America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  Claro was smiling mysteriously.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, comrade?” he said, raising a clenched fist. “I could have saved you all this trouble.”

  “You are greatly mistaken,” I protested.

  “It’s all right to be cautious,” he whispered. “I understand your position. How is it down there? Are we strong enough to start something big?”

  I saw Steve Laso come in hurriedly. A foreman for one of the big farmers, he was one of the first to withdraw from the fields. A folded copy of the morning paper was in his pocket. He looked very tired.

  “You’d better leave this town right away!” he said. “They are looking for you.”

  Claro interrupted. “Let him stay, Steve!”

  “It’s impractical,” Steve argued. “He will mess up everything if he stays. You must go at once, Carl!”

  I walked to the back door. Claro’s face darkened; there was grim determination in his eyes. He raised his hand in the Communist salute.

  “I’ll be back, Claro,” I said.

  “I’ll drive you out of town,” Steve said. “The patrolmen are watching the highways. But we will take a chance.”

  We ran to Steve’s car and started driving on the highway to Oakland. What was happening to all of us? What was going on among Filipinos? Was everybody moving toward a faith strong enough to blast away the walls that imprisoned our life in America? I yearned to talk to Steve, but he was driving madly down the road. I would go back to Stockton after the strike and talk to Claro.

  Several miles out of town, near the hills, we saw the shiny motorcycles of patrolmen guarding the highway. They were searching every car. Steve told me to take off my coat and muss up my hair. He shoved a big cigar into my mouth and told me to light it. I lit it when the patrolmen stopped us. They looked at me suspiciously for a moment, opened the rumble seat, came back to the wheel to look at me again. Then they let us go. I sighed with relief.

  “I don’t like to run away, Steve,” I said. “But if it’s for the good of the strike, I will go.”

  “It’s better this way,” he said. “But I will be waiting for your return. You fooled them with your youthful looks. You must take good care of that face and those hands. Your youth is a weapon. Good-bye!”

  I stopped the bus when it came to the bend of the road. I jumped on and settled myself comfortably. I was tired and sleep came at once, with troubled dreams.

  In one dream I saw my mother serving my brothers and sisters. When my father told her to eat she answered that she was not hungry. But I knew that she was hungry, because I had been with her all day. We had gone to the villages together selling salt and salted fish; we did not eat anything except a few stalks of young rice that we snatched from the fields. The dream shifted to another evening, and my mother was serving again. She would not eat. Then I knew why. There was not enough food in the house. She was starving herself so that her children would have something to eat. I knew now, because I had been with her all day.

  I stopped eating and announced that I was feeling faint. My mother looked up at me and a flash of understanding crossed her face. I walked to the ladder and went out into the yard. It was a dark night and the coconut trees stood like ghosts among the grass houses. I climbed an acacia tree in the front yard and looked through a window into our house. I could see my brothers and sisters eating; even my mother was eating now. I was happy then, seeing my mother eating, and laughing too when one of my brothers told a joke. I looked up and prayed that my mother might live long under those skies.

  I was awakened by my tears of remembrance. I looked out the window and saw the water shimmering with lights. San Francisco was glowing, and behind us Oakland was fading. I could hear foghorns in the bay. They sounded like carabaos lost in a wide meadow. I felt like going to a land far away. Then I went to sleep again and dreamed about my father!

  I was up in the acacia tree again. I was watching my mother cooking a few kernels of corn. I could see them shining golden in the lamplight. There was a worried look in my mother’s face. What was it? She came to the front window and called for me, looking up and down the twilight road. I did not answer; she returned to the kitchen.

  I climbed down the tree and started running away from our house. I wanted to run away from all that poverty. I did not want to, because there was affection in our family—but I hated the aching misery. I did not know where to go now. I seemed to hear someone shouting to me in the coming darkness.

  “Run! Don’t go back! Run!”

  I lifted my shirt and wiped the blinding tears out of my eyes. I ran swiftly in the dark. I was running away from love, from all that was good and true. I was afraid to know that we were poor. I could not bear to see my mother starving herself. Wait for me, star of night. . . . Days and nights I walked until a policeman found me sleeping in the public market of a strange town. When I refused to reveal my name, he took me to the town jail. The chief of police, a kind young man, came into my cell with bananas. I ate some of them while he watched me.

  “You like them?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You looked hungry so I thought maybe you would like to try our bananas in this town. I raised them myself. Would you care to see the trees?”

  He lifted me off the bench and took me to the low window that overlooked the backyard of the presidencia. There in the wide yard, tall and fragrant and full of fruit, bananas stood under the sun like village girls on their way to church.

  “You planted them, sir?” I asked.

  “Sure!” he said.

  “We have bananas too,” I said. “My father and I are farmers. I wish you could see our banana grove. And our coconuts! Sir, that is something to see!”

  “I would like to see your farm now,” he said.

  “Let’s go!”

  He took my hand and went outside where an old Ford was waiting. He jumped behind the wheel and started the motor.

  “Where to, partner?” he asked.

  “Binalonan,” I said.

  “Binalonan!” There was sudden recognition in his face. He smiled at me and drove on. “I used to have a friend from your town. He became a maker of songs in America. . . .”

  I looked at him with great yearning. When he saw that I was curious, he patted my head as if I were his own son.

  “America is a land far away,” he said.

  It was the first time I had heard about America. I was going back to my family from a town that seemed hundreds of miles away. When the man drove into our yard, my father came down and carried me lovingly into the house.

  “You mustn’t run away again, Allos,” he said.

  He took me to the kitchen where my brothers and sisters were waiting. My mother was spreading food on a low table, but when she saw me in my father’s arms, she dropped the ladle in her hand and reached for me.

  “We have enough food now, son,” she said.

  I sat on the floor and started to eat; then suddenly I remembered the man who had driven me in his old car. I ran to the window and looked into the yard. But he was already gone—he who was so kind, gentle, and good. Would I see him again somewhere? Would I? Were all people from America like him? Were all people in America like him?

  “He is gone,” I said, rushing to the ladder. . . .

  I woke up when the man next to me shook me vigorously.

  “You were crying in your sleep,” he said.

  “It was just a dream,” I said apologetically.

  “We are in San Francisco now,” he said, walking to the door of the bus and into the station’s waiting room.

  I followed him slowly. Suddenly it came to me: it was not a dream. It had actually happened to me when I was a little boy in Binalonan. It had come back to me in a dream, because I had forgotten it. How could I forget one of the most significant events in my childhood? How could I have fo
rgotten a tragedy that was to condition so much of my future life?

  CHAPTER XLI

  I returned to Los Angeles where I found José waiting for me. He had gone only as far north as San Jose. We prepared a form letter and sent copies to well-known Filipino labor leaders on the Pacific coast. We invited them to a conference in Los Angeles with the idea of organizing a committee on which we could work together irrespective of affiliations.

  Ganzo, who had been publishing the Philippine Commonwealth Times, was the first to arrive. Three delegates came from Seattle, two from Portland, one from San Francisco, five from Central California, and one from San Diego. There were twenty-one delegates when we finally assembled in the house of the Filipino Communist in Boyle Heights.

  I knew most of the delegates because some were members of our old group: the same men who had fought for unionism when it was still illegal to organize workers in California. But the unions had come to stay, and the progressive movement had come too; and some of the Filipinos were joining the ranks of the Communists. All of us wanted to create a working committee from which we could form the nucleus of a broad organization for Filipinos on the Pacific coast.

  I did not know that the Los Angeles delegation was controlled by two parvenus, Roman Rios and Javier Lacson, who came to the conference with a red-headed girl from New York. But a nucleus had already been formed in San Francisco, where José, Nick, and Conrado Torres met before they joined us in Los Angeles. When they arrived with the other delegates, I was sure that they would propose a plan for a broad organization. And I was not wrong: on the first day of the conference the Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights (CPFR) was created.

  I was new to two delegates from Seattle, Joe Lozano and Marc Dorion, who came with Torres to represent the state of Washington. These two were active in the labor movement in the north, and officers of the UCAPAWA, Local 7. They were to become the most active supporters of the progressive movement in the Northwest.

  On the second day of the conference, the CPFR took up as its major task the campaign for the right of Filipinos to become naturalized American citizens. The new organization had vitality and direction at a time when intelligent leadership among Filipinos was sorely needed. It became, in a way, the most effective weapon of the Filipinos on the West Coast.

  * * *

  —

  I had found something to occupy my time, for in the CPFR I had a channel through which I could release my creative energies. I wrote articles and special news items about our work in the organization. With the intermittent help of José, we published Ganzo’s paper. It was the only publication interested in the struggle for a definite social security for Filipinos in the United States. But it lacked the strong financial support that publications of its kind required. My brother Macario, who was never idle for a moment, put up his own money when an issue was withheld by the printers due to unpaid bills.

  I believe my inclinations are toward conspiracy. I became restless working on the paper: there was not enough drama in it. I asked myself in moments of agitation what it was that made me react to violence with all my fury. Was violence the only force that could stir me intellectually?

  In my sickroom, following the activities of the members of our committee, I became frantic and lonely. I wanted to live their lives, suffer their sufferings. Even when Representative Vito Marcantonio introduced a bill in Congress proposing Filipino citizenship, even then I looked out the window of my room like a prisoner on some isolated island.

  I knew, however, that the Marcantonio bill gave us a chance to campaign nationally. I kept in close touch with the branches of the CPFR, which had been established in every important city on the West Coast. I corresponded with the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, an organization in New York whose program was similar to that of the CPFR. Thus our work was centralized.

  Upon the approval of the central committee of the CPFR, I began speaking before American audiences in Southern California. The Hollywood Democratic Committee was very active, so, much as I distrusted the middle class, I embarked upon this new phase of my life with great enthusiasm.

  Once, when I spoke in the meeting hall of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, where I discussed the predicament of the Filipinos in the United States, I met an American woman who invited me to her house. We rode in her car down Sunset Boulevard until we stopped in front of a white house.

  The rug in the living room was as white as the clouds in the skies of Mangusmana. When she went to the icebox, I bent over and felt the soft strands of white hair that were woven into the rug. How luxuriously this woman lived! Was this the reason that made me hate her class? Was my lack of comfort the mainspring of my dark fear?

  I sat on a chair deeply agitated. She sat down and we talked about the CPFR. I patiently traced its origin: how it had sprung from the need of Filipinos for a broad organization. It was when she was mixing drinks that the doorbell rang. She looked uncertainly at me, then at the door. Finally she hurried me into the kitchen and ran to the front door.

  I heard a man come into the house. But I could not hear what they were talking about. I was burning with indignation. Was I right in my fear after all? Was there no way to cure this land? Why did she push me into hiding when a friend of hers came into the house? Was she ashamed because of my race? What was the real reason? I could not understand it. I did not notice the time. When she came to the kitchen again the man had gone.

  “I’ll give a party for your organization in my house,” she said. “Will you be my guest?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  “Next week?”

  I nodded. My personal pride was hurt. But I was working for something big. This I knew: Filipinos worked and lived in national terms, so that when they were maligned they thought their whole race was maligned. And so it was with me—with this slight difference: my deepening understanding of socialism was destroying my chauvinism.

  But it was strange that when I emerged from the house, I thought of the white rug in the living room with yearning. There was a comforting, delicious feeling in me. As I walked farther from it, I was possessed by a strong desire to buy a rug like it someday.

  * * *

  —

  I had one important job to do: the campaign for the Marcantonio bill. But the race-haters in California were also busy lobbying against it. Headed by a Congressman, with the backing of big farmers and allied interests, they fought the bill and killed it. And there were other groups against Filipinos: Liberty League of California, Daughters of the Golden West, Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Parent-Teacher Association. These, with the Associated Farmers of California as the sharp spearhead, were instrumental in killing every bill favorable to Filipinos in Congress and in the state Legislature. They worked as one group to deprive Filipinos of the right to live as free men in a country founded upon this very principle.

  My brother’s spirit was broken. His savings had gone into our campaign. One afternoon he came home sick and tired. He went to bed, hoping to gather strength to go back to work the next day. In the morning a man from his place of work came to our apartment.

  “You’d better come to work, Macario,” he shouted to my brother, “if you want to keep your job.”

  I was preparing some soup for Macario when I heard him moving about upstairs. I knew he would go. He was searching for his working shoes now. Was he thinking of me? Was he afraid for me if he had no job? Suddenly I seized a butcher knife from the table and rushed madly up the stairway. My brother saw me first, and he leaped for my arm before I could raise it.

  “No, Carlos!” he shouted, hanging on the arm with the butcher knife. “No! Let him alone!”

  “I’ll kill you!” I shouted to the man.

  He ran into the other room. When my brother had taken the weapon from me, he went to the room where the man was hiding.

  “You mu
st go now,” I heard him say.

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” the man protested. “What is the matter with him? Is he crazy?”

  “Please go now,” Macario said.

  I heard them go out together. I closed the door and burst into tears. Why hadn’t I killed him? I heard Macario coming back to the house. He went to his room and lay weakly on the bed. I went to the door and peered through the little opening. His hands were neatly folded on his chest. I felt like a little boy whose god has been struck down by evil winds.

  * * *

  —

  I wanted to work now that my brother was ill, but I was too frail to do anything that demanded much physical exertion. Was there no one among our friends who had money to lend? But we were all in the same predicament: we were cornered beyond rescue and the only escape was death.

  I walked in the streets at night hoping to meet someone with money. Would I go back to the violence of the old days—with Max and Julio? I felt the gun in my pocket and the desire to kill for money seized my mind. Was not this weapon a symbol of my past? Max had killed a white man with it. I had smashed the head of a Japanese farmer with it. Maybe I could use it again! Why not?

  I ran down the street and stopped to look up at the State Building. There was a light in Carey McWilliams’s office. I calmed down. I sat on the cement stairway. Maybe I could borrow money from him. I looked up again with anticipation. But when the light went out of his office, I could not face him. I got up quickly and ran home.

  I was climbing the cement stairway that went up to our court when I noticed that one of the houses was open. Stealthily I went to the door and peered inside. I heard a woman taking a bath upstairs. On a portable radio, shining like a firefly, was a diamond ring. I slid inside the door and grabbed it. I ran outside and down the stairs into the street, where the sudden warm wind calmed my nerves.