America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  “I like money,” Alfredo said. “It is everything.”

  They spoke with cynicism, but there was a grain of wisdom in their words. We were driving a borrowed car toward a farmhouse, away from the flower fields that made Lompoc famous. We drove across a dry river and into a wide orchard, then Alfredo knocked on the door. An Italian came to the door and told us to follow him into the back yard.

  “How many bottles do you want?” he asked my brother, starting to dig under a eucalyptus tree.

  “I think I can sell two dozen,” said Amado.

  “The big size?” asked the Italian.

  “The big size,” Alfredo said.

  The Italian looked at me suspiciously. When he had all the bottles ready, Amado paid him, and the Italian opened a small bottle and passed it around to us. I refused to drink, and Alfredo laughed. Then we went to the car and drove carefully to town.

  They disappeared with the bottles, peddling their bootleg whisky in gambling houses and places of questionable reputation. They were boisterous when they entered the room, throwing their money on the bed and talking excitedly. They were disappointed when I told them that I wanted to go to Los Angeles.

  “Don’t you want to go into business with us?” Alfredo asked me.

  “Maybe I will come back someday,” I said.

  “Well, I was hoping you would want to begin early,” he said. There was a note of genuine disappointment in his voice. He put some money in my pocket. “Here is something for you to remember me by.”

  “If you would like to go to school,” said my brother in parting, “just let me know. But whatever you do, Carlos, don’t lose your head. Good-bye!”

  I sat in the bus and watched them walking toward the Mexican district. I wanted to cry because my brother was no longer the person I had known in Binalonan. He was no longer the gentle, hard-working janitor in the presidencia. I remembered the time when he had gone to Lingayen to cook for my brother Macario! Now he had changed, and I could not understand him any more.

  “Please, God, don’t change me in America!” I said to myself, looking the other way so that I would not cry.

  CHAPTER XVII

  I reached Los Angeles in the evening. An early autumn rain was falling. I waited in the station, looking among the passengers for Filipino faces. Then I went out and turned northward on Los Angeles Street, and suddenly familiar signs on barber shops and restaurants came to view. I felt as though I had discovered a new world. I entered a restaurant and heard the lonely sound of my dialect, the soft staccato sound of home. I knew at once that I would meet some people I had known in the Philippines.

  I sat on one of the stools and waited. I saw three American girls come in with three Filipinos. I thought I knew one of the Filipinos, so I approached him and spoke in Ilocano. But he did not understand me; even when I spoke in Pangasinan, he did not understand me. He was of another tribe, possibly a Visayan.

  “If you are looking for your brother,” said the proprietor to me, “go to the dance hall. That is where you always find them.”

  I asked him to direct me. It was still early, but the girls were already arriving. They went hastily up the stairs and their perfume lingered after them. I stood outside for a long time watching through the door until the guard closed it.

  Filipinos started going inside, putting their hands high above their heads so that the guard could search them for concealed weapons. The guard was a white man and he was very rough with them. I went to Main Street, turned to the north, and found the Mexican district. The sound of Spanish made me feel at home, and I mingled with the drunks and the jobless men. In the old plaza some men were debating a political issue; a shaggy old man was preaching to a motley crowd. And farther down the street, near Olvera Market, I saw little Mexican boys carrying shoeshine boxes. They were eating sunflower seeds and throwing the empty shells into each other’s faces.

  It was now getting late. The crowd in the street was dispersing. The bells in the church tower began to ring. I looked up and saw devotees coming out of the door. It was already ten o’clock and the night services were over. The haggard preacher in the plaza leaped from his perch and disappeared in the crowd. I sat on a wooden bench and put my cap over my face so that I could sleep in the glare of the street lamps.

  Toward midnight a drunk came to my bench and lay down to sleep. I moved away from him, giving him enough space to be comfortable. Then a young Mexican whose voice sounded like a girl’s sat beside me. He put his hand on my knee and started telling me about a place where we could get something to eat. I was hungry and cold, but I was afraid of him.

  I walked away from him, watching the church across the street. When I was sure no one was looking, I rushed to the door and entered. The church was empty. I went to a comfortable corner and lay on the floor. I saw on old man with a white beard coming in the door, and I thought he saw me. But he went to the candles and blew them out one by one, then disappeared through a side door. It was like heaven, it was so warm and quiet and comfortable. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  I was awakened in the morning by the merry peals of tiny bells. I ran across the room and through the door, bumping into many people who were arriving for the morning services. I walked in the crowded street toward the Filipino district. I felt as though a beast were tearing at the walls of my stomach. The pain nauseated me: I was hungry again.

  I thought I saw my brother Macario in a streetcar. I jumped on with all the power of my legs, but I was wrong. I got out on the next block and started walking aimlessly. I began to wonder if my life would always be one long flight from fear. When had I landed in America? It seemed so long ago. I crossed the green lawn of the new City Hall.

  * * *

  —

  I walked from Main Street to Vermont Avenue, three miles away. I returned to town by streetcar and went to First Street again. A Filipino poolroom was crowded, and I went inside to sit on a bench. The players were betting and once in a while they would give the table boy a dime. I waited until the men started coming in groups, because their day’s work was done.

  I was talking to a gambler when two police detectives darted into the place and shot a little Filipino in the back. The boy fell on his knees, face up, and expired. The players stopped for a moment, agitated, then resumed playing, their faces coloring with fear and revolt. The detectives called an ambulance, dumped the dead Filipino into the street, and left when an interne and his assistant arrived. They left hurriedly, untouched by their act, as though killing were a part of their day’s work.

  All at once I heard many tongues speaking excitedly. They did not know why the Filipino was shot. It seemed that the victim was new in the city. I was bewildered.

  “Why was he shot?” I asked a man near me.

  “They often shoot Pinoys like that,” he said. “Without provocation. Sometimes when they have been drinking and they want to have fun, they come to our district and kick or beat the first Filipino they meet.”

  “Why don’t you complain?” I asked.

  “Complain?” he said. “Are you kidding? Why, when we complain it always turns out that we attacked them! And they become more vicious, I am telling you! That is why once in a while a Pinoy shoots a detective. You will see it one of these days.”

  “If they beat me I will kill them,” I said.

  The Filipino looked at me and walked away. As the crowd was beginning to disperse, I saw the familiar head of my brother Macario. He was entering the poolroom with a friend. I rushed to him and touched his hand. He could not believe that I was in America.

  “Why didn’t you write that you were coming?” he asked.

  “I did not know I was coming, brother,” I said. “Besides, I did not know your address. I knew that I would not stop traveling until I found you. You have grown older.”

  “I guess I have, all right,” he said. Then suddenly he became quiet
, as though he were remembering something. He looked at me and said, “Let’s go to my hotel.”

  I noticed that he did not speak English the way he used to speak it in the Philippines. He spoke more rapidly now. As I walked beside him, I felt that he was afraid I would discover some horror that was crushing his life. He was undecided what to do when we reached Broadway Street, and stopped several times in deep thought. He had changed in many ways. He seemed in constant agitation, and he smoked one cigarette after another. His agitation became more frightening each minute.

  “Why was the Filipino shot?” I asked, pretending not to notice his mental anguish.

  “Someday you will understand, Carlos,” he said.

  Carlos! He had changed my name, too! Everything was changing. Why? And why all this secrecy about the death of one Filipino? Were the American people conspiring against us? I looked at my brother sidelong but said nothing. Suddenly I felt hungry and lonely and tired.

  We turned to the north and came to a hotel near the Hall of Justice building. We took the slow elevator to the fifth floor. My brother knocked on a door and looked at me. There was a hunted look in his face. I heard many voices inside. A patter of feet, then the door opened. The strong smell of whisky brought tears to my eyes. It was so strong it almost choked me. I knew at once that there was a party. I saw three American girls in evening gowns and ten Filipinos. I was amazed at their immaculate suits and shoes.

  “Friends,” my brother announced, “this is my kid brother—Carlos! He has just arrived from the Philippines.”

  “More than six months ago,” I corrected him. “I went to Alaska first, then came down to Los Angeles. I think I like it here. I will buy a house here someday.”

  “Buy a house?” a man near me said, his face breaking into a smile. But when he noticed that my brother was looking hard at him, he suddenly changed his tone and offered me a glass. “Good, good!” he said. “Buy all the houses you want. And if you need a janitor—” He turned around to hide the cynical twist of his mouth.

  Then they rushed to me. All at once several cocktail glasses were offered to me. The girls pulled me to the table, tilting a glass in my mouth. The Filipinos shouted to me to drink.

  I looked at my brother, ashamed. “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “Go on—drink!” a curly-haired boy prodded me. “Drink like hell. This is America. We all drink like hell. Go on, boy!”

  He was only a boy, but he drank like a man. I watched him empty three glasses, one after the other. My brother came to me.

  “This is a wedding party,” he whispered.

  “Who got married?” I asked, looking around.

  “I think that one,” he said, pointing to a woman. “That is the man. I think he is twenty years old.”

  “She is old enough to be his mother,” I said.

  “What is the difference?” the curly-haired boy said to me. “They know what they want, don’t they?” He winked at me foolishly and emptied another glass.

  I gripped the glass in my hand so hard that it nearly broke.

  * * *

  —

  It was past midnight when the party was over. I thought some of the men would go home, but it was only Leon who announced that he was leaving. The bridal couple started undressing in the other room, and the other men came to the outer room with the two girls. The curly-haired boy switched off the lights and the men started grabbing the girls.

  I could see the red glow of their cigarettes moving in the dark. The girls would protest for a while, cursing the men. Then they would quiet down and go to bed, laughing yolkily when they threw their gowns on the floor. My brother took my arm and told me to follow him. We walked silently through the hall and down the stairs. I heard the married woman squealing and laughing, and I was bewildered and afraid. I wanted my brother to explain everything to me.

  The sky was overcast and the lights in the streets were out. Newsboys were shouting the morning papers. We walked for hours because it was hard to talk. We had not seen each other for years, and it was difficult to begin. We could only pick up fragments of our lives and handle them fearfully, as though the years had made us afraid to know ourselves. I was suddenly ashamed that I could not express the gentle feeling I had for my brother. Was this brutality changing me, too?

  At dawn we walked back to the hotel. What I saw in the room would come back to me again and again. One of the girls was in the bed with two men. The other girl was on the couch with two other men. They were all nude. Six men were sleeping on the floor and three others were sprawled under the bed.

  My brother motioned to me to undress, switching off the lights. I found a space near the closet, and I lay down hoping to sleep. My heart was pounding very fast. Leon came into the room with another girl. He cursed the sleeping forms and took the girl to the other room. They went to bed with the married couple.

  I wanted to talk to my brother in the dark. But when I put my ear close to his mouth, I knew that he was already asleep. I could not sleep any more; my mind was wandering. I rolled over on my other side and tried to remember a prayer I used to recite when I was a little boy in Mangusmana.

  A man named Nick was the first to wake up. He was making coffee in a big pot when I went to the kitchen. The girls were still in bed. My brother woke up suddenly and went to the bathroom. He was fully dressed when he came out.

  “I’ll look for a job today,” he said.

  “There is no use,” Nick said. “I have been looking for a job for three months.”

  “I’ll try, anyway,” said my brother.

  “Well, I hope some worker dies today,” Nick said.

  My brother looked at me. The girls woke up. They walked unashamedly in the room. The other men came to the kitchen and began drinking whisky again.

  It was then that I learned their names. José, the curly-haired boy, was Nick’s brother. They had both been going to college some months before, but the depression had deprived them of their jobs. Mariano, with the well-trimmed mustache, had been an agent for a clothing company that had failed. Victor and Manuel had worked in an apartment house in Hollywood. Luz, long out of a job, had come from the farm to live in the city. Gazamen was the life of the party: he was always singing and playing his portable phonograph. Leon was selling tickets in a dance hall: he was the only one who had a job. Alonzo was a college student, and had never worked as far as the other men knew. Ben was doing house work in Beverly Hills, but he seldom came home with money.

  I found my brother Macario in a strange world. I could stand the poverty and hunger, but this desperate cynicism disturbed me. Were these Filipinos revolting against American society in this debased form? Was there no hope for them?

  One night Leon, who was the sole mainstay of our company, came home with a bottle of bootleg whisky. He brought a girl with him. She was small and dark. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the girl started screaming. We rushed to the other room, but it was too late. Leon was dead and cold. The girl cried loudly and hysterically. Mariano struck her with his fist, felling her. The blow was so hard it stunned her. It was not that he hated her; it was that this was the sad end of a little world that had revolved around a man who sold tickets in a dance hall.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  When Leon died the proprietor gave us notice. Mariano’s girl went away with him to Santa Barbara where, for reasons I did not know at the time, they were driven out by the police. They went to Lompoc, and Mariano, hoping to make a fresh start, started working in the pea fields. The girl stayed in the house where several other Filipino farmhands were living; then she ran away with one of them to Delano, where she became a professional prostitute. Mariano, disgusted and bitter, left the farm and went to town, entering a career of crime that drove him to the very edge of insanity.

  Nick’s girl, Rolla, graduated from college and took up teaching, and after a while she refused to see him. Nick mov
ed with my brother Macario and me to Hope Street, in the red light district, where pimps and prostitutes were as numerous as the stars in the sky. It was a noisy and tragic street, where suicides and murders were a daily occurrence, but it was the only place in the city where we could find a room. There was no other district where we were allowed to reside, and even when we tried to escape from it, we were always driven back to this narrow island of despair. I often wondered if I would be able to survive it, if I would be able to escape from it unscathed, and if the horrors in it would not shadow my whole life.

  Manuel married a white girl from Oklahoma, who had been married at twelve and had had two children. Her mother, two older sisters, and a brother came to live with them. Manuel was a janitor in a big apartment house in Hollywood, but his sixty dollars a month was not enough to support a large family. He was doing the work of two men and slowly his health gave way and he went to a hospital with tuberculosis. His wife gave birth to a baby girl and lived with Victor, running away from him in Salinas to live with a farm-labor contractor. Afterward she was stabbed to death by a Filipino gambler, and her children, fatherless and without support, were put in a state orphanage.

  Luz found a Mexican woman in the street one cold night and took her to our room. José and my brother Macario were sleeping in a small bed, but Nick and I were together on a couch near the door. When Luz and his woman came into the room, Nick spread a blanket on the floor and told me to sleep with him. I cursed the cold night and the hard floor.

  Luz and his woman made love all night. The woman was very drunk, and she screamed and laughed alternately, depending on what they were doing. Now and then José, who was constantly cursing, threw something at them. Once Luz went to the bathroom in the hall, leaving the door open. José, seizing his opportunity, jumped into the couch where Luz’s woman was waiting. I got up hurriedly and bolted the door, hoping to avoid a scene. Luz started pounding on the door, shouting threats to the woman. The tenants came out into the hall and shouted to him to stop. Nick jumped to his feet and opened the door. But José was already back in his bed, feigning innocence when Luz switched on the lights to see which one among us had gone to his woman.