Alphabet

"Tomás," my mother used to tell me, "Tu tienes que hablar por mi."

So I would go with her down to the welfare or some other place, the post office, the bank, the school, and I would be her voice.

I could always talk real good, and come to think of it, I could conversate with just about anybody. I knew how to break the ice, knew what to say. Knew how to stir things up, too, how to get at someone right where they lived, like a stun gun. I was always good with words.

At my trials I didn't get to use no words at all, seeing as my lawyers thought it best I decline to testify. I wanted to talk for myself, to say what I was thinking, or to be more accurate, how I was too doped up and twisted around and clouded to do much thinking at all, just too caught up in the wanting and needing that was my whole life from waking to sleeping, to do anything but beg and con and sell and steal my way there. At the sentencing I got to say sorry, but who believes you then?

Sí, I always was good with words. Palabras that you say out loud, that is. Who had time for school? There was too much other stuff to do. Watching los niños, making rice and gándules, and perníl on special occasions, hustling up the money for the rent, fakin' all the things I missed by being gone. Slippin' out to see what was shakin' on the street. I dodged detention, and the corner was my school; that's just where I wanted to be, and I got to tell you, I had the finest teachers and I got straight A's.

But now I can do more than talk out loud, and this pen feels good in my hands, almost like a weapon, which it can become, easy, with some masking tape and some concrete, and there's plenty of that to sharpen it on in here. They give us these little limp ones, thinking we can't hurt nobody with these, but everyone should know that anything, anything at all can be turned to hurting.

You can barely use these floppy pens, though, which is purely a new issue of mine's, since it's been mi secreto, for every day of mi thirty-eight-year vida, 'til three years ago last April, that I never learned to read or write.

I know how to put my words down now. I know how to spell them and I study where they come from, how they're put together, how they came to be. And I love me some words. I survived the shame, Mama's and my own, for not knowing what even little niños know. I was second generation what you call illiterate, 'til I owned that fact, and mostly I didn't get no grief. They know who I am in here, and that's not the kind of thing that makes a punk. That's way too close to home.

I know words are not the same as la vida, though, even the wrote-down kind. They give you somewhere to lean, though, and something to choose. They give a way to name it all.

One day I'ma write a letter to m'hija. She's a woman now, I'll have to find her first.

I can't get enough of reading and writing down what I could only talk before, and no one has to do it for me, pa'yo. I'ma stay with this book until the lights go out, and start again at six when they come on again. And soon I'ma start working on my ged. Las letras, las palabras, they're all the way mine.

My first sentence? "I am Tomás." That's it. I exist. This is my own name. Tomás, or Boo to you.

And now that it really belongs to me, I'm redoing the alphabet. This here's my own...