Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  COYOTE CROSSING

  It’s when you least expect it. El Coyote leaps out of the snarl of blackberry bush and flashes across the roadway. You nearly hit him, but then he gets away with it, meat between his teeth. And you wonder if you imagined the memory of his appearance.

  The amazing efficacy of patriarchy is that it is a covert operation. It is entre nos, just between us—man and woman, sister and brother, father and daughter, queer and not so queer. It takes place behind closed doors, inside la hacienda and back there in the slave quarters. It is so seamlessly woven into the fiber of our lives that to pull at that dangling thread of inequity is to rip open an entire life.

  * * *

  My mother’s portrait, which had occupied my ancestor altar for many months, now sits upon a small wooden table at the foot of the white marbled altar. A lone veladora casts a warm light upon her face. It is the only site of Mexicanism amid this Catholic Church’s minimalist sacred suburban design.

  The funeral proceeds routinely under the deceptive haze of Orange County brightness. The sun, a whitewash, is a silent conspirator in my mother’s erasure. There are spirits lurking, unreconciled in their namelessness. I know this by a palpable absence; by the sullenness of my blood relations. We have not made peace with this polite passing de la familia. My mother, truly its last matriarch, is now dead, and the tribe goes with her.

  I place my attention on the portrait at the base of the altar. Only through that elder face that looks back at me, dark and foreign amid such deadening summertime brilliance, am I able to find the courage to rise from my place next to my sister in the front pew and approach the sunlit stairs to the pulpit. The face of the aged monsignor, also a marbled white, stands at the periphery of my fixed stare. My mother’s hardening flesh, upon her death, stirs more vividly in my imagination than this pale priest, my brother’s confessor and my mother’s adversary. She had not trusted the man with whom James had often broken bread at a table to which my mother was not welcome. My hard leather soles tap across the altar floor. I step up to the pulpit.

  This is the moment in which I had imagined I would eulogize my mother with words that emerged from the fluidity of our connection. Even as my life took on directions she could not portend, she’d never stood in my way. Stupid words. Stupid words would not do. Arrogantly, I had imagined myself greater than the speechlessness of my sorrow.

  My eyes scan the gathering of suited pale professionals and middle-aged matrons in summer jersey. Who are these people? My siblings’ friends? Business associates? I cannot find the old faces. Where are the old ones? Was I mistaken? Have they all vanished with my mother’s passing? I look down at my notes. They look back at me, utterly useless.

  I begin and try to speak the impossible, of what my mother meant to me: that I had prayed to her as ancestor before her death; that I would miss her smell, the feel of her rough fingers stroking the hair from my forehead; that from her Mexicanism I had learned every value that is worth something to me to this day. But each word I utter is swallowed up by a ravenous hollowness. Where are the old ones?

  “I want to honor my brother,” I continue, “for finally saying last night at the Rosary vigil words my mother had waited a lifetime to hear.” I taste the lie in the word honor as it drops from my mouth. We both knew his words came too late. Saying so was my small revenge. But I speak beyond volition; my words, captive hummingbird wings fluttering furiously inside my throat. I go on to acknowledge my sister’s “fierce warriorship” and my father’s “unfailing presence”—small rhetorical gestures at truth. The words push and stumble past my lips through stammered sentences and long pauses as I desperately try to construct my next line. I glance over at JoAnn in the front pew. Her steady gaze remains fixed on me, as my brother seethes next to her, his face red with building rage. My father is pressed between the two of them, numbed and deafened by his own private sadness. I search my vacant mind for one true thing to say for my mother and then it erupts:

  “She was not requited in this life.” And already I know I have said too much. I feel my brother, a stranglehold on my throat.

  I press on.

  “She was so grand. We could neither grasp nor hold all that she desired.” And then I add, “Even my father knew this.” He half nods in agreement, only a sad acceptance on his face. My eyes land upon my tía Eva, a cousin or two, among the sea of white faces. Frozen in their own grief, I read no response from them.

  * * *

  At the Rosary vigil the night before, the spirit of the gathering had felt so different, at least in the beginning. The altar Celia had arranged for Elvira was ablaze with ánima—flores, lighted velas, white blossoms floating in a glass bowl of water. There were pictures of Elvira surrounded by familia at the pivotal moments of her nine decades. Mexican ballads played from speakers over the quiet hum of relatives saludando uno al otro con abrazotes y lágrimas.

  Si Dios me quita la vida antes que a ti …

  My mother’s body, tastefully attired, as my sister had arranged, was presented in an open cherrywood casket. She looks good, I think, the way I remembered her before her illness. I notice a slight smudge of lipstick on her cheek. I let it go, appreciating the lack of perfection in it. The casket sits upstage to the right of the altar Celia has built. I call my sister and brother over to it and we light the candles in a gesture of reunion.

  “Mira, Mamá, we are all here together,” I say aloud, but it feels forced, performed.

  Soon after, I see James’s wife and their four adult children entering the mortuary chapel. They are strangers who move in single file through the assembled. There is a murmuring among the relatives, as the five scoot into an empty pew. Is that them? Is that James’s family? The aunties and elder cousins lean against one another, whispering, since most of them have never seen any of James’s children, now well into adulthood. As I am my mother’s host, I go over to greet my brother’s family. There is no “I’m sorry for your loss” from Aileen, only “Where’s James?”

  In the years of my mother’s illness, I remember seeing Aileen visit her only one time at Expressions and very briefly. She watches my brother embrace our very ill mother and I see Aileen’s eyes well with tears. I do not know if she cries over the waning of my mother or my brother’s impending loss, or perhaps a moment’s regret over having been so distant. I do not care. She cries for something that is of our family. But there is no sign of such feeling at the Rosary.

  After my brother has collected his wife and moved her into the front row, he rises to give the eulogy. His eloquence stuns and disconcerts, for his speech is a love treatise to our mother. He honors her, the history in her hands, her hardworking ways, her devotion to Saint Anthony, her dignity of bearing.

  My relations are confounded.

  Had he felt that way, they would murmur later, why had he never told her so? Why had he spent a lifetime separated from her? Why had he allowed her to suffer his absence?

  As James continues speaking, the energy in the chapel shifts. I become physically unsettled, and Celia grabs my hand. Through tears, I watch my mother’s portrait blur behind the small lake of candlelight. She is just nineteen in the Tijuana studio photograph, but with the contained look of a woman of thirty. James reinscribes my parents’ half-century union as a benevolent agreement signed solely by our father, where he had generously “released the reins” of their marriage to his wife’s considerable will. Cowardice and self-interest had nothing to do with it. Suddenly the containment begins to crumble. My brother’s voice in the foreground, I watch the expression of her portrait change into one of entrenched fury.

  Is she angry with me? I worry, my heart pounding. Have I betrayed her by doubting my brother’s words? I am a fifty-two-year-old woman, yet these are the thoughts of a little girl.

  Celia hands me a bottle of water. I try to steady my breath and the palpitations in my chest. I grow dizzy. Have I come all this way to have my mother leave me like this? I am staring not only at my mother’s portrait,
but at the portrait of my own prison: my absolute impotence as a Mexican woman under the ultimate authority of my brother’s words. They render me guilty and shamed.

  Is this not also what my mother suffered? The self-blame, the lie of her father’s integrity, her elder brother’s authority, her mother’s complicity in this legacy of male neglect? The same neglect proffered Elvira by her only son and a benign but weak-hearted husband?

  Suddenly, there is the sound of glass breaking but James continues without interruption. Celia quietly rises, goes to check on the altar, yet there is no sign of disturbance.

  Later, after the other testimonials and a slide show of our mother’s near-century-long life, I gradually recover myself. La familia begins to slowly exit. I cross over to the casket to observe one last time my mother’s reposing body when I notice the shattered glass of a large mortuary candle that hangs red and broken just above Elvira’s head. Celia spots it at the same moment.

  “Her spirit is so strong, Cherríe,” she says.

  * * *

  When I returned to my sister’s home after the Rosary, I stayed up all night drafting a eulogy for my mother’s funeral that refused the pen. It was as if James had stolen my words and I was left speechless. I scratched at my pages of notes, trying to unravel the intricate knot of what her life meant to all of us—my mother’s surviving siblings, our cousins, nephews, nieces, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren; but all I could arrive at was: my mother, the family matriarch, has died, carrying a great llanto of discontent inside her.

  The next morning, I stood at that Roman Catholic pulpit, where the representatives of the god I had renounced upon my womanhood were authorized to speak. So I had no real authority to speak, I knew, more certainly at that moment than at any juncture in my life. I knew that regardless of how JoAnn and I had foolishly tried to ensure we would have the last word on our mother’s life, I could not speak, not fully.

  I could not say that I had not believed my mother’s protestations, her pose for strangers in an Anglo world. I could not say that I had been the recipient of different messages; that she had told me discordant things, desires she could not live up to, but that perhaps were once tasted in the urban freedom of 1930s Tijuana.

  I could not say that in my heart, I understood her body like a lover, because the wants of women are not foreign to me; and that I was not afraid to hold her as a daughter of that knowing. I could not profess what I knew to be so; that my mother was a woman of unyielding poderes that would not be suppressed.

  The possession of the mestiza mother by the white patriarchs. This is what I felt for Elvira, looking out upon that funeral congregation. This censored knowing tied my tongue, muted the underground stirrings of insurgent ancestors. But standing at that pulpit, a memory spirit broke through me, and my eulogy became a rebellion.

  ROUNDHOUSE

  I walk about our Oakland home como una sonámbula, unable to place the missing in any one spot. The lingering absence of my mother is evident in each and every shadowy corner and creaking floorboard. It permeates the very air of the house. But I am spent of spirit; only a numbing sadness remains.

  Seeing this, Celia slips out of the house and, hours later, returns with a small piece of furniture to serve as an altar for my mother’s passing. It would provide a location for my loss. “For a full year,” she says. But as Celia and I carry the wooden cabinet up the two flights of brick stairs, Celia misses a step and falls on the second-floor landing, breaking her leg.

  One week later, she is back in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism.

  She had awoken that morning with her back racked with pain. At first, we thought it was a muscle spasm from a long and strenuous week of carrying around the weight of her broken leg. Finally, she asked a family friend, a young massage therapist, to come over to help dislodge the disabling knots in her back. After hours of work, when the pain became unbearable, Celia called me downstairs to get her eagle feather and tobacco. Invoking the Winnemem spirit of Grandma Flora, who had thirty years before healed a traumatized and ruptured Celia, she holds the feather and instructs Alma and me in her own healing.

  As Alma’s fingers follow a huge marble of pain through a network of roadblocks, I blow the cigar’s smoke into every site of stoppage. Together, the three of us travel with that knot of excruciating pain up and through Celia’s long torso until at last she feels the blockage burst, spilling a battery of tiny pellets into her chest.

  Later that night, Celia’s discomfort persisted and we ended up in the emergency room. After many hours of testing, the embolism was discovered, but, as the physician explained, none of the blood clots was big enough to block the artery to her heart. That one large marble of pain, which Celia had felt travel up her back, had been a blood clot headed for her heart. This near-death incursion, so close to my mother’s death, hit us both hard. It was as if an undercurrent of messages was trying to reach us, but I would not heed them.

  * * *

  I remember.

  At my mother’s burial.

  The monsignor had handed the two brass crucifixes that sat upon Elvira’s casket to my sister and me. I felt the wet of the monsignor’s breath in my ear as he leaned into me and whispered words I could not discern. But a chill ran through me. And I was left disturbed, unsettled.

  I remember.

  The early morning following the funeral. The call that takes only a few minutes. JoAnn comes into the bedroom to tell me James has demanded to see her.

  “I don’t want her,” meaning me, “to come. If you bring her, I’ll leave.”

  Within a half hour, they are seated outside at a nearby Starbucks. He has already stopped the promised check for the trio of musicians that had played for our mother’s burial. Now he has only one question:

  “Did you know what Cherríe was going to say in her eulogy?”

  JoAnn quickly searches his heated face. She has been subpoenaed to appear and on this witness stand, she is allowed only a yes or no response. No is an indictment of her younger sister, isolates me as the sole culprit in what James perceives as a conspiracy against him. But she feels it, his seething indignation, and the truth is, JoAnn had not known.

  “No,” she responds.

  After that, she is not allowed to speak and my brother spews out all the rage he holds toward me.

  JoAnn described his anger as like nothing she had ever witnessed. “Like he was possessed,” she said. “It was so ugly, Cherríe, the things he said about you.”

  She did not have to tell me. I had already read it on his face from the distance of the pulpit—felt the palpable sense of his hands around my throat.

  That day over a Starbucks coffee, my brother had the wherewithal to stay the hand of his grief-stricken anger, tossing in my sister as a buffer to bear the brunt of it.

  “I felt my mom protecting me,” JoAnn said, “like this great shield came up between us. I heard James’s words, but I could not feel them. They couldn’t get to me.”

  Perhaps this, too, was the deeper intention in the sequence of events: that my sister was able to feel our mother finally rise in her defense.

  * * *

  Once Celia was discharged from the hospital, I wrapped up the crucifix and sent it on to James. This was intended for you, I wrote. Then Celia and I, along with Rafa and Erin, jumped into the car and drove three hours north to Winnemem Wintu land. I had invited Erin to bring her pure love of her grandmother with us. And to bear witness.

  We were to sit before the Winnemem fire in gratitude for Celia’s life and to pray for healing. And for protection.

  As Celia limps into the roundhouse on crutches, Chief Caleen, Grandma Flora’s daughter, hardly acknowledges the “accident”; for it is not an accident, the chief concurred, when the synchronicity of events cannot be explained away by logic. Celia had taken the fall for me and they both knew she was strong enough to handle it.

  For, although Celia sat with her leg in a cast propped up on a milk crate, staring at the roun
dhouse fire, I was the broken one. I was the one needing healing. I was the one whose grief spun like a filero splitting my already ruptured heart. Celia had merely stepped in the way of the blade in my defense.

  When the Winnemem chief finally lays her hands on me, the root smoke enters me hungrily. I long to be devoured by it. But there is no mystery to this healing. I inhale and breathe out the diablitos that have occupied me for a lifetime. Or so I pray.

  The fire in the center of the roundhouse smells of old oak, peach tree, and acorn-ground earth. We watch the fire for many hours. As we pray into the night, the charred branches take on the shape of serpents and wagging tongues. Crooked-limbed men split apart in the belly of the heat; their mocking mouths melt into ember before turning to silent gray ash.

  “Go home and take care of your family,” the chief tells me, after many hours with the fire. She means my woman and our tribe of kids. “You know how to do this. They need you.”

  This is not what I expect to hear. I came to be “healed,” to be relieved of my burden. But she tells me to go back home and shoulder it again. My mother would’ve done the same; did the same with every loss she encountered.

  “Look at your son,” she goes on. She has smoked him with the root. I do, and his look is simply of the most profound and unequivocal compassion.

  “He’s afraid that you loved your mother so much, you’ll have nothing left over to love him.”

  But loving him is easy, I think. There is always so much left over for him, siempre.

  Loving my woman is harder. We are not blood relations, so we imagine we can choose. Our loving is bound by nothing more than the whimsical movement of the heart, the infidelity of circumstance. When does it get to be too much? Too many bills, too many kids adopted into one overtaxed heart? But the truth was that if I closed my eyes, inhaled the smoke of that burning prayer, and saw only with my heart, there was nothing to distinguish the loss of my mother from the prospect of the loss of this familia, forged by this fire and built with my bare hands in the grasp of Celia’s.