My mother, Studs Terkel, and me
This was one of two pieces written for the Thomas Wolfe Lecture, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, October 21, 2014. The second, “A Borrowed House,” is included near the end of this collection.
When Thomas Wolfe was already a successful author someone asked him if he would consider moving back to North Carolina. He said, “My writing is my home, now.”
So it was in the 1930s—when the writer Betty Smith moved to Chapel Hill she found herself at home here in more ways than one. First, she found a place that was calm and safe and affordable for a single mom raising two kids, and calm and safe and affordable are essentials for a writer. While living in Chapel Hill, Smith found another home. She came home to a book that would give her permission to write her own best seller, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Wolfe’s Of Time and the River guided her back home. It was while living in Chapel Hill that Smith was able to see her childhood more clearly, see her Brooklyn, admit what set her memories apart from others in Chapel Hill, from her own Brooklyn family. So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own.
The same thing happened to me when I went off to live in the foreign terrain of Iowa for graduate school. It held up a mirror to myself and allowed me to see what made me different from my workshop classmates, to go home to my Chicago childhood, to the neighborhood and people only I knew, the stories that were mine alone and not those of my brothers or cousins or friends. While at Iowa I began a book that wasn’t part of my thesis, but which served to shelter me during my time there. I needed shelter. Maybe I was never more homeless than during those two years in graduate school. I found my home in the country-folk monologues of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, the anti-poetics of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, the rage of Malcolm X.
We find ourselves at home, or homing, in books that allow us to become more ourselves. Home “is not just the place where you were born,” as the travel writer Pico Iyer once noted. “It’s the place where you become yourself.”
When I was a young student in Chicago, big-shouldered Carl Sandburg’s lyrics showed me the way to sing with syllables. I was directed to Mango Street by way of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote about the bean eaters in the Bronzeville kitchenettes of South Chicago, of folks who live in cramped apartments with shared bathrooms and not enough hot water. I knew plenty of bean eaters too, but they lived in the Mexican communities of Pilsen, Humboldt Park, Little Village, or Logan Square. Hot water was also a commodity in my home even though we didn’t have to share it with neighbors; we were neighborhood enough in a family of nine. Sandburg and Brooks—their books said, “Come on in!”
The golden pen of Nelson Algren gave Studs Terkel a lift home for keeps and a day, and Studs in turn revolutionized radio by recording the oral histories of the little guy, the never heard, the brave and exhausted from Kentucky to Guanajuato working in factories and steel mills, too busy to get downtown for a little culture. It was Studs who introduced Pablo Neruda’s poetry to my mother from the radio on top of the refrigerator next to the slouched loaf of Wonder Bread. The kitchen was my mother’s classroom, and she was promoted from the ninth grade to the University of Life with a PhD. Studs schooled her. Studs showed her the way home.
My mother, Studs Terkel, and me
I was lucky enough to tell Studs this before he departed for the great big radio station in the sky, and he was lucky enough to meet his star pupil, Elvira Cordero. I have a photo of my mom and me and Studs in the WGN studio, all of us looking surprised Divine Providence could bring us together, but that’s Divine Providence for you.
In the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska’s novel La Flor de Lis, this dialogue occurs more than once between the protagonist and others:
—But you’re not from Mexico, right?
—I am.
—It’s that you don’t look Mexican.
—Oh, yeah, well, what do I look like?
—A gringa.
—Well, I’m not a gringa. I’m Mexican.
—A poco. You gotta be kidding.
Some artists belong very much. Perhaps not so much to their home country, but their adopted one. Elena Poniatowska was born in Paris, but came to Mexico to live with her grandma as a young girl during World War II. She spoke French at home, English at school, and learned Spanish from the poorest members of Mexican society, the indigenous domestic workers—the cook, the nanny. This Mexican Spanish embraced Elenita, and she embraced it back to such a degree that she won the highest literary honor for a Spanish-language writer—the Cervantes Prize—for writing so essentially Mexican, it’s made her writing almost untranslatable. She has become an ambassador for the voiceless, a courageous voice in a country where speaking up can cost you your life.
I remember seeing Carlos Fuentes speak at the University of Illinois, Chicago, when I was una jovencita, a young thing. What command! What presence! The public adored him. Adored! Well, that one was the ambassador of everything, so handsome and dapper, like a Mexican Cary Grant. Who wasn’t going to pay attention to him?
I remember Fuentes sprang to his feet, ran down the aisle, and gamboled onto the stage like a kid goat. He read something…I don’t remember what, except I remember I didn’t understand a word. But what is engraved in my memory was the little leap onto the stage, a Mexican hat dance of sorts that only someone with the utmost self-confidence could give before uttering a syllable. En esos tiempos, en ese país. In those times, in that country.
I’m reminded too of the many occasions I was in the audience for the lectures of Jorge Luis Borges. Every time he came to Chicago, we thought it would be the last since he was so old. There would always be a huge wave of disciples, and un silencio enorme, a great silence, even before he opened his mouth and spoke. The master Borges was already an elderly man, and blind besides, which, as he himself admitted, inspired kindness.
En esos tiempos, in those times, el maestro Borges sat on a chair and leaned, it seemed to me, on a cane. At least he is leaning on a cane in my memory. He spoke of marvels, things that cause astonishment, labyrinths, mirrors, stories that leave you with your mouth open, because he liked to tell those kinds of stories.
And like a blind Tiresias, Borges spoke as a prophet to those of us who were writers. His work appealed to young writers. He was experimental and avant-garde. The form of his fable stories, the ones that later would be published in the U.S. in a collection called Dream Tigers, especially impacted me, a new genre between poetry and fiction, even though Borges’s poetry seemed to me then, as it does now, old-fashioned. But it was his stories, many less than a page, that inspired me to invent a new form of writing, a novel like a pearl necklace, without being aware of Elena Poniatowska’s diminutive story cycle, Lilus Kikus.
I don’t want to appear pretentious and say I write like el maestro Borges. I only want to say that it was his Dream Tigers that gave me permission to dream in the same way that Kafka gave Gabriel García Márquez permission to dream, that Thomas Wolfe gave permission to Betty Smith. Sometimes we need permission, encouragement, someone to fill our heart with desire, because without desire you can’t invent anything.
I don’t know how I wound up writing a book of fiction while in a poetry workshop, but I know that the International Writing Workshop at Iowa and books from the Latin American Boom allowed me to find my way home at a time when I felt I didn’t belong.
I don’t know anything, but I know this: whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come. This I know.
The House on Mango Street was written in a period of complete impotency. As a high school teacher, I had no idea how to save my students from their own lives except to include them in my writing, not for their sake, but for my own. I couldn’t undo myself from their stories any other way. How do you get any sleep at night if you witness stories that don’t let you go?
During the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a student demonstration took place in a plaza called Tlatelolco. Thousands of students were massacred by the police, including Elena Poniatowska’s brother. She said she didn’t want to be an accomplice to impotency, and so she wrote Massacre in Mexico, a book that gave Elena a home in Mexican letters by inventing a new genre, a book made of oral testimonies. I think the great opportunities in life arrive when we are in this state of grace.
And so, I find myself coming home when I read Thomas Wolfe. The Gants are my family, their crowded rooms shared intimately with strangers called family. They take me in and happen to lead me to my own crowded rooms in a house on Mango Street, or a falling-apart fixer-upper on El Dorado Street in San Antonio, Texas, in a novel called Caramelo, with a mom who also has big real estate dreams.
Wolfe guided Betty Smith all the way home to Brooklyn in his own writing about the same terrain. And Betty Smith writing about growing up poor, growing up ashamed because she was poor, sheltered my mother when she was a young woman trying to find her way from poverty and shame out to her true home. I am kin of Betty Smith, and Betty Smith is kin of Thomas Wolfe, and so we are branches of the same tree. Your people are my people, whither thou goest, me too.
The paradox for a working-class writer is that we are never more exiled from our real homes, from the blood kin we have honored in our pages, than when we have drifted away from them on that little white raft called the page.
I had dinner recently with two other Latina writers, and I asked them if their families had spoken to them yet about their new books, and we paused and looked around and blinked. None of us could admit our books had brought us closer to our families. Not once in the recent or faraway past. Maybe it’s as the writer Cherríe Moraga says: they don’t need to read our books; they have us.
I know for myself I can’t go back home to that place where I was raised except through stories, spoken or on paper. Once when I tried to invite a relative to a reading I was giving in Chicago, she looked at me, exasperated, and said, “Sandra, I’m your family, I’m not your fan.”
I should’ve said, “But I’m your fan.” Of course, I didn’t think to say this then, but I’m a writer, and I’m saying it here now.
Instead, I look for my kin in my fellow writers. Those I know in person and those I know on the page. I feel fortunate at least to open books and be invited to step in. If that book shelters me and keeps me warm, I know I’ve come home.