A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  “Maybe he’s a snitch?”

  “He’s a punk.”

  “He’s afraid.”

  “Es puto, no vale verga, no tiene corazón, chale con aquel vato.” He’s a sissy, he ain’t worth it, doesn’t have heart, forget that dude.

  Guards on every shift routinely came to my cell and, raking a baton across the bars, called my number. When I just stared back, they checked my number off on a clipboard and placed another write-up slip on the others.

  The counselor came up on the third week. “What the hell you trying to pull?” He stood away from the bars.

  “Fuck you, liar,” I said, and turned my back on him and faced the sink. I spooned coffee in my plastic cup and filled it with hot water from the tap and stirred it. I turned and stared at him. Behind him other cons across the way were watching. I drank the coffee and felt it warm and bitter in my stomach. The whole time I was glaring at him I was thinking how he had set me up. My look must have frightened him, because he left without saying anything.

  Later, when everyone had come in from work and was showering and getting ready for supper, five guards stormed through the front of the block into the landing with riot-gear helmets, shields, and batons. In the lead, Mad Dog Madril yelled at the tier guard to rack my cell as the goons clomped up the shaking stairwell.

  “Shake it down!” Mad Dog was seething. He pushed me out on the tier in my boxers, without shirt or shoes or pants. Cons stuck their mirrors out through bars and I could see their confused faces, questioning eyes. The goons ripped the mattress apart, squeezed out the toothpaste tube, emptied my tobacco bag, searching my cell for a shank or drugs. They found a small packet of sugar from the kitchen.

  “Add contraband to the charges!” Mad Dog commanded. Five Hundred jabbed me with his stick and marched me down into the landing in the middle of the block. Cons stood at the bars as one voice and then another and another cursed in a deafening roar. They shook the bars, yelping like hyenas snarling over fresh kill. Their eyes were hard and glassy. I tried to tell myself they were cursing the guards, but it was me they were condemning.

  I remember the humiliation of seeing them grip the bars and push their angry faces forward as they screamed. They had revealed their secrets to me, and believing I had turned on them made me no different from all the perpetrators who had killed their spirits. I was the friend they had embraced and who then had stabbed them in the back.

  That was one of the worst and strangest days of my life. Their rage and censure were forcing me to find something out about myself which didn’t exist yet but which I felt struggling to come out. Stripped of everything I believed in—pride, friends, my reputation for being a solid con were all gone now—I felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something beyond what I knew about myself in the world.

  I was facing the tiers toward my cell when a cup of scalding water hit me in the shoulder from behind. I turned and someone else threw urine and then someone else a Styrofoam cup of feces. It was as if I was standing outside myself and watching this. I told myself it had nothing to do with me. I wiped my face with my hands. The yelling caught on and the whole block was cursing me from both sides.

  When I go back to that night now, I think I felt at the time that I was insane. That it would only be a matter of time before I swirled into a black pit of disintegration. With wide eyes, I watched the ones who didn’t scream watch me with detached pity. They certainly thought I was crazy. If it happened to me, they thought, it could happen to anyone. Even them. Anyone could break. A link in the chain had snapped, and for that their repugnance stormed down on me, shaking tiers and trembling concrete. I stood quietly taking it all in, pretending to myself that someone else was standing there.

  Mad Dog Madril came down and chained me around the waist, hands, and wrists. Then he and his goons marched me out of the block.

  Outside, going across the yard, I knew that, despite this loathing, by standing up for myself I had done something completely new. I might have lost the respect of my peers, but I was feeling a sense of my own worth that I had never felt before. I knew I was no longer a twenty-two-year-old illiterate brown man, not just another con with a number who was going to submit to degradation. Something had altered in me. I felt tremendous pride in having taken this one little step. I now knew I had wanted to take it for a long time.

  This isolation cell was much smaller than the others I had been in. It was my third time in the hole, but no matter how many times you go in, you never get used to it. I tried to review the events that had put me here again, but I couldn’t concentrate. Adrenaline was pulsing so strong in me that I could feel my blood pounding away in my bare feet, my arms, my hands. I listened to the noises of the prison, thinking about the tons of steel and granite that surrounded me and feeling them pushing in like a vise to squeeze the life out of me. I got up and took three steps to the rusty sink, pushed the button, cupped my left palm under the spout, and rinsed myself with cold water. Then I sat down on the floor, drew up my legs, crossed my arms on my knees, and rested my head on my arms. I could still feel myself trembling. I shook my hands out, massaged my arms, and tried to calm my breathing, inhaling and exhaling slowly. I rubbed my face with my hands, trying to shake off my confusion.

  I began to question how I might have handled it differently. But there were no answers, just a growing explosion in me, like a deep cry to have a life, or at least a chance at having one. I thought how even as a kid I’d had no options except to take the hurt that came my way. As I grew a little older, I learned to strike back. It had been the quickest way to get rid of the pain, a way to show people I was alive. Until now. This time I didn’t lash out, which short-circuited everyone’s expectation of how a con was supposed to act. Despite the guilt of letting a lot of solid convicts down, not doing what everyone expected turned out to be the most powerful thing I ever did.

  Behind my closed eyelids, I wanted to lose myself in a sweet memory, and my thoughts wandered off to the wind’s blowing dust so that my mother and I snugged newspapers and rags in window crevices and doorjambs to keep the prairie grit from entering. I saw images of my peaceful village, the chimney stacks with woodstove smoke, the calm fields between adobe houses, and I’m holding Grandma’s hand, standing next to my sister and brother in the bright sunny yard. In anguish my legs shake with fear and I pee my pants. Mother is telling Grandma she’ll be back, but I see Richard’s beet-red face. She’s lying. She’s leaving. I run and hide in La Casita’s crawl space where no one can see me or find me. I clench my fingers tight to create pain, bending my fingers until they hurt. I’m pissed off and I start kicking and it’s cramped and isolated and dark under the shack.

  Alongside this memory, I realize I’m not under the shack, I’m in this cell, but then I’m thrown back to Estancia, where my Grandpa cannot get out of bed. With my Grandpa near me, I was certain that life would always be happy. But when Grandpa had a heart attack while scrubbing floors at school, everything changed for me. The shaman Emiliano, a friend of Grandpa’s, came over and spent the entire morning praying and giving him herbal liquids. He did healing ceremonies, but they didn’t dissipate the menacing pall that hung over Grandma’s house.

  “Two spoons sugar and cream,” I had said to Grandpa, full of delight that morning, thinking coffee would surely get him out of bed. He had always risen before dawn, but it had been two weeks and Grandpa was still in bed.

  “’Sta . . . bien,” Grandpa had whispered, forcing a smile and nodding to the chair.

  I said, “Get dressed, Grandpa. I’ll walk with you to school.”

  He opened his eyes, as if reading my mind, and said, “Jugamos mañana, mejito” We will play tomorrow. Then he closed his eyes. He was weak and breathing with labor. The wrinkles on his face were no longer smile creases but death claws, slowly raking my Grandpa away from me. I went outside and ran. I watched a hawk drifting backwards and watched it glide sideways, wings stiff against the breeze. For a moment the hawk whirled off balance, t
hen it regained its poise. I took it as a sign that the hawk was my Grandpa, fighting against death. I watched it fighting the wind, trying to assume an aerial stance, but the wind kept buffeting it back and down, and then with startling grace it regained its glide and flew toward the Manzano peaks until it was a mere speck.

  It was late in the afternoon when I went back to Grandma’s. Trucks and cars were parked around the house. I made my way through adults weeping in the kitchen, and in the back room I peeked in to see Grandpa sleeping in bed. I was curious about the candles in the room and the group of old women with black veils praying, my Grandma among them, each with a rosary in her hand.

  Uncle Julian grabbed me and forced me through the crowd and back out into the yard. He took me to the shed and smacked me across my head and shoulders, ordering me to stay there until morning. He kept saying, “It’s your fault! It’s your fault! All the worry you cause!”

  “My fault?” I asked, not understanding.

  He glared. “Grandpa died! And you’re to blame, always worrying him!”

  I yelled back, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”

  Julian locked the shed and left. I peeked at him through the board cracks and looked around, expecting Grandpa to come out of the shadows. The evening light cast a sadness over the warped rafters, broken hoes, old hammers and shovels. He had worked hard and lived humbly. He prayed to live one more sunrise, to hear another song from the dove, to go to the woodpile and chop a log and put it in the stove and feel the heat on his palms, to savor one more plate of huevos rancheros and drink one more cup of coffee with milk and sugar.

  He loved going to the community center on fiesta days, greeting his old friends under the colored string bulbs and listening to the fiddlers, accordion players, and guitarists. The women set out beans, squash, frijoles, tortillas, empanaditas, bizcochitos, chile verde, enchiladas, burritos, and tacos. The young men cried out and kicked up scuffed boots, cowboy hats cocked back, guffawing loudly and carelessly, lifting partners off the floor and twirling them. Men patted each other on the back, sharing stories about work.

  He was hired as janitor for the first school in Estancia, a two-story building with windows brought in from Kansas and red flagstone brought in on wagons from surrounding red cliffs. The job came at a good time. He was having trouble breathing because of chemicals sprayed on plants in the fields where he had always worked. His joints hurt with arthritis, his knees burned, and his back ached. He read from the Bible and prayed the rosary each night. To him the most important tools in life were a good pair of work boots, a pair of gloves, denim overalls, and long Johns. Putting on his secondhand suit coat and fedora at dawn, he’d say, “I think I’ll chop wood.” When he came back into the kitchen, carrying an armful of wood, he smelled of cedar shavings, and he’d sprinkle some on the hot woodstove top to fill the house with their fragrance. He would tell me stories on the way to school, about how he drove to the salt flats to load his wagon and trade the salt to Indians for fish, deerskins, and herbs. The simple times had changed, he said, and I knew what he meant. He saw what was happening to his family: Refugio and Damacio drinking every day, my mother leaving us, newcomers stealing our land and calling it homesteading. Ruined ranchers and farmers came and went through Grandma’s kitchen, grieving the loss of their land because of new tax laws they didn’t understand. To make a living, they left for Chicago or LA and never came back. One by one, families were disappearing, and life as Grandpa had known it was changing, and he died of a broken heart. His absence had always been a hurting I carried in my heart without recourse to God.

  I had wanted to escape into sweet memories, but now I was thrashing like a leaf in a prairie duststorm and thinking one couldn’t have had a worse life than mine. Suddenly I understood, not with my mind but with my body. I was sweating and the heat was unbearable in the isolation cell. Even as I gritted my teeth trying to stop the images, I saw a freeway and I remembered raising my face to the wind.

  I feel cold wind blowing my thick black hair. Mieyo and I are in the back of my uncle’s truck, heading into Albuquerque. We’re dropped off at Saint Anthony’s Boys’ Home. For weeks after that I weep under the massive summer branches of a huge cottonwood by the outside pool. I wait every Sunday by the gate next to the grotto of our Sacred Mother. From the gate I see arriving families getting out of cars, carrying bags of clothes and candy for kids they’ve come to visit. Every Sunday I wait there for my mother to appear. Children’s names are called over the loudspeakers, and after their visits I see them coming out of the main building to my left, smiling and carrying gifts. My name is never called, but I wait until dusk and the last cars drive off into the evening before I go in.

  The orphanage evenings are despairing, but one early Sunday morning, when I’m watching visitors arrive, I think I recognize my mother climbing out of a car. My heart leaps up in my throat and I can’t wait to see her. I sneak out of the dining room and head up to the second floor to the Blue Room, where visitors wait for kids. Sister Anna Louise, coming down the stairs, catches me and orders me back to the dining room. She says I am not to go roaming the halls. But nothing can stop me from seeing my mother. She’s here to take me home with her. I knew she would come back! Back in the dining room, when I think I’ve given Sister Anna Louise time to go about her business, I take off again, down the hallway, dashing around the corner to go up the stairs to the second floor and into the Blue Room where relatives meet their kids. As I turn the corner at a full gallop, a hand shoots out and grabs my shirt and throws me on the floor on my back. Sister Anna Louise is over me, screaming that she told me not to leave the dining room. She slaps me until my cheeks go numb, saliva forming at her thin lips, her eyes narrowed with rage. But even after the beating, when she drags me back to the dining room and leaves, I cut out again. This time I use a different route. I go around the front of the building, up the stairs, into the Blue Room—and the lady in the chair is not my mother.

  A few years pass, and it has now been a long time that my parents have been away. I’m older and bigger when I’m called to Sister Superior’s office. She says that since I’m thirteen she’s going to send me to Boys’ Town. Attempts at placing me in a foster home have failed. When prospective parents come, my brother and I are never chosen. Our hair, our color, our speech—everything is wrong about us. She asks me how I feel and other personal questions, and I respond with shrugs, not really caring about anything. I already know what I’m going to do. That night I sneak out of my dorm and meet my brother by the fence. He promises he’ll follow me as I take off down the ditch under the stars, crossing the alfalfa fields until I stop at the place we’re supposed to meet. He never comes. Later the cops arrest me for running away. After several runaways I’m finally taken to the Detention Center for Boys and put behind bars. In the end, as always, a cell is the only place they have for kids without families.

  I tried to prevent these memories from surfacing, but they refused to be repressed anymore. I wasn’t dreaming, it was all happening in my head as I lay awake. I wanted to run like I did as a kid but I was in this cell. I had nothing. Martina and Mieyo had each other. Uncle Refugio, the bottle, drinking every day. Father, fighting and drunkenly searching for Mother. Uncle Santiago, respect from his friends and love and work with his ranch animals. Grandpa and Grandma had God and each other. Uncle Carlos and Aunt Jesse, money and power. All of them knew where they were going, knew that upon waking up in the morning their shoes would be under the bed where they placed them the night before. I didn’t know anything about the crazy world. I didn’t know where trains came from, how windows are made, if trees are like humans and have minds and hearts. I didn’t know. I lay down, pretending my cell floor was the dirt under the small shack beside Grandma’s house. I didn’t move but hugged my knees, feeling the coldest I’d ever felt, loathing myself, regretting being born. A sickly despair made me want to throw up. I squeezed my eyelids to push the hurting memories out, but all that did was make me weep out
all my pent-up anxiety and frustration.

  I wept with an overwhelming fear about what was happening to me and what I was doing. I felt like a little boy again, staggering in the fields, just knocked off his horse by a blow to the head, unaware of where he is or where’s he’s going, where to place the next foot, and what lies in front of him.

  The cell-block speakers blared out supper and I tried to compose myself, to center myself, but I began to cry uncontrollably. I groaned aloud, biting my lips, on the floor in a fetal position, my body racked with a weeping seizure, purging out every lie, all the hurt streaming out of my eyes. I heard the chow wagon nearing and guards coming up the stairs. The swill slot opened. A porter shoved a tray through and I grabbed it. I sat on the floor, eating, my hands trembling as I lifted the spoon to my mouth, tears and blood from my lips mixing with the food. It was at that moment, in the dark, in my isolation cell, that a revelation struck me, the way lightning strikes ground in the night and reddens it. I knew why I couldn’t get out of the chair, why I refused to work, why I stayed in my cell—in every muscle and bone of my body a tortured voice cried out that I could never again tolerate the betrayals that had marked my life, stretching back to my earliest years.

  NINE

  Letting me out after a month in isolation, Mad Dog Madril escorted me to the warden. I had done two years in prison already and had passed my twenty-third birthday in isolation. I found myself sitting before the warden as he yelled how I had failed to heed his warning about not getting into trouble. I needed a lesson. Insubordination before a Reclassification Committee and refusing to work were serious institutional infractions. No lecture, no conversation—he was tired of wasting his time. He didn’t even say what the punishment was going to be. Mad Dog Madril didn’t say anything either as he marched me across the yard.