An Excerpt from "Jíbara" in When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
When I Was Puerto Rican, by Esmeralda Santiago, Da Capo Press, 2006, pp. 11–13.
We children slept in hammocks strung across the room, tied to the beams in sturdy knots that were done and undone daily. A curtain separated our side of the room from the end where my parents slept in a four-poster bed veiled with mosquito netting. On the days he worked, Papi left the house before dawn and sometimes joked that he woke the roosters to sing the barrio awake. We wouldn't see him again until dusk, dragging down the dirt road, his wooden toolbox pulling on his arm, making his body list sideways. When he didn't work, he and Mami rustled behind the flowered curtain, creaked the springs under their mattress, their voices a murmur that I strained to hear but couldn't.
I was an early riser but was not allowed out until the sun shot in through the crack near Mami's sewing machine and swept a glistening stripe of gold across the dirt floor.
The next morning, I turned out of the hammock and ran outside as soon as the sun streaked in. Mami and Papi sat by the kitchen shed sipping coffee. My arms and belly were pimpled with red dots. The night before, Mami had bathed me in alcoholado, which soothed my skin and cooled the hot itch.
"Ay bendito," Mami said, "here's our spotty early riser. Come here, let me look." She turned me around, rubbing the spots. "Are you itchy?"
"No, it doesn't itch at all."
"Stay out of the sun today so the spots don't scar."
Papi hummed along with the battery-operated radio. He never went anywhere without it. When he worked around the house, he propped it on a rock, or the nearest fence post, and tuned it to his favorite station, which played romantic ballads, chachachás, and a reading of the news every half hour. He delighted in stories from faraway places like Russia, Madagascar, and Istanbul. Whenever the newscaster mentioned a country with a particularly musical name, he'd repeat it or make a rhyme of it. "Pakistán. Sacristán. ¿Dónde están?" he sang as he mixed cement or hammered nails, his voice echoing against the walls.
Early each morning the radio brought us a program called "The Day Breaker's Club," which played the traditional music and poetry of the Puerto Rican country dweller, the jíbaro. Although the songs and poems chronicled a life of struggle and hardship, their message was that jíbaros were rewarded by a life of independence and contemplation, a closeness to nature coupled with a respect for its intractability, and a deeply rooted and proud nationalism. I wanted to be a jíbara more than anything in the world, but Mami said I couldn't because I was born in the city, where jíbaros were mocked for their unsophisticated customs and peculiar dialect.
"Don't be a jíbara," she scolded, rapping her knuckles on my skull, as if to waken the intelligence she said was there.
I ducked away, my scalp smarting, and scrambled into the oregano bushes. In the fragrant shade, I fretted. If we were not jíbaros, why did we live like them? Our house, a box squatting on low stilts, was shaped like a bohío, the kind of house jíbaros lived in. Our favorite program, "The Day Breaker's Club," played the traditional music of rural Puerto Rico and gave information about crops, husbandry, and the weather. Our neighbor Doña Lola was a jíbara, although Mami had warned us never to call her that. Poems and stories about the hardships and joys of the Puerto Rican jíbaro were required reading at every grade level in school. My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jíbaros. But I couldn't be one, nor was I to call anyone a jíbaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn't yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on. But there was no arguing with Mami, who, in those days, was always right.
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I noticed that the children do not use beds to sleep in. Instead they use hammocks. Why don’t the children leave the hammocks hanging? It seems like a lot of work to hang it up in the night and take it down in the morning.
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I realized that every morning the hammock always comes down. After doing that, the author went outside for some reason.
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