Revolution of Evelyn Serrano (9780545469586)

by Manzano, Sonia

  There was a crowd at the church that continued to swell. The mood was high, happy, joyful!

  “Evelyn!”

  It was Migdalia.

  “What’s up, girl?” I said.

  “Us, you, me, everybody in El Barrio!”

  We laughed, happy to be part of the sea of army jackets, purple berets, and Puerto Rican flags.

  “Let’s go!” yelled Abuela.

  We marched. The group grew bigger. Don Juan caught up with us at 112th Street, and I couldn’t help sneaking looks at him because I now saw him in a different way. A forward-thinking but still old-fashioned macho kind of guy. I took a peek at his belt to see if he still wore it tight to relieve hunger. But he didn’t, and I was happy to see his belly was nice and round and well fed. Then I saw Angel.

  “Yo, Evelyn!” he said.

  “Button your coat. It’s cold out here,” I said.

  Six mounted policemen followed the crowd, and a bus-load of cops followed us on foot. We stopped on the church steps and held a rally, the Young Lords repeating their demands of a day-care center and a free-breakfast program and all the rest.

  I looked for that brave golden boy with the crown of hair who had shouted, “There is something wrong here. This is not a community,” but I didn’t see him. Instead, I saw Pops out of the corner of my eye. I was surprised — but also glad — that he was here. He looked at me in a sad and disappointed way. I walked up to him at the edge of the rally.

  “How come you’re not home with your mother?” he said.

  “Because I want to be here,” I answered quietly. “Papi, this is important.” That was the first time I called him Papi in my life. I had always saved “Papi” for whenever I talked about my real father, but this time I was going to use it for Pops, because what I was saying was really important.

  “I feel like somebody now, Papi,” I said. If he thought it odd I called him Papi, he didn’t say anything. With one of his thick, overworked fingers he was quick to push away a tear that had dripped from my eye.

  “Your mother is not feeling well with so much tension going on. Her back hurts.”

  “Not feeling well,” I repeated. “The whole Barrio isn’t feeling well. Angel isn’t feeling well. His father isn’t feeling well. I’m not feeling well….” But then I had to stop because that wasn’t true. I was feeling well. Actually, I was feeling good. As a matter of fact, I was feeling great. I hadn’t felt this good in a long time. “Papi,” I said, “don’t worry.”

  He sighed, wondering, I’m sure, if he had done enough. Then he patted the top of my head. “You mother needs you. She has a bad backache.”

  I was feeling so good — but why was I aching too?

  “Come home,” he repeated.

  “I will. After.”

  Then I watched him walk away looking like he had lost something.

  “We will not be dissuaded!” yelled one of the Young Lords. “We have the right to determine our own destiny. Puerto Rico should be free….”

  I listened as I looked around. Reporters had come and were taking pictures.

  Monday morning, Migdalia ran up to me on my way to school — hair flying out from underneath her stocking cap, cheeks all pink with excitement, and waving a copy of the New York Times. “Listen!” And she read the headlines:

  “‘Eight hurt, fourteen seized in a church clash. Three policemen injured here battling Puerto Ricans.’”

  Then she added, “At least this time Wilfredo was arrested for a good reason, not for just being at your bodega after it was broken into.”

  She didn’t sound angry, and not because Wilfredo had been let go after the bodega break-in, but this newspaper article was putting any bad feelings behind us. Tearing my gloves off, I reached for the paper so I could read it myself. Migdalia laughed.

  “Wow, girl.”

  It was December 8, 1969, and the weather was getting colder and colder, but I didn’t care a bit because of the growing warmth in my heart. I read:

  “‘Five members of a militant Puerto Rican group and three patrolmen were injured in a clash during a service at an East Harlem church yesterday.’”

  “Yes, that’s just what happened,” said Migdalia wistfully.

  I scanned down the article and continued, reading what an eyewitness said:

  “‘Some of the guys started to defend their friends and that’s where it started. The police started fighting with the people and the people started fighting back. The whole place was full of them. If you tried to walk out peaceably, you got your head smashed.’”

  I finished reading and folded it up.

  “Can I keep this, Migdalia?” I wondered if it was time for me to save newspaper articles in my own album.

  “Yeah.” Then somberly, quietly, “What’s going to happen, Evelyn?”

  She looked scared.

  “I don’t know, Migdalia.”

  The next Sunday morning, I found myself in the middle of Operation Pasteles.

  I always warn people: Do not try this unless you are a real-deal down-home Puerto Rican who really likes to spend hours and hours peeling root vegetable until your knuckles bleed, in order to make a messy masa in which you hide a mixture of meat and then wrap that all up into a neat rectangular-shaped brick that then gets tied up and frozen to be sold to people too lazy or smart to make them on their own during the Christmas holidays; this labor-intensive occupation is called making pasteles.

  Our kitchen looked like a factory. Sheets of dry plantain leaves were piled up on three of the kitchen chairs. A ball of white string with a pair of scissors stuck through the top of it rested on the fourth chair. Every other surface in the kitchen was covered with piles of white and yellow yautías waiting to be peeled and ground down, and a four-foot-tall bunch of green bananas waiting to be stripped of their hard skin, then mashed. I stood in the doorway and watched my mother peel a yautía, which was more like trying to peel the bark off an oak tree with a nail clipper. She looked at me.

  “¿Quieres café?”

  “No, Mami, I’m okay.”

  She winced as she turned to her work so I knew that her back was still hurting her. Still — she wanted to make coffee for me.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be making pasteles ’cause you hurt your back and all.”

  “I have to make them, mija. People expect me to.”

  “I know, Mami, but you don’t make that much more money.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  I started to tell her maybe working so hard wasn’t the only way but didn’t. She wouldn’t get it anyway.

  “You going to church?” she asked, tossing the peeled yautía into a pot of salted water.

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “I guess I can thank the Young Lords for that.”

  “What?”

  “They making you like church. Even though you are wearing jeans — like you are a farmer.”

  It was true. Since Abuela bought me a pair of jeans from Lerner’s, it’s all I’d been wanting to wear. But I ignored Mami’s comment and watched her peel another yautía.

  “The pastor has agreed to meet with the Young Lords today, Mami.”

  “Pues lo que sea. Whatever,” she said, and continued working. The light coming in from the window was hitting the back of Mami’s head so I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her hands. She had one split nail that grew in crooked and a scar. I knew the nail had been damaged while she was helping Pops unload a refrigerator, but I didn’t know how she got the scar under her thumb. The cuticles on all her fingers were jagged, all the nails ragged. The image of Abuela’s coral-colored fingertips went through my mind and I had to ask.

  “Mami, how come you and Abuela are fighting all the time?”

  We listened to the sound of her knife gouging off the hard skin of the yautía before she answered carefully.

  “I guess you are maybe old enough to understand. Your abuela and I were never close. How could we be? She was always away working with the Nationa
lists all over the island.”

  “Who did you stay with?”

  “A few people. For a while, I stayed with an older cousin in Ponce. They were nice, they were doing all right, but I always felt I was taking from them.”

  “Taking what?”

  “I don’t know. Food. Space.”

  Mami sighed.

  “When my cousin had a baby, she needed the room, so I had to leave.” Mami dumped the yautía she was peeling into the salted water. “There was another cousin who took me in, but it was on the other side of the island, Aguas Buenas. That was hard. It was mountainous, and when it rained, it was very muddy. I didn’t see my mother much after that.”

  She stopped talking and poured some lard into a frying pan, set the flame, and began to slice up some onions. “These onions always get in my eyes,” she said, wiping them with the back of her hand. “I was happy to get married to your father and live in my own place.” Then she started laughing. “It’s funny. One of the few times I saw your grandmother was when tu padre died. She came to protest.”

  “That he died?”

  “No, to protest the war in Korea.”

  “But Papi died way after the war.”

  “But he died of a wound that happened during the war. Your abuela came with signs that said she was against all wars fought by poor people for the rich.”

  Mami said this with no hint of judgment or opinion.

  “Pregnant with you, I came to New York as soon as I could. I had to get away. There was work here. I wanted my own house. I just didn’t know how hard it was going to be to get one.” She tossed the onions into the hot fat, and we listened to it sizzle. “But I got here — and I will get my house.” She paused, then went on, “You better go. I’ll stay here and finish.”

  She didn’t want to talk anymore. I went from being angry to pitying her and walked to church trying to contain the revolution those two feelings were causing inside of me.

  The arrests and the rally finally convinced our rubber-lipped pastor to at least grant the Young Lords a meeting after the service. When I got to the church, the tension was thick. It felt like a crazy person tightening a guitar string tighter and tighter, not stopping when he or she should have. Daring the string to snap, pop, put somebody’s eye out.

  It had taken arrests, broken arms, and a rally to get them to agree to a meeting. Certainly something good was going to come of this. It had to.

  At the church I sat by Abuela. If she could sense the battle going on in my heart, she said nothing. There were thirty Young Lords, about a hundred people who were on the side of the Young Lords, and eighty or so regular parishioners. Toward the end of the service, a Young Lord got up and said, “We did not come to ask for money; we only ask for the use of space in this church.” At least eighty people got up and left immediately, muttering.

  “¡Ave María purísima!” said one parishioner, clearly fed up with everything. “Hail Mary to the purest!”

  “¡Déjense de eso!” cried another. “Forget this nonsense.”

  “No sean ridículos,” said a third. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  And my heart dropped. My mother had looked so empty, and lost, and tired from making the pasteles, and we had never been so far apart, and for what? I put my head in my hands and almost started to cry, when Abuela said gently:

  “Look.”

  I looked up and my heart soared up as quickly as it had dropped. Though many had left, at least a hundred and twenty people had stayed. When the Young Lord realized everyone he was speaking to was already on his side, he left for the meeting with the pastor.

  “Good,” Abuela whispered to me. “Time for some action.”

  We sat. Every second that passed was like a turn of the guitar screw. Everybody talked in fervent hushed tones that created a buzzing sound. Migdalia came over to us.

  “What do you think?” she said, her eyes darting around nervously. “Do you think the Young Lords will get their way?” she asked, sitting down.

  “I hope so,” I said. “What’s the big deal?” I added weakly. “All they want is space to run a day care. You’d think they wanted to use the church for something illegal.”

  “I know, dig it, that’s what I was thinking, too. It’s not like they are trying to take over the world,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  Angel came to us. “Hey, how come everybody’s still here?”

  “We’re waiting to see how the meeting turns out,” I said.

  “What meeting?”

  That made us all laugh, breaking the tension a little bit.

  “Angel, I’ll tell you later, okay?” I said.

  Our laughing relaxed the little kids in the church. They giggled and started to run around.

  “Careful, you kids. You don’t want to trip and break your faces, do you?” It was Wilfredo. He was wearing a beret. He had become a Young Lord in training.

  We sat and waited.

  “Don’t worry,” said Abuela. “The spirit of Pedro Albizu Campos is with us.”

  At the sound of his name, people around us perked up and started talking all at once.

  “Albizu Campos! Seguro que sí.”

  “Un gran hombre.”

  “A great Nationalist!”

  “He used to say, ‘The motherland is valor and sacrifice,’” said Abuela. And then she gathered all her strength and said it in Spanish: “La patria es valor y sacrificio.”

  Abuela should’ve been an actress, I thought.

  “Didn’t he go to Harvard?” somebody asked.

  “Of course. Where else do you learn about freedom all over the world and all those things?” said Abuela.

  Everybody laughed.

  She continued. “People were protesting just like we are now when they were shot at by the Guardia Civil.”

  I sank down in my seat. I knew that Pedro Albizu Campos had something to do with the Ponce Massacre of 1937 and that the massacre was an attack on the Nationalists. But did Abuela have to bring that up now?

  Please don’t tell them about your husband being there and shooting into the crowd. I live in this neighborhood.

  “When don Pedro finished college, he could’ve gotten lots of good jobs, but instead he came to La Cantera….”

  I’m safe. She’s not going to say that we are related to someone in the Guardia Civil.

  “La Cantera, that was one of the poorest sections of Ponce,” someone said.

  “I almost starved to death there,” said another bitterly.

  “When he joined the Nationalist Party in 1924, he changed it, making it more … militante.”

  I feel like a phony.

  Abuela stood up. “He came back to Puerto Rico to fight for the rights of the poorest people!”

  How could we not win? I thought. But after two hours, we got the bad news. Our pastor would not grant permission for the Young Lords to use the church for social programs.

  Sourness settled on the crowd, but not for long. Abuela had gotten the crowd going, and she wasn’t going to let up.

  “Don’t worry. The Young Lords are going to get what they want if they keep trying. Even if they have to change their name to the Old Lords before it happens!”

  Everybody laughed, but my heart dropped into my shoes again.

  What is the cost of space? Not Apollo outer space, just space to be, to exist in. And how much are you willing to pay for it? The Young Lords took space on the 28th of December. This was how it was reported in the New York Times:

  HARLEM. The Young Lords, a cadre of Puerto Rican activists in East Harlem, yesterday nailed shut the doors of a church with six-inch railroad spikes and occupied the building.

  The action, which came at the end of regular Sunday services at the First Spanish Methodist Church, was the latest maneuver in a series that began three months ago in an effort to gain church space for a free-breakfast program administered by the Lords.

  … a spokesman for the group, rose and attempted to address the congregation. For the last 12 w
eeks, many of the 80 parishioners and 150 supporters of the Lords have come to regard such speeches as part of the service.

  This time, however, most of the parishioners filed out of the church, which is at Lexington Avenue and 111th Street …

  … As they left, crosspieces were quickly nailed onto the church’s two doors, which were also chained from the inside.

  What was not in the newspapers was what went on at church between my mother, my grandmother, and me. We were sitting in our usual spots. I on the left with Abuela, surrounded by the supporters of the Young Lords, and Mami sitting on the right, surrounded by the uptight parishioners. The sad Young Lord made a last-minute plea for the church to let them use the space for a free-breakfast program.

  I looked at my shoes, Abuela looked straight ahead, and most of the parishioners left. But then, suddenly, faster than I could even see, the doors were being chained shut. Seconds later, I heard pieces of wood being nailed to the doors outside. The Young Lords moved quickly and efficiently. This takeover had been planned way ahead of time.

  Confusion erupted immediately. People didn’t know what to do. Were we trapped? Being held hostage? A Young Lord told us to stay calm. That they were going to occupy the church. That in just a while, some of us could stay or go. Abuela braced herself, and Mami rushed over to me.

  “I’m going to stay,” I said.

  “No, you cannot stay.”

  “Mami, I’m staying.”

  “There are police outside,” she said. “You are just a kid!”

  “So are the Young Lords.”

  “Then I am staying, too!” Mami insisted. Summoning all of her extra weight, she sat down heavily. Then she spat out, “Es la culpa de tu abuela, yo lo sé….”

  “Mami, please, Abuela had nothing to do with me wanting to stay.”

  “Sí, sí, es ella…. It’s her putting ideas in your head.”

  I hate that expression of someone “putting ideas in your head,” like my head was an empty ball waiting for anyone to “put ideas” in it. My mother went on speaking to Abuela over my “empty head” in fast jabs of words. Everything said between them was a restrained but searing cut.