I speak American!” Whoopee is already making up some words to the rap song we will have to hear all day.
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  While we look at the stores in the mall, Uma tells us about her dream. In the dream, a boy with skin the color of copper had taken her to the roof of our building to show her the night sky. Instead of the usual constellations, the stars formed the map of America. She recognized New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, California. The beautiful young man had said to Uma, Let us climb on your flying carpet and go for a ride.

  “What happened next?” Whoopee wants to know, but Uma has fallen silent in front of a shop window where Ricky Moreno is dressing a dummy.

  “That is the boy in my dream,” Uma says in a strange low voice. I look at her as she watches the papi-lindo of our building struggling to fit a turtleneck sweater over the head of a tall male dummy. The dummy stares without eyeballs at us while Ricky practically decapitates him. It is almost impossible not to burst out laughing. But I look at Uma’s eyes and they are big and filled with tears. Whoopee is shaking her head and looking at me. Big mistake! is what we are both thinking. Too late. Ricky has discovered his audience. He is now posing behind the glass for our amusement. He imitates the dummy’s pose, standing perfectly still, staring with unblinking long-lashed eyes at Uma, his copper skin shiny from perspiration that reflects the lights. Soon several other girls have stopped to look at the living doll in the window. It is the papi-lindo doing what the papi-lindo does best.

  “It is the boy in my dream,” Uma repeats, speaking to no one in particular.

  “More like a nightmare,” Whoopee says in a disgusted tone and pushes both Uma and me toward the movie theater. They are showing American Beauty. It costs only one dollar since everyone in the whole world has seen it except us.

  You’ve heard of the Latin Lover. Men with eyes like tractor beams, like the kind they use on the starship Enterprise to pull in stuff from outer space. This is what I said when Whoopee, Uma, and I were watching Star Trek: TNG and Uma kept breaking into tears because Ricky Moreno had promised to call her after he talked her into going up to the roof with him. That was a week ago, and he has not even looked at her at school.

  Whoopee said, “Space debris. That’s what they use tractor beams to pick up.” That was too much for poor Uma, who ran upstairs to her apartment to cry her heart out by herself. “You really believe that stuff about Latin Lovers, girlfriend?” We heard some footsteps out on the sidewalk and saw a bunch of guy feet go by — among them, Ricky Moreno’s shiny Italian designer shoes.