When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [1]
The guava joins its sisters under the harsh fluorescent lights of the exotic fruit display. I push my cart away, toward the apples and pears of my adulthood, their nearly seedless ripeness predictable and bittersweet.
JÍBARA
Al jíbaro nunca se le quita la mancha de plátano.
A jíbaro can never wash away the stain of the plantain.
We came to Macún when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt. Our home was a giant version of the lard cans used to haul water from the public fountain. Its windows and doors were also metal, and, as we stepped in, I touched the wall and burned my fingers.
“That’ll teach you,” Mami scolded. “Never touch a wall on the sunny side.”
She searched a bundle of clothes and diapers for her jar of Vick’s VapoRub to smear on my fingers. They were red the rest of the day, and I couldn’t suck my thumb that night. “You’re too big for that anyway,” she said.
The floor was a patchwork of odd-shaped wooden slats that rose in the middle and dipped toward the front and back doors, where they butted against shiny, worn thresholds. Papi nailed new boards under Mami’s treadle sewing machine, and under their bed, but the floor still groaned and sagged to the corners, threatening to collapse and bring the house down with it.
“I’ll rip the whole thing out,” Papi suggested. “We’ll have to live with a dirt floor for a while....”
Mami looked at her feet and shuddered. A dirt floor, we’d heard, meant snakes and scorpions could crawl into the house from their holes in the ground. Mami didn’t know any better, and I had yet to learn not everything I heard was true, so we reacted in what was to become a pattern for us: what frightened her I became curious about, and what she found exciting terrified me. As Mami pulled her feet onto the rungs of her rocking chair and rubbed the goose bumps from her arms, I imagined a world of fascinating creatures slithering underfoot, drawing squiggly patterns on the dirt.
The day Papi tore up the floor, I followed him holding a can into which he dropped the straight nails, still usable. My fingers itched with a rust-colored powder, and when I licked them, a dry, metallic taste curled the tip of my tongue. Mami stood on the threshold scratching one ankle with the toes of the other foot.
“Negi, come help me gather kindling for the fire.”
“I’m working with Papi,” I whined, hoping he’d ask me to stay. He didn’t turn around but continued on his knees, digging out nails with the hammer’s claw, muttering the words to his favorite chachachá.
“Do as I say!” Mami ordered. Still, Papi kept his back to us. I plunked the can full of nails down hard, willing him to hear and tell me to stay, but he didn’t. I dawdled after Mami down the three steps into the yard. Delsa and Norma, my younger sisters, took turns swinging from a rope Papi had hung under the mango tree.
“Why can’t they help with the kindling?” I pouted.
Mami swatted the side of my head. “Don’t talk back,” she said. “You girls keep away from the house while your father is working,” she warned as we walked by my sisters having fun.
She led the way into a thicket behind the latrine. Twigs crackled under my bare feet, stinging the soles. A bananaquit flew to the thorny branch of a lemon tree and looked from side to side. Dots of sun danced on the green walls of the shady grove above low bushes weighted with pigeon peas, the earth screened with twigs, sensitive moriviví plants, and french weed studded with tiny blue flowers. Mami hummed softly, the yellow and orange flowers of her dress blending into the greenness: a miraculous garden with legs and arms and a melody. Her hair, choked at the nape with a rubber band, floated thick and black to her waist, and as she bent over to pick up sticks, it rained across her shoulders and down her arms, covering her face and tangling