Cesar Chavez Adult School

1.

The building is spacious and tiled, echoingin Spanish, in shuffling feet, in backpacks slungfrom the shoulders to the floor. It is a fitting tributeto the man whose face is in the little display caseby the door. It's there, the faded photographof Chavez and the campesina in field clothes,indistinguishable from the other imagesof men and women who sacrificedeven their children for lo que se puede.

She stands beside him,face and hands the color of her gente, of the soil,of the patina of mestizo blood. She restsan arm around him, her eyes and smile the pictureof conviction. "That woman is a scab."

Both my parents laugh from the shock of seeingher there, the one who turnedon her God to become a "Hallelujah," on her gentefor a steady paycheck and the pride of three good meals.

"She turned early,"my parents say, "crossedthat picket line

before the strike." They talk quietlyin the lobby, gazing deep into herface, remembering they'd had her friendship after all of it,"But a body who can turn like that …"

They shake their heads.They step away.

2.

That night they asked their friendsif they remembered. I remembered,though I was not yet two when he went hungrythat first time, and that yearand the years that followed scattered over me like shards.

When he was buried, my sister calledto talk. "You should havegone," she said to me over the phone."Lines of children wavedwhite handkerchiefs behind school fences.Workers walked in head rags,and Jerry Brown weavedin and out with elbows and Excuse me's."

When she saw the photograph, my mother said,"Forty dollars a week. Your father went for the novelty;I went for the money. Without it,I would have stayed home."

When I remembered, I hearda tall man berbering in the parknext to someone too weak to stand. The street and grape fieldsburned sulfur yellow as the sun, and all aroundme, silhouettes stood patternedlike the shirts the women cut to wraparound their heads. Then a second man spokewords till all the men around us clapped.

"You should have gone," my sister said."Jesse Jackson and reporters touched their facesup beside the actors in their folding chairs. The priest said,'Ashes to ashes' over the simplecoffin, so we crossed ourselves."

But Ma said they'd given outthe money only the first and second weeks. After that,she and Pa ate beans and marched and asked the otherswho had money for the driving back.

And in the shabby townwhere we played, the street beyondthe fence in the dusk stretchedout into the fields till pickup trucks roselike smoke from the vineyard tops.We screamed and ranto tell the grownups, and men's shadows reachedfrom the boxes behind the cabs, their armsgrowing into rifles.

"You should have gone," my sister said."People prayed the rosary in groups, or they sang,or they walked up to each other and talkedquietly, like they didn't see each otherat the store every day of their lives,but it was special, somber."

"Then we'd march," my mother said,"at the farms, with flags and signs and chantsand silence, lots of silence, till the scabs rolled inon trucks, and then the shouting flared:'Go on then. You're dogsto these people,' we'd say,'drinking from mud puddles, pissing in dirt, squattingin their money while they dust you in poison.'"

And sometimes we would run suddenly.Once it was from a hall broken upby long tables, where I hopedwe'd eat, through a door, past a church bell on the sidewalk,Ma pressing us against Pa's calves and jabbingwith hands and knees for us to dropbehind a station wagon, where he left us,and we waitedfor the car to comebefore Ma's body shook toohard to keep us...