One afternoon, as I was editing video footage shot in the village where I spent part of my childhood, my grandmothers face appeared on the monitor, and shock waves of hurt erupted in me. Her image revived the unbearable pain of leaving her when I was a child. I always thought my childhood was savage, beautiful in parts, but mostly full of hurt. Seeing her face, ravaged leather cracked and burned by the sun, her silver, squash-blossom eyes, it came back to me how much she had loved me and how warm and nurturing my childhood had been because of her love. On the film, her mouth pursed into wrinkles as she said in Spanish,

"You ran every day to the railroad, and no matter how we spanked and scolded you, you would run to play on the tracks. You spent so many afternoons there. You loved waving to the caboose engineers, and throwing rocks at the cattle cars to see if you could hit them between the slats. You had a fascination for things that went away, that traveled and came by in a whoosh and then were gone. You wanted to go with them, and it was hard to bring you back, to bring you home, especially after you had seen a train. You wanted to go after those trains, and I was scared when you ran alongside them. Once you threw your rosary on top of one of those flatcars and waved it good-bye. Yes, how you loved things that ran and went on and on."

I didn't remember any of that. It hurt to have forgotten so much, and I wondered why I had imagined my life so destitute and deprived. My grandmother had an old-world decency. She would offer food first to the guest, offer the best chair, offer whatever the guest lacked: comfort, a bed, change from her penny purse. She would share anything and pray every night for those less fortunate than she. I would fall asleep to that mumbling drone of prayers, like a Buddhist monastery chant. They calmed me and I fell into tranquil dreams. My grandmothers face has a powerful dignity, like that of an old female eagle on a craggy peak, whose world is eternal. Her gestures are restrained, tentative and soft, as if the world around her, the innocent earth and flowers, were a child easily bruised. Her silence is sunlight, sparkling in a freshwater snowmelt stream. The memories of her suffering, evoked by those film images, were too much for me.

I stopped to monitor, pulled on my oilskin jacket, and left the house. As I walked, a dark remorse brimmed in me. If I had not left our village, if I had stayed all these years with her, I could have learned from her; I could have been a better man than I am today. My life seemed to me a fool's jig of drunken jesters dancing for the deaf and blind. I fled from her face because it was too strong a telling of undeserved suffering. As I thought these things, my rage burst out in savage sounds of grief. Those who cannot see might take my grandmothers kindness and caring for weakness. She has lived with hunger, beans, tortillas, and chile her daily bread; worn frayed and faded clothes, mended a thousand times over. Yet never has she extended her hands for help, those hands always reaching to help others. For more than eighty-five years she has risen before daybreak to prepare the breakfast for her family. Her meals are to those who know how to savor the fragrant scents of fermenting earth and the magic of dew and sunlight. Her aged body is bent as if in perpetual homage to the earth. Those aspects of goodness that she embodies, truth, kindness, giving, and compassion, are virtues of high wisdom that the hurrying world derides. I wish I had sat with her longer to listen to the stories of the history of our people that she carried inside her frail rib cage as a morning dove carries the song that awakens dreamers to the dawn. On rare visits after I left home, we would sit in her kitchen, happy to be together, and I would make her laugh, so hard she would cry, at my vato loco jokes, pulling her handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbing her wrinkled cheeks.

She loved my wordplay. To her I was still the little boy who obeyed no one, who after getting spanked would rush to a grown-up's knees and hug them, who needed to be loved and was afraid to love. I was still the angel who tripped over his wings and loved running more than being still and good, who loved laughter and men's conversations in bars more than prayers in church. When I would tell her how difficult it was to pay my bills, she would smile gently and say, "Poverty in the pockets brims riches in the imagination, that's why you are a poet." Those images of my grandmother's anguished face impacted deepest reserves of my feelings and made me understand the misery of her life as something criminal.

How distant she is from my world, how much truer and more sustained is her world in grounded work of the spirit. As I mourned the distance, it seems as if my life, a boat halfway across the lake, was capsizing. Yet as a child I had lived in her world and drawn from her spirit, the mirror that gave me my face. When I was near her, I too was gentle and caring, and raucous with joy as a yearling cold cavorting on canyon slab rocks, outrunning the wind. With gusto and reverence, I lapped up hot chile and bean soup, slurped the goat's milk that fed my young strength. Leaping up from the table, I would roll on the ground intoxicated with laughter.

In those early days, I used to watch the men of our barrio build adobe and clapboard houses for neighbors, how their hands worked the earth with love, with such dignified attention to their tasks. The rigors of life were themselves occasions of praise for the sustaining life force that allowed us to breathe and wake and work. Work became a celebration of hands, of fingers that could move and bend, grip and push. Intelligence, wood, mud, voice, eye, all were precious, all gifts, but laughter was the highest gift, and courage and endurance. When the men worked there was much laughter, but long spells of silence, too, before the talk would start up again, so quietly. They did with words what Bach could do with musical notes: they composed the most beautiful improvised poems from everyday talk. And, as I listened, the red seed of my young heat took root and blossomed under the prairie moon. These men always followed careful pathways through their days, following ways where they would not be obstructed, avoiding foreigners who might question them or block their passage. They refused promotions that would compromise their cultural values, preferring to work with friends and earn less than to work with strangers at a higher status and wage. Work of the hands, with the earth, was to them holy work, good for the spirit, that allowed a man to feel his life lived on earth was shared with others. And there is much good to say about leaving your house at dawn, in your trusty jacket, and breathing in the cold air, walking down a familiar path to meet friends who wait for you, noticing the changes in the fields around you, and feeling the rising sun on your cheeks and brow. It was a mythic life they lived. Yet these gentle heroes were regarded as ignorant and vicious by those who did not know their hearts. Outsiders provoked them to fight to enhance their own machismo. They treated these kind men as if they were knife-carrying savages, every one, against whom you had to strike the first blow. When they came around looking for trouble, or arrogant tourists snooped around our yard , my uncles would ask them politely to leave. But then, if they still hung around, treating the place as if it was their own, my uncles would get angry. Without a word they would lift these intruders off the ground and toss them into the pickup bed, or drag them out of the yard by the collar and throw them in the dirt road.

The time came for me to leave the pueblo and go to school. There I learned hard lessons not to be found in books. The Anglo boys mocked me and hurled insults at me. I felt ashamed and lowered my head, trying to hide my face. When they beat me up they were heroes; but when I struck back, defending myself and knocking them down, I got the name of troublemaker. Their blows boosted their self-esteem, while, for a time, my defenseless silence assured my survival. Looking at the monitor, hearing my grandmother talk and seeing her gestures, brought back to me what I had lost. Because I was too fragile and sensitive to endure the abuse, eventually I struck back. And, in so doing, I lost the inner balance of my elders, rejecting their wisdom and becoming lost to their ways. At first I withdrew into silence, searching out others like me, brown children from rural towns whose confidence had been crushed; outsiders, unwanted, scorned, and condemned to lives of servitude. But later I rebelled refusing to do anything that I was told to do. Yet fighting was against my deepest instincts. When I raised a fist, my other hand stretched out, pleading for peace. I was caught in a conflict not of my making that squeezed from me every drop of my childhood's sweetness. I soon realized that, to many, I was just a mestizo boy destined for a life of hard work in the fields or mines, and nothing more. But that was a judgment I couldn't accept.

Knowing no other way to refuse, I found myself falling into the dark worlds where the winos and ex-cons live, a gypsy child in the urban wasteland, hanging under neon lights and on hopeless street corners. I began to drink and take drugs. I was becoming what society told me I was, prone to drugs and alcohol, unable to control my own life, needing a master to order my affairs, unworthy of opportunity and justice, a senseless beat of labor. I drugged my pain and drowned my self-hatred in drink, seeking oblivion. I had no future, no plans, no destiny, no regard for my life; I was free-falling into bottomless despair. Death seemed to be the only way out. Finally, I found myself hoping for death in a fight with the police or the Anglos; or that a security guard would shoot me when I tried to rob his building. Or that one night while driving my car I'd be so high I would sail off a cliff and explode in a rage of bursting petroleum and gnarled iron, my misery ending in a smoldering, lifeless mound of pulverized bone and burning flesh at the bottom of a canyon. Now I had become the coauthor, with society, of my own oppression. The system that wanted to destroy me had taught me self-destruction. I had become my own jailer and racist judge, my own brutal policeman.

I was ruthless to myself and murdered all my hopes and dreams. I was in hell. They told me I was violent and I became violent, they told me I was ignorant and I feigned ignorance. It was taken for granted I would work for slave rations at the most foul and filthy jobs, and I did. It was taken for granted I could not resolve my own problems, and I relinquished control of my life to society's masters. I was still young, a teenager, tormented because none of what I did was who I was. I was screaming for release, I was afraid. My dreams for a good life, a life I could make for myself, had been strangled at birth or were stillborn.

They sent me to prison for drug possesion. And there, out of suffering, I found a reprieve from my chaos, found language, and it led me back to the teaching and conduct of my elders. I discovered a reason for living, for breathing, and I could love myself again, trust again what my heart dreamed and find the strength to pursue those dreams. Language has the power to transform, to strip you of what is not truly yourself. In language I had burned my old selves and improvised myself into a new being. Language has fertilized the womb of my soul with embryos of new being. When I left prison, I went to see my sister, who showed me photographs of a teenager leaning against a Studebaker, his foot on the bumper, a bottle of wine in his hand. In the background a park, mildly subdued in afternoon sunlight. It was me, my sister said, at Highland Park. I remember my amazement and pain that I had no recollection of ever being this person I was looking at. The mistral singer I am, whose hand-clapping, heel-kicking love dances celebrate every living moment, has always found it hard to go back home. The place of humble origins exposes the illusions of my life. My loss thunders with fountains of memories, and I want to reach out to the paths, the alleys, the leaning fences, the adobe bricks, the ground, and kiss them all, rub my face in the grass and inhale the sweet earth and mesquite fragrance of my innocence. Going back, there is so much hurt to overcome.

Recently, I visited our village again. My grandmother's house is a very lonely house, filled with spirit shadows, spiritual presences, lingering echoes of ancient drumbeats. In the yard, the golden yield of spring in all its millions of shoots is evocations of the returning dead, breaking dirt to smell and taste and bathe again in the warm sunlight. My grandmother is hunchbacked and disfigured now with age, a bronzed anchor, her hooked fingers refusing to loosen their grip on the llano. Her wrinkles are encrusted watermarks on canyon walls, telling of almost a century of living. So many years after her birth, she still stands in her back doorway to welcome friends. Pools of silence float in the rooms where her children, my uncles and aunts, once lived. People were born and grew up there and went away, leaving their spirit prints on the air. There is something in quiet rooms where old grandfathers and grandmothers have lived and died that vibrates with sanctity. Some of these presences do not want something to be touched or revealed. Others want something to be remembered. These spirits mourn lives filled with struggle, pain, solitude, and love, mourn the moments when they felt truly one with all earth and all people. And now there is empty space, the great vertigo of nothingness, of chairs, and beds, rugs and old photos, and curtains and wood and windows falling into a meaningless abyss of motionless silence.

So few things make sense to me. I have lived on the dark side of life so long, nosing my way into patches of rotting life to find my answers; the side of life where I wear my coat without sleeves, where sometimes I wake up in the morning and shave only one side of my face, where I wear a hat with a brim and no crown. I furnish my life with what I can find on the road or in trash cans, books, chairs, and shoes that have known other lives, picked up by the waysides on my journey. I am fool and king, genius and imbecile, for this is what it is to be a poet. In my poems, whatever has been crippled in me, my hope and love and trust and endurance, rises up again in spume of fire, unleashing bird wings and jungle howls. My poems beckon those who are dry into the rain, those without love into lovers' beds, call those who are silent to cry out and moan in revery. Who can say why one day I take my shotgun and shoot the newspaper, bits of paper floating on the air as the little dog whines and scampers for cover? The poor telephone rings, and it, too, goes up in an explosion of black plastic pieces, and I am howling and laughing. The next thing I know, I am sitting cross-legged in a tepee under a pine tree in the forest off South 14, fasting and meditating. This to me is normal. How can I contain this violent bursting of canoes that white-water in my blood and vault into the world laden with songs and flowers? Such joy will not be confined in prisons of nine-to-five. There is too much life and too much flint in my blood, and the crazy and wild light in a boy's eyes, the innocence in a small girl's whisper need all my life to tell and to praise. And so my grandmother. How her image hit me with a jolt of lightning, and how her way of living, so different from mine, makes so much sense to me now, and I understand her gift to me. In her presence I can be anyone. I am scuttling lizard scurrying from tin can to tin can, under boards, into weeds; then I jerk my praying mantis head and my right eyeball stares in one direction while my left eyeball swivels askance.

My heart is a cow's tongue slowly licking a block of ice. My legs want to catch the train the way a cat catches a mouse in the cupboards. I flick on the light in the midnight of my life, and cockroaches skitter everywhere on these pages, on the fingers of the reader, along the woman's dress, up the man's arm and neck and into his nose, to nest in his heart that touches the life around him with cockroach antennae, testing the floors in filthy housing projects. In the French Quarter, I am that woman at the table by a window drinking her cappuccino, her suffering concentrated in her ankles like cold iron anvils pounded with sledgehammers, her life a red-hot iron sizzling in a bucket of black water. And on the Lower East Side, down a dingy street, in crack dealer alleys, I howl and mutter in unknown sacred tongues. In a small mountain town in Arkansas, I am the woman screaming because her parakeet got stuck under the refrigerator and died, green shit smearing his once-sleek feathers. I am the field worker in south Texas whose showered-off dirt forms the image of Christ's face on the floor of the stall. Thousands of people arrive to pay homage to the miracle, kneeling with candles and rosaries, cripples crowding the bathroom with their crutches and braces and bottles of pills, it's a sanctuary; while the president's son in the Rose Garden snares a butterfly into his net and rips off its wings. Some day he will command great armies.

A poet in the forests of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains stares at placid pond frozen over with crust ice, where a bluebird flits across the steamy, cold fog simmering off the surface. And I walk out and take off my clothes and start to sing and flowers appear on the air, blue and red and green and yellow flowers, and the ice cracks and fish spin in glittering swirls and catch the flowers. And in other places millions of things are happening, equally absurd, equally heartbreaking and marvelous. How incredible our life is! How much there is that we do not understand. How honorable and full of heart has been my grandmother's life. My grandmother does not understand what a Chicano is. She does not read newspapers, listen to radios, watch TV. Her life is lived elsewhere: thirty years meditating on the pebbles in her yard, fifty years smelling the dawn, eighty years listening to the silence at dusk, ninety years waiting for the two hummingbirds that come each spring to her unpainted picket fence, if they arrive she will live another year to await their arrival again. Forgiveness rises in her heart as she watched them whir around the yard and hum at her screen door. She understands how they are truly flowers given wings and a beak, and how she is truly an old female turtle lumbering on wide, wrinkled footpads, raising her head with the millennial slowness of a diamond forming in the coal mines of dark years, ocean moaning in her blood vessels, returning home. While the image of a young boy chasing a train visits her, a boy as new as a just-hatched baby turtle, stumbling toward the ocean for the very first time.

written by Jimmy Santiago Baca

taken from "Currents from the Dancing River"
--Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry
edited by Ray Gonzalez
© 1994