CHAPTER XXXV
I had cultivated a friendship with a young boy named John Custer, a patient in another ward. He came to our ward one morning and looked at me for a long time, as though he were afraid to talk.
“Will you do something for me?” he said finally. He fumbled in his pockets for a piece of writing paper. “It’s for my ma in Arkansas.”
I took the paper from him.
“You just say I’m okay.”
I started writing to an American mother in Arkansas. She had never heard of me, and I had never seen her, but her son was a common bond between us. I was writing to her what I had had in my mind and heart for years. The words came effortlessly. I was no longer writing about this lonely sick boy, but about myself and my friends in America. I told her about the lean, the lonely and miserable years. I mentioned places and names. I was not writing to an unknown mother any more. I was writing to my own mother plowing in the muddy fields of Mangusmana: it was the one letter I should have written before. I was telling her about America. Actually, I was writing to all the unhappy mothers whose sons left and did not return. There were years to remember, but they came and went away. I was telling them about those years. Then it was finished.
I read the letter slowly. When I finished reading it, he was crying.
“I have never learned to write,” he said. “I had no time for learning in Arkansas.”
I realized that this poor American boy had worked all his life. I could have told him then that I had worked all my life, too. I could have told him that I came from that part of my country where there were very few schools. I could have told him that for a long time the world of books was closed to me. I could have told him that I had been denied the little things in life that were denied to him. I could have told him that I had acquired my education by working hard. Yes, I could have told him, because when I looked at him I knew he would understand.
When he left the hospital, I said to him: “Rediscover America. You are still young. Someday I will hear from you.”
“I will remember what you said,” he said.
“Yes, John,” I said, “it’s only in giving the best we have that we can become a part of America.”
“Thanks.” And he left.
Years passed and the war came. Then one day I received a letter from him. He wrote in part:
“I doubt if you remember me. I met you in the Los Angeles County Hospital years ago and you wrote a letter for me. I returned to Arkansas and followed your suggestion. I found a job and educated myself when I was not working. I have studied American history, which was your suggestion. Learning to read and write is knowing America, my country. Knowing America is actually knowing myself. Knowing myself is also knowing how to serve my country. Now I’m serving her. . . .”
When summer came I was free to go outside the building. I would take the elevator and go down and sit on the sunlit grass beyond our porch. My brother Macario came back to Los Angeles.
“I couldn’t get a visa,” he said. “Nick couldn’t get one, either. But Felix is now in Spain.”
But the war in Spain was about to end; the Republican Government was about to be crushed. Macario knew that the fight would be over in a few months. He had found work in a downtown restaurant and rented a house in Echo Park.
Nick, who had come back with my brother from Mexico, went to Alaska to work in the fish canneries. When he returned to the mainland he proceeded to Portland where UCAPAWA, Local 226, an affiliate of the CIO, had fallen into the hands of reactionary leaders because of the departure of Jim Luna for the Philippines. Nick seized his opportunity, and offering a progressive program, was elected secretary-treasurer.
Now the local in Seattle was also in the hands of our group. The leadership in San Francisco was held by Americans and Chinese. But José tried vainly to break into it because the Filipino membership was large. He gave up in failure and went to San Pedro, where the cannery workers had been organized into the AFL by a dynamic Mexican woman unionist. Again José’s attempt to put the workers into the CIO failed, so he went to Alaska to observe the situation there. When I heard from him again he was in Portland fighting against the element that was trying to break the local which had been re-invigorated by Nick’s progressivism.
So while I was waiting for a possible improvement in the hospital, my companions were fighting in the trade union movement and for the propagation of progressive ideas. I wanted to work with them again.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Toward the end of May the sun came close to the earth; the heat was stifling and the patients were alarmed. Those in the ward seemed to die as fast as the flies that came into the hospital through the wide squares of the screens. Now in the summer there were more deaths than in the winter, when the cold gravely affected the patients. But the porch where I was had become a luxury and a symbol of my attachment to life, for there was a soothing coolness under the large tree near it. There was no other tree near the building, and as the number of deaths in the ward piled higher, the tree began to indicate recovery and survival to me.
I believed in the potency of the tree. I who had grappled with the forces of evil also believed in its power. Perhaps it was because I wanted to live so urgently that I ascribed a mystical power to the tree, and in this urgent need to live, I worshiped it like a pagan. I knew that no man in our ward died, or in the other wards that were near the tree.
I was not alone in this superstitious attachment to the tree. Other patients felt the same faith: we felt we were alive because of it. When the slight breeze rustled its leaves we got up from our beds and stood near it. I held onto my faith although the doctors disputed it. Let them. I held onto the tree, as though its leaves protected me from death.
When one of the patients went to a rest home or sanitarium, a lucky patient in the ward would take his place on the porch. Most of us on the porch were “walking patients,” and we helped the attendants with the racks of food. We also helped them change the beds of the other patients. Perhaps from this psychological basis we created an immunization.
I noticed that when a bed patient was transferred to the porch he recovered rapidly and helped the attendants with the trays or other patients. I was allowed to do minor chores for the nurses, and all of us were free to play cards. Panagos, the Greek, was very adept at sweeping the floor: he woke up early in the morning, before the nurses came out with the charts, and started pushing the laundry rack so that he could clean the floor before the attendants came with the trays of food. But Sobel, the Jew from Poland, could not be outdone: he would stand in the hallways waiting for the racks of food, and when the attendants came with them, Sobel would push them into the porch and ward, singing peasant songs as he carried the trays of those who were too weak to get out of their beds.
I liked this part of my life on the porch. I promised myself that if I got out I would go back to visit those who would be left. I had something to eat. I had books. I had Eileen Odell. I had many friends—now. I had had none of these on the outside; I had had only violence. I was afraid, even if I were well again, to go out and live in such a world.
* * *
—
The hot days of summer came and went. The war in Spain was nearly over. I read Barbusse’s Under Fire, and then, at the insistence of Eileen Odell, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: passionate war books, intensely written with a message for a tottering world. Then Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain; the stories of Liam O’Flaherty, the plays of Sean O’Casey, and the poetry of the proletarians in the United States.
I felt that I was at home with the young American writers and poets. Reading them drove me back to the roots of American literature—to Walt Whitman and the tumult of his time. And from him, from his passionate dream of an America of equality for all races, a tremendous idea burned my consciousness. Would it be possible for an immigrant like
me to become a part of the American dream? Would I be able to make a positive contribution toward the realization of this dream?
I was enchanted by this dream, and the hospital, dismal as it was, became a world of hope. I discovered the other democratic writers and poets, who in their diverse ways contributed toward the enlargement of the American dream.
* * *
—
My sudden discovery of America made me a lost man in the hospital. I felt I could not converse with the other patients because of their intellectual sterility. I acquired a mask of pretense that became a weapon I was to take out with me into the violent world again—a mask of pretense at ignorance and illiteracy, because I felt that if they knew that I had intellectual depths they would reject my presence. I remembered Robinson Crusoe, and compared him with my fate. But my lostness was deeper because I was lonely among men. This loneliness was to encircle my life, to close around it, marring my vision, so that my thoughts were filled with melancholia.
I wanted to go away from the hospital; perhaps a new environment would give me a fresh outlook. In fact, I had been in the hospital two years now—long enough to be transferred to a sanitarium for complete recovery. I told my doctor of my desire to be moved away. He told me that it was beyond his jurisdiction.
I asked the Social Service Department to look into my case. A woman came to interview me. She wanted to know when I had come to the United States; my brothers’ names and occupations, and the names of their wives and children; and also, which I thought ridiculous, the names and education of my parents and their immediate relatives. Could I tell her about my labors in Mangusmana and Binalonan? Could I tell her how I started working as a herd boy at five? Could I tell her about my starvation in Baguio? And my early years in America—could I tell her some of the violence and of my fears, my flights?
It was the simplest way of eliminating certain patients from relief care for technical reasons. My plea for a transfer was shelved. I could not go to a sanitarium. I should have known, but I had illusions, and was immersed in my studies. This was one of the realities that I had overlooked in the brilliance of my gigantic dream to know all America.
I revealed my predicament to the doctor when he came to see me. He took it up with the Social Service Department, and another woman came to see me.
“There is nothing I can do for you,” she said. “You are ineligible to go to a sanitarium for technical reasons.”
“I didn’t commit any crime,” I said.
“You were a minor when you came to the United States,” she explained kindly. “If you had any relatives who had taken care of you when you came, it would be a different story. As it stands, you were a minor and, as far as I know, you need a guardian to sign all these papers.”
“It is very foolish,” the doctor said. “We doctors try our best to help these patients toward recovery, but their future is dependent upon stupid restrictions.”
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “There is nothing I can do. This is a big institution and I’m just a worker here.”
“You are actually hanging him on a tree,” the doctor said.
The woman left. All right, that was it. I began to feel like the Mexicans who thought the doctors were killing them off because there were too many of them. I was angry and afraid at the same time. Slowly I reviewed my life: it had always been chaotic. I became truly afraid to face America.
* * *
—
I brought my case before the Social Service Department again. The first woman came, not to help me but to tell me that there was racism even in the Los Angeles County Hospital.
“You Filipinos,” she said calmly, “ought to be shipped back to your jungle homes!”
I felt consoled when I realized that this Social Service woman was only voicing a personal opinion, an individual hate against Filipinos. I had read enough books now to know the roots of racism: I had had experience with it when I was still on the outside.
I was crushed. I wanted to be brave, but there was no hope. And once again, as when I landed in the United States, I felt a rising tide of fear and revolt. Fear always worked this way with me. I had seen so much prejudice that I reacted murderously when confronted by it.
When my brother Macario came to see me, I told him about the whole affair.
“I’ll get you out of this hole, Carl,” he said. “I have a job now and I’ll take care of you until you are well again.”
“I don’t know if we should take this step,” I said. “I need medical attention and care.”
“I’ll take care of that, too,” he said. “Don’t worry now. I’ll come next week.”
I knew that I would be a burden to Macario. But it seemed the only way. I packed all my books and magazines. Eileen Odell came with a new brief case with my name on it and arranged my poems and some scattered chapters of my autobiography. Then Victor, who was living with my brother in a Japanese hotel downtown, came to take my things away.
One June morning, exactly two years after I went to the hospital, I said good-bye to my companions and the personnel on our floor.
CHAPTER XXXVII
I was afraid to leave the hospital. I knew that a perilous life awaited me outside, that I would be inevitably caught in its whirlpools. I had never known peace, except in the hospital, where there was always something to eat and a place to sleep on the cold nights. There were also genuine friends, who had sat with me in the hopeless hours, the black days of my operations. On the outside life was alien and unfriendly, and the summer days were long and the winter nights were sharp with cold. I was determined to face it again, but now with an unswerving intellectual weapon. Maybe I would win this time, and if I did—would I not create a legend of courage and valor that other poor young men could emulate?
My brother was not yet in the hotel when I arrived. I waited in the lobby. Victor came first. We climbed the winding stairs into their little room. Then my brother came with sandwiches, and Victor went downstairs for a bottle of milk. It was good to be with them again.
On Sundays they awoke at noon and walked to First Street, talked to the Pinoys, ate Filipino food, and went to a movie when night came. Their friends also lived the same humdrum life. They met in a dingy restaurant or a dark poolroom to exchange news; then they scattered for another week of endless drudgery. It was the same life that had filled me with fear when I had arrived in America. It was the same life that led me to the labor movement. Now I must decide what to do with my remaining years.
I slept with Victor in the bed, while Macario slept on the floor. It was the same routine all over again—only now Leon was long dead and other members of our group were in jail or wandering somewhere. Then my brother decided that we had to move from the hotel, because climbing up and down the four flights of stairs with my stiff knee was dangerous to my health.
Victor suggested that we find a place around Vermont Avenue. We packed our belongings. I was surprised to know that after eight years in the United States I had only one old blue suit, a cheap suitcase, and three shirts. Victor and my brother were a little better off because they had worked more steadily.
Macario and I boarded a streetcar and went to the Vermont Avenue district. What we encountered almost broke my heart. We saw a nice little apartment house near Commonwealth Avenue and when we approached the landlady took away the “For Rent” sign. She went inside the house and peered furtively through a window. When sure that we would not go back, she went out to the yard again and put up the sign.
The next woman was more discreet. She stood by the sign as we approached.
“This house is not for rent,” she said awkwardly. “The sign is nailed to the wall and it’s hard to pull out. Maybe you can find one next block.”
But the next woman faced the issue squarely. She said: “We don’t take Filipinos!”
My brother was persistent. He interviewed every apartment
manager in the whole area. I have often wondered why he seemed so blind to the open prejudice of the people. Perhaps his good education and correct upbringing in the Philippines and his association with educated and well-meaning Americans made him forgiving. I do not know what made him tolerant, because even now, when he is once more in the Philippines, he writes to tell me how much he has missed America.
I was different. Where there was prejudice, I challenged it with prejudice. But where there was goodness, I reacted with goodness. This attitude, too, was conditioned by my experiences. In the years before I went to the hospital, when I was growing up in a world of horror, I fought against the perpetuation of brutal memories. Maybe I succeeded in erasing the sores, but the scars remained to remind me, in moments of spiritual vicissitudes, of the tragic days of those years. And even now, when I can look back without the black fury of hate that I had, I still double my fists.
* * *
—
I gave up looking for a better place to live. The only section where we were allowed to stay was notorious for criminals, pimps, gamblers, and prostitutes. We could not find a place even in Boyle Heights, the Jewish section, nor in the Mexican district.
I was washing our clothes when José, who had suddenly appeared in Los Angeles, knocked on the door.
“I’m married now, Carl,” he said. “And I have a little boy. I named him after you. I hope he will grow up to carry on the tradition!”
America Is in the Heart Page 28
