America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  “This is the first time, Allos,” said my brother, putting his arm around me and shouting, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”

  I cupped my hands to my mouth. “What year is it?” I shouted into my brother’s ear.

  “It is the year of the Lord,” he shouted back. “You must remember this year because it is significant: it is the year of all years. In the United States it is the sad end of another depression year and the beginning of a sadder one. Happy New Year! Happy New Year, Allos!”

  When one o’clock came the celebrants circled the plaza and crowded into the presidencia. The noise suddenly ceased, and the people started for home. One by one lamps in the houses went out and the policemen barred the door of the presidencia. My brother and I walked in the street, suddenly exhausted.

  “Where is your suitcase?” he asked.

  “I have it in the house,” I said.

  “House?” he said. “That house was sold months ago.”

  “I did not know that,” I said.

  “Father sold it because he had a chance to buy a small piece of land in Mangusmana,” said my brother. “Mother and the two girls are there with him. I have heard that mother is doing most of the work. Father is very sick.”

  “I must see them at once,” I said. It was unbearable to think that my mother was now doing the farm work. And my two little sisters—how were they going to grow up now?

  We went to our former house and picked up my suitcase. Then we proceeded to Luciano’s house where, greatly disturbed by the thought of my mother, I got up from my mat at dawn and walked to Mangusmana through the wet rice fields.

  * * *

  —

  It was only when I was nearing our village that I remembered my brother Leon. He had come back from a war about which he had never spoken, and then had gone away again with his wife to start a new life. I was not coming from a war, but it was my first homecoming—home to the village and our grass hut, home to years of hard labor and bitter memories. And the grass was taller than usual, the water in the ditch was sweeter, the mango trees by the footpath were greener and the meadow larks more melodious. There was a sweet feeling of homecoming in me.

  Then I saw my mother’s familiar back. She was following the plow, her skirt tucked between her legs. Suddenly I knew what Leon had felt the day he came home, running suddenly to take the plow from my father. I started running across the fields and leaping over ditches, shouting and calling frantically:

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  My mother stopped the carabao and looked toward me. The sun was falling directly upon her face, and she raised her hand to protect her eyes from the strong morning light. When she recognized me, she tied the rope to the handle of the plow, as my father used to do, and waited for me.

  “Have you come home, son?” she said. And that was all she could say. Her mouth began to tremble with joy and sorrow, because to her joy and sorrow were always one and the same. Suddenly she grabbed me affectionately and wept, murmuring: “We are poor people, son. We are very poor people, son.”

  I brushed back the tears from my eyes. I tried to laugh in order not to cry. Gently I pushed my mother out of the way and took the rope from her.

  “Go home, Mother,” I said. “I will finish this piece for you.”

  “Don’t work the animal too hard,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I said. I watched her go away, a little peasant woman who carried the world on her shoulders. Then I flipped the rope gently across the carabao’s back, and the animal moved obediently and expertly along the deep furrows.

  The sun came slowly up and burnished the upturned earth, felling the sweet dew in the grass and rousing the birds in their nests. I could hear dogs barking in the houses near by and the roar of water rushing through the tall talahib grass and rolling over the flat, fine sand in the river. I unhitched the carabao and tied it to a peg with a long maguey rope, so that it could reach the shade of the tamarind and the water in the ditch. I covered the plow with grass and started for our hut.

  My father was lying in a corner in the kitchen, coughing violently and shivering whenever the draft reached him. His body had shrunken and his teeth had fallen out. He ate only soup and logao, or soft-boiled rice. He could no longer stand up even to get a cup of water, but my sister Francisca attended to his needs. She was only six years old, but she knew what to do around the house. I knew that she would grow up into a fine peasant girl.

  I was home with my family and this alone was a comforting feeling. I had come back to manhood, here in my native village. I had come back to myself and my roots, here in this narrow strip of land. Back to my soil and to my father’s faith. I had not forgotten him limping through Mangusmana on his sore feet, going from house to house and asking the farmers if they could lend him a piece of land to cultivate or could hire him. I had not forgotten his love for the earth where his parents and their parents before him had lacerated their lives digging away the stones and trees to make the forest land of our village a fragrant and livable place.

  * * *

  —

  While we were planting rice seedlings one of my cousins came to our house and invited me to go to a dance in a nearby village. We wrapped our clothes with banana leaves and walked through the rain and mud, shouting our manhood into the night.

  We found a well near a banana grove where we washed our feet. My cousin was a high school student in Vigan, a large city in the province of Ilocos Sur. He had a good pair of shoes and his alpaca suit was new and smoothly pressed. He wore a red tie and striped silk shirt. My feet were still as bare as when I was born, but Luciano had given me an old khaki suit. I put a bandanna around my neck and the girls thought that it was better than a necktie.

  I noticed a girl who had fallen for my cousin. I saw him kiss her on the mouth, a thing which was very daring in those days. The old men looked at them with great anticipation, but the women frowned with scorn. The girls snickered in their corners, sticking out their little yellow tongues behind outspread fans. The little girls and boys around the dance floor drummed on their bloated bellies. Sometimes they danced among themselves and attracted much attention from the crowd with their naked bodies and ugly, spreading toes: spitting as they jumped to the wild music, their spittle falling on their naked loins.

  I was too shy to dance, so I hung about the pavilion.

  “Approach a girl you like and stand before her if you are afraid to talk,” said my cousin.

  “Do you think it will work?” I asked.

  “It always works with these shy peasant girls,” he said. “Watch me do it.” He saw a rather good-looking girl in a red dress. He strode across like a peacock and stood in front of her.

  I was watching her mouth to see if she would say something to him, but she almost jumped into his arms. My cousin turned around and winked at me. I saw a girl I liked sitting on the bench near the door, at the far end of the dance floor. I circled the people and stood in front of her. The girl flung herself into my arms, and I was taken by surprise, and for a while I could not move my legs. Then we were holding each other innocently and dancing the way it should not have been done in the village. I could see the sensual stare of the men and the anger of the women. The children spread out along the walls, sticking out their tongues and giggling.

  When you dance for the first time, the world is like a cradle upon the biggest ocean in the universe. There are no other sounds except the beating of your hearts, and when the wild blaring of the trumpet and the savage boom-boom of the drum bring you back to reality, you get scared and begin to misstep and falter. Your hands weaken their hold on the rapturous being near you, and you want to apologize to her but the words are stuck in your throat. Suddenly you become conscious of the staring people around you, appraising you with obscene eyes and lascivious tongues, and slowly you lead the beauteous creature in your arms back to her seat. Then the orche
stra becomes a cymbal of crashing noises, meaningless and riotous, and you return to your corner, trembling with cold and sudden fear. You are pushed back to reality, to the world of puny men and women who are circumscribed by fear. Then you, too, are one among them and one of them, prisoned by their fears and the ugliness of their lives. You go to the window and lean far out, savoring the bitter taste on your tongue. . . .

  * * *

  —

  The next morning my cousin came running to the field where I was planting rice.

  “Let us go away at once, Allos,” he said.

  “I think I will stay until the rice is all planted,” I said. “And I would like to help my mother with the crop. I am sorry I cannot go with you.”

  “You don’t understand what I mean,” he said. “Remember those two girls we danced with last night? Well, they are sisters. They are in the village now looking for us. I think they would like to force us into marriage.”

  I laughed, because it seemed incredible.

  “It is no laughing matter,” my cousin said.

  “Well, what have we done?” I asked.

  “We danced, that is all,” he said. “But you’d better come with me to Lingayen if you don’t want to be married to a mud-smelling peasant girl. I will go to school there instead of Vigan, but I am on my way to town now. Hurry, Allos!”

  “I will think it over,” I said.

  My cousin started running toward Binalonan, looking back and shouting to me to follow him. I waved at him innocently and went back to my work. But when I went home in the afternoon, Francisca met me at the door.

  “Mother said for you to go away for a while,” she said, giving me a bundle and a basket of vegetables.

  I thought it was all very foolish, but when I reached the ladder, the heads of the two village girls became visible. They were talking to my mother. My father was coughing violently. I could see Marcela playing with the girl near the stove. I took the bundle from Francisca and ran for the gate. Only when I reached the rice fields did I begin to feel free.

  I wanted to stay in town for a week. But ten days afterward, when I returned to Mangusmana, the rice seedlings were already planted. My mother told me that I could go. I went to Binalonan and stayed with Luciano. When my cousin set out for Lingayen in an oxcart, I decided to go with him. I had saved a little money in Baguio, but it was not enough to take me to America. With Lingayen’s fishing industry in mind, I went with my cousin. But the cow was very small and lazy, and it was three days before we arrived in Lingayen.

  CHAPTER XI

  It was the second week of June and the students were coming back to Lingayen. They came by oxcart with their provisions of rice and assorted vegetables, bringing with them members of their families or close relatives to do their cooking and laundry. When they could not make this arrangement, the poorer students did their own cooking after school hours and their washing on Saturdays. They went to church on Sundays. Those who had a little money came by caromata, their rough wooden trunks and rattan suitcases piled on top of the flimsy vehicle. The horses looked like fleas about to be thrown into the sky by the weight of their burdens. The students who lived in the neighboring towns consigned their belongings to their more fortunate friends and came on foot. They could be seen on the highway waving their hands eagerly when an automobile or a bus came by.

  The students filled the little houses of the fishermen on the shore of Lingayen gulf. Even the three chapels were converted into boarding houses, for while the students were devoted Catholics and went to church regularly, they could not always afford to buy a candle or contribute to the church fund. The chapels depended only on the fishermen who had houses and who took in boarders, but the donations from these frugal men were not enough to sustain the buildings.

  As soon as we arrived in Lingayen, my cousin told me to stay at his boarding house. The owner of the building was a fisherman who owned two fishing boats. He was in need of men, and he asked me if I wanted to work with him. I was glad, because I could earn a little money while away from home.

  My cousin lived with fourteen boys attending high school, but the house was too small for all of us. The toilet was connected with the house by a narrow bamboo footbridge that hung on two abaca ropes. The kitchen was a hive of activities. There was a cook, an elderly peasant woman, and a young girl who did the washing. They were always going in and out of the house, throwing the bucket into the well in the yard and shouting with friendliness to the other women in the neighborhood.

  At meal time the girls next door, fifteen of them in a house like ours, came to the long table in our dining room wearing their heavily starched cotton dresses. As soon as we were through eating, some of the more considerate girls stayed to help the cook with the dishes. Sometimes they stayed to discuss their school work with the boys. But the others returned to their rooms to sing or sew. All of them came from peasant families in other towns.

  There was a town ordinance forbidding students of opposite sexes to live in the same house. It had been prompted by the birth of illegitimate children some years before. Since only students were specified in the ordinance, I was free to go into the house of the girls. When another student moved into our house, the landlady found a small corner for me in the girls’ house.

  I used to wake up at dawn to go to work. I walked between small nipa houses, and when I arrived at our meeting place, my companions were already waiting for me. When our crew was completed and we were ready to put out to sea, the man on the prow of the boat blew a horn. We climbed into the boat with our meager lunch of rice and salted fish and started rowing seaward.

  It was wonderful to work with men who knew the sea. They knew nothing of books, but they could tell what kind of tuna was running a mile away. They stood in the boat and put their hands over their eyes: then they knew whether it was a school of lobster or white fish. They wasted no motion of their sea-browned bodies. When they spoke, it was full of wisdom. And from them I learned the different edible weeds and grasses in the sea.

  We cast our end of the long net about three miles away from land and the men in the other boat cast theirs. Then we started rowing slowly away from each other until the net was stretched taut. Another blast of the horn, deep and challenging and meaningful to men of the sea, and then we started rowing toward the shore, toward the day’s end.

  The process was slow because we had to be careful with the net. It would be about three in the afternoon when our boats reached the shore. Putting small yokes about our bodies, we would start pulling in the long nets and singing:

  “Sin-ta! Sin-ta! Sin-ta!”

  Slowly and rhythmically our legs moved in the sand, on and on, until the children in the grass houses near by came to the shore and started singing with us:

  “Sin-ta! Sin-ta! Sin-ta!”

  They would begin pulling the rope with us and singing at the top of their voices. After two long hours of slow pulling the catch would be drawn to the shore. We could see the fish desperately swimming in circles, crashing against the net and bouncing back into the water. When we were ready to land the catch, the children would release the rope and run to the center of the net. The fish would leap tirelessly until they were heavy with sand.

  Then the owner of the boat would see to it that every man had his due share; even the children who had done a little pulling had something. The fish buyers were waiting with their carts to buy our catch. Then I would be on my way home, stopping at the school ground and watching the students playing and singing. I would try to single out my cousin, but there were over ten thousand boys and girls in the yard. I would proceed to my boarding house, where my landlady was waiting for me.

  * * *

  —

  Not long afterward my cousin asked me to go to school with him. Since the fishing season was over and there would be no work for three months, I eagerly consented to his suggestion. It was an experience to be with my
cousin in his classes. But it was tiresome to sit in one place for forty minutes, the time allowed for each subject. The boys, thinking me a regular student, would start talking to me in English. I saw some of the girls glancing at my long hair and bare feet with pitying eyes.

  My cousin’s English teacher was a man who had been in America. He wore American shoes and clothes, and came to class smoking a large pipe. He sat on a small chair which he tilted backward, putting his feet on the table so that we could see his silk socks. The timid girls in the front seats were embarrassed. But he took an interest in me, and even invited me to his house. There he wrote out a credit card which made it appear that I had been going to school regularly for two years, graduating from one grade to another with excellent marks.

  “These fat sons and soft daughters of the sons-of-bitches think they are smart,” he used to say to me, referring to the children of the crooked politicians and land grabbers in Pangasinan. “The girls come to my classes to show me their pretty little rumps, as if they could buy me with that! I will show them!”

  I did not understand him at times, but I was learning rapidly about the Philippine middle classes. It seemed that he had gone to America as a boy, had worked as houseboy, and in fifteen years had finished his course. His parents were poor peasants; they had died by the time he returned to the Philippines. This misfortune had made him bitter and confused. Instead of using his experience as an inspiring example to other peasant children, he had turned inward and used it as a weapon of revenge. He had turned against the hacienderos, or landed gentry, and finally against his own class and heritage.

  But he was kind and considerate to me. When a general intelligence test was given to all the students, he gave me a copy of the examination paper in advance. I studied the questions and found the answers in my cousin’s books. I took the examination along with the rest, but only for fun.