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In the World of Women and Children
When we lived in Brownsville, my world involved only women and children.
Mother had friends, Cora and Eva Hernandez, whose father owned a
tobacconist/news stand. He stood behind the counter and cash register, a
quiet man with a big moustache. His daughters were very lively young
women who never married. They stayed home to look after him and their
handicapped younger sister. The only other men I saw were the priest,
who said Mass and heard confessions at the convent/orphanage where I
stayed weekdays, and occasionally Pepe, my godfather, married to my
madrina Celia, who stood at my baptism.
In our world of
secluded women and girls, only female voices broke the silence. After
the nuns left to say the rosary, we sat outside on our front steps, all
one-parent orphans. It was time for riddles and stories. These were not
the usual children's fare. Our stories were imaginative, but no more sad
or scary than the sight of a purple bruised Jesus, dripping blood,
hanging over the church altar. Besides, we were all familiar with loss.
Two of the girls had lost all family members to tuberculosis. One girl
haemorrhaged regularly. Aged homeless women lived in the crowded smelly
dormitory behind our quarters.
An old cemetery was behind our
convent.
The story of La Llorona impressed me. Years later I
found traces of her in the Mexican mythology that emerged after the
destruction of Tenochtitlan, when indigenous women threw their children
into the lake to save them from enslavement by Spanish invaders. We
children knew we'd heard La Llorona, and were certain she mourned her
lost babies in the local waters of Brownsville's Resaca.
The nuns
had little to do with us. Their appearance in our dormitory caused
apprehension and curiosity about scalps. Theirs were bald, we thought.
Ours had lice.
I entered another world when we moved to
Harlingen. The neighbourhood children were rowdy, had opinions on, and
discussed, every adult conversation they'd overheard. Little girls spoke
of the rose-petal baths recommended to help an unmarried relative
attract a husband. Boys played out familial dramas by pretending to be
staggering drunk, swilling water out of emptied beer bottles, belching,
and farting. They took turns peeking through the holes in outhouses and
screeched in one voice, as the person emerged, "Rosa has fanny hairs!"
The men weren't particularly visible, or given much importance in the daily
lives of these women and children. They were not venerated as the priest
or Jesus was at the convent. At best, men could be entertaining when
they told stories at big family gatherings. Mostly their breath stank of
stale liquor. Their nails were always as grimy as were their clothes,
with oil from the trains and the roundhouse where they worked. Overalls
were boiled in tubs outdoors and scrubbed with brushes.
Home
births were almost a public affair, and every child was known by
everyone on the block. A new mother was expected to stay in bed up to
six weeks, because her body required rest. Her body openings, fresh and
torn, needed time to heal. Relatives helped maintain her special status
regardless of how many children she'd already borne.
When a
neighbour's baby daughter died, she was viewed in the living room of the
family home. She lay in a satin-lined casket trimmed with rosebuds and
ribbons. A bubble of pink foam slowly emerged from her lips. The
sorrowful mother, her family, and neighbours wearing identical black,
tear-worn and pale, smelled of blood, milk, and the kitchen. The men,
silent uncomfortable sentinels, got quietly drunk outside. The
grandfather periodically broke into quiet sobbing. The children took
breaks from playing chase, ran inside to peek at the bubble on the
baby's lips, were shrilly reprimanded, and returned giggling to their
boisterous games outdoors.
Mother gave birth noiselessly to her
baby, delivered by Paula Arena, the midwife. When the baby died of
complications due to pneumonia and gastroenteritis, her grief was wrung
out in silence. The attending physician earned Mother's hatred. Her
child was left alone at Ashcroft Funeral Home to await burial.
On
the day of the burial, two uninvited guests joined us at the cemetery.
Two children, a boy and a girl, ragged, barefoot and dirty, stood
squinting against the sun, and sombrely joined us in throwing dry clumps
of earth onto the tiny coffin. They departed as mysteriously as they'd
appeared.
One night I awoke to the howling of dogs and the
keening of women. A neighbour had been shot dead in a barroom brawl. The
neighbourhood women, a protective cloud, wrapped around the widow and
her children. Afterwards we children studied the heavily made-up face of
the man lying in the casket in the middle of his living room and
wondered among ourselves where the bullet holes were, how they were
plugged, and with what.
In those days the home and family was a
woman's exclusive territory, almost as much as the man's place was
outside the home. And the children belonged to the mother, even if the
laws outside the home stated differently. Knowing this, the husband
could threaten to take the children away from the mother if she left
him. And they did threaten, often. If she didn't have family relations
to help her, he might succeed. Male relations upheld the injured woman's
rights, as was the case in our neighbourhood when one young woman got
pregnant. The impatient young suitor was beaten and threatened with
worse if he didn't marry the girl. He married her. And the family kept
careful watch on his treatment of her after they were married.
The world of women and children was one in which everyone knew the
rules. There were restrictions, but it was more supportive and
respectful towards women than was the church, and kinder towards
children than were most fathers.
Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published:
November 14,
2005
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