Broken Ground (27 page)

Since I left Union, I've dodged my memories of Tobias—my work with him and my time in his class. These memories make me feel sick inside. But one night when some of the older, more precocious children are giggling and distracted, and some of the younger, less advanced children are struggling to keep up, I force myself to recall at least some of what I learned in Educational Practices. Examples from the textbook and Tobias's lectures descend on me. I hear his voice in my head, see myself hanging on his every word, remember how I ignored the warnings, and feel once again ashamed. But then one idea settles and catches my attention: not a distraction but a possibility. The adults don't have to be the only teachers among us. Let the older children use what they know to help the younger.

I divide my group into five smaller groups of about four children each, then I hand out five of the ten chalkboards that Thomas has managed to purchase in these last months. I set each group different math tasks. I oversee the groups, but with the children helping one another in this way, I'm mostly able to observe. With a few errors, each group manages to move through the addition tables all the way up to five. I gather them together again, we correct what needs correcting, and start in on learning the sixes.

Thomas has been reading
The Story of Doctor Dolittle
to the middle group. The next night, I bring my copy of
The Brothers Grimm
to our meeting. The children practice their sixes together, and as a reward for their good behavior, I ask if they'd like a story. They clamor for one and draw closer around me, settling themselves as comfortably as possible on the ground. I sit down, too. I let the book fall open on my lap The pages flip to “Rapunzel.” I stare at the first page and the facing illustration of a girl in the tower. Edna Faye loved this picture best. After one of her visits, Charlie would ask me to tell the story of “Rapunzel”—not the fairy tale but Edna Faye's response to it. “How was our neighbor today?” he'd ask. And I'd describe her gray eyes widening, her hands clasped at her chest, her lingering sweet, sad smile of longing, her questions, her answers to my questions. Charlie loved hearing all this, and I loved telling it to him. He would love that I'm telling the tale again now.

I know it practically by heart. Certainly, I know every detail and twist and turn of Rapunzel's entrapment and escape. But I'm afraid I'll cry if I rely too much on my memory now with Charlie so present to me that I expect any moment he will step into the circle of light cast by the fire. So I ask the children to raise their hands if I say something that's unclear or if they have something to add, and I begin to read the fairy tale word for word from the book.

Soon hands are waving. Sometimes I am able to offer a satisfactory explanation to a question, but other times the children have to help me—those who can translate my English into Spanish or make comparisons to the world they all know. I listen carefully to their discussions, and in this way I learn a little more about each child. Charlie and Edna Faye retreat a bit, and I find myself absorbed with my students instead. They show me yet another side to the fairy tale. While Edna Faye liked the tower best, and I liked the escape, these children are more interested in the woman who's hungry at the beginning. A woman who's hungry, and pregnant, desperate to eat anything—desperate for the plant growing in a nearby garden most of all. The children discuss how it is when people are hungry like that, surrounded by good things to eat that they are not able to have. It is like that all the time in the fields, they say. The woman's condition, coupled with her desire, causes her to beg and plead with her husband to do the wrong thing. When people are desperate, the children agree, they are often driven to do things they otherwise would not do. They might be driven to steal things that don't belong to them, if it meant keeping someone they love alive. And this is how it is for the husband in the story. One night, so great are his wife's cravings, he climbs the wall separating them from the plant she desires—a plant called rapunzel. He picks the plant—“harvests” it, one of the children says, doe-eyed Clara, who spends her days minding her little brother and baby sister. He takes it back to his wife, and the woman devours it. But of course it isn't enough. (It is hardly ever enough, the children agree.) She wants more. So the next night the husband tries the same thing again, only this time he is caught by the woman who owns the garden. She lives in the castle—a very fine house, a
hacienda,
the children agree. The woman is a witch. “
La bruja es mala,
” a small boy cries with a shudder. His name is Gabriel. I tell Gabriel—and the other children, who look worried, too—that yes, this witch is bad. “But she's not real,” I say. “She's only in this story.” The witch catches the man as he scales the garden wall, and she accuses him of theft. She says she will curse him or, better yet, kill him. But the man begs so eloquently for mercy that the witch finally grants it. On one condition. When the man's wife gives birth to their baby, he must deliver the baby to the witch. “Now we get to the best part,” I tell the children. “The tower and the escape.”

But they don't want the story to continue. They want to stay right there, between house and castle, between good and evil. “It is like Adam and Eve and the serpent,” says one of the older girls, Maria. She is all of eight, with two long black braids secured at her temples so that they hang like teardrops against her cheeks. She's made it clear before that she knows her Bible well, and that she's had some previous schooling. In Spanish, she quotes a verse from Genesis 3, then translates it into English: “ ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food . . . she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.' ”

I swallow my surprise and tell Maria she's right. “So interesting. This part of the story is a bit like Genesis,” I say.

“Bad things happen to people who do bad things.” Maria nods, confirming her assertion, and her teardrop braids bobble.

“That can be true,” I say.

“Or when people go where they're not supposed to go.” Maria gives her peers a knowing look. “That's why we must never leave camp alone. Bad things happen all the time.”

Again Gabriel shudders. “
La bruja es como La Llorona
.”

“I know that song.” I sound like a child, piping up eagerly. But the other children keep their sober gazes on Maria and ignore me.

“
Sí,
” she says. For now, she is the authority in the group. She says something in Spanish, then gives me a sober look. “The witch is like La Llorona
and
the officials who want to deport us.”

This is not what I intended to happen when I chose to share this tale. I wanted to give the story to the children as a reward and, if possible, teach them a few things, simple things, classic things—about beginning and middle and end, plants and towers and adventurous escapes. I didn't want the children to become frightened, which, from the looks on their faces, many of them are. They're comparing government actions and authorities to evil spells and witches. What will they remember from this storytelling time, and what will they tell their parents? Will they have nightmares tonight because of me?

“But you've done nothing wrong,” I say. “As Maria pointed out, the husband in the story got himself into this mess.”

The children ignore me, understandably. If I were one of them, I'd ignore me, too.

An older boy named José begins talking about his mother, who is pregnant. Unlike Silvia, she is still working in the fields. Today the two of them were miles away, picking beets. “She is still hungry, though we had some supper tonight. If I had stolen food, maybe she wouldn't be,” José boldly says.

“Ruth.”

I turn to see Thomas standing some yards away. And then I see my students' parents, waiting and watchful, nearby. Reluctantly, I stand and go to them.

“You all right?” Thomas asks. “The rest of us finished some time ago.”

“I'm sorry. I must have lost track of time.”

“I can see why.” Thomas smiles. “Look at them. They're chattering away. They're interested. Not so shy of you anymore.”

“You think so?”

“Look!”

He's right; I can see their enthusiasm. A few children are brave enough to beckon to me; they want me to return so we can resume our discussion.
We
.
Our
. The children and me. Students and teacher, although I'm the one who is by far learning the most. Smiling, I return to where they sit. Three more children may speak, I say. Then we'll go home to get some rest. We'll resume the fairy tale tomorrow. We'll see it through to its end—the official tale and their unofficial realities, two sides of one coin that add up to a living truth.

T
he next morning, I return to the river to do Silvia and Luis's laundry as well as mine. The older women know me now, as do the little children, and they greet me, smiling and waving me over to stand with them, not at a cautious distance. Their welcome fills me with happiness—unfettered by any other emotion, uncompromised by memory or doubt. With gestures and a few words of English, the women include me in their work. They smile at my clumsy Spanish. The soaking and scrubbing, the drying—they show me how best to do it here. When my basket of laundry is empty, the clothes carefully draped over rocks and steaming in the midday sun, I am nearly as dry as when I arrived. This is thanks to their good direction, and they know it, nodding approvingly. But then the children grab my hands, tug me deeper into the river, and splash me with water. We're playing as before, drenched as before. The women seem bemused by the sight.

When the clothes are dry, I walk with the women and children back to Kirk Camp. It is midafternoon by the time I arrive at Luis and Silvia's. Carrying the full basket in my heavy, sodden clothes has left me tired, and I nearly miss the slip of folded paper tacked on the door.
Ruth
is written on the outside. I open it to see a note from Thomas.
The parents and other adults are asking if we'll work with them, too. If you're able, come an hour earlier tonight, and we'll figure out what we can do
.

Juntos, no separados
. In the past, my circle of friends has rarely exceeded two. Charlie and Miss Berger in Alba. Charlie and Edna Faye in East Texas. Helen and, God help me, Tobias at Union University. Now my circle is expanding quickly. Silvia, Luis, Hector, the older women at the river, the younger children there, the children I teach and their parents. And Thomas. I feel wealthy in a way that I never have felt before.

Inside the shack, I put away the clean laundry and make a late lunch of rice and beans for Silvia and me. Well, the beans are for me. She can't stomach beans, nor should she, her book says, for the child to stay healthy in her womb. There's one orange left in the bowl on the table, and I press her to eat it. She starts to peel it, but then she nearly drops it. She looks at me, her large, dark eyes fearful. “I don't know myself,” she tells me. Her lack of strength, I think she means. I peel the orange and pass it to her segment by segment. Then I bring her the pan she uses to relieve herself, and when she's finished, I wipe her dry.

“Only a little while now,” I remind her.

I stroke her hair, hum songs and nonsense tunes until she sleeps. Then, dropping down on my cot, I fall asleep, too. Luis is home for the evening when I wake. He readily agrees to prepare supper so I am able to leave early for the bonfire, my copy of
Brothers Grimm
tucked under my arm.

While the children watch and play around us, Thomas and I work with the adults who've asked for help improving their English. We sit in two separate circles: I work with the women, Thomas, the men. There are ten adults in each circle. “How are you?” “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” “How may I help you?” We all take turns asking and answering these questions, working on not just the words and their sequence but their pronunciation. Sometimes the questions and answers spark surprising exchanges that end in laughter. In this way, the hour passes. As our time draws to a close, I hear Thomas asking the harder questions, so I feel liberated to ask them, too—the frightening questions, the questions that are frequently an attack, the questions that it is most important to answer correctly. “Are you a United States citizen?” Each woman in my group answers no. “Then where are your papers?” All but two of the women reveal work permits pinned inside the waistbands, pockets, and hems of their skirts. We practice new phrases now: “Here they are.” And “Please, look.” The two women without legal documents shrink into themselves, their gazes darting around the group, but meeting no one's eyes.
I don't see you, you don't see me
. They seem to be playing this children's game. Only they, like the rest of us, know it is no game. Their fear is palpable.

In this way, the lesson ends. “It is very nice to meet you,” we say to one another. And then: “I hope to see you again soon.” I extend my hand to each woman, and after some hesitation, each one shakes it. The two women without documents try to slip away, but I catch up and cajole them until, flushed and unsettled, they say farewell to me. I long to tell them not to worry, that all will be well. But I can't think of the words in Spanish, and I'm not sure of how truthful the words would be. I watch the two women hurry back toward camp and whatever awaits them there. I watch until they are lost in the shadows, and then I turn to the children, gathered together and waiting in the bonfire's warm glow.

Thomas is working on a science lesson with the older group; they are dissecting, naming, and drawing the parts of a plant. They're working with flowers—the bright orange and yellow poppies that bloom wild all around us. His other students are divided into groups of two; they are, with varying degrees of attention and success, taking turns reciting important dates in history, related to the United States and Mexico: 1492, 1776, 1865, 1929 for the United States; 1521, 1810, 1848, 1910, 1923 for Mexico. (What these last dates signify, I don't know yet, I realize to my shame.) And then for California, 1850, the year it became one of the states. “The thirty-first.” A serious young girl with long black curls falling over her shoulders says this to her partner. “Before that, this land belonged to Mexico.”