“But at least Zorro speaks the right language.”
Then somebody would hoot, “Yeah, Hollywood inglés. Look at the actors who play Zorro, Gringos every one. John Carroll. Reed Handley. Tyrone Power. ¡Mierda!”
That was what Zorro did to us. Better than Gene Autry but still a phony Spaniard, while all the indios y mestizos were bit players.
That was no doubt the reason why our favorite was the Cisco Kid. Even the one gringo who played the role, Warner Baxter, could have passed for a Mexican. More than one kid said he looked like my old man, so I was one of those who accepted Warner Baxter. Somebody even thought that he was Mexican but had changed his name so he could get parts in Hollywood—you know how Hollywood is. But we conveniently leaped from that to cheering for the “real” Cisco Kids without wondering how they ever got parts in that Hollywood: Gilbert Roland, César Romero, Duncan Renaldo. With the arch-sidekick of all time, Chris-Pin Martin, who was better any day than Fuzzy Knight, Smiley Burnette, or Gabby Hayes.
“Sí, Ceesco,” we’d lisp to each other and laugh, trying to sound like Chris-Pin.
We’d leave the theater laughing and chattering, bumping and elbowing each other past the lobby. There Flash Gordo would stare at us as if trying to remember whether or not we had bought tickets, thoughtfully clicking his false teeth like castanets. We’d quiet down as we filed past, looking at that toupee of his that was, on closer inspection, old hair blackened with shoe polish that looked like dyed rat fur. Hasta la vista, Flash, I’d think. See you again next week.
One Saturday afternoon when I returned home there was a beat-up old truck parked in front of the empty house next door and a slow parade in and out. In the distance I saw the curious stare of a towhead about my age.
When I rushed into the house, my three-year-old brother ran up to me and excitedly told me in baby talk, “La huera. La huera, huera.”
“Hush,” Mama said.
Uncle Tito, who was Mama’s unmarried younger brother, winked at me. “Blondie’s wearing a halter top and shorts,” he said. “In the backyard next door.”
“Hush,” Mama said to him, scowling, and he winked at me again.
That night when I was supposed to be sleeping, I heard Mama and Papa arguing. “Well,” Mama said, “what do you think about that? They swept up the gutters of Oklahoma City. What was too lightweight to settle got blown across the panhandle to New Mexico. Right next door.”
“Now, Josefa,” Papa said, “you have to give people a chance.”
“Halter top and shorts,” Mama snipped. “What will the children think?”
“The only child who’s going to notice is Tito, and he’s old enough, although sometimes he doesn’t act it.”
But then my eyelids started to get heavy, and the words turned into a fuzzy murmur.
One day after school that next week, Chango decided that we needed some new adventures. We took the long way home all the way past Fourth Street Elementary School, where all the pagan Protestants went. “Only Catholics go to heaven,” Sister Mary Margaret warned us. “Good Catholics.” While her cold eye sought out a few of us and chilled our hearts with her stare.
But after school the thaw set in. We wanted to see what those candidates for hell looked like—those condemned souls who attended public school. And I wondered: if God had only one spot left in heaven, and He had to choose between a bad Catholic who spoke Spanish and a good Protestant who spoke English, which one He would let in. A fearful possibility crossed my mind, but I quickly dismissed it.
We rambled along, picking up rocks and throwing them at tree trunks, looking for lizards or maybe even a lost coin dulled by weather and dirt but still very spendable. What we found was nothing. The schoolyard was empty, so we turned back toward home. It was then, in the large empty field across from the Rio Valley Creamery, that we saw this laggard, my new neighbor, the undesirable Okie.
Chango gave a shout of joy. There he was. The enemy. Let’s go get him! We saddled our imaginary horses and galloped into the sunset. Meanwhile, John Wayne, which was the name I called him then, turned his flour-white face and blinked his watery pale eyes at us in fear. Then he took off across the field in a dead run, which only increased our excitement, as if it were an admission that he truly was the enemy and deserved thrashing.
He escaped that day, but not before he got a good look at us. I forgot what we called him besides Okie gabacho gringo cabrón. In my memory he was John Wayne to our Cisco Kid, maybe because of the movie about the Alamo.
That then became our favorite after-school pastime. We’d make our way toward the Fourth Street Elementary School looking for our enemy, John Wayne. As cunning as enemies usually are, we figured that he’d be on the lookout, so we stalked him Indian-style. We missed him the next day, but the day after that when we were still a long block away, he suddenly stopped and lifted his head like a wild deer and seemed to feel or scent alien vibrations in the air, because he set off at a dogtrot toward home.
“Head him off at the pass!” Chango Cisco shouted, and we headed across toward Fifth Street. But John Wayne ran too fast, so we finally stopped and cut across to Lomas Park to work out a better plan.
We ambushed him the next day. Four of us came around the way he’d expect us to, while the other two of us sneaked the back way to intercept him between home and the elementary school. At the first sight of the stalkers he ran through the open field that was too big to be called a city lot. Chango and I waited for him behind the tamaracks. When he came near, breathing so heavily we could hear his wheeze, and casting quick glances over his shoulder, we stepped out from behind the trees.
He stopped dead. I couldn’t believe anyone could stop that fast. No slow down, no gradual transition. One instant he was running full speed; the next instant he was absolutely immobile, staring at us with fright.
“You!” he said breathlessly, staring straight into my eyes.
“You!” I answered.
“¿Que hablas español?” Chango asked.
His look of fear deepened, swept now with perplexity like a ripple across the surface of water. When he didn’t answer, Chango whooped out a laugh of joy and charged with clenched fists. It wasn’t much of a fight. A couple of punches and a bloody nose and John Wayne was down. When we heard the shouts from the others, Chango turned and yelled to them. That was when John Wayne made his escape. We didn’t follow this time. It wasn’t worth it. There was no fight in him, and we didn’t beat up on sissies or girls.
On the way home it suddenly struck me that since he lived next door, he would tell his mother, who might tell my mother, who would unquestionably tell my father. I entered the house with apprehension. Whether it was fear or conscience didn’t matter.
But luck was with me. That night, although I watched my father’s piercing looks across the dinner table with foreboding (or was it my conscience that saw his looks as piercing?), nothing came of it. Not a word. Only questions about school. What were they teaching us to read and write in English? Were we already preparing for our First Communion? Wouldn’t Grandma be proud when we went to the country next Sunday. I could read for her from my schoolbook, Bible Stories for Children. Only my overambitious father forgot that Bible Stories for Children was a third-grade book that he had bought for me at a church rummage sale. I was barely at the reading level of “Run, Spot. Run.” Hardly exciting fare even for my blind grandmother, who spoke no English and read nothing at all.
Before Sunday, though, there was Saturday. In order to do my share of the family chores and “earn” movie money instead of accepting charity, my father had me pick up in the backyard. I gathered toys that belonged to my little sister and brother, carried a bag of garbage to the heavy galvanized can out back by the shed, even helped pull a few weeds in the vegetable garden. This last was the “country” that my father carried with him to every house we lived in until I grew up and left home. You can take the boy out of the country, as the old saying goes. And in his case it was true.
; I dragged my feet reluctantly out to the tiny patch of yard behind the doll’s house in which we lived, ignoring my mother’s scolding about not wearing out the toes of my shoes.
I must have been staring at the rubber tips of my tennis shoes to watch them wear down, so I didn’t see my arch-enemy across the low fence. I heard him first. A kind of cowardly snivel that jolted me like an electric shock. Without looking I knew who it was.
“You!” he said as I looked across the fence.
“You!” I answered back with hostility.
Then his eyes watered up and his lips twitched in readiness for the blubbering that, in disgust, I anticipated.
“You hate me,” he accused. I squatted down to pick up a rock, not taking my eyes off him. “Because I don’t speak Spanish and I have yellow hair.”
No, I thought, I don’t like you because you’re a sniveler. I wanted to leap the fence and punch him on those twitching lips, but I sensed my father behind me watching. Or was it my conscience again? I didn’t dare turn and look.
“I hate Okies,” I said. To my delight it was as if my itching fist had connected. He all but yelped in pain, though what I heard was a sharp expulsion of air.
“Denver?” The soft, feminine voice startled me, and I looked toward the back stoop of their house. I didn’t see what Tito had made such a fuss about. She was blond and pale as her son and kind of lumpy, I thought, even in the everyday housedress she wore. She tried to smile—a weak, sniveling motion of her mouth that told me how Denver had come by that same expression. Then she stepped into the yard where we boys stared at each other like tomcats at bay.
“Howdy,” she said in a soft funny accent that I figured must be Oklahoma. “I was telling your mother that you boys ought to get together, being neighbors and all. Denver’s in the second grade at the public school.”
Denver backed away from the fence and nestled against his mother’s side. Before I could answer that Immaculate Heart boys didn’t play with sniveling heathens, I heard our back door squeak open, then slam shut.
“I understand there’s a nice movie in town where the boys go Saturday afternoons,” she went on. But she was looking over my head toward whoever had come out of the house.
I looked back and saw Mama. Through the window over the kitchen sink I saw Papa. He’s making sure she and I behave, I thought.
“It would be nice for the boys to go together,” Mama said. She came down the steps and across the yard.
You didn’t ask me! my silent angry self screamed. It’s not fair! You didn’t ask me! But Mama didn’t even look at me; she addressed herself to Mrs. Oklahoma as if Snivel Nose and I weren’t even there.
Then an unbelievable thought occurred to me. For some reason Denver had not told his mama about being chased home from school. Or if he did, he hadn’t mentioned me. He was too afraid, I decided. He knew what would happen if he squealed. But even that left me with an uneasy feeling. I looked at him to see if the answer was on his face. All I got was a weak twitch of a smile and a blink of his pleading eyes.
I was struck dumb by the entire negotiation. It was settled without my comment or consent, like watching someone bargain away my life. When I went back into the house, all of my pent-up anger exploded. I screamed and kicked my heels and even cried—but to no avail.
“You have two choices, young man,” my father warned. “Go to the matinee with Denver or stay in your room.” But his ominous tone of voice told me that there was another choice: a good belting on the rear end.
Of course, this Saturday the Rat House was showing a movie about one of our favorite subjects where the mejicanos whipped the gringos: the Alamo. I had to go. Los Indios were counting on me to let them in.
I walked the few blocks to town, a boy torn apart. One of me hurried eagerly toward the Saturday afternoon adventure. The other dragged his feet, scuffing the toes of his shoes to spite his parents, all the while conscious of this hated stranger walking silently beside him.
When we came within sight of the theater, I felt Denver tense and slow his pace even more than mine. “Your gang is waiting,” he said, and I swear he started to tremble.
What a chicken, I thought. “You’re with me,” I said. But then he had reminded me. What would I tell Chango and the rest of Los Indios?
They came at us with a rush. “What’s he doing here?” Chango snarled.
I tried to explain. They deflected my words and listened instead to the silent fear they heard as they scrutinized Denver. My explanation did not wash, so I tried something in desperation.
“He’s not what you think,” I said. Skepticism and disbelief. “Just because he doesn’t understand Spanish doesn’t mean he can’t be one of us.” Show me! Chango’s expression said. “He’s—he’s—” My voice was so loud that a passerby turned and stared. “He’s an Indian from Oklahoma,” I lied.
“A blond Indian?” They all laughed.
My capacity for lying ballooned in proportion to their disbelief. I grew indignant, angry, self-righteous. “Yes!” I shouted. “An albino Indian!”
The laughs froze in their throats, and they looked at each other, seeing their own doubts mirrored in their friends’ eyes. “Honest to God?” Chango asked.
“Honest to God!”
“Does he have money?”
Denver unfolded a sweaty fist to show the dime in his palm. Chango took it quickly, like a rooster pecking a kernel of corn. “Run to the dime store,” he commanded the fastest of his lackeys. “Get that hard candy that lasts a long time. And hurry. We’ll meet you in the back.”
Denver’s mouth fell open but not a sound emerged. “When we see him running back,” Chango said to me, “you buy the ticket and let us in.” Then he riveted his suspicious eyes on Denver and said, “Talk Indian.”
I don’t remember what kind of gibberish Denver faked. It didn’t have to be much, because our runner had dashed across the street and down the block and was already sprinting back.
Our seven-for-the-price-of-one worked as always. When the theater was dark, we moved to our favorite seats. In the meantime, I had drawn Denver aside and maliciously told him he had better learn some Spanish. When we came to the crucial part of the movie, he had to shout what I told him.
It was a memorable Saturday. The hard sugar candy lasted through two cartoons and half of the first feature. We relived the story of the Alamo again—we had seen this movie at least twice before, and we had seen other versions more times than I can remember. When the crucial, climactic attack began, we started our chant. I elbowed Denver to shout what I had taught him.
“¡Maten los gringos!” Kill the gringos! Then others in the audience took up the chant, while Flash Gordo ran around in circles trying to shush us up.
I sat in secret pleasure, a conqueror of two worlds. To my left was this blond Indian shouting heresies he little dreamed of, while I was already at least as proficient in English as he. On my right were my fellow tribesmen, who had accepted my audacious lie and welcomed this albino redskin into our group.
But memory plays its little tricks. Years later, when I couldn’t think of Denver’s name, I would always remember the Alamo—and John Wayne. There were probably three or four movies about that infamous mission, but John Wayne’s was the one that stuck in my mind. Imagine my shock when I learned that his movie had not been made until 1960, by which time I was already through high school, had two years of college, and had gone to work. There was no way we could have seen the John Wayne version when I was in the first grade.
Looking back, I realized that Wayne, as America’s gringo hero, was forever to me the bigoted Indian hater of The Searchers fused with the deserving victim of the attacking Mexican forces at the Alamo—the natural enemy of the Cisco Kid.
Another of my illusions shattered hard when I later learned that in real life Wayne had married a woman named Pilar or Chata or maybe both. That separated the man, the actor, from the characters he portrayed and left me in total confusion.
But
then life was never guaranteed to be simple. For I saw the beak of the chick I was at six years old pecking through the hard shell of my own preconceptions. Moving into an alien land. First hating, then becoming friends with aliens like my blond Indian Okie friend, Denver, and finally becoming almost an alien myself.
The New Negro
DARRYL PINCKNEY
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly, late in my childhood career as a snoop, like discovering that babies didn’t come from an exchange of spinach during a kiss. The great thing about finding out I was a Negro was that I could look forward to going places in the by and by that I would not have been asked to as a white boy.
There was nothing to be afraid of as long as we were polite and made good grades. After all, the future, back then, assembled as we were on the glossy edge of the New Frontier, belonged to us, the Also Chosen. The future was something my parents were either earning or keeping for my two sisters and me, like the token checks that came on birthdays from grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts.
The future was put away for us, the way dark-blue blazers were put away until we could grow into them, the way meat-loaf was wrapped up for the next nervous quiz meal and answers to our stormy looks were stored up for that tremendous tomorrow. Every scrap of the future mattered, but I didn’t have to worry my breezy head about it because someone was seeing to things and had been ever since my great-grandfather’s grandmother stepped on the auction block.
All men were created equal, but even so, lots of mixed messages with sharp teeth waited under my Roy Rogers pillow. You were just as good as anyone else out there, but they—whoever “they” were—had rigged things so that you had to be close to perfect just to break even. You had nothing to fear, though every time you left the house for a Spelling Bee or a Music Memory Contest the future of the future hung in the balance. You were not an immigrant, there were no foreign accents, weird holidays, or funny foods to live down, but still you did not belong to the great beyond out there; yet though you did not belong it was your duty as the Also Chosen to get up and act as though you belonged, especially when no one wanted you to.
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