When I Was Puerto Rican (35 page)

“I good studen. I lern queek. You see notes.” I pointed to the A’s in my report card. “I pass seven gray.”

So we made a deal.

“You have until Christmas,” he said. “I’ll be checking on your progress.” He scratched out “7-18” and wrote in ”8- 23.” He wrote something on a piece of paper, sealed it inside an envelope, and gave it to me. “Your teacher is Miss Brown. Take this note upstairs to her. Your mother can go,” he said and disappeared into his office.

“Wow!” Mami said, “you can speak English!”

I was so proud of myself, I almost burst. In Puerto Rico if I’d been that pushy, I would have been called
mal educada
by the Mr. Grant equivalent and sent home with a note to my mother. But here it was my teacher who was getting the note, I got what I wanted, and my mother was sent home.

“I can find my way after school,” I said to Mami. “You don’t have to come get me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

I walked down the black-tiled hallway, past many doors that were half glass, each one labelled with a room number in neat black lettering. Other students stared at me, tried to get my attention, or pointedly ignored me. I kept walking as if I knew where I was going, heading for the sign that said STAIRS with an arrow pointing up. When I reached the end of the hall and looked back, Mami was still standing at the front door watching me, a worried expression on her face. I waved, and she waved back. I started up the stairs, my stomach churning into tight knots. All of a sudden, I was afraid that I was about to make a fool of myself and end up in seventh grade in the middle of the school year. Having to fall back would be worse than just accepting my fate now and hopping forward if I proved to be as good a student as I had convinced Mr. Grant I was. “What have I done?” I kicked myself with the back of my right shoe, much to the surprise of the fellow walking behind me, who laughed uproariously, as if I had meant it as a joke.

Miss Brown’s was the learning disabled class, where the administration sent kids with all sorts of problems, none of which, from what I could see, had anything to do with their ability to learn but more with their willingness to do so. They were an unruly group. Those who came to class, anyway. Half of them never showed up, or, when they did, they slept through the lesson or nodded off in the middle of Miss Brown’s carefully parsed sentences.

We were outcasts in a school where the smartest eighth graders were in the 8-1 homeroom, each subsequent drop in number indicating one notch less smarts. If your class was in the low double digits, (8-10 for instance), you were smart, but not a pinhead. Once you got into the teens, your intelligence was in question, especially as the numbers rose to the high teens. And then there were the twenties. I was in 8-23, where the dumbest, most undesirable people were placed. My class was, in some ways, the equivalent of seventh grade, perhaps even sixth or fifth.

Miss Brown, the homeroom teacher, who also taught English composition, was a young black woman who wore sweat pads under her arms. The strings holding them in place sometimes slipped outside the short sleeves of her well-pressed white shirts, and she had to turn her back to us in order to adjust them. She was very pretty, with almond eyes and a hairdo that was flat and straight at the top of her head then dipped into tight curls at the ends. Her fingers were well manicured, the nails painted pale pink with white tips. She taught English composition as if everyone cared about it, which I found appealing.

After the first week she moved me from the back of the room to the front seat by her desk, and after that, it felt as if she were teaching me alone. We never spoke, except when I went up to the blackboard.

“Esmeralda,” she called in a musical voice, “would you please come up and mark the prepositional phrase?”

In her class, I learned to recognize the structure of the English language, and to draft the parts of a sentence by the position of words relative to pronouns and prepositions without knowing exactly what the whole thing meant.

The school was huge and noisy. There was a social order that, at first, I didn’t understand but kept bumping into. Girls and boys who wore matching cardigans walked down the halls hand in hand, sometimes stopping behind lockers to kiss and fondle each other. They were
Americanos
and belonged in the homerooms in the low numbers.

Another group of girls wore heavy makeup, hitched their skirts above their knees, opened one extra button on their blouses, and teased their hair into enormous bouffants held solid with spray. In the morning, they took over the girls’ bathroom, where they dragged on cigarettes as they did their hair until the air was unbreathable, thick with smoke and hair spray. The one time I entered the bathroom before classes they chased me out with insults and rough shoves.

Those bold girls with hair and makeup and short skirts, I soon found out, were Italian. The Italians all sat together on one side of the cafeteria, the blacks on another. The two groups hated each other more than they hated Puerto Ricans. At least once a week there was a fight between an Italian and a
moreno
, either in the bathroom, in the school yard, or in an abandoned lot near the school, a no-man’s-land that divided their neighborhoods and kept them apart on weekends.

The black girls had their own style. Not for them the big, pouffy hair of the Italians. Their hair was straightened, curled at the tips like Miss Brown’s, or pulled up into a twist at the back with wispy curls and straw straight bangs over Cleopatra eyes. Their skirts were also short, except it didn’t look like they hitched them up when their mothers weren’t looking. They came that way. They had strong, shapely legs and wore knee socks with heavy lace-up shoes that became lethal weapons in fights.

It was rumored that the Italians carried knives, even the girls, and that the
morenos
had brass knuckles in their pockets and steel toes in their heavy shoes. I stayed away from both groups, afraid that if I befriended an Italian, I’d get beat up by a
morena,
or vice versa.

There were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived, like myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The two types didn’t mix. The Brooklyn Puerto Ricans spoke English, and often no Spanish at all. To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was backward and mosquito-ridden. Those of us for whom Puerto Rico was still a recent memory were also split into two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible.

I felt disloyal for wanting to learn English, for liking pizza, for studying the girls with big hair and trying out their styles at home, locked in the bathroom where no one could watch. I practiced walking with the peculiar little hop of the
morenas,
but felt as if I were limping.

I didn’t feel comfortable with the newly arrived Puerto Ricans who stuck together in suspicious little groups, criticizing everyone, afraid of everything. And I was not accepted by the Brooklyn Puerto Ricans, who held the secret of coolness. They walked the halls between the Italians and the
morenos
, neither one nor the other, but looking and acting like a combination of both, depending on the texture of their hair, the shade of their skin, their makeup, and the way they walked down the hall.

One day I came home from school to find all our things packed and Mami waiting.

“Your sisters and brothers are coming,” she said. “We’re moving to a bigger place.”

Tata and I helped her drag the stuff out to the sidewalk. After it was all together, Mami walked to Graham Avenue and found a cab. The driver helped us load the trunk, the front seat, and the floor of the rear seat until we were sitting on our bundles for the short ride to Varet Street, on the other side of the projects.

I’d read about but had never seen the projects. Just that weekend a man had taken a nine-year-old girl to the roof of one of the buildings, raped her, and thrown her over the side, down twenty-one stories.
El Diario
, the Spanish newspaper, had covered the story in detail and featured a picture of the building facing Bushwick Avenue, with a dotted line from where the girl was thrown to where she fell.

But Mami didn’t talk about that. She said that the new apartment was much bigger, and that Tata would be living with us so she could take care of us while Mami worked. I wouldn’t have to change schools.

The air was getting cooler, and before Delsa, Norma, Héctor, and Alicia came, Mami and I went shopping for coats and sweaters in a secondhand store, so that the kids wouldn’t get sick their first week in Brooklyn. We also bought a couch and two matching chairs, two big beds, a
chiforobe
with a mirror, and two folding cots. Mami let me pick out the stuff, and I acted like a rich lady, choosing the most ornate pieces I spotted, with gold curlicues painted on the wood, intricate carving, and fancy pulls on the drawers.

Our new place was a railroad-style apartment on the second floor of a three-story house. There were four rooms from front to back, one leading into the other: the living room facing Varet Street, then our bedroom, then Tata’s room, then the kitchen. The tub was in the bathroom this time, and the kitchen was big enough for a table and chairs, two folding racks for drying clothes washed by hand in the sink, and a stack of shelves for groceries. The fireplace in the living room, with its plain marble mantel, was blocked off, and we put Tata’s television in front of it. The wood floors were dark and difficult to clean because the mop strings caught in splinters and cracks. The ceilings were high, but no cherubs danced around garlands, and no braided molding curled around the borders.

On October 7, 1961, Don Julio, Mami, and I went to the airport to pick up Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia. Papi had sent them unescorted, with Delsa in charge. The first thing I noticed was that her face was pinched and tired. At eleven years old Delsa looked like a woman, but her tiny body was still that of a little girl.

In the taxi on the way home, I couldn’t stop talking, telling Delsa about the broad streets, the big schools, the subway train. I told her about the Italians, the
morenos
, the Jewish. I described how in Brooklyn we didn’t have to wear uniforms to school, but on Fridays there was a class called assembly in a big auditorium, and all the kids had to wear white shirts.

Tata prepared a feast:
asopao,
Drake’s cakes, Coke, and potato chips. The kids were wide-eyed and scared. I wondered if that’s the way I had looked two months earlier and hoped that if I had, it had worn off by now.

All my brothers and sisters were sent back one grade so they could learn English, so I walked to the junior high school alone, and my sisters and brothers went together to the elementary school on Bushwick Avenue. Mami insisted that I take the long way to school and not cut across the projects, but I did it once, because I wanted to find the spot where the little girl had fallen. I wondered if she had been dead when she fell, or if she had been still alive. Whether she had screamed, or whether, when you fall from such a great height, you lose air and can’t make a sound, as sometimes happened to me if I ran too fast. The broad concrete walkways curved in and around the massive yellow buildings that rose taller than anything else in the neighborhood. What would happen to the people who lived there in case of fire? I imagined people jumping out the windows, raining down onto the broad sidewalks and cement basketball courts.