One mid-December evening my mother clears the kitchen table of the paper-napkin holder, the salt and pepper shakers, and the bowl of oranges and saltine crackers. When she’s done, my father lifts San Lázaro off the dresser and carries him to the kitchen, where the saint stands at the center of the table. My mother arranges plates of popcorn and apples at the santo’s bruised feet, as well as white candles.
“Light a candle,” my father says, giving me the matches.
There is a vela on the table for everyone who lives in the house, and lighting one is our way of asking San Lázaro to protect us in the coming year. I examine each candle closely, anxious to choose the right one, the one that is only for me.
“Pick one already,” my father snaps.
I grab one, light it, and then sit at the table, watching the flame for any sign of what the coming year will bring. At times, it wavers and threatens to blow out, but then it rages back to its small stature, and I hope that this is a good sign.
My father is not alone in his devotion to San Lázaro. In Hialeah, Florida, people like him—Cubans, exiles—have built a church for the saint so that worshippers can travel there weekly or daily to pray at the foot of a statue that is almost seven feet in height, his open sores the size of my fingers. A thick purple robe covers his bony shoulders. At his feet, supplicants light candles and leave white carnations and dollar bills.
When visiting Hialeah, I love watching people’s lips moving in silent prayer and the bouquets of flowers exploding around San Lázaro’s feet; I love that the saint’s body—bruised, tortured, on the verge of collapse—does not repulse his worshippers but instead inspires grown women and men to press their fingers gently on San Lázaro’s legs and feet and crutches. The consensus is palpable: only a man who has suffered like this can know what we need and keep us safe from harm.
In December, at home in New Jersey, I sit in the dark with my father, staring at the saint’s crutches, relieved that the bones in my left leg and my right arm have healed since the surgeries, and I am grateful for my father’s silence.
After twenty minutes though, I grow sleepy and head to bed, wondering how my father can do this from dusk to dawn every year.
This is our home: Jesus and his chest cut open in the living room, a candy dish in the basement, a man with open sores on the kitchen table, and that rooster, always that tin rooster with gray eyes, way above our heads in the kitchen, a constant companion.
In graduate school, while researching colonial Cuba, I come across a book on Santería. The word is on the cover, which surprises me. Like Spanish, the word Santería—and also Elegguá and guerreros—are part of an oral language for me, and yet here in this book, the words are written down, stationed among commas and squeezed between periods. They are important and real, and I start reading. And then, I turn the page.
Here I will pause.
If I could sum up the lives of people like me—people whose parents don’t write books, whose aunties and cousins don’t step onto college campuses except for the time we graduate—I would write our lives with that one phrase: and then, I turn the page.
I turn the page in a book and find the words we use at home written down. Or I turn the page and come across a detailed passage describing the bananas and roses and coffee shipped from South to North America, which begins to explain what my mother and Tía Chuchi mean when they say they came here for work.
Or I turn the page and find a picture of the candy dish.
The photograph shows a rock in a clay plate. Cowrie shells form the familiar eyes and open mouth. The dish is filled with candies, including lollipops. It has objects my father’s dish does not, like bird feathers and beaded necklaces, and overall it is much cleaner. It is not a dish that has been kept hidden.
Elegguá, it turns out, is an orisha, a spirit, a god. In Africa, in Yorubaland, once upon a time, he sat at the entrance to marketplaces. He’s the god of the crossroads, of trickery, of helping people find their camino. He adores children.
Elegguá is not alone. The rivers and the woods, the soil and iron and wind belong to the spirits, and the spirits have lyrical names: Oshún, Yemayá, Changó, Oya. In the stories that are told about the orishas, they are like ordinary people. They have long-standing feuds with each other and intimate relations and favorite colors. Oggún works too much, and Ochosi is at the courthouse again. That’s who they are—the angry toys in my father’s second clay dish, the rake and the machete and the arrows. They are Oggún and Ochosi, the orishas of work and justice.
When the white men arrived in Africa, they failed to see the gods. They beat the Yorubans, shoved them onto ships, across the oceans, and never suspected that the holy ones were heading for Cuba, too. Once they realized it, that the orishas had arrived in the Americas—the Yorubans drummed and danced and sang, the spirits came down and took hold of their heads and wrists and feet—the Spaniards forbade their practice of the religion. They thought they could outsmart Elegguá.
It’s the end of the day. I can imagine dusk crawling across the sugarcane fields. A slave woman is working with a fractured arm. It’s in a makeshift sling. She’s worried the bone will grow crooked now. She needs the orisha Babalú-Ayé, but how? Where and when?
Someone knows. They’ve seen him here in Cuba, except the Spaniards call him San Lázaro. Like Babalú-Ayé in the Yoruban stories, the Catholic santo has open sores on his legs. And, so, the woman procures a small statue. She places San Lázaro on a table in her shack, offers the santo frutas y tabaco and begs for mercy. She can pray freely now and not worry about breaking the law.
It began like this perhaps: The saint in public and the orisha in secret. The bleeding Jesus in the living room and Elegguá in the basement. And high above our heads, the tin rooster my mother keeps above the kitchen cupboard: Ósun, the one who brings messages when your life is in danger.
I read more books in more libraries and learn that my father and my mother are protecting us with a divine army: Elegguá, Ochosi, Oggún, Ósun. In the religion, they are los guerreros, the warriors who protect the life of the practitioner and, by extension, his daughters.
The tricky thing with open secrets is that you can’t barge your way in. You can read all the books you find at the library and download unpublished theses. You can visit botánicas, buy candles, and have your questions, but to be let in, you have to wait for people. You have to learn when to ask a question and when to shut up.
It’s like dealing with someone’s heart. You can’t just knock at the door. You can’t show up and say, “I want to live here.” You have to prove yourself. You have to stick around. You have to wait until the other person is ready.
And in the end, you realize that it was you who had to wait. It was your own heart you couldn’t barge into.
My mother tells me matter-of-factly to not be home one day.
My hours during graduate school are largely unpredictable, and she needs to be sure that I’ll be out of the house. This time, I’m old enough to follow her cue.
“Who’s coming?” I ask.
“Una señora.”
I nod and when she doesn’t say anything else, I let the conversation end. That evening, the house is airy and light. A woman, I imagine, has swept a terry cloth across each room. The house feels satiated, as if the walls themselves had been thirsty and were watered.
Another time, Tía Chuchi asks me to take one of my aunties to the mall. Tía Dora doesn’t believe in this sort of thing, she says, and it’s best that she not show up at the house unannounced. Tía Chuchi doesn’t say what this sort of thing is, and I know to not ask.
A third time, I come home to find my mother at her sewing machine in the basement and next to her, on the floor, a box with holes the size of nostrils. The bird feet scrape the cardboard from the inside.
“What’s that?”
“It’s your father’s things,” she says, not looking up from the pants whose hem she’s taken apart. The box moves in spurts on the floor, but my moth
er snips at the thread and says no more.
When a woman arrives, her hair wrapped in white cloth, my mother tells me to stay in my room. I don’t argue. I have already read about what happens to the birds, and I am not sure that it is anything I want to see.
I walk into the basement one day to wash a load of laundry and find my father talking to a woman I have never seen before: Ana. She’s a santera, a priest in the religion. She’s short, with large hands and gold rings on almost every finger. I feel at ease with her, and curious too. She’s a book whose cover I like.
“Go upstairs,” my father says, waving at me as if I were a mosquito rather than a woman in her twenties. It is not his usual bark, though. It is more like a pleading.
“Let the girl stay,” Ana says, grinning. “She has to learn.”
Ana cracks open a coconut with a large knife and starts cutting the meat into big chunks. She moves the blade as quickly and easily as if it were a pocketknife.
“Why do you use a coconut?” I ask.
“El coco habla,” she answers.
I nod, as if I, too, usually chat with fruits and vegetables.
It is my father and me that day. My mother comes later. But for a while, it is only us and the woman, and on the floor, Elegguá in his clay dish, along with Ochosi and Oggún and the tin rooster. Ana says prayers that sound like songs, and I find myself tapping my foot to the beat. She blows tobacco smoke at Elegguá, which at first looks insulting, like smoking in someone’s face, but after a few seconds it appears romantic and submissive, like a woman offering her lips to a lover.
Ana instructs my father to bring out one of the birds. It’s small, and she holds it by the legs and brings it around my father who stands with his arms open. The bird’s wings flutter as Ana moves the animal around his body, over his arms and torso and back.
Next, it is my turn.
I close my eyes and it is the sensation of being tickled as the wings thrum against my face, my outstretched arms, my belly. I find myself grinning and feeling as light as the bird’s wings. By the time I open my eyes, the woman has slit the bird’s throat and the blood is pouring onto Elegguá, feeding the orisha.
I had read about this ritual in books and thought I would find it repulsive, strange, frightening. But to my surprise, it feels normal and ordinary, like watching a Catholic priest at Sunday Mass refer to a cup of wine as the blood of Jesus Christ.
Ana tells my father to talk directly with the orishas. This is his time to make a request and share his feelings. I stare at the floor, wishing now that I was upstairs in my room. I am embarrassed. My father, as far as I know, has never been told to discuss his feelings.
He starts by shuffling his black boots, his eyes on the ground. I glance over at him. He looks like a little boy, shy and awkward in front of his teacher, his hands clasped behind his back. He makes his requests, and the sound of his voice is like nothing I have ever heard from him. This is the man who routinely screams at my mother to turn off the television, whose voice is raspy from smoking too many cigarettes and cigars, but now he is someone’s son. His voice is tender, suavecito, earnest even.
Ana touches the chunks of coconut to my father’s forehead and arms and then throws them to the floor. It is time for Elegguá and the guerreros to speak.
“You need to take care of your stomach,” she says to my father.
From there, she proceeds to tell him about his health, and the fact that Papi listens is more astonishing than the notion that a coconut and a rock are delivering the news. Whenever we take my father to the doctor, he spends more time complaining than being examined. But here now, before the orishas, my father is quiet and attentive.
As much as I hate to admit it, books have limitations.
Over and over again in the literature on the orishas, the rooster that sits atop the staff and guards us from his perch on the kitchen cupboard is described as small. Ósun’s bells are tiny, the scholars report.
But the tin rooster in our kitchen looks large to me. He stands tall and brave, his silver chest wide and proud. It is said that the day a person dies, his Ósun is buried with him, and I think of the tin rooster this way, as if he were a friend who would walk with you into the final secret of this life.
I wait with Ana at the front door afterwards, while my father retrieves money from the bedroom to pay her.
“Call me when you’re ready to receive your Elegguá,” she says, adding, “when you have your own home.”
I nod, ask how much it would cost, and say that I’ll think it over, although I already know I won’t do it. I don’t even know if I believe in this because it is real or what I grew up with or what hasn’t betrayed me, or if any of that matters. It’s similar to my relationship with my father. I can’t jump into forgiveness. The heart doesn’t work that way. I have to gather information, take notes, observe what changes, what stays constant, what remains hidden, what can be trusted. Forgiveness and faith are like writing a story. They take time, effort, revisions.
When Ana leaves, my father sits on a folding chair in the basement. He lights up a cigar and I put my clothes in the washing machine. Elegguá sits on the floor nearby as usual, his face blood-stained, his cowrie shell eyes watchful and, it appears to me, smiling.
A Cup of Water Under My Bed
La Viejita María is a woman who looks like dried corn. Her face is a light yellow, the skin dry and wrinkled; her white hair like a husk, with silk threads pulled back and running wild around her head. She lets Tía Chuchi and me into her apartment, her dark eyes peering at me. It is the first time she and I are meeting. I am in high school and she grins, as if she approves of my height, my hair, my age.
The apartment itself is stuffed with white carnations, rosary beads, statues of San Lázaro and La Virgen del Cobre. Dollar bills are folded at the feet of the saints, creating the impression that the holy ones are grabbing the money between their toes. Apples are laid out for the saints, too, and unlit candles crowd the shelves and side tables, their wicks bent like black fingers pointing at me.
We talk with the viejita for a while. Actually, it is Tía Chuchi who speaks. She sits on the edge of a love seat and slips into a back and forth with the old lady about people they know from Bergenline Avenue and which priest is presiding over the morning Mass these days. Their conversation moves like a river, following the contours of question marks and commas. I try to not stare at the santos, because their eyes look more real than my own. I also ignore the bag of cookies my auntie brought and which sits unopened on the coffee table. When La Viejita María glances at me, I offer her a polite smile.
The old woman is supposed to read the cards for me.
We are here because I am growing older, because Tía Chuchi thought this was a good idea, because the factories in New Jersey are closing, and although I do not plan to work in a fábrica, I am worried about the money. No one ever told me how much college costs, and I keep imagining the worst: unable to afford higher education, I work as a manager at McDonald’s, closing the store at one in the morning, my babies binging on the Happy Meals I bring home. The cards, the tarot cards, will tell us what we need to know about the future.
Us. My future is always plural. It is always about my mother and my father and my aunties and my sister. The pressure is enormous, and La Viejita is here to ease the sensation that comes over me whenever I think of the years ahead: the feeling of a fist squeezing my throat.
The conversation between the two women continues until, as if by the natural order of things, the river takes a turn in the woods, passes a small clearing.
“María,” Tía Chuchi begins. “It’s that we came for the girl.”
The viejita sets her eyes on me. There are a few moments of mutual observation, and then the kitchen table is cleared and the cards are shuffled. The old woman instructs me to create three stacks with the cards. She picks one stack and places the cards on the table side by side, creating a long river of images: of men in robes, a smattering of swords, knight
s riding horses, a woman wearing a crown. The viejita observes each card as if it were an old friend and tells me what they are whispering to her: a man is protecting you, a woman is leading you, you are working with books and words, and this is good. There are other pronouncements until we reach the last card.
“Don’t worry about the money,” the old corn-face lady says, grinning at me. “The money will come.”
The viejita gives me that kindly old people way of looking, as if she has already been where I am now and she has no judgment about it. I smile again, hoping that she will say more, but she only nods and ends the reading. My auntie tucks a few dollars beneath La Caridad’s toes.
As we leave, I chastise myself for having believed that an old lady who looks like corn would know anything about something as important as the future and college and books. When I call the scholarship office at the local state college, they tell me they still don’t have an answer. I call again and again, and the third or fourth time, the man says, “Yes,” and I can hear him smile. “You got the Trustee scholarship.”
“How much will that cover?” I ask, anxiously.
“Four years of tuition and fees.”
La Viejita Maria. New Jersey is filled with women like her. They read tarot cards and cups of water. They swear by herbs and honey, cowrie shells and Florida water. They come from Cuba, but also other places south of Jersey: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Alabama, Mississippi. When Frederick Douglass needed protection from the white man, his elders in Maryland insisted he carry hierbas on his right side. Roots, they called them.
In Jersey, the women run botánicas, selling religious candles in the front of the store and reading the cards in the back room. They see people in their kitchens, prescribing remedies for a bad cold or a job that has been lost. They sell powders that when added to a lover’s orange juice render the querido faithful. They do limpiezas, cleaning kitchens and bedrooms of bad energies with cigar smoke and holy water. They talk with the dead, with the gods, with the cartas, and then come back to us with messages.
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