America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  “It will be easier for me if I go now,” I said. “And maybe I will be able to go to America someday.”

  “Be sure to let me hear from you wherever you are,” he said.

  “Are you really planning to go to America, son?” asked my father suddenly.

  “Yes, Father,” I said. “But I will come back to Binalonan before I leave. I hope I shall be able to save enough passage money in two years.”

  “Your bus is not due for two hours,” said my brother. “Let us walk to the schoolhouse and see what the children are doing.”

  We walked through the tall talahib grass in the plaza. It was recess time and the children in the yard were playing and singing. We hung on the pointed bamboo fence and watched them, shifting our weight when the ants bit our legs. The bells on the church tower began to ring, and we looked up to see what it meant. It was not the Mass hour and there was no funeral procession in the street. There was something portentous about the tolling bells. The sound was deep and sad, as though they were mourning the death of an important man.

  “What is it, Father?” asked my brother suddenly.

  “It is nothing of importance,” said my father. “The bells are ringing for the end of a decade.” Then he looked at me meaningfully, and there was a sudden surge of affection in his face. “But they are also announcing the birth of another decade.”

  I did not understand what my father meant. We moved to another corner of the fence and watched the younger children singing and circling an acacia tree. When my bus was ready to leave we rushed through the tall grass again and my father fell into a paddy. He took off his muddy shirt and came running after us to say good-bye. Then my bus started northward, following the road that I had helped build three years before.

  It was good-bye to Binalonan and my childhood. I was going away from all of it forever. I looked back through the window and saw my father and Luciano becoming smaller and smaller in the distance. Then it came to me that my life there was too small to float the vessel of my desires. I wanted to cry out to all those who were left behind, but my tears choked me and only a violent fit of trembling shook my body. I knew that even if I went back to them, after many years of loneliness in another land, I would not be able to pick up where I had left off. I was going out into the world to build a new life with untried materials, and I knew that if I succeeded and went back to them, then it was only to drink of the water of our common spring.

  At last we came to the river where I had been almost washed away to my death—the same river where my mother had lost her precious beans. Then Puzzorobio and its cement public market, and I remembered the elegant girl who had struck our basket of beans and how my mother had knelt on the pavement picking up the beans saying: “It is all right. It is all right.”

  When we came to the first hill it began to darken, and the air changed radically. The bus climbed steadily, passing through tall pine trees, skidding and stopping when we came to sharp turns in the road. I looked down into the valley below. It was deep and dark; a few lights twinkled here and there. I sat in position and looked ahead, remembering what my father had said in parting.

  * * *

  —

  Baguio is a small city in the heart of tall mountains where the weather is always temperate. There are no rains nor heavy winds. But in the morning there is a light mist in the air and when you walk through it you feel as though you are walking through silk. The roads are asphalt and the most modern and beautiful in the Philippines. The houses and theaters are built in Western fashion. Tall pine trees cover the mountains and at night one can hear the leaves singing in the slight wind from the deep canyons beyond the city that comes up with the sweet tang of fragrant vegetation from the surrounding valleys. Far down, there are lustrous truck farms where industrious Igorots produce grapes, cabbages, lettuce, and various fruits.

  In the center of the city is a lake strung with multicolored light bulbs that sparkle at night. Near the lake is a dancing pavilion, open only on Saturdays. And farther down, within shouting distance of the town hall, is the public market, teeming with European and American tourists. Under the cement awnings are numerous oxcarts owned by the lowland people who come to Baguio periodically to sell rice, corn, and bananas.

  It was at this market that I first landed. Europeans of affluence, Americans with big businesses in the islands, and rich Filipinos lived in Baguio. Their beautiful white houses dotted the hills.

  I went about asking the store managers if they needed a janitor or a messenger boy. But the stores were fully staffed because it was summer and the students were on vacation from high school. The storekeepers preferred students because they could speak English to the foreigners. I went to the great hotels and asked if there were anything open for me, but they also catered to English-speaking clients. Only the public market remained.

  I walked around the lake and watched the lights in the water, yearning for the sight of food and the touch of bed. When twelve o’clock came the lights went out. Once more I retraced my steps to the market and found a place to sleep between the sacks of rice.

  In the morning some of the traders from the lowland began cooking on improvised stoves. I hung about and offered whatever services I could, hoping I would be invited to eat with them. Sometimes they would let me eat hot rice, and sometimes they would give me a banana or an egg. I went around the vegetable stalls and picked up what they had thrown away in the gutter.

  My clothes began to wear out. I was sick from eating what the traders discarded. One day an American lady tourist asked me to undress before her camera, and gave me ten centavos for doing it. I had found a simple way to make a living. Whenever I saw a white person in the market with a camera, I made myself conspicuously ugly, hoping to earn ten centavos. But what interested the tourists most were the naked Igorot women and their children. Sometimes they took pictures of the old men with G-strings. They were not interested in Christian Filipinos like me. They seemed to take a particular delight in photographing young Igorot girls with large breasts and robust mountain men whose genitals were nearly exposed, their G-strings bulging large and alive.

  Then a rice trader from Binalonan took pity on me. He could not afford to hire anyone because he did all his own work, but he had noticed that I was acquiring a cough. He told me to help him carry the large sacks of rice on a wheelbarrow from the cart to the booth. I also wheeled the sacks to the automobiles of the customers. The wheelbarrow was almost too large for me to push, but it was a job and I had to eat.

  It was on one of these trips with the wheelbarrow to the houses near the market that I found a better job. An American woman came to the market one day, bought some rice from my employer, and asked me to carry it for her. I followed her with the small sack of rice on my back. She went about the booths and bought pottery and other products from the Igorots. I returned to my employer’s booth and, taking the wheelbarrow, put the woman’s purchases into the barrow and pushed it down the road to her apartment.

  She lived near the library, where she was working. She was really a painter, but working in the library brought her a small income. She had worked for fifteen years in a small-town library in Iowa and had saved her earnings. When she had saved enough, she bought an artist’s paraphernalia and sailed for the Philippines, where her father had gone and died in the war that was to link the destiny of those two countries.

  I will never forget Miss Mary Strandon on the day I pushed the wheelbarrow to her apartment. When I had carefully piled the vegetables and rice in the kitchen, she opened her purse and offered me five centavos.

  “What did you do to your face?” she asked suddenly.

  I was ashamed to tell her that I had hoped the white men and women who came to the market with cameras would photograph me for ten centavos. They had always taken pictures of natives with painted faces, and I had hoped that I could fool them with the charcoal marks on my face. I said it must be dirt.


  “Wash it off!” she said, giving me a bar of soap.

  I filled the bucket in the kitchen and the soapsuds tickled my skin. It was the first time I had ever used soap.

  “Go along now and return the wheelbarrow,” she said finally. “But come back here if you would like to work for me.”

  I returned the wheelbarrow to the man from Binalonan. Miss Strandon hired me and I learned to cook the way she wanted me to, and to clean the apartment the way she did. I became adept at general housework.

  There was another American woman who lived in the apartment next door. She had an Igorot houseboy whose name was Dalmacio. She was a teacher in one of the city schools, and the boy, who did her washing and cooking, was one of her pupils. When our work was done for the day, Dalmacio and I would go to the lake and sit on the grass.

  “I will soon go to America,” he said one day. “I am trying to learn English so that I will not get lost over there.”

  “I am planning to go to America in two years,” I said. “If I save enough passage money to take me there.”

  “You don’t need money,” Dalmacio said. “You could work on the boat. But English is the best weapon. I will teach you if you will do some work for me now and then.”

  He put a book in my hand and started reading aloud to me.

  “Repeat after me,” he said. “Don’t swallow your words. Blow them out like the Americans.”

  I repeated after him, uttering strange words and thinking of America. We were reading the story of a homely man named Abraham Lincoln.

  “Who is this Abraham Lincoln?” I asked Dalmacio.

  “He was a poor boy who became a president of the United States,” he said. “He was born in a log cabin and walked miles and miles to borrow a book so that he would know more about his country.”

  A poor boy became a president of the United States! Deep down in me something was touched, was springing out, demanding to be born, to be given a name. I was fascinated by the story of this boy who was born in a log cabin and became a president of the United States.

  That evening I troubled Miss Strandon with questions. “Will you tell me what happened to Abraham Lincoln, ma’am?” I asked.

  “Where did you hear about him?” she asked.

  “I was reading,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you could read, Allos,” she said. “Lincoln was a poor boy who became a president of the United States.”

  “I know that already,” I said. “Tell me what he did when he became president.”

  “Well, when he became president he said that all men are created equal,” Miss Strandon said. “But some men, vicious men, who had Negro slaves, did not like what he said. So a terrible war was fought between the states of the United States, and the slaves were freed and the nation was preserved. But one night he was murdered by an assassin. . . .”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” she said. “He was a great man.”

  “What is a Negro?” I asked.

  “A Negro is a black person,” she said.

  “Abraham Lincoln died for a black person?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was a great man.”

  From that day onward this poor boy who became president filled my thoughts. Miss Strandon began giving me books from the library. It was still hard for me to read and to understand what I was reading. Miss Strandon realized that I had a passion for books, so she made arrangements with the city librarian to let me work with her.

  I found great pleasure in the library. I dusted the books and put them in order. When Miss Strandon wanted a book she would tell me. I would put my feather duster in a corner and rush to the rack. I was slowly becoming acquainted with the intricacies of a library. Names of authors flashed in my mind and reverberated in a strange song in my consciousness. A whole new world was opened to me.

  A few people came in to the library; they were always elegant and patronizing. Now and then a stranger would come and talk with Miss Strandon about books. But most of the wealthy residents asked that books be delivered to their homes. I used to make the deliveries, hugging the books and running joyfully in the sun. How beautiful their homes were! I would stand outside the door and hand over the books to a white-liveried servant. On my way back, I would remember our grass hut in the village of Mangusmana and compare it with the magnificent mansion I had just left. I would remember many things in my childhood: my father and his land, my mother and her salted fish, my brother Luciano, slowly dying of tuberculosis, and my two other brothers who had gone away. . . .

  I was fortunate to find work in a library and to be close to books. In later years I remembered this opportunity when I read that the American Negro writer, Richard Wright, had not been allowed to borrow books from his local library because of his color. I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting. I was emerging into sunlight, and I was to know, a decade afterward in America, that this light was not too strong for eyes that had known only darkness and gloom.

  The months passed quickly and suddenly a year had gone. I stayed in Baguio until another year was nearly completed. I became restless and homesick. I told Miss Strandon that I wanted to go back to Binalonan. I had saved a little money working for her, but I did not know what to do with it. It was not sufficient to ransom our land from the moneylender, so I considered buying a carabao for my father. With this plan in my mind, I left Baguio.

  I do not remember all that Miss Mary Strandon said to me in parting. But I remember her saying that she would like me to come someday to her home town of Spencer, Iowa. She told me that the trees there were as luxuriant as in Baguio. Fifteen years afterward I went to Spencer, hoping to find her. But she had been dead for more than ten years. I wrote her name on a copy of my first book and donated it to the local library. I think she would have been happy to know that I would someday write a book about her country.

  CHAPTER X

  I had written to Luciano that I was coming home, but he was not at the station in Binalonan when I arrived. I put my suitcase on my back and walked in the darkness, watching the flickering lamps in the houses on both sides of the street. It was a time of religious festival and there were many peasants in the street, on their way to church. They wore homespun clothes and rough wooden sandals, and there were townspeople in the crowd who wore leather slippers and shoes and cotton suits. The more fortunate ones rode in decorated caromatas with their perfumed daughters and sleek-haired sons. The peasants moved carefully out of their way. If the man in the caromata were an important personage or a government official of rank, the driver would lash at the peasants or spit on them. The important passenger would merely show his face in the window and everything would be forgiven and forgotten.

  I was surprised to find our house in total darkness. When I saw that it was empty, I felt desolated. I stood at the gate for a long time trying to decide what to do. Several of our neighbors passed by with their carabaos and other beasts of burden and called my name, but I did not answer them because I lacked the courage to say anything.

  Slowly I climbed into the house and fumbled under the earthen stove for matches. When I found the little box, I went into the living room and struck a match. The tiny yellow flame flared up and lingered in the small cup of my hand. Mice scampered into their holes and house lizards fell from the roof, turning over and over on their scaly sides. Then I saw the oil lamp on the rack at the edge of the table and lit it.

  I took the lighted lamp and went to the kitchen. The pots were all clean and in order. The rice bin in the corner was empty. The plates were clean and the earthen drinking jars were full. There was firewood by the stove, and the salt tube above it, stuck in the grass roof, was full and leaking where the rain had touched it. Hanging on a rope above the stove was a leg of lamb. I was relieved to find something to eat, because I had not eate
n since I had left Baguio.

  I went to the wall where we kept our sharp bolos. The rack was still there, but the bolos were gone. I began to wonder what had become of my family. Had they come upon a fortune? Had they recovered the land? Had they gone to the village? I cut a piece of meat and chopped it into little pieces. Spraying vinegar and chopped pepper on the meat, I started to eat the hard rice crinkle I found in the bottom of one of the pots. The food warmed my stomach and my heart. I was in my own house.

  I washed my hands and took off my clothes. I spread the grass mat on the bamboo floor and tried to sleep, but the mice kept coming out of their holes and running about the house. I was thinking of going to the village when the bells in the church tower began pealing and people from everywhere started shouting. I could hear the resounding roar of pagbayoan, or threshing boxes. When the spreading clamor reached our neighborhood, I could see people rushing into the street and children waving palm leaves and screaming.

  I went outside and ran to the street where the crowd was thick and noisy. I rushed into the crowd and mingled with the people milling madly up and down the street. Then I heard them shouting:

  “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”

  I pushed my way deeper into the crowd, shouting and laughing aloud when I accidentally ruffled the dignity of a shy village girl.

  “Happy New Year!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Happy New Year!” I pushed and moved slowly with the crowd. I kicked the ground like a little boy again, remembering other years that were not like this one.

  “Happy New Year, Allos!” I said to myself.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my neck. I turned around and saw Luciano waving a palm leaf in his hand.

  “This is a miracle!” he shouted above the noise. “I did not know you were in town. When did you arrive?”

  “A few hours ago,” I said, beginning to feel the miracle of the new year. “Since when did you start celebrating like this?”