in my first memory of you, you are talking to my father and he is
shaking his head. i am 5 years old.
i should be in school, you say. it’s not worth the trouble, my father
says. we’ll be leaving soon. her older siblings are working,
shoveling cottonseed at the cotton gin. and the closest school is 5
miles outside of town. she’s too young to take the bus every
morning by herself.
my mother and my father were illiterate. their families pulled them
out of school to work as children. they never stopped working. my
family followed the harvests from Texas to Oklahoma to New
Mexico, migrating every few weeks or months. the work didn’t
stop for school. my siblings and i missed weeks, missed months.
you were so brave, Mrs Adams, tiny, old and white with a perfect
bouffant bubble, refusing to back down. you persuaded my father,
built like a bull and with a thundering voice, to let me go to school.
you promised to take me to schoool every morning and bring me
back every afternoon.
and so i went to kindergarten. learned how to write my name.
learned the alphabet. and discovered the magic of words on a page.
i remember sitting very quietly and very still in your car. big and
shiny. powder blue. my mother must have told me to behave, to
ask for nothing, to say thank you everyday. we must have talked
about flowers, Mrs Adams, because one day you made me a gift of
daffodil bulbs.
i showed them to my mother who said they wouldn’t grow in
South Texas. that we could plant them, but we’d be leaving before
they could bloom. i wanted to plant them. i made two neat rows by
the side of the house where they could be seen from the street.
only the slightest green had started to poke through the earth when
it was time for us to go. i watered them one last time. and then we
left. but even then, when i was 5 years old, i was happy, imagining
those daffodils in bloom.
sometimes i think they are still blooming. sweet and bright and
brilliant. i wonder, Mrs Adams, if you ever thought of me after that
season— if you ever would have dreamed that that small
dark-skinned 5-year-old Mexican American girl would spend her
life writing books. wonder if you ever drove by that house and saw
the daffodils i planted for you. wonder if you ever wished me well
and saw me in your mind's eye— blooming and blooming and blooming.
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