Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  I’d see her on my way back from school, watching the 1 train run down the avenue, and sometimes I’d see her sitting in front of her building on a foldout chair. Her daughter was a total bitch. She hated us “Spanish people,” I heard her say once on my way home from school.

  It was a gorgeous late-spring day. My bare legs didn’t feel numb from the cold anymore, even with my uniform rolled up to midthigh. After school, I ran into people gathering around several police cars and an ambulance.

  There she was. Strands of bluish-white hair drifting in the air like dandelion seeds. Her face had been rubbed off on impact, and pieces of limbs—a foot here, an arm there—were strewn about the street and sidewalk with empty beer bottles, candy wrappers, and dog shit.

  The only recognizable part of the old woman were her creased pastel polyester pants, still connected to her small torso, spilling out what looked like spaghetti pomodoro sauce onto the shoes of the man who picked her up and tossed her body into a black plastic bag. On her way to Pathmark, the old lady had been run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

  I imagine the neighbors looked at the two Marias like they did the old lady’s mangled body: in awe. Plus, many of Maria’s neighbors were jealous of her. Maybe they thought she was rich because she always had enough food to feed anyone who walked into her kitchen.

  * * *

  Maria now turns off the lights in the hallway and living room before we sit down to eat dinner. The front door remains locked all day, and I’m instructed not to open it when someone knocks to visit or share a juicy morsel of bochinche.

  Doña Amparo, too old and fragile to deal with not knowing if I’d snap at any moment, stopped visiting Maria shortly after I came back. Fat Maria, who once watched me chase Angel around the block with a kitchen knife after catching him with another girl, was ghost.

  One night after dinner, I convince Maria to go for a walk to get ice cream.

  “Do you remember when we thought you had been found dead off the Henry Hudson Parkway?” Maria says, breaking her silence.

  “How could I forget that?” I say.

  Raquel was discovered slumped over the steering wheel of a car right off of the Dyckman exit by Fort Tryon Park. Nobody knew what happened or why.

  I was still in Pittsburgh, and Maria was in Santo Domingo visiting family, when she received the call. She was inconsolable, crying and yelling my name when not sedated with Valium. Only my voice on the other end of the receiver calmed her nervios.

  “Ma, what’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s up with the ataque cardíaco?”

  “¡Dios mío!” she wailed into the phone. “Thank God it wasn’t you. Thank God. Must have been the other Raquel.”

  I was stunned and at once saddened for the other Raquel. Nobody seemed to really give a shit about her, not even in death.

  “But what happened to Raquel?” I asked.

  “I have to call Angel to tell him it’s not you,” she cried. “You see, I was right about my dream?” Nueva York was no place for you at—ay, I need another pastilla.”

  Maria was right about her dream. I needed to leave New York City.

  “I felt so bad for Raquel, don’t you, Maria?” I ask her as we walked back to 512.

  “Yeah, I do. And anyways, you no even my daughter,” she says, nonchalantly. “I just feel sorry for you like a recogida.”

  Maria’s words smack me in the face. I feel an overwhelming sense of empathy for my paternal grandmother, Ercilia. I had forgotten about that other recogida in the family I was born into but never really belonged in. With that sentence, Maria manages to cut the proverbial umbilical cord between us that had, over time, become infected with a wicked strain of codependency.

  * * *

  As sick as it sounds, I keep that conversation in the foreground of my mind whenever Maria slips into one of her dark moods.

  I never find the right time to tell her that it was she and not Casimiro who ultimately taught me to believe in the power of dreams and spiritual guides. I want to tell her about the realization of the dream that brought me back to New York City. Soon after I came back from Pittsburgh, Chris called to tell me that the windows of his Peugeot (not the Volkswagen in my dream) were shot up by thugs driving a maroon SUV (rather than the black SUV of my dream) in a fit of road rage. Thankfully, he wasn’t in the car when it happened, he was upstairs picking up tickets to a comedy show.

  * * *

  Had Maria not pushed me out of her nest, I might have never found myself. I get a job at a quasi-Afrocentric novelty store in Greenwich Village, selling watered-down fragrance oils and Ron G mix tapes, and I start spending more time downtown. I hang out at Washington Square Park and the surrounding areas, rediscovering the neighborhood, collecting flyers, and meeting people down with spoken word and hip-hop, the lines of which are practically seamless in the early 1990s.

  I’ve been writing poetry for as long as I can remember, but I never think about reading any of it out loud until I start to frequent open mike nights at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side. After watching how viscerally the poets onstage connect to the audience with their words, I start writing feverishly again. A friend from Pittsburgh puts me onto a poetry night he hosts at the Fez Under Time Cafe on Lafayette Street, where poets and hip-hop artists perform in a room filled with rappers, hip-hop journalists, and executives, including Russell Simmons. There, I catch Freestyle Fellowship’s Mykah Nyne and Aceyalone perform “Inner City Boundaries.” In unison, they rhyme: “Once we have the knowledge of self as a people then we could be free . . .” That performance inspires me to dive headlong into the deep end of the hip-hop-inspired poetry scene.

  Soon thereafter, I become the poetry editor at New Word, an urban lifestyle magazine (“urban” being the code word for all things Black and Latino). I begin publishing poets and spending more time in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where the magazine is based, not far from the home of the Notorious B.I.G., whom I meet through a mutual friend. Brooklyn is becoming the center of my universe.

  Under the New Word banner, I start producing poetry readings around the city. Sometimes, with the masterful beat boxer Rahzel, I cohost poetry gatherings featuring Jada Pinkett, muMs, Mos Def, Lauryn Hill, and many other actors, rappers, and artists down with spoken word. Almost every night brings with it a new experience, a hip-hop or poetry event, and an impromptu slam in Washington Square Park or on the corner of a Harlem or Brooklyn block. Had I not been so hungry, working mostly for free at the magazine after quitting my gig at the novelty shop, I may have never ventured back uptown to Maria’s kitchen. And when she was out of town in Santo Domingo or visiting Angel, who now lives in Virginia, I had no choice but to crash at Dad and Alice’s place.

  * * *

  Alice and Dad—I now call him “Dad” because it’s more generic and less affectionate than “Papi”—didn’t know I was back in the city for weeks. I barely spoke to them when I was in Pittsburgh and saw Dad only once from across the street since I’ve been back. He was walking down Broadway embracing a woman who wasn’t Alice.

  When I do show up, Dad and Alice barely say a word to me. The apartment is almost as I left it over two years earlier. The space where my piano and my bed used to be is filled with piles of junk. I sleep on a cot Dad found discarded in the basement. I find the yarmulke he kept hidden at the bottom of his dresser in the same spot I’d seen it years earlier, when snooping around for evidence that I was adopted. It was as if, except for the decaying walls and cracked bathroom tiles marking the passage of time, life came to a standstill here.

  At night I use my pager for light when reading and writing poetry. The only time Dad and I speak is when he barks at me to get off the phone. Alice, too happily distracted from working at the hospital to think about what and who Dad may be doing these days, remains as emotionally detached as she was the morning I left for college.

  * * *

  I don’t know how Rocío finds me here. I’ve been staying in Clinton Hill for the last several months
with Jamal, a man I recently met when walking past his brownstone on Gates Avenue after leaving a nearby café. He was looking out his window when I smiled and complimented him on his beautiful huge eyes and long eyelashes. When I was almost at the end of the block, I heard him yell, “Hey, you,” from his stoop. His tall stature and basketball-player build struck me. “Do you have time for a coffee?” he asked, and that was it.

  After going on a few dates, I decided he was nice enough to spend a weekend with, then a week, and eventually a couple months. I try to ignore the things that irritate me about him, which is almost everything. Jamal and I can’t be more different from each other but not in a harmonious yin-yang way. I’m a free spirit, a poet and aspiring journalist. He’s an engineer who’s almost twelve years my senior, with real bills to pay and responsibilities to assume. Jamal dresses like a suit, even on the weekends, when he visits his elderly parents in nearby Bed-Stuy. In our world, opposites don’t attract but, rather, keep each other company.

  “Raquel, some woman is on the phone for you,” Jamal says one afternoon.

  I can’t think of who it could be other than Maria, and she never calls. At first I don’t recognize the voice on the other end of the receiver.

  “Ello,” says a woman in a soft singsong tone, “may I speak to Raquel?”

  “Sure,” I say, hoping the voice is that of a magazine editor with a paid assignment, “this is she.”

  “It’s your mom, Raquel.”

  How in the hell did she get my number, I thought. Maybe it was Mama who sold me out and gave it to her. She’s the only person besides Maria who always has a contact number for me no matter where I am in the world. Mama promised she wouldn’t share it with anyone.

  “Rocío, how did you get my number?” I ask.

  “I am your mother,” she says in a rhythm I haven’t heard her speak in before. “Am I not allowed to have your number?”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “Are you with a Mexican dude now?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she responds, laughing.

  “Well, you’re singing your Spanish like they do, so I’m assuming—”

  “Well, si, I am. Así es la vida.”

  Rocío continues calling for me the next several weeks, almost daily. The conversations are one-sided and mostly about her boyfriend and church. She never brings her other children up other than to say she would like to have more.

  During one of our last conversations, the subject turns to sex.

  “Do you think it’s normal that he doesn’t like to”—pause—“you know, pleasure me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He likes to spend a lot of time with this guy, a friend from Ireland,” she sings, “more time than he does with me now.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. You know,” I say, “you haven’t asked me once how I’ve been or what’s up with my life. That’s crazy.”

  “We have time for that, Raquel,” she says. “Right now I need you to understand”—pause—“I have so many problems with my boyfriend, I am barely managing my situation here. I just need you to listen.”

  This time around, I play the role of an old friend. I am someone whom Rocío can maintain a comfortable distance with, just enough to vent her dramas to without fear of being judged. I’m relieved when she stops calling.

  * * *

  I see less of Maria these days.

  “Mi hija, when you’re coming to visit me?” she says over the phone. “Your twin sister, Tiffany, no stop barking because she miss you.”

  “Yes, I miss her, too,” I say, “I promise I’ll try to come by soon.”

  “Forget that writing stuff,” she says. “You don’t even speak good English.”

  “I’m going to become a famous poet and writer,” I tell her. “Do you want me to read you something?”

  “Yes, but make at least some of the words Spanish,” she says.

  I explain to Maria that some of the racial dramas I experienced in Pittsburgh are playing themselves out again in Brooklyn. The idea of fitting into a Black or white mold was something I never did well. Life is so much more colorful than that, at least in my community.

  “This poem,” I tell Maria, “is about a poetry reading I went to in Harlem where some folks didn’t get it.”

  She doesn’t understand. “Get what?” she asks. I begin to read a part of the poem to her:

  Entered the room full of my brothers and sisters

  Beautiful faces

  Different shades of Black and Brown races

  But those faces hint traces

  of hate when I enter the place

  Guess my hair is too straight

  But I’m Black, as Black as my master permitted

  From Spain, the man was acquitted

  Of the crimes he committed against my ancestors

  Against my tatarabuela

  But people give muela

  When I enter the place like I was a disgrace to my race

  And welcome me with shade to make me seem darker

  Más oscura, que locura

  nunca puede ser . . .

  Maria laughs. “You always a dreamer, always trying to get pee’po to see things when they no ready,” she says. “Anyway, por favor, come and write here, mi hija. We miss you.”

  I don’t come for a long time.

  Months turn into a couple of years at Jamal’s brownstone. Living with him is like running through a revolving door; I often find myself on the outside looking in. Sometimes friends come to my rescue and make room for me on their couches, and when I wear out my welcome I stay with Maria back uptown. It becomes a routine. After a few weeks, Jamal tracks me down at Maria’s, where I always find him sitting in the kitchen with Tiffany resting atop his expensive shoes, waiting for me. He wins me back each and every time by taking me on shopping sprees at Saks Fifth Avenue and to dinners at Mr. Chow or whatever restaurant is hot at the moment. It only takes a few days, though, to feel suffocated once more by Jamal’s constipated outlook on the world and his controlling nature. I’m even more weighed down by my own guilt for essentially using the guy for a place to live and work out of.

  Somewhere along the way, I make the transition from spoken word to hip-hop journalism, making a slight detour into a paying job as a music publicist. Jamal, sick and tired of my writing for free and bleeding him financially, called a music industry friend who got me the job.

  I start saving money with the intention of freeing myself from Jamal’s conservative grip. I want to come and go as I please and continue to flow in hip-hop’s current without being questioned by someone who doesn’t get it. I want to write like Robert Christgau and Joan Morgan and Greg Tate and Lisa Jones, all journalists whose contributions to the Village Voice replaced the played-out textbooks I barely cracked open as a high school senior at the onset of the ’90s.

  I develop my voice and begin to write for papers and magazines about hip-hop and R&B music, and cultural criticism, but something happens along the way that throws my plan a bit awry. I step out on Jamal out of boredom and have a fling. In the spring of 1996, I find out I’m pregnant.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Whitewash

  There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.

  —CARLOS FUENTES, LAST TWEET

  NOT LONG AFTER MY DAUGHTER, DJALI, IS BORN, MARIA STARTS spending more time in Florida, where her eldest son relocated. She’s terrified of living by herself because of the World Trade Center attacks. A couple of months later, when American Airlines Flight 587, bound for Santo Domingo, falls above Queens, killing everyone on board, she takes it as a sign that it’s time for her to go, and starts planning her move down south. New York City has become a miserable living thing to Maria. She was convinced it would swallow her whole if she stayed put. I try to dissuade her but I’m no match for her paranoia and Casimiro’s ghost haunting her empty bed at night.

  Maybe it was
a good time for Maria to leave. After all, the neighborhood has lost its adobo. It now has the flavor of a piece of dry toast, with people hiding under a saccharine veil of political correctness. It’s most evident during the rush hours. In the morning, people anxiously ride the train downtown, afraid that it may blow up at any moment. Then, after a long and stressful day at work, the menacing glare of racial profiling goes into overdrive on the way back uptown. The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.

  As is the case with many first- and second-generation children of immigrants, we are stuck in between the old-school social and cultural standards of our parents, their respective homelands, and this American one, the latter growing increasingly hostile to our presence. People across the nation are freaking the fuck out.

  As a group, many American-born Latinos exist in a kind of liminal state. For one, although different Spanish-speaking groups have been migrating here since at least the 1800s—the exception being Mexicans who were here well before the first Europeans arrived—we are still being treated like personae non gratae in our own home. The thing is, mainstream society isn’t sure who they’re discriminating against—are we all the way white, Black, or Native-American? Are we Arabic and, therefore, presumed terrorists?

  One evening on the A, my comadre Gigi and I are headed uptown and notice that we’re being given dirty looks by a white woman sitting across from us. At first I figure that something unrelated must have happened earlier in the day to make her sour, but soon I realize that we are the sources of her unease. “They must think we’re Arabic,” I whisper to Gigi, “especially since you’re rocking that caftan-style dress.”

  The white woman sucks her teeth as we step out of the train. I walk up the steps behind her. “Excuse me, but we are both Latina, darling.”

  Embarrassed, she smiles back nervously and says, “Oh, I wasn’t sucking my teeth at you—I, I just—”

  “No worries. Every time I see someone who looks like Timothy McVeigh, I freak out and assume she or he’s a terrorist too,” I say. “Besides, I don’t think my friend or I mind being mistaken for Arabic women.”