America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  We had deprived ourselves of any form of leisure and simple luxury so that my brother could finish high school. But even then he kept asking for more money, threatening that he would stop if we did not send him enough. The thought that he would really stop terrified us.

  My father went to town once more and found the moneylender who had given him two hundred pesos some months before for one hectare of farm land. He gave my father more money and got the deed to another hectare. The stipulation was that after a certain period of time we would pay back the money and thus retrieve the land; but in the event that we could not pay the moneylender, we automatically lost ownership of our land. Oddly enough, we were not bothered by this usurious arrangement. We were waiting for the day when my brother Macario would teach school and pay back the moneylender.

  All this time my brother Amado was working industriously with us on the farm. He worked seriously because he, too, wanted Macario to go through high school. Amado had gone as far as the fifth grade, but although he was eager to go farther, my father stopped him. We could afford only my brother Macario’s education.

  Now we had only one hectare of land left, not enough to maintain our family. Not far from us was a wide piece of church land which had not been touched for years. The soil was rich and the vegetation that grew in it thick and lusty. My father went to the men in the church and asked them to let him clear away five hectares. His request was granted, and he came back to the village with a new hope.

  We started working when the slight rain came. We let the roots and logs float down the river. We set fire to the land and watched the flames eat the bushes. When the heavy rains came, in the last days of April, we started digging out the huge roots of fallen trees. Sometimes we put a sturdy pole under the roots and heaved them slowly out of the hole; then we put down the pole and used our bolos and axes, cutting wildly here and there until we were ready to pull the whole cluster of roots away.

  Then we were ready for the biggest roots. We put a sturdier pole under them and hitched it to the carabao. It was slow and painful work. The heavy rains kept beating upon us and the lightning flashed incessantly in the sky. The thunder rolled and broke like a huge drum near us. The carabao stopped pulling the pole and quivered with fright. But we worked on, rain or shine, until the work was almost done.

  There was now only a narrow section of the land where the big, stubborn roots were firmly embedded. The other section was already as level and clean as our other land, spreading out like a rainbow toward the river. My father was plowing it, hoping that we could plant highland rice when the water receded and the soil became firm.

  My brother Amado and I were pulling out the remaining huge roots with our carabao. It was during these last days of our backbreaking work that Amado entered my consciousness and stayed there like a firebrand for years. We were working under a heavy rain. It was getting dark and our bodies were aching with pain. The carabao we had been using stopped suddenly and refused to move. My brother jumped out of the hole and urged the animal with his mud-caked, trembling hands, shouting with controlled anger as he pushed him. Then he shouted at me to jump into the hole and to push the pole while he slapped the carabao a little harder. But the animal did not move; he sank slowly into the mud.

  Suddenly my brother began beating the carabao with a stick. I stopped pushing the pole and jumped quickly out of the hole. The animal’s hind legs collapsed weakly in the water, and he sank deeper into the mud. Then my father came running toward us and, seeing the helpless animal, leaped at my brother and slapped him sharply across the face.

  “What are you doing to the carabao?” shouted my father, striking my brother again.

  Amado stepped back and for a moment I thought the hand with the stick would strike my father. My brother raised his hand and stopped, shaking with blind fury; then he flung the stick angrily upon the carabao and started running furiously in the direction of Binalonan. When he had gone a hundred yards, he stopped and looked back at me; then he came running back to where I was standing near the huge roots and touched my head. Then he ran away again and halted almost on the same spot where he had first stopped. He raised his dirty right hand and waved lovingly at me.

  “Good-bye, Allos!” he shouted.

  I watched him disappear behind the tall grass in the river, his bare feet pounding in the mud as the rain swallowed him. I did not know then that he was running away from the cruelty of our hard peasant life. There were tears in my eyes, but the rain washed them away. My father heard me sniffling and saw my lips quivering in anguish.

  “What are you crying about?” he said, rubbing the back of the carabao affectionately with his palms.

  * * *

  —

  I saw my brother Amado again not long afterward in Binalonan, where I had gone to live with my mother. He was then a janitor at the presidencia, or town hall, and helping us support my brother Macario who was still in high school. I went from house to house in the neighborhood, climbing coconut trees out of which, if I picked five of the fruit, I could have one nut for myself. Toward the end of the day compradores or buyers would come to the grove and buy all the coconuts, including my share. I would run home and give the money to my mother; she in turn would give it to Macario.

  But one day when it was raining, I fell from a coconut tree. I lay on my grass mat for a long time waiting for the broken bones to heal. My mother was away most of the time. My sister Irene was still a baby; she crawled on the floor when we were alone in the house. My brother Amado came home every lunch time and prepared something for us to eat; then he went back to work, running home again in the evening before my mother arrived. He brought home old stamps and magazines that he had picked up while sweeping the floor of the presidencia.

  A year passed slowly by. In July, when school again opened, I was well enough to walk around the house. Amado came home with a big book filled with pictures and large letters.

  “If you learn to read this book,” he said kindly, “I will take you to school with me.”

  “I will learn to read it in one day,” I said boastfully.

  “I know you will, Allos,” he said.

  There was something moving in the way he talked to me; his words seized my mind and nourished my life to the edge of the day. I was greatly fascinated with the idea of going to school, but did not know why, since there was no hope of my going beyond the third grade.

  I remember Amado putting a frayed cap on my head one morning and taking me to school, along with the other children in our neighborhood who were accompanied by their parents. He had stopped going to school when my father took him to the village to help us. But he had always had a passionate desire for education; and even later, in a distant land, where he was thrown to make his world, it never completely died.

  CHAPTER III

  It was now the end of my brother Macario’s school year. We gave a sigh of relief. We knew that our burden would end at last. God willing, he would shoulder the responsibility of buying back our land.

  There was a national election that year, and the peasants went to the presidencia to cast their ballots. My father was not a political man, but he had always considered his right to vote a great privilege. One morning he told me to tie a rope around the neck of the white kid in the pasture. My brother Macario would be home for a few days, and we had an occasion to celebrate. It was my first opportunity to see him. I had been born in the barrio and when I had gone to town he had always been away.

  My father filled a large sack with eggplants and tomatoes and told me to take the kid. The animal followed me obediently. When we were nearing the town, my father saw a pond with many snails in it. We took off our clothes and went into the water, gathering the slow-moving snails from the bottom of the pond. We filled our hats, which the kid carried to town, stopping now and then to kick the burden off its back.

  When we got home my mother was still in the public market. We
put the snails in a large earthen jar. I tied the kid to the ladder so that my mother could see it when she came home.

  “Let’s go to town and wait for your brother, son,” said my father.

  “Is he coming home today?” I asked.

  “Sometime this afternoon,” he said.

  “I hope he will bring some books with him,” I said.

  The street was filled with voters on their way to the presidencia to cast their ballots. They carried little jugs of basi, which is a homemade drink extracted from sugar cane and seasoned with herbs and leaves; and some of them brought their food and blankets with them.

  My father and I stopped in the public market to see my mother. She was selling salted fish and an indescribable aggregation of vegetables under an umbrella, while my sister Irene was crawling on a blanket near by. My mother gave me two centavos for pan, a kind of bread made from rice flour, which children in my day particularly enjoyed.

  Then my father and I went to the plaza and sat in the shade of the kiosk, listening attentively to the band playing our national anthem and other patriotic songs. When the students from Lingayen began to arrive, we ran to the station under the large arbor tree. We sat in the coffee shop and watched every bus that stopped, but my brother Macario did not arrive. After a while my father went to the presidencia to cast his ballot; but before he came back a bus full of students came along. A young man in a white cotton suit alighted from the bus and kept turning around, as though he were looking for someone. I knew he was my brother Macario because even at his age his resemblance to my father was unmistakable. The way he carried his head slightly toward the left made me sure.

  But I was afraid to go up to him. I could not move from my stool. I kept watching him for fear he might disappear before my father came back. Then he saw my father coming out of the presidencia with the old felt hat in his hand. My brother lifted his rattan suitcase and ran to meet him. They shook hands affectionately, which was uncommon because ordinarily Macario would have kissed my father’s hand; but he was being educated in the American way. Then my father waved to me.

  It was the first time I had seen Macario, surely the most educated man in our family. He looked at me wordlessly for a moment and then passed his hand over my head.

  “Is this Allos, Father?” he asked.

  “Yes, son,” father said.

  “Well, let us go home and I will cut your long hair,” said Macario to me. “Don’t you ever cut your hair, brother?”

  I was speechless. I was ashamed to say anything.

  “He needs it for protection against vicious mosquitoes and flies,” said my father. “It is also his shield from the sun in hot summer.”

  “I will make a gentleman out of him,” Macario said. “Wouldn’t you like to be a gentleman, Allos?”

  I could not say anything. I walked silently between them: my brother on my left, my father on my right. They were like two strong walls protecting me from the attack of an unseen enemy (moving into my life to give me the warm assurance of their proximity, and guiding me into the future that was waiting with all its ferocity).

  We went to the public market, but my mother had already left. We walked eagerly to our house; then we saw the black smoke coming out of the small kitchen window. My mother was preparing an early dinner. My father told me to run ahead and untie the kid under the ladder.

  My mother was boiling rice, but she came running to meet my brother at the door, uttered a few words of affection, and returned hastily to the stove. My father carried the kid on his shoulder to the bench in the kitchen and tied its legs. It was very gentle; it did not resist. While my father sharpened the bolo on a soft stone, I poured vinegar and uncooked rice into a large wooden bowl. When he struck the jugular vein with the sharp blade, I knelt on the floor and put the bowl in place. The kid jerked convulsively, moaned, stiffened, and died. The warm blood rushed out of its gurgling throat into the bowl.

  The night came on quickly. I could hear my father hacking at the meat in the lean-to; once in a while his bolo flashed in the faint lamplight. Beyond him, in the backyard, I could see the weird silhouettes of the banana leaves, and above them, in the light of the sky, I caught glimpses of the coconut trees moving in the wind. Then the stars shone brightly in the sky, and my mother opened the windows so that the light would fill the house.

  After we had eaten our dinner we went to the living room and sat around the low table.

  “How are you getting along with your studies, son?” asked my mother.

  “Three months more and I will be through forever,” said my brother, moving uneasily in his chair. “But I need two hundred pesos to finish the course. That is why I am here.”

  “Two hundred pesos?” said my mother, rising slightly from where she sat on the floor. “You might as well ask for two thousand pesos.”

  “Don’t you have it?” asked my brother, looking at my father and then at my mother. “Can’t you do anything at all? Can’t you sell some more land?”

  “We have only one hectare left, son,” said my mother, trying desperately to make my brother understand our poverty with futile movements of her hands.

  “Can’t you sell this house?” asked my brother.

  It was then that my father stirred in his seat and said: “We will sell the land. You can go back to school and do not worry at all. We will send you the money and you will finish your studies.”

  My mother’s hands leaped frantically from her lap to her mouth and stayed there, stifling the protest. In one fleeting instant I saw her hands—big-veined, hard, and bleeding in spots. I saw her lips tremble for a moment, and the fear in her eyes.

  “You can go back to school and do not worry about anything,” said my father again, rising to go to the kitchen for our bundles.

  Now, toward midnight, we were on our way to the village to work all the harder because we would have no more land. What words of great conviction were said when my father got up from his seat, I had not heard, and if I had, they were forgotten in the sudden rush of conflicting emotions.

  * * *

  —

  We had no more land except the narrow strip of ground where our hut stood and the lot where my father had built a house for my brother Leon and his wife. We still had the clearing, but it did not really belong to us; most of what we raised still went to the church. According to the verbal agreement we could raise anything but the church would have one third of it, and from the third year on, we would share the crop on equal basis.

  The land was not for sale, so there was no hope of possessing it. There were no usury laws and we the peasants were the victims of large corporations and absentee landlords. When the church took part in the corruption, the consequences almost tore the Philippines from its economic roots. It was only years afterward that a definite program was adopted for the peasantry, but even then it was merely a bait tossed by politicians into the restless life of the nation.

  Some of my uncles were already dispossessed of their lands, so they went to the provincial government and fought for justice; but they came back to the village puzzled and defeated. It was then that one of my uncles resorted to violence and died violently, and another entered a world of crime and criminals.

  But my father believed in the eternal goodness of man, and only once did he almost give up his faith. Even when the usurers were closing in on us, he did not believe that he would be cheated. He was an honest, simple man, who went about his work hoping for an ample reward at the end. He was also a strong man when his deep convictions were at stake. Illiterate as he was, my father had an instinct for the truth. It was this inborn quality, common among peasants, that had kept him going in a country rapidly changing to new conditions and ideals.

  One summer day, when the rice lay golden in the sun, startling rumors came to Mangusmana: the peasants in a province to the south of us had revolted against their landlords. There the
peasants had been the victims of ruthless exploitation for years, dating back to the eighteenth century when Spanish colonizers instituted severe restrictive measures in order to impoverish the natives. So from then on the peasants became poorer each year and the landlords became richer at every harvest time. And the better part of it was that the landlord was always away, sometimes merely a name on a piece of paper.

  The peasants did not know to whom they should present their grievances or whom to fight when the cancer of exploitation became intolerable. They became cynical about the national government and the few powerful Filipinos of foreign extraction who were squeezing a fat livelihood out of it. They began to think for themselves and to take matters into their own hands, and they resorted to anarchistic methods. But there came a time when an intelligent campaign for revolt was started, with the positive influences of peasant revolts in other lands; and the Philippine peasants came out with their demands, ready to destroy every force that had taken from them their inherited lands.

  The unorganized revolt in the southern province ended in tragedy; the peasants were shot down and those who survived were thrown into medieval dungeons. But these conditions could not go on for long without disastrously rocking the very foundation of Philippine life. These sporadic revolts and uprisings unquestionably indicated the malignant cancer that was eating away the nation’s future security and negatively influencing the growth of the Philippines from a backward and undeveloped agricultural land into a gigantic industrial country. The wealth that was not already in the power of the large corporations, banks, and the church, was beginning to flow into the vaults of new corporations, banks, and other groups. As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies, as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.

  But some were favored by this sudden upsurge of industry. The sons of the professional classes studied law and went to the provinces, victimizing their own people and enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. In a few years these lawyers were elected to the national government, and once secure in their positions and connections, they also took part in the merciless exploitation of the peasantry and a new class of dispossessed peasants who were working in the factories or on the vast haciendas.