Mañana Means Heaven

Afterword

AftErword 217 fiNdiNg bEA frANco Only a month ago I’d returned home from the East Coast, where I’d spent three days at the New York Public Library scrutinizing each one of Bea’s handwritten letters to Jack. It was my second trip, in fact, and both times I’d held the same aged scraps of paper in my hands and placed them on the clean green felts of a sterile archive room and ruminated over them, investigating them for clues, landmarks, sediment, sentiment, anything that might reveal who she was, and her whereabouts. The same way I had once seriously contemplated climbing to the top of that big tin water tower in the middle of Selma and shouting out her name in hopes that some passerby, a campesina on her way home from work, might shout back—“Hey, you! You’re looking for la Señora Franco? I know where she lives, come down from there!” But here I stood now, on this street, this yard, sweat tickling the length of my spine and gathering on the skin beneath my moustache. The heat was unbearable this day; it was early fall and still in the mid-90s. I wanted badly to remove my blazer but didn’t want to expose the tattoos on my left arm.I was too aware that this was a moment that needed to be handled delicately, strategically. One misstep, one bad move, and it could take months, years, before I’d ever get this family to open their door to me again. I rehearsed my lines once, twice, but it didn’t help. I kept forgetting them and had to trust that they’d come back to me in the moment. In the seconds before walking up the steps and knocking on the metal screen door I panicked, thinking about the kind of reaction I’d get with this far-fetched claim. Would they refute the story before hearing me out? Would they slam the door and threaten to call the cops? Not unusual in these parts. Or was it possible that they’d always known and simply didn’t want to be found? Which would mean I’d be ruthlessly picking at the seams of an old wound. It was all possible. But there were the glaring synchronicities that kept playing in my head. Like this one: the simple and true-to-God fact that the yard I found myself standing on in that moment, the yard belonging to one Bea Franco, was only one mile down the street from my house. 218 As I went up the concrete steps, a cat leapt from the stoop and sidled up to my leg. I wanted to bend down and pet it but was too close to the door now to do anything but channel my focus on the strength of the first impressionable knock. She wasn’t expecting anyone, so when she heard the door, she peeked through the window curtain first. Not recognizing the face on the porch, she did what all people on that side of Fresno do, she spoke through the bolted metal screen. I smiled and squinted my eyes, trying to make out her face on the other side of it, but it was impossible. She asked what I wanted. Her voice was light, but with a hint of age behind it. I had to talk fast. I wiped the sweat from my brow. “Is this the home of Beatrice Franco?” “Yes, it is,” the woman replied. “What’s this about?” “Are you Beatrice?” “No.” She hesitated. “I’m her daughter, Patricia.” Already it was proving fruitful.I fumbled through my lines,tried explaining, painfully inarticulate as I was, that I was a writer. She stood silent, unimpressed. I pushed on, spilling to her this unlikely story that she wouldn’t believe for some time. Even as I spoke it and knew it to be true, it sounded absurd coming from my mouth. Finally, I said,“I’m working on a book about a woman, a farmworker from Selma in the 40s.”I paused and could feel my legs beneath me again.“She was a character in a book, a famous novel . . . her real name was Bea Franco.” I gave her a second to respond, but Patricia had nothing to say. “I’ve been researching her for three years now. I know it sounds strange, but everything...