America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  It was about this time that I received a letter from the Philippines, from my cousin Panfilo, telling me of my father’s death. It seemed that he had gone back to Mangusmana to plant rice in a strip of land belonging to one of our relatives. He was better then—much better than when I saw him for the last time in San Manuel harvesting mongo with my mother and sisters. But he did not realize that he was sick, that he was dying. And he died a lonely death; he had been dead for five days when his neighbors found him. My cousin wrote that he must have been eating when he died because there was still rice in his mouth and untouched plates were scattered around him. He died alone in the place where he had been born.

  My father’s death was the turning point of my life. I had tried to keep my faith in America, but now I could no longer. It was broken, trampled upon, driving me out into the dark nights with a gun in my hand. In the senseless days, in the tragic hours, I held tightly to the gun and stared at the world, hating it with all my power. And hating made me lonely, lonely for love, love that could resuscitate beauty and goodness. For it was life I aspired for, a life of goodness and beauty.

  But I found only violence and hate, living in a corrupt corner of America. I found it in a small Filipino who appeared in town from nowhere and, strangely enough, called himself Max Smith. Max pretended to be bold and fearless, but his bravado was only a shield to protect himself, to keep the secret of his cowardice.

  “Have you a gun?” Max asked me one night.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  “Go to hell!” I told him.

  “Give it to me!” He was trembling, not with anger but excitement.

  I gave him the gun.

  “Follow me,” Max said, ducking into an alley.

  I followed him down the block. He stopped near a small truck and told me to hide behind a tree. A Japanese appeared in the alley, walking toward the truck as though he were dancing. He wobbled a little and his breath was heavy with liquor. Max leaped from the darkness and hit him on the head with the butt of the gun, felling him instantly. Waving the gun at me, Max began searching the victim’s pockets. I jumped from behind the tree and bent over the Japanese, my legs shaking. Max jumped to his feet, motioned to me to follow him, and ran up the alley toward the town jail.

  Robbery? It was something I had never done before—but it was a desperate year. Anything could happen, even in Lompoc. Max procured another gun somewhere, and I got back mine. I roamed the streets at night, following Max, banging at the doors of prostitutes when he wanted whisky. Then a tremendous idea came to my mind, driving me like a marijuana addict when it seized my imagination.

  “What is it?” Max asked.

  “The bank,” I whispered. “Let’s rob the bank.”

  He seized my hand, thought deeply for a moment. “It could be done!”

  “Yes!” I said. “Now here is what we will do. Remember there is only one night watchman. We will stop him in the street and force him to go to the house of the president of the bank. Then we will take them to the bank and—presto!—the large safe where all the bills are kept.” I stopped to catch my breath, so great was the idea, so breathtaking and courageous! “Then, Max, we will drive them to the mountain. We will tie them to the car, set fire to the car, and plunge it into the deep ravine below the highway. There will be no trace of them! And perhaps the fire will turn the mountain and this town into ashes! Let’s do it tonight!”

  Max held my hand tightly, looking from side to side. “We’ll make it our last act in this damned town!”

  It was settled. We would rob the bank and run away. I was standing in front of the Chinese gambling house when Max went inside and came out running, ducking into the dark alley with a bag of money. The excited proprietor came out with a gun, followed by other Chinese, chattering in singsong voices. I pointed in the other direction when they asked where Max went, cursing them in my dialect so that the Filipino gamblers would understand, and go away.

  I knew where Max was hiding: the local jail. It was the safest place to hide because it was always empty, and the sheriff never bothered to investigate it. When the streets were clear, I went to the jailhouse. Max was waiting with my share of the loot.

  “Let’s go to San Luis Obispo and have fun,” he said. “We will come back tomorrow for the bank. The grand finale!”

  “Okay, Max,” I said.

  “Wait for me at the bus station,” he said.

  “Right.” I went to the station and bought our tickets. Then Max came back with a bottle of whisky, his hand on the pocket where the gun was hidden. He jumped into the bus and took his seat beside me.

  He began to get drunk. I watched him close his eyes and go sound asleep. I looked out the window. Night was gathering fast. The sky was dark and boundless.

  In San Luis Obispo, walking in Chinatown, Max pointed to a house in a corner. “This is where my wife lives,” he said.

  “Your wife?” I did not know he was married.

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “The bitch!”

  I walked silently. Then I knew! Max was trembling. He looked tranced, like a gamecock before it is thrown into the arena. He put his hand where the gun was hidden.

  “Wait for me here,” he said.

  I saw him cross the street toward the house. In a little while he came running out, the gun still hot in his hand. I rushed to meet him.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I shot him!” he said. “I killed the white bastard who lives with my wife!” He shoved some money into my pockets. “Go away! Now!”

  “How about you, Max?” I could not leave him alone.

  He pointed the gun at me. “Go!” he screamed.

  I leaped to my feet and ran down the street. I stopped at a corner and looked back. Max was crossing the street toward the house again. There was no time to lose. I ran to the bus station and bought a ticket for Los Angeles. I tried to reach my brother Macario by phone, but he was busy in the garden. He was still working in the big house in the hills above Hollywood.

  I took a train to New Mexico. But the farther I went away, the more the thought of the crime possessed me.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The primitive beauty of Santa Fe reminded me of the calm and isolation of Baguio, the mountain city in Luzon where I had worked for Miss Mary Strandon. Morning was like a rose cupping its trembling dews, shattering and delicate, small but potent with miracles. But the nights were tranquil with millions of stars.

  When I looked out the window of my room, I felt as though I were thrown back into a familiar scene of childhood. Far away, in the desert, I could see buzzards circling in the sky, waiting for the carcass of a dying coyote. And frightened little birds ran into the bushes to hide, and came out when the danger was over and the sky was clear again.

  But I did not know what to do, away from my people. When I was alone, sitting in my room, I would think of going back to California, to the violent life I knew. Then I received a letter from my brother Amado, who was serving a jail sentence in Santa Barbara. It was my opportunity to run away from the solitude and loneliness that wrapped me and stifled my desire to live.

  I took a bus to California. I stopped in Los Angeles for a lawyer. I was disappointed when I found that there were no Filipino lawyers. I called my brother Macario, but he informed me that Filipinos could not practice law in the state. I was angry and bewildered, but I left immediately for Santa Barbara.

  I found an American lawyer who promised to reopen my brother’s case, paid him two hundred fifty dollars, and looked for a job. The lawyer, of course, did his best, but Amado stayed in jail for six months. It seemed that he had been implicated in a robbery in Lompoc, but he swore he had had nothing to do with it.

  I felt that I should stay near Amado. I found work at an ice plant, but it was too strenuous for me. I lifted a block of ice almost twice my
weight into a wheelbarrow and pushed it to a truck outside the plant. My hands became brittle and dead with the cold. But I stayed on for five weeks. On weekends, when I visited my brother, I bought chop suey and Filipino dishes with the money I earned at the ice plant.

  I still do not understand why I almost killed myself working for Amado when he had free board and room. In reality he was enjoying life, for outside where I was living there were cold and hunger. But perhaps it was because of my belief that it was dishonorable to be in jail. Amado might come out, but the stigma would cling to him and ruin his life. Yet, looking back now, I can see that his life was already ruined, and I know that all my efforts to rehabilitate him were futile.

  Sometime afterward, when Amado came out of jail, I found work in a milk company. It was lighter work because the cans weighed only twenty-five pounds, and it was easy for me to carry them into the trucks. But it was night work, and it was cold when I started washing and filling the cans at one o’clock in the morning. When the truck drivers came at about four, I washed the floor and put the empty cans in order. I went to my room about seven, after I had cleaned the cans, when the drivers came back to take over the plant.

  I thought I had lost interest in everything. But here I was again, working industriously as before, hoping to survive another winter. It was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. I was merely living from day to day: yesterday seemed long ago and tomorrow was too far away. It was today that I lived for aimlessly, this hour—this moment. It gave me an acute sense of time that has remained with me.

  * * *

  —

  When Amado came out of jail, I told him that he should go to work, and he did. He was an excellent cook: it was the only trade he learned in America. I noticed, some months afterward, that he was losing interest in his work. I gave him my money to start a business. He bought a restaurant down the block near where I was working and renovated it. I helped him when I was not working at the milk factory, and when he needed money for additional equipment, I gave it to him. I felt confident that he would succeed in this new life.

  The restaurant prospered and Amado, exhilarated by his new prosperity, leased the building above the restaurant. It was an old, two-story building that belonged to an Italian woman. In a little while Amado’s old friends, who had scattered when he was in jail, began coming to his place. They helped him in the kitchen and at the counter, but they also slept in the hotel. Slowly and gradually they came and soon the place was full of them, depriving the farm workers of hotel accommodations when they were in town.

  But I was learning something vital from Amado. What mattered to him was the pleasure he had with his friends. There was something urgent in their friendship, probably a defense against their environment. They created a wall around themselves in their little world, and what they did behind it was theirs alone. Their secrecy bordered on insanity. It was something I did not want to be a part of, but was not strong enough to escape from.

  Then Amado was forced to close the restaurant and to give up the hotel. The milk factory discharged me. It was a dark year. There were many unemployed men in the streets, ready to work for almost nothing. I gave up my room and went to the Mexican district. Amado went to Chinatown. One night, after several weeks of isolation, I went to a Chinese gambling house on Cañon Perdido Street. I was asking the gamblers about my brother when I saw Alfredo coming through the door with a wide smile.

  “You look hungry, Carlos,” he said.

  “Yes, I am hungry,” I said.

  “Well, you won’t be in a few minutes,” he said, taking my arm. I followed him to a chop suey house across the street, where he ordered enough food to feed four hungry men. I ate silently, watching the widening grin in his face.

  “Open your eyes, Carlos,” he said, showing me the fat roll of bills in his hand. “This is a country of survival of the fittest. Quit sleeping on top of pool tables. There is plenty of money around. Here. . . .”

  I reached for the money in his hand. “Where did you get it?” I asked, not understanding what he was driving at. “You have enough to feed this town.”

  “Where did I get it?” He laughed. “I found a Mexican girl picking peas in Arroyo Grande. Then, my friend, I bought some nice clothes for her. When I was convinced that I had her, I borrowed a car and took her to the Pinoy camps in Santa Maria Valley. She was beautiful. The boys were crazy about her.”

  I wanted to stab him with the fork in my hand. But I was hungry and there was no place to stay. I was beginning to cough at night.

  “I am sick, Alfredo,” I said. “Please leave me alone. Now!”

  “I’ll be seeing you around,” he said.

  But I did not see him again. He disappeared with another girl and never came back. It was only some years afterward that I began to have some understanding of his life, but he had already been deported to the Philippines. He became a playboy among the rich women in Manila, a gambler among the politicians, and a gangster in the provinces.

  * * *

  —

  When Alfredo disappeared from Santa Barbara, Amado became restless and unhappy. He left for Los Angeles where, he told me, he would look for a job. He found one in a downtown hotel, cooking for visiting businessmen and retired gamblers. Happy for the first time, he told me that he would save his money and start another business.

  I stayed on in Santa Barbara, hoping the farmers in Goleta, a town ten miles to the north, would need hands for the carrot season. But there was no price and the farmers plowed their crops under. The gambling houses closed because most of the Filipinos were out of work, and the Chinese who operated them gambled among themselves.

  Later I found work in Solvang, farther north, picking flowers and seeds for a big company that supplied these to the nation. But the pay was only ten cents an hour, and what I earned in a week’s time was scarcely enough to pay for the gloves I used to keep my hands from the cold. I was enchanted by these flower fields and the kind, tall, blue-eyed Danish farmers in the valley, so that I felt like crying when I left for Buelton.

  Here, in this highway town, I washed dishes in a large hotel where rich tourists stopped for a rest. I slept under the peach trees in the yard when my work was over. Once the proprietor, a Frenchman who spent more time drinking than attending to his business, sat beside me and began crying.

  “It’s the sound of home, boy,” he sobbed. “I’m lonely for the sound of home.”

  “This is your home, sir,” I said.

  “No, my boy,” he said. “Home is where my heart lives. Home is in the blue hills of Normandy.”

  “This man,” I said to myself, “who came to America as a young boy and made a fortune and married a beautiful white woman is lonely for the blue hills of his childhood.”

  “Go home, my boy,” he said. “Home to your islands before it’s too late.” Then he started talking rapidly in French, gesticulating and laughing. He jumped to his feet and began dancing what must have been a folk dance of the farmers in those blue hills in Normandy. There were tears of joy in his eyes. Then he stopped and went into the hotel.

  The sound of home! Would I also someday yearn for the sound of home? Would I also cry for the sad songs of the peasants in Mangusmana? And before I realized it, I began talking in our dialect: “Ama! Ina! Manong! Ading! Sicayo!” The sound of home! Home among the peasants in Mangusmana!

  Across the street, working in a grocery store, was a young girl who fascinated me. She was my size, with brown hair and blue eyes. I would go to the store pretending to buy something, but I wanted only to look at her. The way she moved around the room, the grace of her arms, the smile on her face. . . . But when she asked me what I wanted, I felt embarrassed and fumbled for something to say.

  “Oh, you don’t understand English well?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t ma’am me,” she said kindly. “I�
��m just a young girl. See? My name is Judith. I have some books. You’d like to read, perhaps?”

  “Yes, Judith,” I said.

  “Follow me,” she said, smiling.

  I followed her through the back door and up into a house. I followed her slowly, drinking in her grace, the lovely way she moved her body. In the living room, piled along the wall, were books of many sizes and colors. Books! I was enchanted when I saw them. They drew me irresistibly to them.

  “Maybe you would like this one,” Judith said. “It’s called The Light That Failed.”

  “What is it about?” I asked.

  “Well, it is the story of a painter who went blind,” she said. “And there is a beautiful girl in it, too. Shall I read something to you?”

  “All right,” I said.

  And she started reading the story of a painter in another land who went blind. When my dishes were done, working faster, I ran to the store so that Judith could read to me. Oh, the sound of her voice! But one day, when a Filipino and a white woman came to the restaurant to eat and were refused, I flung my apron away and attacked the headwaiter with my fists. The son of the proprietor, who had come home from a university for vacation, came running with words of anger.

  “You are fired!”

  These same stabbing words that followed me everywhere. You are fired! All right. I packed my things and went to the grocery store to say good-bye to Judith.

  “If only you could stay on in this town,” she said.

  “I’ll come back someday,” I said.

  “Good-bye.” There was something lost and faraway in her voice. She raised her arm and turned away.

  I went to the door and out into the sunlight.

  CHAPTER XXIII