“My dad told me to do anything but be a musician. I couldn't believe he would tell me that after he had spent his whole life playing music. In Mexico, I had worked so hard to learn the guitar and worked strip clubs in Tijuana to buy my first guitar. I was so mad at him that I became more determined to play my music,” Carlos said.
“Why did your dad say that? Didn't he want you to follow in his footsteps?”
“Mom was working in a Laundromat, and Dad was playing in Mexican restaurants that didn't pay much, in the Mission. He was frustrated and afraid I would have the same hard life. But when he said it, I didn't understand—I just thought he was trying to stop me from reaching the most important goal of my life. One afternoon when I worked at Tick Tock's, the Grateful Dead pulled up in a limo and I told myself then that if they could make it, so could I. It was music or die.”
In December we traveled to Cihuatlan, México, with my mom and dad, Carlos's parents, and Salvador. At the Manzanillo airport, Carlos's maternal aunts, Tías Sylvie and Gollita, and Tío Cesar, together with many friends and relatives, waited for us. They were dancing with the thrill of having their sister Josefina and all of us in their land. We were taken by Volkswagen bus to Las Hadas, the resort where we stayed, nestled in front of mountains with a sparkling oceanfront beach and luscious magenta bougainvillea trailing along the white buildings. When we visited the tías' house, Salvador was the star—his feet never touched the ground. Gollita ran about the house waiting on us hand and foot as she chattered Spanish adorations at her grand-nephew.
The town was a shocking contrast to the hotel. When cars sped through the dirt streets, dust flew everywhere. Mrs. Santana had sent money to her sisters, so their house had two indoor bathrooms, nice furniture, and a washing machine. Sylvie told us another woman in town had a washing machine she had won in a contest, and how happy it made her because she had twenty-two children.
Dad and Carlos played tennis at the hotel and let me in for one Australian set, where we played two on a side, rotating around the court. I loved being on the side playing singles against the two powerhouse men, and I slid back and forth on the red clay to keep up with their forehand smashes and backhand cross-court slices. Afterward, we dined beside the pool under amber lights, Salvador asleep in my arms. Carlos and his Dad wanted to travel to Autlán, the town where Carlos and most of his siblings had been born. A friend took us in a truck while Salvador stayed with Mom and Dad at Las Hadas. Mrs. Santana was content to stay and talk nonstop with her sisters about her children and what had changed in Ci-huatlan.
We drove through land lush with fruit-laden banana, coconut, and papaya trees. The road snaked through farmlands and valleys with thousands of palm trees as far as I could see—a breathtaking, tropical paradise. The sun baked us, and a thin film of perspiration lay like dew on my skin. Fields of sugarcane and corn drifted in and out of view. I asked what the yellow-breasted birds were swooping through the sky. “Garrionsillos,” Mr. Santana said.
Small, open-air casitas were situated on each farm, and speckled black chickens pecked the dusty road for morsels of food. I marveled at the beauty and simplicity of this life, where families could live richly off the land. Yet the poverty was so great that many houses were without roofs—brick casas left half finished, with pieces of plastic sheeting or tin covering their tops. Horses stood saddled up and tied to fence posts, and men's faces were weathered and hardened with weary expressions. Outside, in the dirt, toddlers played, watched by older children. I thought how easy my life was, how hard it must be to work this glorious land as a campesino. In fields of lavender flowers, Brahma bulls' muscles twitched to shake off flies; and farmers wearing yellow and white peasant shirts walked behind horses tilling the soft earth.
We passed El Tigre, and wound downhill into a desert of cactus, tall as trees, to Autlán. We parked and extracted our cramped bodies from the cab of the truck, walking to the zócalo in the center of town. Carlos had not been there since he'd left at the age of ten. “I can't believe how small it is,” he said. “It seemed like a big city when we lived here. It was all I knew.”
We walked to the church where Carlos had been an altar boy. He kneeled before the Virgen at the door and touched his dad's shoulder, a poignant, bittersweet moment: Good memories and bad from his childhood and times of strife between his parents that haunted him; but to be home again was exorcising a giant shadow that he had spent years running away from.
We passed a restaurant, and men ran out to us. “Don José!” they exclaimed, and clapped Mr. Santana on the back, yelling across the street to their friends. Laughter. Then faces turned to Carlos, and they spilled out sentences in Spanish, pointing to Mr. Santana.
“Dad's like the mayor of Autlán,” Carlos said, smiling. “He's more famous here than I am.”
It was dark when we climbed into the truck to drive back to Salvador. I could not wait to get my arms around that chunky boy. I had learned about myself on this trip to Carlos's birthplace: how privileged my childhood seemed compared with Carlos's humble beginnings, and how I do not need material wealth to be happy. I saw how much we have that we do not need, and I wanted to remember Mexico to avoid being swayed by the competitive nature of American life.
Could I be happy on one of these farms in Mexico? I didn't think so. But I could keep my life real in homage to the weathered farmers and shoeless children I had seen and knew Carlos had once been.
alvador was the sweetest child, whose language was drumming on bongos in the living room, on pots and pans in the kitchen, or on his high chair during meals. He pointed and sighed when he wanted something, sometimes speaking in indistinguishable words. The summer he was eleven months old, we met the band on tour in Europe with Bob Dylan, traveling to Nice, France, with Carlos's sister Irma, and to Italy and then Spain. The day of the show at the Palaeur in Rome, we boarded the tour bus, Salvador on his knees in the seat next to me, breathing on the window while he watched a waiter at the outdoor café. Carlos sat behind me deep in conversation with keyboardist Chester Thompson. He was telling CT how he had pushed past Dylan's security to ask Bob to jam with Santana— proud that he had received a yes. My stomach turned over, and a thin string of bile rose in my esophagus. I closed my eyes and swallowed. I must be pregnant. I waited to tell Carlos until we checked into the Palace Hotel in Madrid. Sunlight streamed through the pale yellow Tiffany stained-glass dome in the gorgeous lobby. We collected our room key and settled in our room. Salvador was napping, and I sat Carlos down. “I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant,” I said. “I felt queasy yesterday.”
“This will be Stella,” he said excitedly. He had chosen that name for our first child, but Salvador had come instead of a girl. Salvador took his first steps in Madrid, teetering from Carlos's outstretched arms to mine, delighted with his freedom, giggling until he drooled.
That night, Carlos read in our room, Salvador asleep in a crib next to him. Irma and I talked in her room, our conversation turning to her childhood in Mexico. “I loved to sing,” Irma said. “I was in a band before Carlos, you know.”
“You're kidding! I didn't know that, Irma.” I knew her as a mother of two sons who were in their early teens.
“Yes. My father encouraged me. I sang songs from the Everly Brothers and Sam Cooke. Mom didn't want me to sing. She didn't have time for things like that. She was so busy keeping us kids in line. She and I fought like crazy.”
“All kids fight with their parents,” I said.
“Mom was angry because Dad was gone all the time. And we had no money. Carlos and I are strong-willed like her, and we didn't know when to back down so that we wouldn't get in trouble.”
Mrs. Santana was always sweet when I was around. She fed us gigantic chile relleños with refried beans and corn tortillas, and horchata with ice, and she seemed to love having children and grandchildren around. Whenever she and I were alone, she told me stories of Mr. Santana's infidelities while wringing her hands. She talked fast, and my limited Spanish vocabulary did no
t allow me to comprehend the whole story. I knew enough of the language to understand that she had been mortified and hurt by his affairs, and at the same time she was proud of her fortitude and love in remaining with José Santana almost fifty years.
I lay in bed thinking about what Irma had said. Mrs. Santana's strength and ability to care for her family—even when her husband led a separate life—had formed a tenuous emotional history for her children. I had learned to approach Carlos genteelly when I was worried or wanted to discuss something bothering me in our marriage: He had quite a temper and had been known to throw a guitar during rehearsal if things were not going right. In talking with me, he often became agitated or worried when forced to listen to viewpoints different from his own. I was like him and Irma—not one who believed in backing down if it meant compromising my truth. I saw now that Carlos probably had never learned to exchange ideas or discuss differing viewpoints in his family. It was the antithesis of the household I grew up in, where we could talk about any subject and debate our ideas with Mom and Dad. They always had the final say, but they listened to our youthful—and many times wild— opinions. We were punished by being grounded when we were teenagers, but were never made to feel shame for our mistakes. Hearing about Carlos's childhood didn't make me relate his father's life with how Carlos would be as a father. He thought Salvador was the most precious gift and I took Salvador on the road to enable the two to be together, since Carlos toured about five months out of the year. Stella arrived two weeks after her due date, on Epiphany. Nine pounds and four ounces, with black hair curled atop her head, her skin was the color of tea with milk in it. Stella brought a new dimension to my life. I reflected on how I could raise a strong daughter, how to protect her yet nurture her independence and set her free in the world. She developed tremendous spunk and drama, with a bit of Aunt Daisy's movie star qualities. By three years old, she twirled through the house in her ballet leotard and tutu and did not mind putting her hand on her hip to tell us what to do. By the time she was four, I was telling her that her Academy Award was in the mail, even though she had no idea what that was. Her vocabulary was clear, and her voice loud. Kitsaun had taught Salvador and Stella the joy of running through the house and screaming with joy, when they were very young. While Salvador lived in a dreamy musical world, mesmerized by dust particles flying in the air— examining the explosion of matter with light—Stella conducted the sequence of their play with bossy determination. They rode their tricycles through mud and chased lizards from warm rocks into the field of poppies beside the house. Words and giggles jumped from their little mouths as they fit pieces into their wooden puzzles, played with plastic cars on the family-room table, and drew with fat crayons. Delight sprung from every step they took, Salvador enthusiastically gathering copper-colored rocks from the garden, Stella singing about the Berenstain Bears. Their innocence was a rippling rainbow through our house.
Salvador and Carlos played drums together to the music of Third World and Olatunji, the rhythms beating through the floor. With both children in the bedroom right next to us, we were outgrowing our mountain-tower house, our tiny kitchen, and the lawn outside the living room; and we worried about the cars rushing by on Panoramic Highway, so close to our little ones. We moved to a larger home in 1987, and although it was wonderful to spread out and have a yard in which the kids could run a full circle around the house, the space—twice the size of the Mill Valley house—was a yawning cavern for a while.
I returned to college—initially at a junior college to study creative writing and Spanish, and then at a local university, Dominican. I took classes in ethics, world religions, and women and literature, and my soul thirsted for more. The lessons I had learned in life came from books as well as from having created Dipti Nivas, working with the band, and raising a family. In Experience, Learning, and Identity—a course for twenty-eight adult students who, like me, had returned to college to complete a bachelor's degree—we examined the ways we had learned during the years we were in the workplace rather than in school, as well as how we had integrated the voices that had taught us, including our own. We accepted that one form of education is doing the practical and receiving knowledge from life experience. My study in the world religions class confirmed that spirituality continued to be my core, and my explorations expanded to Native American ideals as well as the feminine aspect of God. My awareness of the larger Self, the oneness of all sentient beings, alongside the reading I did in Huston Smith's book The World's Religions, made me more conscious of how religious doctrines guide and motivate people's lives. I developed the desire to live less selfishly and with more compassion for all. I be- came friends with my classmates and saw how many of the women struggled, like me, for time to grow outside of family.
The band was going to Moscow to play in a concert Bill Graham had organized for the end of the American-Soviet Peace Walk. I had never been away from my babies more than two nights at a time, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Even though I would be gone six nights, I made plans to meet Carlos and the band in Washington, D.C. Salvador and Stella stayed home with my mother-in-law and Carlos's sister Laura. All I knew of Russia was from high school history books and American media that had taught Communism as a repressive economic and political system denying wealth and freedom to the Russian people.
Two hundred Americans and two hundred Soviets were walking from Leningrad to Moscow for peace and to bring global awareness to the threat of war and to bring people together to end an unwanted nuclear arms race. Santana would perform a free concert in Moscow's Izmajlovo Stadium on July 4 with the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, and Russian bands.
On the Aeroflot flight, Bill's staff handed out a brief history of Russia—with excerpts from essays about the culture, quotes from a glasnost-inspired Gorbachev, and a page of scheduled press conference and show times. I hoped to learn firsthand about Russian people, the effects of Communism on their lives, and the daily atmosphere of a city of nine million people. I knew being there would give me a sense of life different than from reading about it in books. Tiles in a hallway, the smell of crushed flowers in a meadow, the dark purple hue of figs in a marketplace, the texture of toilet paper—simple, everyday occurrences would cast impressions of life on another continent.
Approaching Moscow airspace, we flew over green countryside. Small towns were nestled near tall factory smokestacks and twisting rivers, acres of bushy firs and tall beech trees, and smooth lakes with a few boats sailing on the waters. We landed and were greeted by a disheveled and exhausted-looking Bill Graham, who had been in Moscow ten days. Killer told us that the staging and roofing had been trucked in from Budapest, some of the sound equipment from London, a portion of the lights from Sweden, and the stage technicians from Hungary— along with three refrigerator truckloads of food to feed everyone. The logistics had been a nightmare, but the type of challenge Bill loved.
Santana was driven to Solnechny Hotel, a dingy, hostel-type, low-rise outside Moscow. We passed three nuclear reactors puffing toxic waste into the atmosphere and entered through electric gates rising out of unkempt grass. The most magical two hours of my trip occurred when Bill sent a bus at midnight to take us to Red Square. The navy sky was broken by a row of thin clouds that opened to a single star. We drove along quiet streets, voices floating through the bus, and I read street names such as Lenin Prospect, imagining the lives of women in this country. A large brick monument said, THE SOVIET UNION IS THE MAKER OF PEACE. Was this government propaganda, or what they truly believed?
Bright red star lights came into view at the top of Red Square. We climbed out of the bus and walked through the cobblestone plaza in silence. Soldiers stood guard at stone ramps leading to the seven towers surrounding the Kremlin, and the onion-shaped domes glimmered with gold flecks against the black sky. I had seen them so many times in photographs—I could not believe I was standing in their presence. Bonnie sang softly, her voice heavy and clear in the night, as though she w
ere in a choir of hovering blues singers. I watched her face, an aura of confidence shining from her freckled skin, walking with the rhythm of an African tribal chief.
We passed the Lenin Library, Moscow University, and the Bolshoi Theatre on our way back to the hotel. In our room, Carlos and I tiredly climbed into two twin beds that were covered in white linen with red woolen blankets and crisp white sheets. I sank into a soothing sleep.
We awoke to early sunlight casting lace flower patterns across our beds. In the private breakfast room we ate bread and eggs from plates on a buffet and climbed onto the bus for the drive to the city for the press conference. In the light of day, Moscow was weathered and covered in dirt. Each building was lined with cracks, and staircases leaned to their sides. Buses spewed oil-black fumes. Women bent at the waist sweeping the ground with straw brooms. I wanted to jump off the bus and wander down alleys and up stairways to stumble into people who would either show me kindness or avoid my foreign skin—but I didn't feel confident wandering the city without a translator.
At the Soviet Peace Committee Offices on Peace Avenue, four rows of media people worked in the hot room, perspiration dripping from their brows. Bill thanked the committee for making the concert possible and explained that 25,000 free tickets had been distributed to people in offices and factories, as well as to students. The musicians answered questions from reporters who became antagonistic after a while, accusing the Americans of not understanding Russia's political struggles and the Soviet government of giving tickets only to approved citizens.
I met the peace walkers after the press conference. Mildred Walter came from Denver, Little Dove from Seattle, Judy and Shirley from the East Coast. They told of the warm welcomes they had received walking through Russian villages as they had hugged babushkas (grandmothers) widowed since World War II, learned numerous Russian words, and in one month created new lives of under standing. They invited me to go with them to meet Lily Golden, an African-Soviet woman who had lived in Russia since her childhood. I had only the address—Moscow 103473, Seleznevskaya 34-1-25—and Carlos questioned my going alone. I kissed him good-bye and called for a taxi. I was more excited about this event than I was about the concert: To hear stories from a Black Russian woman and see firsthand how she lived, how she perceived her life, was just the experience I had hoped for. The taxi dropped me off in a neighborhood of Baroque buildings with wrought-iron balconies, curved windows, and enormous entrance doors. Ms. Golden, standing in her doorway to greet us, was quite tall—perhaps five feet ten inches—stately, and elegant, with naturally soft, brown hair in African curls. We entered her flat and sat in her book-filled living room. In a deep voice with a lovely accent and words, she told of her father, Oliver Jerome Golden, who was sought out by the Russian cotton industry and asked to bring a group of experts to Russia to improve farming techniques. In Tuskegee, Alabama, he had been hated and chased, his heart weakened by running from mobs of racist whites. In 1931 he had gone to Russia and taught cotton farming; eventually he had moved his family to the country. Lily had fond memories of growing up in Russia, where she was the darling of her school. She excelled in playing the piano and was a tennis champion. She had married an African man she'd met at university. A respected author, Lily wrote Africans in Russia, a chronicle of her life experience, and translated Angela Davis's works into Russian. She served us tea and fruit, and we asked questions for two hours. I was satisfied with stories of her brilliant life, rich in global ideas and culture. My new friends stood in the street with me until a taxi arrived to carry me back to the hotel. The roads were almost empty, and I savored my Moscow adventure in a cab with a driver who spoke no English and me no Russian.
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