Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  “Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back to her roses.

  Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust from their bodies.

  “I’m tired,” Victor said.

  “Of everything,” Thomas added.

  They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the promise to pay it all back.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make any difference anyhow.”

  “Probably not, enit?”

  “Nope.”

  Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy story teller who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind the seats.

  “I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends would give you too much shit about it.”

  Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas something, anything.

  “Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”

  Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told this story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”

  Victor smiled.

  “I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,” Victor said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something. Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.”

  “Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”

  Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up his driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.

  “Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got to ask one favor.”

  Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted back. “What do you want?”

  “Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.

  “Just once?”

  “Just once.”

  Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.

  from Mama’s Girl

  VERONICA CHAMBERS

  Ten years before Air Jordans, I learned to fly. It’s like the way brothers pimp-walk to a basketball hoop with a pumped-up ball and throw a few shots, hitting each one effortlessly. Like a car idling before a drag race, there is an invitation, perhaps even a threat, in the way their sneakers soft-shoe the pavement and the ball rolls around in their hands.

  As double-dutch girls, we had our own prance. Three of us and a couple of ropes. It had to be at least three girls—two to turn, one to jump. We knew the corners where you could start a good game. Like guys going up for a layup, we started turning nice and slow. Before jumping in, we would rock back and forth, rocking our knees in order to propel ourselves forward; rocking our hips just to show how cute we were. It wasn’t a question of whether we’d make it in, we’d conquered that years before. The challenge was to prove how long we could jump. The tricks we would do—pop-ups, mambo, around the world—were just for show, just to work the other girls’ nerves. The real feat was longevity. So when we picked the corner where we were going to double-dutch, we came with ropes and patience.

  There is a space between the concrete and heaven where the air is sweeter and your heart beats faster. You drop down and then you jump up again and you do it over and over until the rope catches on your foot or your mother calls you home. You keep your arms to your sides, out of the way, so they don’t get tangled in the rope. Your legs feel powerful and heavy as they beat the ground. When you mambo back and forth, it’s like dancing. When you do around the world, it’s like a ballet dancer’s pirouette. In the rope, if you’re good enough, you can do anything and be anything you want.

  Beverly Road go swinging,

  Beverly Road go swing-ing,

  Beverly Road go swinging,

  Beverly Road go swing-ing.

  On my side of the street is where we jumped rope because Drena, who lived by me, had the best rope, and like cattle, we followed the rope. The best kind of jumping rope was telephone wire because it was light, yet sturdy, and it hit the sidewalk with a steady rhythm—tat tat tat. The telephone wire that connected your phone to the jack was not long enough. The only way to get telephone rope was from someone who worked for the telephone company. Drena’s uncle was a telephone repairman so she always had rope.

  The worst kind of rope was the kind you bought in the store—cloth ropes with red plastic handles that came in plastic packages with pictures of little blond girls on them. First of all, they were too short. It would take two or three to make one side of a good double-dutch rope. Second, the ropes were too soft for serious jumping (which only made sense because everybody knew that white girls were no kind of competition when it came to jumping rope). But in a clutch, you could run a soft rope under a hose and get it good and wet to make it heavier. The only problem was keeping it wet.

  Miss Mary Mack-Mack-Mack,

  All dressed in black-black-black,

  With silver buttons-buttons-buttons

  All down her back-back-back.

  We would split into teams. Only two positions: jumper and turner. You had to be good at both. No captain, just Shannon with her big mouth and Lisa, who really couldn’t jump, but talked a lot of junk. With two people turning and one person jumping and everybody else sitting around, waiting for their turn, it wasn’t hard to start a fight.

  “Pick your feet up! Pick your feet up!”

  “I hear you.”

  “Well then, act like it.”

  “You just mind your business, okay?”

  Sometimes when I was jumping, I would catch someone on my team yanking the rope so she could call a time-out. Usually, it was Drena because it was her rope and she thought that meant she didn’t have to play fair.

  “Uh-huh. Start over. Jeanine is turning double-handed,” Drena would say. To us, double-handed was something like being crippled or blind. When a double-handed person turned, the ropes would hit against each other, spiraling in lopsided arcs. It not only messed up our jumping, it looked ugly, shaky, and uneven. A good double-dutch rope looked like a wire eggbeater in motion.

  “It’s okay. It’s fine,” I would say.

  Drena wouldn’t be swayed. “Veronica, don’t try to cover up. Everybody on the block knows Jeanine is double-handed.”

  “I am not,” Jeanine would mumble.

  If there wasn’t someone to take Jeanine’s place, Drena would wrap up the rope and declare the game over. Then we’d go back to her house and watch TV. Drena was the only girl on the block to have her own room, plus a canopy bed, a dressing table, a TV, and a stereo. Staring blanky at Gilligan’s Island, I would ask Drena, “Why’d you mess up the game? You know Jeanine is not double-handed.”

  She would roll her eyes. “I’m so sick of those girls. I was just trying to get us out of there.” But other times, she would stick to her story and refuse to budge. “You know that girl is double-handed. Shut up and pass the Munchos.”

  Ooh, she thinks she’s bad.

  Baby, I know I’m bad.

&nbs
p; Ooh, she thinks she’s cool.

  Cool enough to steal your dude.

  We’d meet at about three-thirty, after we’d changed from our school clothes into our play clothes. Then we’d jump until the parents started coming home. Most of our parents worked nine to five in Manhattan and it took them about an hour to get home. We knew it was coming up on six o’clock when we saw the first grown-up in business clothes walking down the hill from the Utica Avenue bus stop.

  Sometimes a grown-up woman, dressed in the stockings and sneakers that all our mothers wore for the long commute home, would jump in—handbag and all—just to show us what she could do. She usually couldn’t jump for very long. These women had no intention of sweating their straightened hair into kinkiness anyway. But we always gave them props for being able to get down. Secretly, I loved the way they clutched their chests, as if bras were useless in double-dutch, and the way their bosoms rose and fell in the up-and-down rhythm of the rope. I longed for the day I would jump double-dutch and have something round and soft to hang on to.

  Around this time, I would start looking out for my mother. I could usually spot her from two blocks away. In the spring, she wore her tan raincoat. In the fall, she wore the same raincoat with the liner buttoned underneath. I knew the purses she carried and the way she walked. If I hadn’t made up my bed or if I was jumping in my good school clothes, I could usually dash into the house before she got there and do what I was supposed to do. If I was not in trouble, I’d try to make my turn last long enough so that my mother could see me jump.

  “Wait, Mom, watch me jump!” I would say. Even though I knew she’d say no.

  “I’ve got to start dinner,” she’d say. “And I’ve seen you jump before.”

  “But I’ve learned a new trick!” I’d try not to sound like a baby in front of my friends.

  But she wouldn’t even turn around. She’d be carrying a plastic shopping bag that held her work shoes and the Daily News.

  “Some other time,” she’d say, closing the gate behind her.

  There’s so much I can do. So much stuff she doesn’t know. But it’s always some other time with her.

  Here is what I wish she knew: There is a space between the two ropes where nothing is better than being a black girl. The helix encircles you and protects you and there you are strong. I wish she’d let me show her. I could teach her how it feels.

  from Recollections of My Life as a Woman

  DIANE DI PRIMA

  It was at my grandmother’s side, in that scrubbed and waxed apartment, that I received my first communications about the specialness and the relative uselessness of men, in this case my grandfather. There was no doubt that he was the excitement of our days, the fire and light of our lives, and that one of his most endearing qualities was that we had no idea what he was going to do next. But it was the women, and there were many of them, who attended on all the practical aspects of life. In the view that Antoinette Mallozzi transmitted, there was nothing wrong or strange about this. We women had the babies, after all, and it was enormously more interesting to us than to any man to know that there would be food on the table.

  Not that I wish in any way to denigrate my grandfather: he worked enormously hard for his family—but he would at any time throw everything over for an ideal. There were many stories of his quitting an otherwise okay job to protest some injustice to a fellow worker. At which point he would arrive home with the fellow worker and his entire family, at the very least for dinner. Often they stayed for weeks. My grandmother would set the table for that many more, and if a solution was not rapidly forthcoming, she and the six girls would take in crochet beadwork to keep cash coming in until my grandfather found another, less unjust employer.

  Now, this sort of thing was not still going on when I was little—by then my grandfather was no longer working for others as a custom tailor—but the stories and the memory of it were in the air. My grandfather was regarded somewhat as the family treasure: a powerful and erratic kind of lightning generator, a kind of Tesla experiment we for some reason kept in the house.

  It was clear to me that he was as good as it got. My father, a sullen man with a smoldering temper, was easily as demanding as Grandpa, but did not bring these endearing qualities of excitement and idealism, this demand for something more than we already had or knew, into our lives. It was like tending a furnace in which the fire had gone out.

  Antoinette was always busy, but there was a way in which she communicated the basic all-rightness of things. I loved to watch her hands. As I think about it now, I realize that as a little person, I was not separated from the old: the sight and feel of soft, dry, wrinkled skin was associated with the sight and feel of love. Of those who had the time to listen, to tell a story. I learned to love the smells and feel of old flesh—I loved to put my round child’s cheek up against her wrinkled one.

  Her hands always smelled of garlic and onions, beeswax and lemons, and a thousand herbs. There was that sense of cleanness and the good smells of the world. A sense of the things that went on. In the turbulent 1930s into which I was born, my grandmother taught me that the things of woman go on: that they are the very basis and ground of human life. Babies are born and raised, the food is cooked. The world is cleaned and mended and kept in order. Kept sane. That one could live with dignity and joy even in poverty. That even tragedy and shock and loss require this basis of loving attendance.

  And that men were peripheral to all this. They were dear, they brought excitement, they sought to bring change. Printed newspapers, made speeches, tried to bring that taste of sanity and order into the larger world. But they were fragile somehow. In their excitement they would forget to watch the clock and turn the oven off. I grew up thinking them a luxury….

  My grandfather and I had our secrets—as when we listened to Italian opera together. Opera was forbidden Domenico because he had a bad heart—and so moved was he by the vicissitudes and sorrows of Verdi’s heroes and heroines that the doctor felt it to be a danger. We would slip away together to listen—I was three or four—and he would explain all the events extraordinaire that filled that world. All that madness seemed as natural as anything else to my young mind. The madness in the air around me, I felt, was no different.

  We would share forbidden cups of espresso, heavily sweetened. Drops of the substance, like an elixir of life, were slipped into my small mouth on a tiny silver spoon, while the eggshell china with its blue-and-gold border gleamed iridescent in the lamplight. I remember that his hand shook slightly. It was the world of the child—full of struggles larger than life, huge shadows cast by the lamp, circumventing the grown-ups. It was a world of enchantment, and passion.

  But then, he told me stories. Terrifying stories, fables whose morals seemed to point to the horror of social custom, of emulation. Or he read me Dante, or we would practice my bit of Italian together. Italian which was forbidden me in my parents’ house, and which I quickly forgot when we were finally separated. Italy was a part of that world of enchantment. Domenico would describe the olive groves of the south, till I saw them blowing silver-green in the wind. When I was seven he promised to take me there “after the war,” but he died before the war was over. I grew up nostalgic for a land I’d never seen….

  I stood beside him as he sat at his desk. He only half-looked at me as he spoke. This was unusual; in the story times I always sat on his lap. Sat in a bentwood chair, sometimes facing the wall together as if to shut out distractions. A Zen austerity. Or were there only certain corners we could go to for these exchanges, where the grown-ups would not see us and swoop down—”Leave the child alone…. Come on, Diane, your mother (or whoever) wants you…. Pop is a little crazy” (an aside, an undertone). If Pop was crazy, I well knew by then that I was crazy with him. They were too late, with their attempts to save me for themselves. The conspiracy between us ran too deep.

  I stood beside him at his desk, and his eyes were not on me. Only, I could feel the stuff of his shirtsleeve against
my cheek, the smell of bluing, of starch. He said, “Someday you are going to go out at night and look at the stars and you will wonder how they got there. Then you’ll study like I studied, and you’ll suffer like I suffered, and in the end you’ll find nothing.” I was not very old but I didn’t flinch at that “nothing.” Only I knew with my full child’s certitude that it wasn’t true. Or anyway the despair that accompanied the word had no truth, however much he felt it. I had no words to argue, only the desire to comfort. I may have put my hand on his starched shirtsleeve.

  I was being recruited, initiated, and I knew it. With my full consent, entering a world larger than life. I knew there was no turning back, and in fact, yearned only to go forward. To go forward, with him, into the darkness. The struggle for Truth. Only, for me, the darkness held no despair. Not nothing, Grandpa. It was someone other than a child who longed to say that.

  Not nothing, Grandpa. It was a promise, a vow. I, Diane, age four or five, would make meaning in the world. Make meaning for him, for myself. The dark was luminous, of that I was certain. That much I knew.

  With that exchange we achieved the full status of lovers. Without further touch or words, we shaped the prototype, the pattern for all my deepest loves to come. Always this despair, this hope, this luminous dark. The conspiracy between us was complete.

  Red Velvet Dress

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  The other people who lived on Lena’s street were: Beverly, who was fifteen, who combed and combed Lena’s glistening hair from the time she was little, as the afternoon light fell in smooth waves across the grass and curbs and softened the shadow of the postman with his cracked leather bag. Margaret, whose mother lived in a wheelchair in the back room of their house. She didn’t roll to the front room very often, but once she did, and told Lena she wasn’t bitter about her life, a secret that Lena carried with her like a fine pearl button. Annie, who ate a wide lasagna noodle boiled without anything on it. Norma, who was plump and pale as a Sunday bun in a basket alongside the German smorgasbord down by the railroad tracks. Peter, who pressed his face into the metal rungs of the fence, calling out in a thin voice, “Lena, Lena! Can you play?” The floating lady in the house with no paint. They could see her float by her upstairs windows late at night when they drove home from being somewhere out in the world. The Robitailles from Quebec with seven children and steaming blueberry pies. They wore French beneath their English like an undershirt.