Mamis Favorite Latino Authors Remember Their Mothers

From First Born by Esmeralda Santiago I was her first child, born feetfirst, the umbilical cord snug around my neck. My father's mother delivered her of me. I fell into Abuela's hands, a blue baby, and Mami thought I was dead. Abuela slapped me hard, and when I wailed, she returned me to my mother's body, to the full, soft warmth of her breast. Maybe it was that perilous beginning that bound me to her at the moment when she sent me forth. Since that rainy Monday morning, whenever I'm breathless and abused, I return to her bosom, hungry. She was sixteen when I was conceived. My father was twenty-eight and already had a child with another woman. I've never asked her how they met, how he seduced her, how she managed to evade her mother and brother and the house full of aunts and uncles with whom she lived so she could be with him. Whenever I ask personal questions, she says she doesn't remember, but a few days later she'll volunteer what she wants me to know. That's how I found out that, around the time they met, she worked as a clerk in her uncle's pastry shop in Santurce. Was it there that Papi first saw her, dark-eyed, fresh-faced, eager for adventure? It was August when they made me, the middle of hurricane season. I imagine a hot, dry day. Or had the sky rumbled and cracked in one of those unexpectedly violent summer storms that break over Puerto Rico with no warning? She's afraid of lightning and thunder. Perhaps he held her in his arms to calm the trembling that accompanies her fears. I was a fussy, sleepless infant, dark and hairy, given to fits of rage that ended as suddenly and inexplicably as they began. I slept in a hammock that Mami swung rhythmically in an attempt to soothe the colic, heat rash, mosquito bites: the irritants I couldn't name but that made her life miserable. Years later she'd wish for my children to give me as much trouble as I had given her, and the possibility kept me childless into my thirties. Before I was two, I had a baby sister. We lived in a one-room house on stilts over muddy water. Wobbly planks led to the street. When we walked across them, Mami clutched my hand and held Delsa against her bosom. "Don't let go," she warned. "Be careful, or you'll fall and drown." As we reached the street, her grip eased and my fears melted, to be renewed again on the way back over the long, splintery boards that creaked and groaned with every step. "But you can't possibly remember that," Mami challenges, and I ask, did we live in a house over muddy water? Were there planks leading to the road? She admits that yes, both things are true, but refuses to believe I can remember that far back. "I must have told you about it when you were older," she claims. On a sleepy afternoon, Mami and I sat at a table near a window, listening to the water slap against the pilings that held up the house. I sucked my thumb while, with my other hand inside my panties, I bothered the place where pee came from. When she saw what I was doing, Mami flew off her chair, grabbed my arm, and spanked me, screaming that I was never to do that, it was dirty, girls shouldn't touch themselves down there. That's the first beating I remember, the sting of her hand against my buttocks, the strong fist around my wrist, the flat sound of her fingers against my skin. She was not the only mother to hit her children. Una pela was a common threat by parents then -- still is -- and it was not unusual for parents to peel skin off with a nubby guava switch or with a stiff leather belt. Papi used his belt on us. Mami used her hands, a rope, a shoe, a frying pan, whatever was closest. In spite of the many pelas I endured, I don't think of myself as a battered child. That term didn't enter my vocabulary until I was in my twenties and newspapers and television broadcasts were filled with stories of children burned with lit cigaSantiago, Esmeralda is the author of 'Mamis Favorite Latino Authors Remember Their Mothers' with ISBN 9780375408793 and ISBN 0375408797.