The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry

The Story of My Body

The Story Of My Body Migration is the story of my body. —Victor Hernandez Cruz Skin I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States. My Puerto Rican relatives called me tall; at the American school, some of my rougher classmates called me Skinny Bones, and the Shrimp because I was the smallest member of my classes all through grammarschool until high school, when the midget Gladys was given the honorary post of front row center for class pictures and scorekeeper, bench warmer, in P.E. I reached my full stature of five feet in sixthgrade. I started out life as a pretty baby and learned to be a pretty girl from a pretty mother. Then at ten years of age I suffered one of the worst cases of chicken pox I have ever heard of. My entire body, including the inside of my ears and in between my toes, was covered with pustules which in a fit of panic at my appearance I scratched off my face, leaving permanent scars. A cruel school nurse told me I would always have them—tiny cuts that looked as if a mad cat had plunged its claws deep into my skin. I grew my hair long and hid behind it for the first years of my adolescence. This was when I learned to be invisible. Color In the animal world it indicates danger: the most colorful creatures are often the most poisonous. Color isalso a wayto attract and seduce 135 a mate. In the human world color triggers many more complex and often deadly reactions. As a Puerto Rican girl born of "white" parents , I spent the first years of my life hearing people refer to me as blanca, white. My mother insisted that I protect myselffrom the intense island sun because I was more prone to sunburn than some of my darker, trigueno playmates. People were always commenting within my hearing about how my black hair contrasted so nicely with my "pale" skin. I did not think of the color of my skin consciously except when I heard the adults talking about complexion. It seems to me that the subject is much more common in the conversation of mixed-race peoples than in mainstream United States society, where it is a touchy and sometimes even embarrassing topic to discuss, except in a political context. In Puerto Rico I heard many conversations about skin color. A pregnant woman could say, "I hope my baby doesn't turn out prieto" (slang for "dark" or "black") "like my husband's grandmother, although she was a good-looking negra in her time." I am a combination of both, being olive-skinned—lighter than my mother yet darker than my fair-skinned father. In America, I am a person of color, obviouslya Latina. On the Island I have been called everything from a paloma blanca, after the song (by a black suitor), to lagringa. My first experience of color prejudice occurred in a supermarket in Paterson, New Jersey. It was Christmastime, and I was eight or nine years old. There was a display of toys in the store where I went two or three times a day to buy things for my mother, who never made lists but sent for milk, cigarettes, a can of this or that, as she remembered from hour to hour. I enjoyed being trusted with money and walkinghalf a city block to the new, modern grocery store. It was owned by three good-looking Italianbrothers. I liked the younger one with the crew-cut blond hair. The two older ones watched me and the other Puerto Rican kids as if they thought we were going to steal something. The oldest one would sometimes even try to hurry me with my purchases, although part of my pleasurein these expeditions i36 came from looking at everythingin the well-stocked aisles. I was also teaching myself to read English by sounding out the labels in packages : L&M cigarettes, Borden's homogenized milk, Red Devil potted ham, Nestle's chocolate mix, Quaker oats, Bustelo coffee, Wonder bread, Colgate toothpaste, Ivory soap, and Goya (makers of products used in Puerto Rican dishes) everything—these are some of the brand names that taught me nouns. Severaltimes this man had come up to me, wearing his blood-stained butcher's apron, and towering...