America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  I almost died within myself. I died many deaths in these surroundings, where man was indistinguishable from beast. It was only when I had died a hundred times that I acquired a certain degree of immunity to sickening scenes such as took place this night, that I began to look at our life with Nick’s cold cynicism. Yet I knew that our decadence was imposed by a society alien to our character and inclination, alien to our heritage and history. It took me a long time, then, to erase the outward scars of these years, but the deep, invisible scars inside me are not wholly healed and forgotten. They jarred my equilibrium now and then, and always, when I came face to face with brutality, I was afraid of what I would do to myself and to others. I was terribly afraid of myself, for it was the beast, the monster, the murderer of love and kindness that would raise its dark head to defy all that was good and beautiful in life. It was then that I would cry out for the resurrection of my childhood.

  * * *

  —

  Not long afterward Luz died in a gambling house. He was playing at a card table when suddenly he collapsed, clutching desperately at the man near him. Then he tore at his tongue and died. His woman, the Mexican, went into prostitution on Central Avenue, in the Negro district, and died of syphilis. Luz’s death was one of the many tragedies that hardened me, and drove me into a world of corruption that almost wrecked my whole life.

  Alonzo, the student, met a divorcée who sent him to college. But one night, when they were living together (they could not marry in the state), detectives broke into their apartment and took Alonzo to jail.

  “You can’t do this to me,” he kept saying. “I know my rights. I haven’t committed any crime.”

  “Listen to the brown monkey talk,” said one of the detectives, slapping Alonzo in the face. “He thinks he has the right to be educated. Listen to the bastard talk English. He thinks he is a white man. How do you make this white woman stick with you, googoo?” Another sharp slap across the face, and Alonzo, staggering from the blow, fell on the floor. Blood came out of his mouth, dripping on the threadbare carpet. He rolled away from the detective when he saw that a kick was coming, jumped to his feet and ran outside where two others felled him with blackjacks. He was carried downstairs to a car that took him to jail.

  It was the turning point of Alonzo’s life. The divorcée was driven out of town, warned never to see Filipinos again. And Alonzo, when he came out, went back to college with a great determination, majoring in languages and international law. Years afterward, in the Philippines, he became a bitter exponent of an anti-American campaign, fighting his crusade through the nation’s press. He was another who conditioned my thinking, who affected my social attitudes. I thought there was no hope for Filipino unity in the United States, so I fought the way Alonzo fought against injustice and intolerance.

  But our lease on the small room on Hope Street was about to expire. My brother Macario had pawned his only suit, so that he walked in the streets in a torn jacket. Nick sold all his books and an overcoat. But José still had his suitcase and a typewriter. When we had sold everything and were still unemployed, I knew that we would soon separate. I knew that I must again hurl myself against a wall of destruction.

  One day my brother and I walked to a splendid street near Wilshire Boulevard, asking the apartment managers for work for us to do. My brother walked on one side of the street, while I walked on the other. But it was futile, and we were tired from walking so long. We jumped into a waiting bus, and two Negro laborers followed us. We did not drop any money in the slot; the Negroes took the blame. I felt ashamed. But it was another lesson: the persecuted were always the first victims of misunderstanding.

  We got off on a street of many new houses. My brother walked on one side of the street again, and I walked on the other. I asked the people in the beautiful houses if they had rugs to be cleaned. I was about to give up when my brother came running out of an alley and told me that he found something for us to do.

  We walked into the backyard of a large house and a servant told us to pick up all the rugs. My brother took off his jacket and rolled up his trousers, beating the rugs vigorously with a broom. When we had beaten the rugs and had put them in their proper places, the woman of the house came down and gave us fifty cents each.

  “Fifty cents for eight hours’ work?” Macario said.

  “What more do you want?” said the lady, slamming the door.

  * * *

  —

  The days of hunger and loneliness came. Aching hunger and stifling loneliness. Every dawn was the opening of a cavern of starvation and exile: from the touch of friendly hands, of friendly voices. And every hour was a blow against the senses, dulling all impulses toward decency.

  “You must be strong in America,” said my brother to me one day. He was frying chopped oxtails he had bought at the Central Market for ten cents. “I’ll get a job and go back to school. In two years I’ll be able to return to the Philippines. Wait and see!”

  I did not understand him, but I knew that I could not wait for those two years to pass. I was afraid to wait for another day. I wanted to be strong because he was my brother, but it was like our life in Binalonan again. I went to the employment agencies, but every job in the list was taken. The agencies sold jobs to the highest bidder. I did not have the money to compete with them.

  Then the manager of the hotel closed our room, locking our few remaining belongings inside. Macario and I slept in the five-cent theaters on Main Street, where the jobless and other denizens of the city slept. I could hardly stand the stifling filth of the men and the monstrous rats that ran over our feet when the lights went out. But it was cold outside and there was no place to go, and no food to appease the hunger that was gnawing at my vitals as viciously as the rats in the theater.

  One day Nick found some money in the street. He happened to be following a woman when he saw her purse fall. He ran for it and grabbed the money. When the woman claimed that it was her money, Nick argued that he had found it and ran off defiantly. It was a beastly struggle for existence in a cold city.

  Gazamen, who had come back from his “foxhole,” found a cheap rooming house on Wall Street, in the Mexican district. He was always disappearing and when he appeared again we had music. He was our song of praise. It was only when melancholia attacked him that he went away, leaving us to wonder what would happen to him.

  The room was small: no bathroom, no closet, no window. The washroom was outside in the hall, where the other tenants hung their washing. One tenant, an old man, had a small icebox in his room. José climbed through the window and pried open the icebox, which was padlocked on both doors. He found only a rotten piece of barracuda, but the old man raved as if he had lost a thousand dollars. José ate the fish but he could not sleep for the pain in his stomach.

  One evening my brother came to our room with a sickly Filipino, who looked as though he had not eaten for weeks. His name was Estevan, and when he saw the food on the table, he fell upon it like a dog. It was only when he had emptied all the plates that he began to talk, banging on the table with his fist when he wished to emphasize a point.

  “I haven’t become a writer in America in vain,” he shouted. “Someday, my friends, I will write a great book about the Ilocano peasants in northern Luzon.”

  “When are you going to write it?” José interrupted him.

  Estevan looked at José silently; then ignoring him, he continued: “The man of our generation, the person who shall direct the course of our history for the next fifty years, will come from the peasantry. And this I know—” he looked defiantly at José—“will be the turning point of my life. I will be the greatest writer of my time!”

  “Has he written anything?” I asked my brother.

  “He has written stories and essays, but has not published anything,” said Macario. “The poor fellow. He is starving.”

  Poor Estevan! He was the first writer I knew. But
the fire was dying in him, eating away at his vitals. Two days afterward he jumped out of the window of his room. I rushed to the hotel with my brother and found stacks of unpublished manuscripts in an old suitcase. I took one story which was titled “Morning in Narvacan,” a poetic recitation describing a peasant town in northern Luzon. I carried it with me for years, reading it again a decade after, when I was intellectually equipped to understand the significance of Estevan’s tragic death and the merit of the story. Thus it was that I began to rediscover my native land, and the cultural roots there that had nourished me, and I felt a great urge to identify myself with the social awakening of my people.

  * * *

  —

  Nick paid our whole month’s rent, which was ten dollars for the five of us in the small room. But one night José came to our room with a Mexican girl and asked for the rest of Nick’s money.

  “I would like to have twenty-five dollars,” José said to his brother, looking at the girl morosely.

  “What for?” Nick asked.

  “Lupe wants an abortion,” José said.

  “Why don’t you be careful?” Nick shouted. But he knew that it was useless, that he would give the money. He handed it to José and looked down when the girl took it.

  That was the end of our money. But José was saved from marrying a girl he did not love. We were thrown into the streets again. Days of hunger and pain followed. And loneliness that clouded the mind, plunged the consciousness into an impenetrable darkness. And the nameless urge to seize something warm and tangible, to clutch it to me that this void inside of me might be filled.

  My brother and I were sitting in a barber shop when a friend told us about a job. Macario borrowed twenty cents from the barber and rushed to the place. Then he came back to tell me that he had been hired.

  Every Saturday night he came to town with two dollars for me. He was working at the house of a movie director who paid him twenty-five dollars a month for cooking and doing the general housework. The place was large and magnificent, and I asked myself why my brother was paid only that much for doing all the work in that great household.

  When I saw the lady of the house with her jewelry and perfume, sitting in the house all day drinking expensive liquors, and her fat husband smoking fifty-cent cigars, I hated myself for accepting a part of my brother’s hard-earned money. On the first night that I went with him to try to help him, he cooked something special and told me to wait on the table. He instructed me carefully. He was very patient. When the dinner was over the guests went to the library. My brother came out of the kitchen and started serving their drinks.

  “Boy,” said one of the men to my brother, “I enjoyed the dinner.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Macario said, smiled, bowed, and withdrew into the kitchen.

  “He is an educated servant,” said the lady of the house. “He was a schoolteacher in the Philippines. And he went to college here.”

  “You can hire these natives for almost nothing,” said her husband. “They are only too glad to work for white folks.”

  “You said it,” one of the men said. “But I would rather have niggers and Chinamen. They don’t have a college education, but they know their places.”

  “And I won’t have a Filipino in my house, when my daughter is around,” said one of the women.

  “Is it true that they are sex-crazy?” the man next to her asked. “I understand that they go crazy when they see a white woman.”

  “Same as the niggers,” said the man who did not like Filipino servants. “Same as the Chinamen, with their opium.”

  “They are all sex-starved,” said the man of the house with finality.

  “What is this country coming to?” one of the women said.

  I withdrew into the kitchen, where I found my brother silently cleaning glasses. I walked outdoors to the end of the road, returned to the house, and helped him put the house in order. It was past midnight when we finished the work. It seemed I had hardly slept two hours when the bell rang for breakfast.

  Macario rubbed his eyes sleepily and looked at the clock. Then he rushed to the kitchen and started preparing coffee and toast. He came back to the room and told me to carry the tray upstairs.

  The lady of the house was still in bed. She got up and went to the bathroom when she heard me knock on the door. She came back to the room without clothes, the red hair on her body gleaming with tiny drops of water. It was the first time I had seen the onionlike whiteness of a white woman’s body. I stared at her, naturally, but looked away as fast as I could when she turned in my direction. She had caught a glimpse of my ecstasy in the tall mirror, where she was nakedly admiring herself.

  “What are you staring at?” she said.

  “Your body, madam,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

  “Get out!” She pushed me into the hall and slammed the door.

  I did not forget her for a long time.

  Macario came to town the following week end and tried to give me another two dollars, my weekly allowance for room rent, food, and other necessities. I refused. I knew that I had to go away. I was angered at Macario’s subservience to these people. What had happened to him? What happened to the young man who had opened such a treasure house of knowledge for me?

  José came to my room and confided to me that he had to run away. It was another girl. My opportunity to escape the city presented itself.

  “I am going to Imperial Valley where there is plenty of farm work,” I said to my brother on the phone. “I will see you again when the season is over.”

  “Be strong, Carlos,” he said.

  I wanted to cry out to him. I could not tell him why I was running away. Not now. I could not bear to see him working for people who were less human and decent than he, and who believed, because they were in the position to command, that they could treat him as though he were a domestic animal. . . .

  José and I went to the freight yards. I heard something shouting at the edge of my mind:

  “I will never let them touch me with their filthy hands! I will never let them make a domestic animal out of me!”

  “What are you crying about?” José asked me, the cold wind lashing his words away.

  CHAPTER XIX

  It was now the year of the great hatred: the lives of Filipinos were cheaper than those of dogs. They were forcibly shoved off the streets when they showed resistance. The sentiment against them was accelerated by the marriage of a Filipino and a girl of the Caucasian race in Pasadena. The case was tried in court and many technicalities were brought in with it to degrade the lineage and character of the Filipino people.

  Prior to the Roldan vs. The United States case, Filipinos were considered Mongolians. Since there is a law which forbids the marriage between members of the Mongolian and Caucasian races, those who hated Filipinos wanted them to be included in this discriminatory legislation. Anthropologists and other experts maintained that the Filipinos are not Mongolians, but members of the Malayan race. It was then a simple thing for the state legislature to pass a law forbidding marriage between members of the Malayan and Caucasian races. This action was followed by neighboring states until, when the war with Japan broke out in 1941, New Mexico was the nearest place to the Pacific Coast where Filipino soldiers could marry Caucasian women.

  This was the condition in California when José and I arrived in San Diego. I was still unaware of the vast social implications of the discrimination against Filipinos, and my ignorance had innocently brought me to the attention of white Americans. In San Diego, where I tried to get a job, I was beaten upon several occasions by restaurant and hotel proprietors. I put the blame on certain Filipinos who had behaved badly in America, who had instigated hate and discontent among their friends and followers. This misconception was generated by a confused personal reaction to dynamic social forces, but my hunger for the truth had inevitably led me to t
ake an historical attitude. I was to understand and interpret this chaos from a collective point of view, because it was pervasive and universal.

  From San Diego, José and I traveled by freight train to the south. We were told, when we reached the little desert town of Calipatria, that local whites were hunting Filipinos at night with shotguns. A countryman offered to take us in his loading truck to Brawley, but we decided it was too dangerous. We walked to Holtville where we found a Japanese farmer who hired us to pick winter peas.

  It was cold at night and when morning came the fog was so thick it was tangible. But it was a safe place and it was far from the surveillance of vigilantes. Then from nearby El Centro, the center of Filipino population in the Imperial Valley, news came that a Filipino labor organizer had been found dead in a ditch.

  I wanted to leave Holtville, but José insisted that we work through the season. I worked but made myself inconspicuous. At night I slept with a long knife under my pillow. My ears became sensitive to sounds and even my sense of smell was sharpened. I knew when rabbits were mating between the rows of peas. I knew when night birds were feasting in the melon patches.

  One day a Filipino came to Holtville with his American wife and their child. It was blazing noon and the child was hungry. The strangers went to a little restaurant and sat down at a table. When they were refused service, they stayed on, hoping for some consideration. But it was no use. Bewildered, they walked outside; suddenly the child began to cry with hunger. The Filipino went back to the restaurant and asked if he could buy a bottle of milk for his child.

  “It is only for my baby,” he said humbly.