By the next ceremony, no longer fearing the names, I could revel in their cadence. I observed how mom greeted her godfather, Padrino Julio, at the front door, but the second he put on that white ceremonial cap, he became Baba Funque. Baba Funque. Now, that’s a name made of music. Testing the waters, I approached her other godfather. “Padrino Tony, what is your Ocha name?” “Oluchande,” he told me. “Oluchande,” I repeated. It felt marvelous to say. And as he smiled, I realized I had dropped my middle name years ago, fatigued by its difference. Meanwhile, this circle welcomed the complexity of new names in new languages. Time to pay attention, Qui Qui. Time to ask if you can accompany mom to the next tumbao or bembe.
Problem was, many ceremonies—big ones, in my home—were off-limits. The fact of my occasional inclusion made these exclusions personal. As if some devotion was too full-on, some mysteries too powerful for fragile Qui Qui. This was not about age, I was pretty certain, but about mom’s tally of my intellectual and spiritual limitations.
* * *
—
Later that night, by the flow of the downstairs conversation, I knew real shit was under way. Batá drums thickened the atmosphere like humidity. I couldn’t make out words, only general urgency. Some voices, I recognized. Sedo, my not-quite stepfather, a Boricua contractor mom had been seeing for years, got in a word or two. Padrino Julio’s familiar cadence was lilting, with his signature trace of giggle. He was mom’s mentor in the religion, an elderly Santero Obá whose kindness softened my reticence. He aimed affection my way without asking permission or demanding reciprocation; for that, I favored him. I knew mom was downstairs, too, as she had called me to greet Padrino Julio y le pidiera la bendición. I could not hear her at present, though. An unfamiliar male voice held forth, his authority galloping in on quick words and melodic inflection. No one interrupted or spoke over this powerful man. In their silence, I inferred deference and profound respect. I stood at the upstairs landing for a very long time, leaning over, hand to ear. Who was this houseguest? What did his presence signal?
One step at a time, that’s how I descended. Telling myself turn back with every inch of progress. Toward the bottom I cursed my own curiosity. I sat in protest, hoping to stall my forward motion. But my desire to advance was strong and I descended the steps in a seated position. At last the living room unfolded before me. Three people sat at the table—mom, Sedo, and Padrino Julio. There was no strange visitor in sight. Mom was the stranger. She was a man. From her mouth flowed the voice I had heard upstairs. A plosive, nasal Spanish with some dialect spliced in. What creole tongue, what pidgin words these were, I hadn’t a clue. A twang of the ancient rode the cadence. By the sound, this was a frisky spirit, and wise. Even the bones in mom’s face were changed. Her slender nose widened, her overbite reversed so that her bottom jaw thrust forward as if rolling a marble between her front teeth. She was squatter now, her usually soft shoulders broad and firm. Se montó el espíritu.
The men sat with her, alert and listening. Padrino Julio fed her rum and asked questions, the answers to which Sedo transcribed in a marble notebook. He filled the pages quickly, his pen resting only when he needed a new page. Occasionally Padrino Julio sought clarity before the next question. The spelling of some unfamiliar town, perhaps, that he’d check on later. “Can you repeat that person’s name, please?” She-not-she answered, then lifted Bacardi to her lips, tipped the jug, and swigged down a third of the nearly full rum. Surely she would vomit or seize. Aside from a beer during spring cleaning, mom never drank. But she slammed down the bottle and the interview continued apace.
My body railed, hating the scene. Knees trembling madly, teeth chattering, fingers squeezing my jaw into silence. I was a crab in the undertow, flailing as the current churned. I wanted to scream, “Stop! You’re gonna hurt my mom!” To run and wipe sweat from this face that was not hers, to reach down her throat and yank out the spirit. First Guillo then Big Vic then Mary Lou, now mom? Everyone I loved, lost. Mom wasn’t mine, I now understood. Never had been. She belonged to herself and the province of spirits, but never me. My thoughts turned to that distant Fourth of July. How hard my cousins danced, how propulsive and insistent their hips had been, as if conducted by some magnificent force. That gathering had been secular, this one was spiritual. And yet, a pulse is a pulse is a pulse. A drum is a drum is a drum. Yes, it was true, and here lay the evidence: dance and possession were dialects off the same mother tongue. I spoke neither. English, my best language, had no vocabulary for the possession nor the dance. And English was what I was made of. My words and my world did not align. That, perhaps, made me a lost soul.
* * *
—
Over an hour in, mom’s stamina raged on. Eventually her breath grew labored. She stopped speaking, started again. She was disoriented, a bull in a ring going down slowly. Suddenly she stood with such thrust and violence that her chair flew back and crashed into the wall. Upright for the first time in more than an hour, mom lost her balance and collapsed in Sedo’s arms. Shallow breaths, hair matted on her forehead. She looked around at our living room with vague familiarity: that wallpaper, this table, the stereo. Sedo chuckled, “Welcome back, negra. You can relax now.” “Cuidao,” Padrino Julio said when she stood, “all that Bacardi will go to your head.” He chuckled as mom saw the half-empty bottle, dazed. Then she walked out back without so much as a stumble. “What happened?” she asked as night air swallowed them. Padrino Julio and Sedo began to answer as I stared at the still life, searching for clues.
So carefully had mom explained her activism. She had invited me into her grassroots advocacy, tutoring me on the hidden crimes against Puerto Rican women. There was a know your roots, guard your truth, never forget vibe in those lectures—a motherhood strategy full of warrior specificity. The intentionality of those explanations only made the mysteries smack of abandonment. What of our family’s hidden deaths, my cousins’ disappearances, her blossoming faith? No motherly sermons provided those answers. Every time a riddle beckoned me closer, a fog descended, obscuring my view. My life required explication, and I didn’t have the language to make it make sense.
God, give me a space where this fits—all of this loss and life. Give me a language to voice the scream so others can hear and understand, and in the understanding I can be made whole. Make me whole. God, help me find the right words for begin and end because right now the death and the dance overlap in ways that make a mess. And even as I prayed I had to laugh, because what god, precisely, was I praying to?
I yearned for a home that required no explanation, for a Western frame so I might see that stuff like my white friends saw it. Yeah, Vietnamese and non-Latino Black friends shrugged at mom’s altars, unfamiliar. But too often, white friends paled when greeted at my door by Eleguá, holder of all pathways, center of the crossroads. He was a cement-filled conch shell with cowry eyes, placed in a clay dish in the foyer. A few pennies and a shot of espresso lay before him, tokens of gratitude. Worse than the disgust on my friends’ faces, though, was the embarrassment that flooded me in response. Shame’s hot furnace lapped at my throat as I wished mom would worship a little bit whiter. Faced with my guests’ disgust, I remained silent rather than apologize for mom, but I also remained silent rather than defend her. More than once, I had the painful realization that friends who insisted sleepovers be at their place were doing so by parental mandate. After hosting an initial hangout, their parents had picked them up and seen Eleguá, deciding this home was no place for their child. My friends confessed difficult conversations with their parents, torn because they had known and loved my mom’s vibrant and warm hospitality. These parents weren’t so cruel as to disallow the friendship, but I couldn’t shake an anger that my Brown mother had been seen as threatening. Nor could I deny, though, that I often feared her gifts and her proximity to gods I’d never met.
I so wanted to take my dad’s side, join his disavowal of any god, his asse
rtion that religion was the root of all evil. It would have brought a perverse relief to write off mom’s gift as gremlins of brain chemistry, to name some psychological diagnosis. But such a dismissal would have denied my gut. Belief, I knew, was beside the point. You don’t stroll through a city going, “Do I believe in the skyscraper, the clouds reflected in its windows, the shadow it casts?” That’s a question for lunatics and self-important pedants. The question was not did I believe in god, los Egun, the Orisha, Ifá. I had seen enough to know that shit went down whether or not I believed. The question was if my curiosity would lead me toward the altars and voices of the spirits, or whether I’d shut the door. Would I look at or look away?
Sometimes I stood in our living room staring at a wood and brass National Organization for Women plaque hanging on the wall. The word hero was engraved above mom’s name. It was accompanied by other framed letters and taped proclamations. State representative Ralph Acosta commended mom’s invaluable work “meeting the health needs of our community.” The “our” had an assertive, celebratory tone—one Philly Rican leader tipping his hat to another. There was mom’s letter of appointment to the state chiropractic board under Governor Casey. An older Memo of Appreciation from Governor Thornburgh beside it. A citation from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives full of calligraphed whereases and therefores. Things she did not file away. Things she didn’t keep secret. I was proud of them. Mom curated this self in the living room. Meanwhile the Orisha, aside from the ones who by mandate perched at a home’s entrance, lived in the sunroom, away from foot traffic. Mom was a warrior out in the world but self-protection mattered in her home. So she hid her altars from the ignorant gaze of friends, neighbors, family. Even, perhaps, from me.
* * *
—
Heat danced on the South Dakota tarmac. Mom had left CHOICE Hotline and now thrived as a youth ambassador for the American Friends Service Committee, the activism arm of the Philadelphia Quakers. A bootstraps Boricua within a white service organization, mom was a natural choice for outreach to teens of color. This was national work for a national organization, and while each new assignment took her farther from her community, I sometimes got to join as mom’s horizons expanded. We would spend a week on the Rosebud reservation, where she would meet with Lakota Sioux teens and discuss everything from alcohol addiction to safe sex.
Mom welcomed the shamanistic opportunity. The Lakota Sioux greeted her as a recognized indigenous Taína, spirit medium, and natural healer. Our trip would culminate in an invitation-only Sun Dance. Mom repeatedly impressed upon me the honor of this invitation. “This is not something taken lightly. You are to behave with utmost respect and deference.” Our rental car cut a scenic route west. I followed the map’s unruly folds, reconciling its printed landmarks with the barren landmasses around me. Through dust and haze, the Black Hills beckoned. Dark, low mounds. “Sacred ground,” mom said. I knew the Jersey Shore, New York City, and Six Flags, but I’d never laid eyes on the belly of our nation. Which is what this landscape resembled—a flat ochre belly.
Crossing onto the reservation, the road became a red stripe dusting into the distance. Sparseness was the only decipherable city planning. Mom drove slower than usual, and we both paid attention. A corrugated steel structure sat back from the road. Topped with slanting tar paper. There were no windows, just a doorway and freshly hung laundry. Whatever held card castles together, the same principle seemed to be at play here.
“Is that a house?” I asked.
“What else would it be, Quiara? Coño, please do not be rude or ignorant around the elders.”
No power lines ran by the road. “Do they have running water?”
“Some do.” Flor’s and Nuchi’s and Tía Toña’s blocks came to mind: burnt buildings, empty vials scattered, derelict lots full of weeds and old tires. Their homes tugged at my memory: plastic sheets for windows, duct tape holding up the ceiling. In North Philly, poverty was the cupboard’s last slice of bread, offered to Qui Qui who had come for a visit. Our nation, it seemed, offered up a panoply of invisibilities. I stared out the window, quiet and observant.
Mom spent much of her time with a Sioux elder named Hildegard, a stout woman with thick braids worn a variety of ways. Hours passed as they whispered about women’s work, spirit stuff. Though she was sturdy and physically capable, age had softened the woman, and mom seemed angular, almost juvenile at her side. Seeing mom in the position of student relaxed me. At last she was not the wisest in the room. Meanwhile, local teens took me to the creek and schooled me on dip. “Tuck it behind your bottom lip,” as if that made the wad any less like coffee grounds. We perched on river rocks, holding menthol magic wands, flipping through well-worn teen idol mags. These kids lived in decent if cobbled homes, with windows and running water and disheveled bedrooms just like mine. But I kept thinking of the shacks and lean-tos and then in turn scolding my memory: stop staring. Mom had frequently told me, “You have no clue, Quiara.” Though I hated that phrase, offered with more weariness than judgment in the face of things I didn’t understand, I now conceded its accuracy.
Mom and I had attended powwows in Fairmount Park at Philly’s perimeter. We liked the dance competitions, how the drums met our guts. Mom always knew which vendors sold good crystals and hand-grew their smudge sticks. And sometimes they’d say, “I knew you were coming! I have something special for you!” But the Sun Dance was no raucous celebration, no shopping fix. A field of blankets stretched beneath the sky. Families filled the expanse, whispering and sharing meals. Meat in clear broth arrived at my blanket, delivered on the hands of a quiet stranger. At the field’s center, young men danced, their pectorals pierced by bone ornaments. The piercings were attached to long ribbons, which in turn were tied to a tree. Through their left and right breasts, the dancers were attached to the pole and therefore to each other. Their footsteps transformed earth into drum. The soil beneath me vibrated as though the men were attached to me. The drum’s voice came at me on the breeze, quilting me and mom to strangers on nearby blankets, sonic stitchery. The ribbons, each one a radius, reminded me of drawing mom’s circle garden in the dirt.
The ceremony had been going on for days. We joined for a long afternoon in the home stretch, the culminating hours. The drumming seemed to bolster the dancers’ fatigue, and they undulated between energy and lethargy. At the ceremony’s climax the men danced backward, outward and thrusting, until the bones ripped and broke from their skin. They were free. I watched, stunned, as they bled. Crimson trickled from the wounds and drew root-shaped paths down their chests. Mom saw how quiet I’d become.
“Women bleed during childbirth, but men don’t get to make that blood sacrifice. In this ceremony, though, they do.” I wasn’t sure if it was her interpretation or something learned. But it resonated, felt personalized even. Blood sacrifice, it seemed, transcended my West Philly living room. Blood sacrifice was impervious to my voyeuristic perch and provincial qualms. It was not just mom’s method of alienating me. Here was sacrifice of the self, of the sanctity of one’s own skin, as a quest for completeness. Maybe in this life begging for explanation, I was the answer I was looking for—my own body, made of blood, bone, and language.
Soon after I landed back from South Dakota, my search began. For god, perhaps, or for my true mother tongue. Or for the fulcrum where those two balanced. I had often struggled to squeeze my reality into words that didn’t fit me. Now I would go searching for better languages.
Sedo Buys Me an Upright; Language of Bach
In Perez homes throughout Philly, womanhood was rampant. Girls, cousins, tías, abuelas, primas, hermanas, madrinas. To keep up with a Perez female, a male needed stamina and resilience. Facing the gale of our hungry bellies and heartbreaks, a man’s sail would require sturdy stitches. Mercedes “Sedo” Sanchez was such a man. His chest was so thick it could bust open a barrel. His wide smile showed off big teeth, with gaps broad as harmonica
holes. The main gap—smack-dab in the middle—was probably the first thing in his mouth and his teeth just grew around it. On his expansive forehead, atop thickest eyebrow, sat a penny-size mole. A mole like a setting sun. On another man the mark would’ve been a blemish but on Sanchez it was regal. He cut a striking figure at six foot two.
People stood straighter when Sanchez walked into the room. Curse words were folded and tucked in back pockets. Hands were presented for shaking. Out on the street, folks hollered as he passed. “Sanchez!” The name, said aloud, put some polish on the day. His joint, the Sanchez Bar and Lounge, was an after-dark oasis at the run-down corner of 5th and Dauphin. Pool tables, disco balls, a neon jukebox with bubble tubes, rum bottles aglow above blue-lit shelves. Tuxedoed waiters traversed the crowd, silver platters perched on their fingertips. A dollar Heineken got you entry to this barrio paradise, and if the bouncer was a no-show, Sanchez manned the door.
He was a well-known builder north of Girard, who wore polished loafers to his construction sites and got drywall dust under his nails. Then he returned the next day, loafers shiny and polished, handing out payday envelopes to his crew. He didn’t have employees, he had guys. Sanchez even smelled good when walking his work zones, with a gait that was calmer and less showy than swagger. His presence quieted people like an ocean vista. The sea doesn’t have to act strong and neither did he.
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