American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [77]
“Unh-huh,” the woman said, and shambled down the aisle.
“You’re an American,” Mother lectured me gravely, “through and through. Don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different.” She looked through the window and sighed, stroking my hair. In time, she began reciting a verse or two, in her funny macaronic way: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who bumpdy-bumpdy-bumpdy said, ‘This is my own my native land!’”
I could see why she loved her native land. It was clean, polished. Even the garbage was tidy. The stops along the way in it were linoleum oases, fitted with candy counters, milk-shake vendors, hot-dog grills, and wide arcades. Tallahassee, Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis, Topeka, Denver. I wanted to swing through those train stations like a monkey through rain forest, but George held me back, skittering after Mother and Papi, fretting that I’d get us lost or that we’d miss the next train. He was preoccupied and surly since we’d left Paramonga. His words were herky-jerky, full of worry. His face was leaping with tics.
In the St. Louis station, Vicki and I took off in search of a bathroom and came to a stop before two doors marked Ladies. One said Colored. The other said Whites. We puzzled over the words, wondering what they meant, but Mother came by, grabbed our hands, and pulled us through the second door.
“Why does that other one say Colored, Mother?” Vicki asked.
“Because only the colored are supposed to go through it,” she replied.
“Colored?” my sister asked, revealing a rare lack of enlightenment.
“Yes. Haven’t you noticed in the station, darling? Or on the train? The black people?”
“With black hair, you mean?” Vicki said.
“No, dear,” Mother answered on her way into a cubicle, latching the door behind her. “Not black hair. Black skin. You have black hair, but you’re white. Your skin is white. So is mine.”
I listened and looked down at my dark-olive knees dangling over the snowy commode. They were green. They were yellow. They were brown. They were colored. Never in a million years could they be called white. But when Vicki and I emerged from the bathroom and looked around the station, we saw what was meant. There were Americans of a deeper hue. Not ocher like me, not hazelnut like Antonio, but chocolate. We had boarded the trains with them, peered into their faces when they leaned over to chat, bought candy from them at counters. It had not occurred to us that we wouldn’t be allowed to go through the same doors.
I had not yet turned seven, but I knew what race meant. There were Peruvians who measured color with what seemed the precision of laboratory calipers, but I had never suspected that any of it would pose a danger to me. I had balked at not being permitted to invite an india to my birthday; I had pressed my ear against bedroom doors to hear the scandal of the laundress’s daughter, I had been humiliated by a schoolteacher who didn’t think I was sufficiently brown. But race in Peru was a subtler issue than in the United States. Indios came down from the mountains, in from the jungle, went to convent schools, mixed with mestizos, and then their mestizo children mixed with the blancos, mixed with the chinos, mixed with the sambos, moved to the cities, mixed it up more. I cannot claim, at such a young age, to have understood any of it really, but I’d seen Peru in shades, felt it. Here in March of 1956, in the St. Louis train station, however, where black and white was spelled so boldly—where colors were carved on doors with directives—I do believe that for the first time I feared a little for myself.
AFTER FIVE DAYS on the rails, we arrived in Denver and boarded a bus for Rawlins. “We’re almost there,” Papi told us; half a day to go. The view from my window flattened into long stretches of prairie with barbed-wire fences winding like Möbius strips, to the horizon and back again. I tried to count telephone poles, the only promise that life awaited us somewhere up the road, but by the time I got to 157, my eyes surrendered to the landscape itself. There were sprays of tall grass, forlorn