Not all of the other first graders had been in my Head Start class, so there were many new students to meet. I was surprised that the mats, extra toys, and arts and crafts that we’d used in Head Start weren’t available in our classroom. I missed Mrs. Davenport, but Mrs. Doggett was a good teacher too. She told me she remembered Mario.
Almost all of the students at Bradley Elementary were Catholic. Once a week after school, my Catholic friends would go to their catechism class at their church, and I would go directly home. I didn’t mind getting to go home and play while my classmates went to catechism, but I knew that my family’s Baptist religion made us different from most of our neighbors. I liked our church, but I wondered why we needed separate churches with different rules.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t forgotten my goal of saving five dollars so I could get a library card. Every chance I had, I continued to pick up coins and drop them through the slot in my bank. After a while, when I added a penny, it clinked almost immediately against what seemed like an enormous pile of money. The bank was almost full.
I asked Mami if she thought I might have five dollars now.
Mami picked up the bank. “It’s heavy,” she said. She reminded me that to get the money out, I would have to break the bank. There was no other way. She covered the green Formica kitchen table with newspaper and gave me a hammer.
For the last time, I looked at my little black cat and stroked its shiny head. It seemed to look back at me. Maybe, I thought, the cat was saying that it had kept my money safe and now it was returning it to me. Then I raised the hammer and brought it down on the cat’s back.
The bank shattered into pieces that flew all over our kitchen, revealing a pile of coins and my one-dollar bill. Surely there would be five dollars here.
Before I could count the money, though, Mami told me I had to clean up. I had to put all the money aside on the table. Then she had me wrap the newspaper carefully around the plaster shards. The cat’s head was intact, and I thought it was winking at me as I folded the newspaper and put it into the garbage. Next, I had to sweep the floor. Then, at last, I could count my money.
By now, I was very familiar with the different coins. I separated the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and I put them into stacks. I counted each one. I had more than eight dollars!
Mami brought out an old coin purse for me to put the money in. Next, she, Laura, and I walked to the downtown branch of the Doña Ana Bank.
Inside, we went right up to a teller’s window. Mami told me to tell the lady standing there that I wanted to open a savings account, so I did. Then I poured the contents of the purse right onto the counter. The lady gave Mami some forms to fill out. She spoke Spanish, so Mami could understand her.
The lady handed me several paper sleeves in different sizes. She told me I had to roll up the coins in the sleeves before she could open the account. Mami and I counted stacks of ten pennies, and when I had five stacks, she showed me how to open up the sleeve marked for pennies and slip them inside. That was fifty cents. I had several rolls of pennies but only one roll of nickels and no complete rolls of dimes or quarters. I thought Mami was so smart when she pointed out that one stack was the wrong size. I counted again and saw she was right. She didn’t make me feel bad for my mistake, though. Mami would never do that.
We soon had all the money rolled up and counted. Now I had to pass the coins and the dollar bill to the lady behind the window. I was worried about handing over my money, but the lady gave me a little book with my name typed inside. She showed me where it said how much money I had given her, right in the book, and she said I could bring in more any time and the bank would keep it safe. What’s more, every few months, the bank would add a little bit of money to my account, which she called “interest.” Why? I wondered. I didn’t know that meant the bank was paying me to use my eight dollars while it looked after my money.
This bank was like a big version of my black cat bank, I thought, keeping my money safe. As we left, I looked around the lobby, just in case there were any black cats swishing their tails, but I didn’t see a single one.
At last, we went to the library. Papá was at work, so Mami took me this time. We went home first to pick up Mario. Laura came too, even though she was too little to take out books.
Mami didn’t even have her own library card back then. She told the lady behind the desk that she wanted library cards for Mario and me. The lady answered Mami in Spanish, but with an accent, so I thought she must speak English too. It didn’t seem quite fair that I had saved up five dollars and Mario hadn’t, but I didn’t say anything. The lady sat down and tapped at her typewriter, and a minute later we each had our own wallet-size card with our name on it.
The lady stood up. “I’m the librarian,” she said. She showed us into the children’s room, a sunny alcove with shelves of brightly colored books, all of them in English. I saw magazines, too. Delighted, I pulled several books off the shelves and showed them to Mami.
“No,” she said. “Take two. You have to save some for the other children.”
I understood; that was fair. Besides, now that I had my library card, I could always come back for more.
Me, in first grade
Chapter 6
A Seat in the Back of the Classroom
Even after two years, my mother still grieved over what had happened to Laura. My father didn’t understand. His younger daughter was alive; we had not lost her. Every night when he got home from work, Laura ran to hug him. But my mother felt she had lost the child who was most like her, the toddler who had lit up the room with her spirit and energy. That little girl was gone.
As Mario and I moved up in school, reading and writing in English, we all saw that Mami had been right about the effects of Laura’s illness. My sister had lost much of her ability to learn. In my mother’s mind, the neighborhood that had been filled with laughter and joy now represented tragedy. If Mami spoke about these feelings, it was to mention the small, cluttered houses and yards and her worries that the neighborhood could be ripe for another epidemic of meningitis or some other disease.
Still haunted by her memories of the terrible day when Laura became ill, my mother had to get away to a place where our family could have a fresh start.
Mami wanted to explore neighborhoods that were farther away than our feet could take us. After she learned to drive, she started venturing out by car while Mario and I were in school. She didn’t do it every day, but once in a while, she’d tell us about an expedition she’d made with Laura to a new part of Las Cruces. Sometimes Tía Angélica would go along too. We didn’t think too much about this until Mami announced that she had found a new house for us.
Mami had mentioned several times that she had heard of a school that was supposed to be much better than Bradley Elementary. One evening, while we ate supper, she told us that she had been looking for a house near that school. Now she had found one within walking distance of it.
As Mami described the house—the pretty kitchen with new appliances, the spacious living room for the television, the yard—Papá looked straight ahead, and when he finally spoke, it was to ask Mario to pass him another tortilla.
We children sat silent. Would we be moving soon? Could we take all of our furniture and clothes? What if we didn’t want to go to a new school? We didn’t know the answers, and we were unsure whether to ask questions. Neither Papá nor Mami continued the conversation, but later, my mother and Tía Angélica took Laura and me to see the house. We couldn’t go inside, but we peeked through the windows. It was much larger than our house, with a big backyard and a carport.
Over the next few days, it became clear that my father just didn’t want to move. He avoided the subject whenever my mother brought it up.
Papá liked our neighborhood, and he didn’t want the obligation of owning a house. We rented the one we lived in at the time, but to buy a house, Papá would have to borrow a lot of money from the bank to pay for it. Mami said this was called a mort
gage. My father also knew owning a house came with a lot of chores. On the weekends, my uncle Sam sometimes recruited my father to help him around his own house, mowing the lawn or performing home maintenance. Papá much preferred the library to a Saturday spent cleaning the gutter or doing yardwork. He was not very good with his hands.
There was more to it than that, though. When Papá was growing up, the kids from Mexican families were shunted into vocational trades instead of being encouraged to go to college. When boys like him were told they were good with their hands, it sometimes meant they were being told they weren’t smart enough for college. Papá was plenty smart, and he did go to college. Much later, I came to think that he took some pride in not being skillful at household chores.
All in all, Papá had plenty of reasons why he would rather rent a house, like the one we lived in now, than buy one. But my mother was not giving up, and the next time we saw Tía Alma and Uncle Sam, Mami brought up the subject of the new house.
Uncle Sam thought of himself as a big brother to my father. He had helped Papá get his new job, and they saw each other at work. Papá also visited him and Tía Alma every Sunday afternoon, sometimes after going to the library at New Mexico State University, where my father read chemical journals. When Uncle Sam said it was time for Papá to buy a house, Papá had to pay attention to his advice. Grudgingly, Papá agreed to purchase the house my mother had chosen, and he finally signed the loan documents, leaving Mami to do most of the packing and make all the arrangements, with help from Tía Angélica and Uncle Sam.
Now it was final. Despite its being the middle of the school year, we would be leaving our close-knit community where everything was nearby—our church, our school, and all our friends.
I couldn’t help being happy to see Mami so excited, but I couldn’t share her enthusiasm. I loved my school, and I hated saying goodbye to my teachers. On my last day at Bradley Elementary School, I didn’t want anyone to see me cry, so instead of walking with my friends, I ran home as they called out to me, hot tears streaming down my face.
That day, the weather was unusually gray and cold for New Mexico. Before I went inside our old house on Griggs Street, I wiped my tears with my coat sleeve. By now, I knew my mother saw the move as a new beginning for our family. I didn’t want to let her know how sad I was.
Inside, Mami and Tía Angélica had everything organized. Tía Angélica often stayed with us for extended visits, and she helped us with the move. My last day at the old school was a Friday, and by Saturday night, we were sleeping in our new house on Kay Lane, in beds made up with clean sheets.
I woke Sunday morning to see that my mother and Tía Angélica had stayed up most of the night, getting the house in order. My mother had breakfast ready for us, and we got to church on time, though it felt strange to drive there instead of walking a few short blocks.
Our friends at church greeted us as if we’d been away for a year, not just one day. Hermana Díaz asked me if I liked my new house. I didn’t know what to tell her. My mother was happy to see her friends and invited them all to come visit. Since the new house was on the far side of town and most of my mother’s friends did not drive, they told Mami that she would have to visit them. After the service, I looked longingly down the block, wishing we could go back to our old home.
Instead, that afternoon, I invented a game for Laura and me to put away our toys and clothes in our spacious new bedroom. My little sister thought moving to a new home was an adventure. She was happy just to play with me, to make a bed for her doll and to follow me around.
As I put the bedroom in order, I had to admit that it was nicer than the one we’d shared in our old house. The closet seemed enormous to me, and when we were done unpacking, there was still plenty of room left. There was even space for a desk.
By the time we’d lived on Kay Lane for a few days, I could see that our new neighborhood was completely different from everything I had ever known. For one thing, everyone spoke English—I had to get used to not hearing Spanish spoken except in our home.
The houses in this neighborhood were much newer than the ones in our old neighborhood. They were built on a former vineyard that had been planted with cotton during the Prohibition era in the 1920s, and for the first few years that we lived there, cotton plants would sprout in the yard. When we moved in, the front and backyards were just dirt, but soon grass and some weeds were growing—and they were the meanest and most persistent weeds in the world. Mami planted crabapple, willow, and mulberry trees, and she also tried to cultivate the grapevines that kept cropping up around the fences.
As for the house itself, it had two bathrooms, a kitchen with a new Formica counter, a screened-in back porch with sliding glass doors, a carport and driveway, and an air conditioner on the roof. We had never lived in a home with air conditioning before!
After we moved, we also had a telephone, which sat on its own little table in an alcove. Like all telephones in those days, ours had a long cord that plugged into the wall. We felt so sophisticated that we had our own phone number: 6-2939.
Most exciting for my mother was the real washing machine. It had been hard work for her to do the weekly laundry in our old house on Griggs Street. There, she’d struggled with an old-fashioned tub washer and its hand-cranked wringer.
In our new house, the washer was in the kitchen, and the laundry dried on clotheslines in the backyard. In the front yard were two small trees, a leafy mulberry and a palm tree. And all the streets were paved.
There were some things we didn’t have, though. In our old neighborhood, there were vendors who sold cantaloupes from horse-drawn carts, but we never saw them on Kay Lane. If we wanted a fresh cantaloupe, we’d have to go back to Griggs Street or to the store.
We’d have to go back to Griggs Street to see our friends, too. They seemed far away to me, and I decided I didn’t like our new house, where we didn’t know anyone. We didn’t have Manchas, either. I still missed him sometimes.
On the Monday after we moved, a cold, gray day in the middle of January, Laura stayed home with Tía Angélica while my mother took my brother and me to enroll at our new elementary school. Mami had made us wear our best clothes, taking time that morning to iron everything, even our socks.
When my mother and father were first married, they’d had a difficult time finding an apartment, because many landlords in El Paso would not rent to “Mexicans,” even though my father had been born in the United States. My mother always took extreme care with her own appearance and that of her children, not wanting anyone to say anything negative about us. In our new neighborhood, there were very few Mexican families. Even though we never heard anyone say anything unkind because of our heritage, Mami was always attentive to the way we—and our home—looked.
At Alameda Elementary School, the principal, Mr. McNeily, wore a formal dark-blue suit. He seemed very tall to me, much taller than Mami, who politely introduced herself and gave him our school records. Mami knew more English now, enough to carry on a basic conversation, but I could tell she felt intimidated.
“You’re from Bradley.” Mr. McNeily didn’t exactly roll his eyes, but the way he looked at Mario and me left no doubt what he thought about my beloved elementary school and its loving, caring teachers. I wished that we’d never moved to a new home and that I were back in my old second-grade classroom at Bradley Elementary, not in the office of a new school with a principal who talked down to us.
My eyes filled with tears as he told us that Bradley Elementary School wasn’t very good. I was so angry! I wanted to tell him that Bradley was a wonderful place, much better than his stupid school, but I knew better.
My mother, seeing my tears, pulled me in for a hug. “Todo va a estar bien, mija”—Everything will be okay, dear daughter—she said before she left the office. Now Mario and I were on our own.
Mr. McNeily showed Mario to a fourth-grade classroom, and my brother disappeared inside, giving me a quick, embarrassed wave. Then the principal brought m
e to another classroom. “She’s from Bradley,” he said to the teacher, and by now I knew this wasn’t a good thing.
Mrs. Miller’s classroom was crowded with forty seats, and every one was filled. I saw a few kids who looked Mexican, like me, but most of them were Anglo. While I stood waiting, the principal went into the hall and found another desk. He slid it into the last spot of the very back row, and I sat down.
It didn’t take me long to learn that the classroom was organized by academic achievement, with the best student next to the teacher’s desk and the worst student on the opposite side of the room in the back. As I took my seat in the last row, the boy in front of me turned around.
“Now you’re the dumbest one in class,” he said, and once again my eyes filled with tears. I hated that boy, and this class, and this school, and this neighborhood. But I had to sit there. There was nothing else I could do.
It turned out that Mr. McNeily had put me in a remedial class, for children who were far below grade level. He just assumed that because I was from Bradley, I was not a good student. Did he think that because most of the kids from Bradley were poor? Because we were Mexican? I didn’t know the answer. I just knew he was wrong about my old school—and about me!
There was no remedial class in the fourth grade—in fact, there was only one fourth-grade class—so Mario wasn’t disgraced the way I was. That first day, he came home and told us that when the teacher left the classroom, the kids went crazy, passing notes and throwing spitballs and paper airplanes. We were shocked. That never would have happened at Bradley!
By the end of my first day, I’d made up my mind that I would not stay the worst student in the worst second-grade class. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I’d find a way to move up.
My chance came that Friday, with the arrival of the Weekly Reader. I was familiar with this magazine from my old school. Mrs. Miller distributed our copies, and then, starting with the best student in class, she had everyone read a few sentences aloud. As she progressed through the room to the back of the classroom, the reading wasn’t as strong, with students stumbling over words that I could read when I was in Head Start, before I started first grade.
Path to the Stars Page 6