The Hummingbird's Daughter (57 page)

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Authors: Luis Alberto Urrea

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BOOK: The Hummingbird's Daughter
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Teresita stood in the center of the flatcar. Enríquez himself manned the bullet spitter on its tall tripod. Tomás hid in the train car, crouched between the seats. Soldiers splayed themselves on the roof, and they huddled behind sandbags on the aft flatcar.

“Slow,” Teresita said.

“It is slow.”

“Stop! Now!”

Enríquez signaled his men.

The train, already crawling, slowed and stopped. It chuffed. Its nose was into the narrow gap between stone walls.

“Ease ahead,” she said.

Enríquez signaled again. The train lurched. The locomotive cleared the gap, then the coal car. The flatcar entered the gap, and she called:

“Stop!”

Enríquez signaled and fell behind his machine gun and yanked back the handle.

“Calma!” he called.

“Don’t shoot,” she said.

“Calma, muchachos!”

“Don’t shoot.”

She could feel them watching her. She knew they were there. The bushes all around her were alive with her brothers, her friends, her followers.

She raised her hands and held them before her. Then she stretched them out to either side. She stood there, still and thin and somehow frightening.

They were aiming at the train.

Enríquez saw a warrior rise from the brush and aim at him.

“Hold your fire,” he told his men.

“Harm no man!” Teresita called.

The warrior lowered his rifle and watched them, confused.

“Calma,” said Enríquez.

One of the People could contain himself no longer. He let out a yell and ran at the train. He was dressed only in a loincloth. His face had streaks painted along the cheeks.

“Harm no man!” Teresita called.

The warrior ran up to the train and smacked it with his palm. He yelled. Smacked it again, and ran back to the brush.

Men yelped. Invisible men. Hooted. Enríquez felt his hair rising on the back of his neck.

Tomás cracked the train-car door and said: “I think I just pissed my pants!”

“Calma!” Enríquez called.

The locomotive double-chuffed as they stood, exposed.
Cha-chuff. Cha-chuff. Cha-chuff.

“Miss Urrea,” Enríquez said, “I believe we are all going to die.”

Teresita called out to the hidden men:

“Brothers! It is my destiny to go! I choose to go! Kill no man! Harm no man!”

Silence.

“Move,” Teresita said. “Now.”

Enríquez waved frantically. His men were hiding in the engineer’s cabin. One of them finally looked and pulled his head in. The locomotive gave out one huge chuff and the train lurched again.

“Viva la Santa!”

The cries came from the sage and the creosotes.

“Viva Teresita!”

“Viva la Santa de Cabora!”

The train was moving slowly, slowly—it was agony for Enríquez.

She never moved. Stood with her hands raised, staring into the canyon. Enríquez could not believe his eyes. Ten, thirty, fifty, a hundred armed warriors rose around them.

“Don’t shoot!” she shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

He did not know if she was shouting to them or to him, and it did not matter. She was shouting to them all. And the warriors came forward. They ran, they jumped down to the tracks. The train slowly accelerated, and the warriors raised their rifles. But they did not shoot. They formed a double line that stretched ahead of the train and vanished around the bend in the tracks. Each man stood silent, staring up at her, and he held his rifle over his head to salute her.

Enríquez stood, made his way to her side. Tomás was on the step behind them, then he came forward to join them.

The warriors stood a silent vigil as their saint passed out of their lives. Tomás saw that some of them were weeping.

The train was moving faster now. The engineer dropped sand through the slots onto the tracks so they could build traction and climb. The train rumbled and howled, sparks swirled around them and smoke, and the whistle shrieked and the warriors never moved.

They climbed and approached the great curve out of the canyon, and the men still stood all along the line.

“There!” Teresita cried. “Look there!”

She pointed.

Tomás looked: sitting on his horse on the last rise beside the tracks, he found Buenaventura. He was laughing. He held his great old idiotic Texan cowboy hat in his hand. He waved it over his head.

And then, as if it had all been a strange dream, Mexico, and Cabora, and the wars, and President Díaz, and the Yaquis and Mayos and Apaches and Pimas and Guasaves and Seris and Tarahumaras and Tomochitecos were gone.

Nothing ahead of them now but night.

Night, and great, dark North America.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

TERESA URREA WAS A REAL PERSON. I grew up believing she was my aunt. Apparently, my great-grandfather, Seferino Urrea, was Tomás’s first cousin. She was a family folktale until César A. González, at San Diego Mesa College, showed me the first of many hundreds of articles I would read about her. Although I could claim to have been pursuing her story since my boyhood, my serious research into her life began in Boston in 1985.

Teresita’s sermons, her argument in the prison wagon with General Bandála, and Cruz Chávez’s heated discussion with Father Gastélum in Tomóchic are all based on Lauro Aguirre’s own notes. Although they are difficult to find, you can still uncover microfilms of his writings if you know a helpful librarian. The story the old woman tells Aguirre near the end of the novel is an eyewitness account told by a 101-year-old curandera in Benjamin Hill, Sonora. It was tape-recorded over a decade ago by my brother, Alberto Urrea. This is the first time it appears in any source.

The teachings of Huila are based on the Mayo medicine woman of El Júpare, Sonora—Maclovia Borbón Moroyoqui. Maclovia was the maternal grandmother and teacher of my cousin, Esperanza Urrea. Esperanza was one of my teachers as I learned a few of the secret medicine ways recounted here.

Two other teachers deserve mention: Elba Urrea, aunt and curandera-hechicera, delivered before her death a trunk full of documents, letters, pictures, and articles relating to Teresita. The Chiricahua Apache medicine man, “Manny,” at Rancho Teresita in Arizona shared much with me.

Please note that these, and many other, sources asked me to disguise certain details from readers. I was taught that it would be fun as an author to show off all the Yaqui and Mayo and curandera secrets I had been shown. But that kind of showing off would be wrong. So I have changed certain small details, and I have maintained the secret names of things. Written formulas are accurate, and all “miracles” attributed to Teresita are from the record, witnessed in writing in the archives.

This book took more than twenty years of fieldwork, research, travel, and interviews to compose. The acknowledgments I owe are extensive and would add several pages to this text. Writers, scholars, clergy, curanderas, and shamans helped me all along the way.

For those interested in sources and the like, a full bibliography and acknowledgments section can be found on my Web site (
www.luisurrea.com
) under the “Teresita” subheading. Michelle McDonald brilliantly designs and maintains the Web site.

Several books are quite valuable to the Teresita scholar. Everyone begins in the same place:
Teresita,
by William Curry Holden. It’s a fine old text, rich in detail. Lauro Aguirre’s
Tomóchic!
(also known by different titles) is interesting, since it suggests it was edited—if not cowritten—by Teresita herself. José Valades wrote the influential newspaper series on Teresita that appeared to great fanfare in the Southwest in the 1930s; this material went into his slender book,
Porfirio Díaz contra el gran poder de Dios.
For a deeper understanding of Tomóchic, and Teresita’s role in the debacle, you must begin with Heriberto Frías’s
Tomóchic.
Paul Vanderwood has written the definitive Tomóchic history,
God and Guns Against the Power of Government.
Brianda Domecq will, perhaps, forgive me if I confess I have not read her no-doubt fine novel about Teresita,
La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora.
Aside from giving me an epigraph for the first section of this book, Ms. Domecq’s work remained a mystery to me, since I didn’t want any fiction affecting the fiction I was composing. I have read her excellent historical notes and essays, however, in such places as the Arizona Historical Society.

I owe a great deal of gratitude to the Lannan Foundation for their generous support. The award is just a small part of it.

Finally, Geoff Shandler, my careful editor, has walked back and forth through this epic, trimming and shaping an unruly text. I couldn’t put my work in finer hands. Along with Geoff, everyone at Little, Brown has been kind and supportive as I’ve bashed my way through this book—thanks to Michael Pietsch, Liz Nagle, Shannon Byrne, Peggy Freudenthal, copyeditor Melissa Clemence, and proofreader Katie Blatt, among so many others. Everyone at the Sandra Dijkstra Agency watches over me and makes my career possible; Mike Cendejas at the Lynne Pleshette Agency battles Hollywood for me and makes dreams come true.

Cinderella did tireless work in support of the creation of
The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
Any husband would be wise to say this, but in my case it’s true: without her help, there would be no book.

More Urrea family members than I can name here gave me hours, days, years of their time. Please see the Web site.

Thank you all. Y gracias, Teresita.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LUIS ALBERTO URREA is the author of
The Devil’s Highway,
winner of the 2004 Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction;
Across the Wire,
winner of the Christopher Award; and
By the Lake of Sleeping Children.
He is the recipient of an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, and a Colorado Book Award, and he has been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. His poetry has been collected in
The Best American Poetry,
and his short-story collection,
Six Kinds of Sky,
won the 2002
ForeWord
Magazine
Book of the Year Award, Editor’s Choice for Fiction. He teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

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