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Authors: Francisco Jiménez

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BOOK: Breaking Through
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"But we're only a few minutes late," I said, recalling the discussion we had in Mrs. Taylor's class about the film in which a boy argues with his father.

"Don't you dare talk back!" he said, raising his voice. "I am still the man in charge of this house. You must obey and respect me, or else!"

Roberto and I went to our room, said our prayers, and went to bed. As I lay in bed I thought how lucky I was to be going to school and to have a job. I did not enjoy being at home when Papá was in a bad mood.

All day Monday I was excited to start my new job. After my last class, I went to the public library on Broadway and worked on my homework. I did my math first because I liked it best. At five o'clock, when the offices closed, I walked a few more blocks to the gas company, which was on West Main Street. It was a huge building with a front office that connected to a large back structure two stories high. As I opened the door to the rear
entrance, a draft of warm air hit my face. It felt safe and comfortable. I went to the janitor's room, picked up the cleaning cart, and began cleaning the offices on the first floor. I emptied the wastebaskets and feather-dusted the desks, which were piled with scattered papers. They looked like my high school counselor's desk. I wiped the ashtrays with a wet rag and straightened the papers.

I then went upstairs to the second floor. It was one large room set up like an auditorium. In front of the room was a full kitchen. Above the stove was a mirror, angled so that people sitting in the audience could view the top of the range. A plate of cookies sat on the counter with a handwritten note that read
PLEASE HELP YOURSELF
. The following day, the plate of cookies was still there. No one had touched them. By the end of the week, someone had changed the note. It read
JANITOR, PLEASE HELP YOURSELF
. After I finished cleaning the bathrooms and dust-mopping the floors, I took a handful of cookies and went downstairs.

I sat at one of the desks to do my homework. I read the first two chapters in my English text,
Myths and Their Meaning.
I had a hard time understanding them. I put the book down, ate more cookies, and wondered what the person who sat at the desk did all day.
It must be neat to work in an office,
I thought. I noticed a picture frame partially hidden behind a pile of folders and picked it up. It was a color photograph of a boy dressed in a football uniform and a man standing next to him, smiling proudly with his arm around the boy. I figured it was the boy's father. I placed the photo in front of the pile of papers and reread the first chapter until Roberto came by to pick me up to go home.

A Typing Machine

By mid-semester, my typing speed had improved, but not my accuracy. The teacher gave us weekly typing quizzes. He projected words that flashed on a screen as fast as a blink of an eye, and we had to type them just as fast. I managed to keep up, but when he moved on to short complete sentences, I kept making mistakes. To get an A in the course, I had to type fifty-five words a minute with no errors. I needed more practice typing. I found the answer to my problem in a lawyers' office.

On Wednesday evening, after I finished the gas company, I went to clean Twitchel and Twitchel, an attorneys office. It was a long, one-story building with several offices, located a few blocks from Main Street. The building had wall-to-wall carpeting, dark wood paneling, and shelves full of thick, leather-bound books. It had a storage room with stacks of long sheets of paper with numbers on the
margins and boxes of pens, pencils, staples, and paper clips. An old typewriter full of cobwebs sat on the floor in a corner. I picked it up, placed it on top of a cabinet, and dusted it. I loaded it with a sheet of paper and tried typing on it. The keys were sluggish and the letters were barely visible. As I set it back down, I heard the front door open and someone say, "Who's here?"

"It's nobody," I responded, quickly coming out of the storage room. "It's just me, the janitor."

"Hi," he said. "I am Bob Twitchel. Mike Nevel told me about you. I didn't expect you to be so young."

"Glad to meet you, sir," I responded. "My name is Francisco."

"Good to meet you," he said. "I'll be here only a few minutes." He went into his office and left the door open. I passed by and glanced in. He was talking on the phone. After I dusted, I cleaned the bathroom and began vacuuming. When I finished, I wound the cord and placed the vacuum in the storage room. I looked at the typewriter again.
It's not being used,
I thought.
Maybe he'll sell it to me cheap.
I passed by Mr. Twitchel's office and glanced in again. His eyes caught mine. I stood in front of the door, feeling nervous. "What is it?" he asked, putting down his pen.

"The old typewriter," I said. "The one in the storage room..."

"Oh, that old clunker. I've been meaning to get rid of it," he said. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, would you sell it to me?" I asked, feeling more at ease.

"Sell it! You can have it," he responded, chuckling. "I was going to throw it away."

"Thank you," I said excitedly. Then I remembered Papá telling us to avoid owing anybody anything, including favors. "I'd rather buy it from you," I added.

"Let's take a look at it," he said, looking a bit puzzled. I brought it out from the storage room and placed it on his desk. He examined it. "It needs a new ribbon."

"Yes, I know," I said.

He gave me a surprised look, smiled, and said: "I'll tell you what. Get a new ribbon for it from the storage room and give me five bucks."

"Thank you! I don't have the money with me, but I'll bring it to you by the end of the month."

"Whenever you can—no hurry."

I took the typewriter home and practiced on the kitchen table every night after work. My younger brothers and sister complained about the noise because they could not sleep, so I placed a towel underneath it to keep the clatter down. Mamá was pleased when I told her I got an excellent grade in typing. "You're a typing machine,
mijo,
" she said, chuckling. "You got fast fingers from picking strawberries and cotton."

Making Connections

At the end of my freshman year, I received good grades in all subjects except English, even though I had worked the hardest in it. Writing was difficult for me. My freshman English teacher told me that my writing was weak. She suggested that I read more, that reading would improve my writing. "At least read the newspaper every day," she told me. "Read for enjoyment." I had little time to read. I read only for information for my classes, and I could barely keep up. Besides, we had no reading material at home and we didn't get the newspaper. I never got more free time to read all during high school, but I did learn to read for enjoyment. It happened in my sophomore year, in English class.

Miss Audrey Bell, my teacher, had a reputation for being hard. When she walked into the class the first day and wrote her name on the board, I heard moans from
classmates sitting next to me. "I am sunk!" one of them said. "Hello, F," another uttered. Now I was even more worried.

Miss Bell had a round face, a small turned-up nose, full lips, and lively blue eyes, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. Her smile never left her, even when she was upset. When she wrote on the board, her upper arm shook like jelly, just like Mamá's arms. The back of her hands were covered with small brown spots the size of raisins, and her shiny nails looked like the wings of red beetles. She teased students and often made comments that made the class laugh. I laughed too, even though sometimes I did not understand her jokes.

No one laughed at her homework assignments, though. Every week she gave us vocabulary and spelling lists and a poem to memorize. I wrote the poems on notecards and attached them to the broom handle or placed them in my shirt pocket and memorized them as I cleaned the offices after school. I did the same thing with spelling and vocabulary words. I had a harder time with reading and writing. I was a slow reader and often had to read each assignment twice. At times my mind wandered off as I worried about Papá. When we discussed the readings in class, I was surprised to find out that I had not really understood what I read.

Writing was even more difficult for me. Miss Bell asked us to write short compositions analyzing short stories we
read for class. I was happy whenever I understood the plot and summarized it, but this was not good enough. "Don't tell me the story," she would say, smiling. "I know it. I want you to analyze it." I thought I knew what she meant, so in my next composition I wrote about the lesson I learned from reading the story. I hoped this was what she wanted. The stories I had heard from Papá and Mamá, Tío Mauricio, and other migrant workers all had a lesson in them about right and wrong, like "La Llorona," "The Boy and His Grandfather," or "The Three Brothers."

When Miss Bell returned our compositions, I fixed my eyes on the stack of papers as she walked around the aisles passing them out, trying to spot mine. The one with the most writing in red was sure to be mine. My papers always came back looking as though she had poured red ink on them. My heart pounded faster with each step she took toward me. She grinned as she handed me my paper. I quickly grabbed it. It had fewer corrections than my previous papers, but the grade was only a disappointing C. I stuck it in my binder, and for the rest of the class I had a hard time concentrating. During study hall, I took out the paper. She had written "Good progress" at the bottom of it. I felt better. I then went over the corrections carefully to make sure I understood them. I did not want to make the same mistakes in my next writing assignment, which Miss Bell announced the following day.

"Our next unit is on autobiography, the history of a
person's life written or told by that person," she explained. "So for your next composition, I want you to write about a personal experience, something that happened to you." I liked the assignment, but it was harder than I expected. I thought of writing about being deported, but I did not want my teacher to know that my family had crossed the border illegally and that I was born in Mexico.

An idea finally came to me late that evening. As I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out what to write, Trampita entered the room, pulling up his white shorts. "What are you doing up?" I asked.

"I am getting a glass of water," he responded, half asleep. His small body cast a thin shadow on the wall. We called him "Trampita," "little tramp," because Mamá had dressed him in baby clothes we found in the city dump. As he passed me on his way back to bed, I noticed his bulging navel, the size of an egg, that had ruptured when he was a few months old.

We had been living in a farm labor camp in Santa Rosa. It was winter. Papá and Mamá worked at an apple cannery at night and left Roberto to take care of Trampita and me while they were gone. One evening, before leaving for work, Mamá prepared the milk bottle for Trampita and laid him on a wide mattress that was on the dirt floor. After my parents left, Roberto and I sat on the mattress and told ghost stories until we got sleepy. We said our prayers and went to bed next to Trampita. We kept our
clothes on because it was freezing cold. At dawn, we woke up, frightened by our parents' screams. "Where's Trampita?" Mamá cried out. "Where is he?" Papá shouted. They had terror in their eyes when they saw Trampita was gone.

"I don't know, Mamá," Roberto stuttered, shivering from the cold. Papá noticed an opening at the foot of the tent near the mattress. He rushed out. Seconds later he returned with Trampita in his arms. My baby brother was stiff and purple.

I decided to write about that experience. I wrote three drafts, making sure I did not make any mistakes. I turned it in feeling confident. When I got my paper back, I was disappointed to see the red marks again. I had made a few errors. I felt worse when I read Miss Bell's note at the bottom of the paper, asking me to see her after class.
She must be pretty upset with the mistakes I made,
I thought. I half listened to what she said during the rest of class. When class was over, I waited until everyone had left the room before I approached her, folding the paper in half to hide the red marks.

"Is what you wrote a true story?" Miss Bell asked.

"Yes," I answered, feeling anxious.

"I thought so," she said, smiling. "It's a very moving story. Did your brother die?"

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed. "He almost did, but God saved him. He rolled off the mattress, landed outside the tent, and cried so much that he hurt his navel."

"His hernia must have really hurt," she said thoughtfully. "I am sorry." She looked away and cleared her throat. "Now, let's look at your paper." I handed it to her, lowering my head. "You're making a lot of progress," she said. "Your writing shows promise. If you're able to overcome the difficulties like the one you describe in your paper and you continue working as hard as you have, you're going to succeed." She gave me back the paper and added, "Here, take it home, make the corrections, and turn it in to me tomorrow after class."

"I will. Thank you, Miss Bell." I floated out of the room, thinking about how lucky I was to be in her class. She reminded me of Mr. Lema, my sixth-grade teacher, who had helped me with English during the lunch hour.

That evening when I got home I worked on the paper. I looked at the mistakes I had made and corrected them, following Miss Bell's suggestions. As I retyped it on the kitchen table, Mamá came over and sat next to me. "It's late, Panchito," she said softly. "Time for bed."

"I am almost finished."

"What are you working on,
mijo?
"

"It's a paper I wrote for my English class on Trampita. My teacher liked it," I said proudly.

"On Trampita!" she exclaimed.

She got up and stood behind me. She placed her hands on my shoulders and asked me to read it. When I finished, I felt her tears on the back of my neck.

The next day after class I turned in my revised paper to Miss Bell. She glanced at it, placed it on a pile of papers on her desk, and picked up a book. "Have you read
The Grapes of Wrath?
" she asked. "It's a wonderful novel by John Steinbeck."

BOOK: Breaking Through
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ads

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