I wasn’t just fighting religious doctrine and sexist dogma but a cultural sociohistorical worldview. A teacher once described the Haitians in her class as very obedient and polite. I said that’s because their families will beat them if they get in trouble. Sensing my disapproval, she said it is good that they discipline their kids. Yes, but it can be taken too far when they instill fear of authority and beat the spirit out of their children. My mom’s concern that I act submissively can be partly attributed to coming from a country where people who stand up get mowed down.
My mom felt that if I loved her, I should obey her in all things and accept everything she said as the truth. When I disobeyed, she’d say, “Even a dog knows his master.” As a five-year-old I had the unarticulated idea that love shouldn’t be so limiting. To my Haitian Catholic mom I was a freak. Home was a battleground. My mother would say horrible things to me everyday in an effort to make me more docile. I was bad when I laughed too hard. I was bad when I disagreed with my uncle’s reasoning. I was bad for running around the house. Their definition of “good” was synonymous with passivity.
One day, on the train after a visit, I realized my mother and my aunt have been too “good” their whole lives. They were the extremes. Like my mom not remarrying because as a devout Catholic she felt she was still married to my father even though he was the one who lied to her and left. The rumor about my aunt is that she had a great love in Haiti who wanted to marry her. Her family was against it so she broke it off. These women followed the rules they were taught too well, and they’ve paid for it. I watch them still paying for it. When I look at my extended family, I notice that the women who were “bad”—those who did their own thing—are the happiest now. Some of my cousins my age growing up in Haiti are very assertive. On the whole the female relatives of my mom’s generation are more traditional, but even in that group my mother and aunt are extremes.
As a kid I’d watch my mother sit in the living room with a worried frown. I wanted her to stop worrying. I’d ask her what was wrong and she’d tell me, “Problems. Too many problems.” She worried about money, my safety, our health and more. She was always worried something would knock her off the little bit of peace she had. In one such conversation, my mom mentally handed me a picture of her, my aunt, my grandmother and me on the streets of New York with no place to go. I fear she carried that picture with her every day of her life. She’d sigh, “If only I had a husband.”
My aunt would take me aside periodically and tell me that her most cherished wish is that I get married soon and have a family. Even understanding her Catholicism and sexist upbringing, I want her to question this belief so I finally ask, “Why in the face of all the bad marriages do you still think that marriage is some type of guarantee of future happiness?”
“Do you want to become like me alone without anyone to take care of you?”
“Mom married with all her Catholic faithfulness and my father left her, and I’m always overhearing some family gossip about some couple divorcing.”
“But you’ll have the children. Even if your husband leaves you, you will have the children.” Ahhh. The Haitian Catholic version of the sperm donor. My mom’s response was less radical: “I’m praying for a good husband for you, he won’t leave you.”
In my mom’s old age, she now imagines there is a man who comes into a house and moves things around. She’s sure she left so and so here and now it is not here. “But Mom, why would he leave the TV, VCR and jewelry alone?”
“It’s a very strange world. You don’t know all the strange things in it,” she says.
And of course he’s a man
“musha-a,”
a mister. I believe he is the devil counterpart, a flip side of the savior, the man who was supposed to save her in the triumvirate. After waiting so long, she made up a demon to take his place.
I’m like my mom in that I want salvation. She tried to escape her existence through prayer. I don’t think she believed it was possible to find happiness in this world. I’ve looked for salvation in love, friends, work, theater, filmmaking, writing, books and myself. It is a struggle. I’ve been saved in little and big ways. I wish my mother would find happiness while I’m here to see it.
Waiting is what I fear. That’s what I realized on a subway ride from a visit to my mom and aunt. I’m not scared of ending up like my aunt as much as I’m scared of spending my whole life existing in that passive position. Every time they ask me about marriage, I feel my own answer to myself: If I’m not waiting, I have to find the courage to make something happen.
Thirty-Eight
Cecilia Ballí
She was twenty-one. She was, as they say in that Mexican border city,
del rancho,
from one of those scrappy ranches on the outskirts of town, which should have meant she was so shy she wouldn’t even eat in front of strangers. But the boys she met at the dances in the city were always surprised to learn that she’d been raised on a farm. In their eyes she was not like the rest of them, because she wore the most fashionably daring clothes and liked to converse and go to the movies.
He was twenty-three. He didn’t know too much about her, only that he wanted to dance with her tonight. You see, he was from the ranch too, but from a real ranch further down the same road that led out of Matamoros, where agriculture had paid off in big wads of cash that were traded for gaudy furniture. They had attended the same elementary school, though their family background set them worlds apart. It wasn’t until he was a grown young man with a trim mustache that he watched her many times from across the bus. He was so dreamy about her that when she got off, he would take the spot where she had sat, just to feel what was left of her. Sometimes, when he drove by Rancho San Pedro on his way home, he honked in case she might be sitting by the window or wandering outside and turn.
But she was oblivious; she had promised herself not to date the young men from the ranches, whose ideas about the world frustrated her. She had grown up admiring the city lights. From her family’s property, she could see them winking flirtatiously if she walked far enough into the fields. Those bright sparkles stood for all the things that couldn’t be hers on this little stretch of dirt. Here, during seven years of schooling, she had lit an old rag late at night and stuck it in a can of petroleum, devouring the facts and numbers her teacher dictated because too many of the schoolchildren couldn’t pay for textbooks. She rose to the top of her class and even got to carry the Mexican flag once during an end-of-year assembly, decked in her cousin’s pink
quinceañera
dress, since she didn’t own a school uniform.
Then it was over. No free education after the sixth grade in her country, and the young women—especially
las del rancho
—had to get a job or help watch their brothers and sisters. She kept on daydreaming, thrilled when she sat by the radio and listened to it murmur all the great things humans did, like walk on the moon. On infrequent trips to the hospital in Matamoros she would adore all the female nurses in their crispy white uniforms. One day she, too, would live in the city and wear a white uniform, she believed then; maybe a chemist’s lab coat. All she knew for her future was that she wanted to discover new things.
So naturally, when this young man offered her a goofy, insinuating grin from across the dance floor, she didn’t understand. And she didn’t really care for it either, despite his good looks and electric personality. What could he want, she wondered? To dance, he came over and confessed. She hesitated. But then, who knows why, she gave in and said yes.
“I like the word ‘wi-do-wer,’” my mother said recently. She was speaking to me in Spanish, the only language she knows well, but she allowed the precariously pronounced English word to teeter on the tip of her tongue. Then she added almost defiantly: “I’m not embarrassed. It gives you personality.”
She had slipped on her black-rimmed glasses to inspect the naturalization certificate she had just received. At fifty-three years, my mother had finally become a citizen of the United States. Always a witness, never a member—that had been the story of her life. I had thought about this as the solemn vocalist set off the ceremony with an overly dramatic rendition of “America the Beautiful” and the robed judge thanked the inductees for representing the very best of this country. Even though I, an American citizen by birth, have in some ways become jaded about the meaning of U.S. citizenship, that morning I found myself swelling with pride for my mother. She was a little distracted herself, flustered by the fact that everyone sped off during the Pledge of Allegiance. But when the singing woman took the microphone one last time and filled the auditorium with glass-shattering strains of “God Bless America,” my mother blinked rapidly and began to fan herself.
It wasn’t until we were outside, walking toward her silver pickup under the warm South Texas sun, that she began to dab her pink eyes sloppily. For the first time, she told me that when she was about eight, she’d briefly attended an elementary school in Brownsville, just next to her Mexican hometown. She wasn’t supposed to be there, of course, not a child who had tiptoed across the U.S.-Mexico border
sin papeles,
without papers. She and her parents and her little brother Raul snuggled into a one-room, rat-infested shack. At the American school the students sang “One Little Two Little Three Little Indians” and “God Bless America.” She was crying now because the song had brought her bittersweet memories of how tough things had been then for that skinny dark-skinned girl who hadn’t belonged. Today my mother has a three-bedroom brick home to herself.
Indeed, my mother has been, for most of her life, only a partial member of her own world. She was raised a woman in a rural Mexican society of the 1950s and 1960s. As a daughter, she was expected to shoulder responsibility without questioning. As a wife, she was expected to serve without resenting. As a mother, she was expected to sacrifice without looking back. To demand that of people is to short-change their potential as human beings. But what effect does that have especially on women, and on a woman like my mother? What does it mean for her entire sense of self to revolve around referents, for her to identify as a mother because she has a daughter, an employee because she has a job?
Soon it was difficult for her to remember just herself and the days when she had indulged in making plans, in thinking about what might make her happy. Only in recent years did my mother begin to make sense of how life had changed her and then brought her back. Only in recent years did she begin to talk to my two sisters and me about herself—not about whom she is in relation to, but whom she is, plain and simple.
I’m not sure when Mami’s dreams vanished, but they must have fluttered out the window on one of those droning forty-five-hour drives across the Interstate-10 to California. Maybe it was the time she rode a Greyhound alone because she was utterly pregnant with twins and didn’t fit on the seat of our uncle’s pickup, yet would have been equally uncomfortable plopped under a camper he had fastened to the bed of the truck. She still cries when she remembers how, three days into the trip and not far from the city where my father and five-year-old Cristina were eagerly waiting to meet her, the bus stopped for a two-hour layover and she walked around aimlessly on swollen feet under the miserable Oakland skyscrapers.
My mother and father began dating after he had asked her to dance that night in Matamoros. Papi and his first wife had separated some time before, so he ran off with this improbable ranch girl and married her. My grandfather, a Mexican American who had chosen to make his life on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River, had planned to leave his ranch to his youngest son, but my father was irreverent and reckless and lost his inheritance to a brother who worked harder. Now that he was ready to settle, he was forced to begin from scratch. He claimed American citizenship, rented a small home in Matamoros and drove city buses in Brownsville while my mother bore a beautiful baby girl.
Once the baby turned one, he and my mother decided to cast their lot making annual pilgrimages to California, where there were ripe fields to pick and few labor laws. In fact, when César Chávez came by with his people urging the workers to demand an eight-hour day, my mother wouldn’t hear it. Every extra hour under the sun was an additional brick on the house she and my dad would build once they settled back in Texas. In Davis they tracked down some cousins and promptly rented a tiny two-bedroom in the same migrant camp. It had no living room or air conditioner but cost just $60 a month. They figured the sacrifice would pay off in a few years.
She didn’t fully know yet how to be a woman in Mexico, let alone in the United States. Yet my mother was determined to do her part to make life better. Antonia Hinojosa de Ballí became Antonia H. Ballí, and she tried not to think much of the ranch back home, throwing her blind faith instead on the idea that maintaining a good family and working hard in a strange country would get us all somewhere. For the most part, it did. Our father was quickly hired to drive a big truck that hauled tomatoes to other cities, which paid far better than hoeing and picking them, and our mom eventually became a cook at the migrant camp’s preschool. They saved every penny they could and watched their daughters grow.
But life was not all easy. My mother had quickly realized after marrying my father that the man she once had worshipped saw the world differently. Although when he was feeling well he lavished her with attention and drove her to Sacramento or the grand weekend flea markets in Roseville, he often didn’t understand her ambitions and believed it was his job to discipline her. It didn’t help that alcohol was gnawing away the best of him. Once he grew furious because she dumped two-thirds of her weekly paycheck on a two-volume set of medical encyclopedias she wanted to read. Another time he caught her chatting with a young man out in the field as they picked side by side. It didn’t matter that my mother was only asking the twentysomething-year-old what it was like for him and his girlfriend to attend the local community college.
Once they were home, Papi hit her—busted her eye like he would have busted any drunk’s at the bar.
People often ask my two sisters and me what our mother did to raise such good daughters. We study, work hard, go to church and love our family. I suppose to many people that is a huge achievement. Our father died when we were young, so we were mostly raised in an all-female household. That we are now such independent women (too independent, several men have complained) is a testament to the fact that we had to learn to make it on our own—and that, once we did, we also discovered we would be just fine.
One day a close friend asked me how far my mother had gotten in school. When I told him seven years, he was amazed. In his middle-class family, he said, going to college was the norm, so there was never any doubt that he would earn a degree. But that three young women—
three,
mind you—could have gotten so far in school despite their parents’ scarce education was truly admirable. I’d heard that one before, and though I appreciated the compliment, what I wanted to tell him was that we have accomplished what we have precisely because our mother didn’t. Being a working-class woman whose dreams had been proved frivolous by the reality of being a caretaker and a wife, she determined early on that things would not be the same for us.
The trips to California ceased after eight years. Back in Brownsville, we moved into a small wooden home in the Las Prietas subdivision while our mother and father built our brick home. There was no contractor involved. Don Lencho, an old carpenter friend from Matamoros, put up the towering frame, and a couple of hired hands helped lay the beige-colored brick. Soon we were living on Clover Drive and just across the street from Perez Elementary School, where my twin Celia and I would begin kindergarten and Cristina, ten years old by then, could finally sit in one classroom all year long. Our mother took a job cooking for a nursing home while our father bought a used 1973 Crown Victoria and painted it egg-yellow, proudly stenciling his cab number—a bold “15” on the front fenders of his new business.
For my sisters and me, household chores mainly consisted of doing our homework. Though our mother could not help us with it, every evening after dinner she wiped off the dining room table that doubled as a desk and often slipped us a favorite snack as we worked out long math problems. When the local grocery store offered a cheap encyclopedia in installments, she carefully timed each trip so that she wouldn’t miss a single volume, bringing home some eggs and milk and another $2 book packed with knowledge. After thirty-one weeks of patient shopping, the full set stood looking rather dignified on our living room bookshelf. And our mom never missed Open House nights. She might have barely understood some of our teachers, but she made sure to smile and nod her head as we translated how we were doing in school:
“Dice que soy muy buena estudiante.”
Almost instinctively, our mother knew that she wanted our lives to be different. Yet, it took time for her to figure out just what that would require. Because she had been socialized differently, childhood frills like going to friends’ slumber parties and volunteering as after-school street-crossing guards were not allowed at first. But we pushed as far as we could; we had to convince her, for one, that extracurricular activities were important. When she urged us with under-the-table pinches to leave an informational Girl Scout meeting after the troop leaders began discussing expenses, my twin sister and I held back our tears and refused to get up. In the end my mom worked out a compromise so that our Aunt Letty, who made beautiful wedding gowns, stitched our Brownie dresses with fabric that was only half a shade darker than the official uniform. Trial-and-error-that is the way my sisters, our mother and I forged our relationship in the early years of my life.
The cancer was eating him up; chewing him from head to toe like an impatient dog. His hair was the first casualty. All the chemotherapy left it lying in chunks on his white pillow, so much that you could soon glimpse his pale scalp under the few sad strands that remained. Gone were the days when he would spend hours before the mirror, gelling it all in place even though he would be spending most of the day sitting under a palm tree as he waited for customers next to his yellow cab. The tumor hid behind his nose, which made the treatment for it particularly debilitating. Now our dad used the mirror to watch himself as he completed the daily routine of jaw exercises the doctor had ordered, forcing him to make exaggerated, phantasmal faces. Plus, something was rotting inside of him, we were convinced, because his disease made him smell very badly. Every morning, my mother would have to coax me in the hallway, quietly so that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt, to walk to his bed and kiss him good-bye, as my sisters and I had always done before running off to school.