I come from a long line of storytellers.
Abuela used to get her pleat-patterned skirt caught in bike pedals, tugging it gently back between her knees as she perched herself sidesaddle on the handlebars. She’d ride through Havana that way, in the 1940s, fingering crustless triangle sandwiches she’d picked up from family friends’ mansions. Her little gang of ricas would put their bikes up against the granite wall that caught the sea and compare jewelry: jade-stone rings, gold bangles to cover both wrists and true-silver pocket watches. But Abuela was always the most impressive. She had a three-piece set of pearls: dangly earrings, a necklace and a brooch — all held in place with a set of mini-diamonds between each link.
Castro came in 1960 and Abuela smuggled her three-piece set to Queens, New York. She wore Calvin Klein pantsuits from Fifth Avenue to her new job in the transistor radio factory. She sometimes carelessly stamped numbers into hearing devices, as her sons took out Pell grants and became somewhat comfortable with bistec panisado every night for dinner. All the while she chatted without breath. To an unhearing audience she harped on the inability to find a crustless sandwich in New York City and someone who cared about her line of pearls.
Tía Ysa did not have beautiful hands. They were scarred and sliced from the sharp crack of machete against sugar cane. I turned her hand over in mine, poked and prodded the raised, white scars that were like spider legs crawling in her palm and asked again what would happen if you found a set of eyes while cutting.
“Ay díós — you plead that you’re a peasant too and that he should put down his rebel’s rife. Porque you only took este gran trabajo, working in Castro’s fields for six months, so you could leave him everything you owned except your new, creaseless plane ticket to America.”
We sat together on the floral, plastic-covered couch making it crinkle as she wove my hair into a single braid that slid down the center of my back. She pulled me close and whispered tales of girls dancing with colored ribbons, Cadillacs with headlights like saucers, and lovers, pressed together against the granite barrier, who looked out over the sea and dreamed.
**
My brother, sister and I were all forcibly subjected to my mother’s own rendition of “summer school” from the ages of three to 13.
“I’m not going to let your minds lose what they teach you during the year,” she’d say, peeling dry macaroni from the craft table, perpetually sticky with Elmer’s glue.
We’d draw too-long hour hands on “Telling Time” worksheets she’d copied herself in black ink; we’d make brown grocery bags into hats, decorated with colorful plumes for our later-scheduled parade; we’d whine when she began yet another history lesson on Jamestown.
But our favorite was always story time. We curled around Ma in blankets as she opened up another tale, reading in a spectrum of character voices. At the end, she’d hand us blank, homemade books: neatly cut and folded sheets of computer paper placed between two pieces of cardboard and a yellow, duct tape binding.
So, we wrote. There was “How to Beat the Bully, Fred” (my brother’s crowning achievement), “The Robot of Uzbekistan” (my first attempt at a graphic novel), “A Collection of Short Poems about Snow,” “The Day I Beat Up Roy Cavarrubia” (a real smart ass in my fourth-grade spelling class), “How the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turned Into Turtles” (their transformation into ninjas had been previously explained), and “What I’d Do If I Didn’t Have Summer School” (Ma wasn’t so big a fan).
Even when the sticky craft table was replaced by the more adult appropriate pool table in our basement, Ma begged us to still write. And when we claimed we were “too busy,” she made dinner mandatory. Over passed plates of frijoles negros and platanitos, we’d share our stories of the day — pining for the most laughter or just the right detail.
**
There is a Jewish saying that reads: what is truer than truth? Answer: the story. And when I think about this in the context of human truths, I cannot help but become a believer.
We exist simply as a collection of our stories. They are the first details we share with our friends or even with strangers who we are just beginning to meet. It is an instant connection, a shared experience, or, more often times, a surprise.
The story is entirely human — from burly Viking men spitting out bits and pieces of “Beowulf” after a clack of drinking horns to Malala Yousafzai whose words about her own life changed a good bit of the world (or at least made the majority of it begin to pay attention). We feel stories. Simple inky symbols on a page or sound vibrations of voice in the air can move us to tears, elate us or even call us to action. There is something so transcendent about the story that it only seems to function on the level of our deepest being.
The humanities matter to me because of this: the power of the story. There must be something in it — for abuela and tía Ysa gave up their whole country, and Ma a good portion of her summers, just so that I would have the chance to one day share my own.
Sandra Menendez is a third-year College student.
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