I had all kinds of Spanish sass to say to the mean girls in my sixth-grade class next time they made fun of my accent, my stinky lunch, my loud clothes, my skinny legs.
El problema was that I didn’t know how to say smart stuff in English. What I did manage to say, the girls mimicked, exaggerating my mispronunciations, so I sounded even dumber. “Spik! Spik!” they cried, hilariously.
The boys roughhoused: yanking my braids, slamming into me like bumper cars, pulling down my knee socks, lifting the hem of my skirt to see if I had a tail. They, too, taunted me, “Spik! Spik!”
What was this strange word they hurled like a weapon? Papi wouldn’t know. His English was terrible. Mami was the most fluent. As a girl, she had gone to a boarding school in Massachusetts—a name the rest of us couldn’t pronounce without our tongues tripping over all those cluttery consonants.
Mami claimed I had misunderstood. “The children want you to be their friend. They are asking you to talk to them. Speak! Speak!” For a tiny segundito, I felt a rush of relief. But then I recalled those flushed faces, grimacing, and I knew those kids didn’t want to hear anything coming out of my mouth.
• • •
We’d come to the United States from the Dominican Republic, fleeing the dictator Trujillo. My father had been part of an underground movement and we’d escaped just in time. My parents kept saying we were so lucky to be in the home of the brave, the land of the free. A country where we could be whatever we wanted to be.
But on the television we watched as black people were hosed down, attacked by dogs, hit with batons, hauled off to prisons. Churches and storefronts were burning. How was this any different from the dictatorship we had come from?
My mother scolded me for my lack of gratitude. “You don’t know how lucky you are! So many people would die to be here.”
Exactly, and they were on TV right now, trying to eat at lunch counters, to sit where they wanted to, not just at the back of the bus. “Tell that to those black people!”
“Don’t think because you’re in a new country, you can get fresh with me!”
“What about freedom of speech? What about the home of the brave and the land of the free?” I always answered back out of reach of the slipper she’d take off to spank me.
It was a slippery slope in our family, what country we were in and what rules applied at any given moment.
• • •
I practiced in front of the mirror. How to pronounce Massachusetts. How to look American when I was speaking. How to say the clever things smart girls said in the stories I was reading.
I had recently become a reader. It was all my teacher’s doing. Sister Mary Zoë could see I loved stories. She put books in my hands. She sent me to the library. A librarian recommended books she was sure I would love. It turned out there was room for me in the ever-expanding circle of readers. I had found what we came looking for in the United States of America between the covers of books. A world where everyone was welcomed. No warnings posted on the covers: NOT FOR SPIKS. NOT FOR BLACKS. NOT FOR GIRLS.
What an amazing world this was, what freedom came with reading. I could go back to olden times, I could go to a whole other country, I could go to the future. I could be a prince or a pauper. I could be a slave girl in the South. I could be a young woman who solved mysteries and drove a convertible and had a boyfriend and a widowed father—no mami to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
The more I read, the more I wanted to be a storyteller myself. But deep inside, I really didn’t believe I was welcomed. I had never read a book about people like me. Or books written by people like me. This was the United States of pre–multicultural studies, pre–anything but the melting pot, that old assimilationist, mainstreaming model. And so the message to me was that although the underlying truth of everything I was reading was no one is an alien here—still there were big gaps on that shelf of American literature.
But then, in one of our anthologies, among absent voices and missing stories, I discovered a poem that meant a great deal to me. “I, Too,” by the African-American poet Langston Hughes. He, too, had encountered prejudice. He had not been invited to the big table of American literature, sent instead to eat in the kitchen of minor writers. But Mr. Hughes knew that tomorrow he’d be at the table, claiming his place in the chorus of American song, an America that was still not listening to him, treating him like a second-class literary citizen.
That poem was music to my ears. The fact that it was included in my textbook proved that he had been right. That it was possible.
And so I set out to be a writer. All through high school, college, graduate school, I kept writing—that little poem had given me a lot of gasoline! Upon graduation, I was hired by the National Endowment for the Arts to give writing workshops in schools, prisons, old-age homes, in Kentucky, North Carolina, California, Maryland. I felt like a migrant poet, traveling across America, listening to its varied carols, like that most Latino-sounding of poets, Walt Whitman.
I was already into my thirties, largely unpublished, when I won a residency at Yaddo, the prestigious writing retreat. My first big lucky break! I would be surrounded by writers I admired as well as by the ghosts of those who had been there before me, including, I found out, Langston Hughes!
Driving into the grounds, 440 wooded acres with stone walls, statues of Greek gods and goddesses overlooking the formal gardens, I wondered if I had the right address. My awe was compounded once inside the ornate, neo-Gothic mansion with its Tiffany windows and its wide, winding wooden staircase. I felt as if I had entered a cathedral of literature.
Talk about location pressure!
I was assigned the tower room with a God’s-eye view of the grounds. A frieze above the fireplace portrayed the muses playing lyres and flutes. Like Yeats in his tower, I wanted to write something important, something on the order of Turning and turning in the widening gyre. Something that might get me invited to the big table, where I hoped to meet up at last with Mr. Hughes and thank him.
A week passed, two, I hadn’t come up with a damn thing. Those were the days before computers, and I could hear everyone else being productive, their typewriters clacking away.
During the workday, we were forbidden to visit each other’s studios or talk in public spaces; our prepared lunches were laid out on a table for us to pick up. At night, we gathered together for dinner, everyone discussing what they were working on. I kept my mouth shut, not only out of deference to all the accomplished writers there, but also because I had nothing to report.
One morning, at my desk, I heard what was music to my ears: a vacuum cleaner coming up the narrow stairs toward the tower room. Someone to talk to! I leapt to the door, swung it open, and startled the young woman with my desperately eager “Hello!”
She held a finger to her lips and gestured for me to follow her downstairs to the kitchen, where the housekeeping staff and the cook were having a coffee break around a big wooden table. I felt like a released prisoner, listening to their stories, juicy tidbits about different writers who had been residents at Yaddo, this one’s escapades, that one’s drinking problem. As they gossiped, I paged through the cook’s thick, falling-apart cookbook, with notes scribbled in the margins, favorite recipes bookmarked with greeting cards and old letters.
I started jotting down the lovely vocabularies: the names of spices, lists of garnishes, icings, pastries, condiments; how to cook a ham, blanch almonds, make a fluffy soufflé. These lists were my madeleines, taking me back to the world of my childhood. Before I had ever dreamed of becoming a writer, I’d been raised, as were most girls in the Dominican Republic in the fifties, to be a housewife and mother. My first apprenticeship had been in the household arts, in the company of women who put meals on the table, hung up the wash, ironed, swept, dusted, sewed at treadle machines or with needle and thread; women who took care of their familias, which were extended and sizable. As they worked, they told stories, they gossiped, they sang songs to lighten the load of their labors.
I realized why I had gotten stuck: I had been ignoring their voices inside me. They did not sound like Turning and turning in the widening gyre, or Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story. They said things like Don’t put so much salt on the salad, you’ll wilt the lettuce! You call that a blind stitch? I see it.
I went upstairs and began writing what would become The Housekeeping Poems. The first was a poem composed of the lists I had copied from that Yaddo cookbook:
Cup, spoon, ladle, pot, kettle,
grater and peeler,
casserole, colander, corer,
waffle iron, small funnel—
the names of our instruments.
Knead, poach, stew, whip and stir,
score, julienne, whisk,
sauté, sift, scallop,
grind, glacé, candy, and garnish—
the names of our movements.
Dash of salt, twist of lemon,
bit of bay leaf, pinch of thyme,
sprinkle with bread crumbs,
deep fry, dice, let rise.
I thought of Langston, and how he’d wanted to eat at the big table in the dining room. I was just as happy staying in the kitchen among the women who had first taught me service to an art. Strong, resourceful, bighearted women, who kept the world running smoothly for the rest of us. They were the America I wanted to belong to, theirs the songs I wanted to write down.
I went back to my tower room, and ignoring the figures on the frieze, I sat at my desk and summoned my muses: Speak! Speak!