Maya Finale: "Ghetto Girl Meets Country Girl"

Awoken from my afternoon nap, Mother Maya gives me a loving maternal pat on the noggin, gently twirling my brillo-head curls that are starting to form ‘Rican dread locks. 

“I see you didn’t put a comb to your hair today, either.”

“Nope, there’s no time “to gits ma hair did.”  I’m on a marathon mission, Lawd knows, “I needs” to get the word out.  It’s been stop and go since the day I started writing.” 

“Don’t we know it.  We’ve been keeping tabs on you from above….”

I open Caged Bird to the same exact place that had stuck with me.  Reflecting on my junior high graduation in ’63—Morrrisania Black Section of the South Bronx—the melody and lyrics to James Weldon Johnson’s Negro National Anthem loudly chime in my ear:     

♪ “Lift every voice and sing                                                      

Till earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of liberty…

We have come over a way that with tears

Has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through

The blood of the slaughtered…♪  

I burst into song as loud as my classmates, in our segregated school, because, then, I was born “Black in America,” too—but of the Spanish-Caribbean persuasion.

Luckily, the Summer of ’69, a Bronx Science junior, at 17, the Fates saw fit that I find my missing roots. During our ASPIRA future leaders sojourn to Puerto Rico, the lyrics penned by nostalgic NYC expatriates (exiles) —El Himno Nacional, En Mi Viejo San Juan and El Lamento Borincano—were forever etched in the heart of a young patriot.  Aboard the tour bus, awed by spectacular tropical sights...

    
I gushed with pride, when we raised our forceful Nelson Mandela fists HIGH in the air, shouting in unison:

DESPIERTA BORICUA, DEFIENDE LO TUYO!

(Wake up My Countrymen!  Defend Our Nation!)

                                                         

I knew not the deeper meaning of his call to action; nor was I, as yet, familiar with the 1930s impassioned orator, Harvard Law School graduate Don Pedro Albizú Campos; a famed native son of equally black complexion, also unjustly imprisoned for standing up to the infamous “Colonial Empire”—hearkening back to Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death.”  But the seeds of resistance were planted (in me) in the same way we are bound to never forget where we come from.  

Down in the Puerto Rican quarter—Manhattan’s Loisaida—the daughter of a janitor and “sweat shop” sewing machine operator [a product of the 1950s TV generation] I was raised on auto-pilot: “Children were seen but never heard” like in the old country.  

It struck me (a late bloomer) that a young black girl in the racist South could be turned on by the white European poets Edgar Allen Poe and William Shakespeare. Also required reading for me, I found precious little literature to turn me on; that wasn’t about the sordid, seedy or bigoted side of the Boricua migrant crossing: that turned me off! Still, must-reads for me: the only signs of Puerto Rican life in the universe were "Down These Mean Streets," by the late poet and also gifted lyricist Piri Thomas (my Berkeley pana); "La Vida" by cultural anthropologist Oscar Lewis, with whom I had a bone to pick for picking the plight of pauperized rural Puerto Rican women to spotlight the oldest profession in the world and where did it get us? …nada que ver. And the West Side Story LP musical score, lyrics I memorized and sang with glee, much preferring the singer actress Rita Moreno had been cast in the lead role of the Puerto Rican Maria —the real McCoy—rather than suffer the grievous insult, watching a repulsive Natalie Wood painted in “adobe brown face” garbling the Spanish language, and lip synching the Sondheim and Bernstein tunes with an affected accent—Wassup wid dat Hollywood?

And as God is my witness, every time I reread my prized books or rumbled to the Broadway lyrics on my stereo record player, I distinctly remember recoiling to the depiction of Puerto Ricans...drug addicts, prostitutes, urban hoodlums and vende patrias, patriotic turncoats. Remember Rita Moreno’s Oscar-winning character, Anita, singing she would rather Puerto Rico sink back into the Ocean?—shame on her (Anita, that is).

In the South Bronx was when the voice in my head first started to scream: THAT’S NOT ME. THAT WILL NEVER BE ME. I WILL ONE DAY SHOW THE WORLD WHO WE THE PUERTO RICAN PEOPLE REALLY ARE! I’d simmer down, gradually, huffing and puffing, waltzing the floors, my partner the mop, in our fifth floor West Farms Road walk-up. Mollified that, at least, we had the Cyrano de Bergerac José Ferrer, first Latino to win an Oscar; the virtuoso Pablo Casals, internationally acclaimed cellist; the ill-fated comedian Freddie Prinze, of “Chico and the Man” TV sitcom fame; the crossover singer Jose Feliciano lighting the fires of peace and love all over America; and the quintessential artist herself, Rita Moreno, the first female Puerto Rican (or “Hispanic” woman for that matter) to take home all four Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy glamorous statuettes. Equally as gratified, was I, to know we had our first Puerto Rican Congressman Herman Badillo raising hell on the hill, defending disenfranchised Puerto Rican New Yorkers, QEPD. 

Mother Maya reels me into her junior high graduation scene again, like magic—enthralled by her virtuoso imagery—I’m sitting next to her on the proud day of her 1940 Lafayette County Training School assembly. Behind the dais, Mr. Donleavy, Little Rock Arkansas’ white school superintendent, pronounces a racist death sentence on their teenage aspirations: 

“Owens and the Brown Bomber were great heroes in our world, but what school official in the white-goddom of Little Rock had the right to decide that those two men must be our only heroes?  ...it was for nothing.  Donleavy had exposed us. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.” 

A "Jim Crow" injustice that, understandably, fires up a litany of rage by the honors graduate: 

“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life.  It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with: no chance of defense.  We should all be dead.  I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other.  A pyramid of flesh with the white folks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks.  The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails.  As a species, we were an abomination.  All of us.” 

Now…Sister grew up her nose buried in a book, the Harlem Renaissance Black authors, also at her disposal, nurturing her non-conformist young intellect and rebellious spirit:

“Then I wished that Gabriel Prossner and Nat Turner had killed all white folks in their beds and that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Harriet Tubman had been killed by that blow to her head and Christopher Columbus had drowned in the “Santa Maria.”

Finally, our walk down memory lane--in our parallel universe--unleashes my Prometheus Unbound:

Speak Truth to Power!  Freedom is as freedom does.  You say Negroes, I say Blacks.  You say Hispanics, I say Latinos.  Look at this 21^st Century world at my fingertips today:  the underground trafficking by Librotraficante of banned ethnic studies books, deemed “incendiary” in Arizona; the underground movement of DREAMers to Freedom U. in Georgia, immigrants non grata; the underground human trafficking of impoverished women and girls, “enslaved” to the drugs underworld prostitution rings, the "US protectorate" Puerto Rico, included. So help me God…LATINOS ARE THE “NEW NEGROES” OF AMERICA!!??

“It looks to me like you nailed that one right on the head.  Why so glum?” 

“I appreciate that.  But this kind of stuff could put the nails on the coffin of my writing career.  Look at how some people would have banned your first book.”   

“I thought it was a mild book.” She expressed to AP. “There's no profanity.  It (Caged Bird) speaks about surviving, and it really doesn't make ogres of many people. I was shocked to find there were people who really wanted it banned, and I still believe people who are against the book, have never read the book." 

I didn’t have the heart to breathe life into the words, “the spirit of Jim Crow lives!”

The night before (on my birthday) a serendipitous link to the Guardian, sent to me by my sister scribe and beta reader, the Chicago-based Latina fiction writer Irma Olmedo, had unearthed a beacon of new and emerging voices of color in America and around the globe [VONA, Voices of our Nation Foundation]. The bad news was:

 

"Pulitzer prize winner Junot Díaz's blistering attack on the “unbearable too-whiteness" of creative writing courses in the US has been echoed by experts in the UK (…) pointing to a "backlash" as the "centre in literature begins to shift away from the Anglo-American writer towards writers with different backgrounds(…) that "when 'race' is written about by black or Asian poets it is too often dismissed as something that has been 'done before', a criticism which is not generally targeted at those writing about 'love' or 'snow’…."

Sure, racism is dumb.  It flies in the face of God’s cardinal law:”love thy neighbor,” stands to reason, to love your neighbor it serves to know your neighbor’s stories, too. 

And so...history repeats itself but in high definition.  Once again, underscoring Maya’s Truth, "The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams."

FINALE

I had been blessed (by this time) with more “Good Mornings” on the island than the law allows; because, frankly, we wrote them.  To NOT smile Buenos Días to your paisano in passing would be dereliction of the sweetest code of civility known to man. A model, I’d say, for the “human race,” make that:  the white, the black, the brown, the red, and the yellow children of God.   

 A mal tiempo buena cara, that is, during socioeconomic duress...keep your chin up.    

Connecting the fortuitous dots from the night before, clearly, Dominican-born author Junot Díaz’s e-cameo appearance (in my inbox) was a harbinger of more messengers to come, easing my sense of loss over the unforeseen death of a comrade-in-arms.  Who would have “thunk it”?  Angels, even in cyberspace—who have one’s back—holding forth against those enemies of the literary license to boldly “tell it like it is”—sin pelos en la lengua—for the good of all mankind.

Since my epiphany, on any tantalizing tropical night rubbernecking over the railing on my second-floor deck, the Star of Maya goes…blinkety, blinkety, blink, for me to gaze up at her. “I no longer walk on terra firma but you can forevermore find me here…blinkety, blinkety, blink.    “Finish your assignment. Always remember querida ‘Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage, you cannot practice any of the other virtues consistently.’”  

"I loves you too, Mother Maya.    Thanks for all the tips, my people thank you too.  Let's get together again next year, same time same place, so we can catch up.  And give my recuerdos to Mami and Papi" (they would have made it back there, too). QEPD.

The Star of Maya so outshines the billions more dotting the midnight blue heavens, I am awestruck the incandescent star-burst catapults forward and winks at ME; holding me party to secrets of the divine (is my understanding). 

  ###

REFERENCES FOLLOW...

Link to UN International Decolonization Committee, http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/gacol3269.doc.htm

 

Link to Time Maya Angelou 2013 interview.  articlehttp://content.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,2257965777001_213964

Link to Centro VOICES Prof. Ana Celia Zentella Interview, http://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/centrovoices/arts-culture/ana-celia-zentella-anthropolitical-linguistics-tato-laviera-and-power-nuyorican-poetry?

Link to Mujeres Talk blog, “Adam’s Rib: Island Taboo Unveiled” http://library.osu.edu/blogs/mujerestalk/2014/08/26/adams-rib-island-taboo-unveiled/

PDF Study available:  Prof. Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, Univ. of Mass. at Boston, and Luis Galanes, University of PR at Cayey; The Vacillations of Children or A Dignified Decision?: Colonialism and Contradiction in Two US Possessions in the Caribbean; Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Link to BBC video article, “Puerto Rico’s Population Swap: The Middle Class for Millionaires” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32344131

Link to Democracy Now video segment, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/21/war_against_all_puerto_ricans_inside

Link to National Institute for Latino Policy report 9/8/2014, “Challenging the Invisibility of Smuggling and Trafficking Persons in Puerto Rico” https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/human+trafficking/148efdaf4982a285

Link to Guardian article http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/junot-diaz-attack-creative-writing-unbearable-too-whiteness

 

Link to VONA Voices, http://www.voicesatvona.org/ 
 Link to Latino Rebels Book Review http://www.latinorebels.com/2015/05/12/jonathan-marcantonis-the-feast-of-san-sebastian-triumphs/

Thank you for reading.