60 x Judith Ortiz Cofe,

Judith Orttz Cofer (b. 1952) spent her childhood in the small Puerto Rican townu,here she was born and in Paterson, New Jersey, uhere herfamily liuedfor mostof each year, from the time she utas three. She attended Catltolic schools inPaterson and holds degrees from the Uniuersity of Georgia and Florida Atlan.ticUnittersity. She has published seueral aolumes of poetry, including Reaching forthe Mainland (1996), and her 1989 noael The Line of the Sun zpas nominated

for a Pulitzer Prize. Cofer has also published two autobiographical uorks; SilentDancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) andTheLatirr Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993). Her most recent books are Woman in Frontof the Sun: On Becoming a Vriter (2000) andThe Meaning of Consuelo (2003).She currently teaches creatiue usriting at the Llniuersity of Georgia.

Judith Ortiz Cofer

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ffif*reeN {l lef}q:g$-H *#{3In "Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood," Judith OrtizCofer describes the bonds that obtain among a community of women-threegenerations of a family headed by the matriarch, Mam5, the author'sgrandmother. In celebrating the intertwined lives of these women of her family,Cofer simultaneously celebrates the power of storytelling. Weaving these twostrands of her essay together-familv and stories-Cofer conveys someimportant ideas about women and their relations with men along withimportant ideas about culture and its significance for identity.

Cofer's "Casa" is about living in and moving between two worlds-thewarm world of her Puerto Rican tropical home and the cold new world of NewYork and Paterson, New Jersey. Cofer alludes to this dual existence early on andexplains its significance later in her essay? referring to herself as an outsider whospoke English with a Spanish accent and Spanish with an English accent. Andalthough this dual linguistic identity made her stand out in both groups, Coferbenefits from her double linguistic and cultural lieritage. It allows her to shiftback and forth readily between two very different worlds, with their differentsets of cultural values.

At three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the hour of cafe con leche, thewomen of my family gathered in Mam6's living room to speak of impor-tant things and retell familiar stories meant to be overheard by us younggirls, their daughters. In MamS's house (everyone called my grandmother

Casa: A Partial Rernembrance oJ'a Puerto Hican Chilclhood * 61

Mamd) was a large parlor built by *y grandfather to his wife's exact

specifications so that it was always cool, facing as/ay from the sun. The

doorway was on the side of the house so no one could walk directlv intoher living room. First they had to take a little stroll through and around

her beautiful garden where prize-winning orchids grew in the trunk of an

ancient tree she had hollowed out for that purpose. This room was fur-nished with several mahogany rocking chairs, acquired at the births ofher children, and one intricately carved rocker that had passed down toMamd at the death of her own mother.

It was on these rockers that rny mother, her sisters, and my grand-mother sat on these afternoons of my childhood to tell their stories,teaching each other, and my cousin and me, what it was like to be a

woman, more specifically, a Puerto Rican s/oman. They talked aboutlife on the island, and life in Los lVueua Yores, their way of referring to

the {Jnited States from New York Citv to California: the other place, nothome, all the same. They told real-life stories though, as I later leanred,

always enrbellishing them with a little or a lot of dramatic detail. Andthey told cuentos, the moralitv and cautionary tales told by the womenin our family for generations: stories that becarrre a part of mv subcon-

scious as I grew up in two worlds, the tropical island and the cold city,and that would later surface in my dreams and in my poetry.

One of these tales was about the woman who was left at the altar'.

Mamd liked to tell that one with histrionic intensitv. I remember therise and fall of her voice" the sighs, and her constantly gesturing hands"like two birds swooping through her words. This particular story usu-ally would come up in a conversation as a result of someone mention-ing a forthcoming engagernent or wedding. The first time I remenrberhearing it, I was sitting on the floor at Marn6's feet, pretending to reada comic book. I may have been eleven or twelve years old, at that diffi-cult age when a girl was no longer a child who could be ordered toleave the room if the women wanted freedom to take their talk into for'-bidden zorresi nor really old enough to be considered a part of theirconclave. I could only sit quietly, pretending to be in another world,while absorbing it all in a sort of unspoken agreement of my status as

silent auditor. On this day, Vlamd had taken rny long, tangled mane ofhair into her ever-busy hands. Without looking down at me and withno interruption of her flow of words, she began braiding my hair, work-ing at it with the quickness and deterrnination that characterized all

62 x Judith Ortiz Cof",

her actions. My mother was watching us impassively from her rockeracross the room. On her lips played a little ironic smile. I would neversit still for her ministrations, but even then, I instinctively knew thatshe did not possess MamS's matriarchal power to command and keepeveryone's attention. This was never more evident than in the spell she

cast when telling a story.

"It is not like it used to be when I was a girl," Mamd announced.

"Then, a man could leave a girl standing at the church altar with a borr-quet of fresh flowers in her hands and disappear off the face of theearth. No way to track him down if he was from another town. He couldbe a married man, with rnaybe even two or three families all over theisland. There was no way to know And there were men who did this.Hombres with the devil in their flesh who would come to a pueblo, likethis one, take a job at one of the haciendas, never meaning to stay, onlyto have a good time and to seduce the women."

The whole time she was speaking, Mam6 would be weaving my hairinto a flat plait that required pulling apaft the two sections of hair withlittle jerks that made my eyes water; but knowing how grandmotherdetested whining and boba (sissy) tears, as she called them, I just sat upas straight and stiff as I did at La Escuela San Jose, where the nunsenforced good posture with a flexible plastic ruler they bounced off ofslumped shoulders and heads. As Mam6's story progressed, I noticed howmy young Aunt Laura lowered her eyes, refusing to rneet MamS's mean-ingful gaze. Laura was seventeen, in her last year of high school, andalready engaged to a boy from another town who had staked tris claimwith a tiny diamond ring, then left for Los Nueva Yores to make his for-tune. They were planning to get married in a year. Mam6 had expressed

serious doubts that the wedding would ever take place. In Mam6's eyes, a

man set free without a legal contract was a man lost. She believed thatmarriage was not something men desired, but simply the price they hadto pay for the privilege of children and, of course, for what no decent(synonymous with "smart") woman would grve away for free.

"Maria La Loca was only seventeen when ir happened to hcr." I lis-tened closely at the mention of this name. Maria was a town character, a

fat rniddle-aged woman who lived with her old mother on the outskirtsof town. She was to be seen around the pueblo delivering the meat piesthe two women madc for a living. The most peculiar thing about Maria,in mv eyes, was that she walked and rnoved like a little girl though she

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had the thick body and wrinkled face of an old woman. She wouldswing her hips in an exaggerated, clownish way, and sometimes even

hop and skip up to someone's house. She spoke to no one. Even if youasked her a question, she would just look at you and smile, showing heryellow teeth. But I had heard that if you got close enough, you couldhear her humrning a tune without words. The kids yelled out nastythings at her calling her La Loca, and the men who hang out at the

bodega playing dominoes sometimes whistled mockingly as she passed

by with her funnl', outlandish walk. But Marfa seemed impervious to itall, carrying her basket of pasteles like a grotesque Little Red RidingHood through the forest.

Maria La Loca interested me, as did all the eccentrics and crazies ofour pueblo. Their weirdness was a measuring stick I used in my serious

quest for a definition of normal. As a Nur.y brat shuttling between New

Jersey and the pueblo, I was constantly made to feel like an oddball bymy peers, who made fun of my two-way accent: a Spanish accent when Ispoke English, and when I spoke Spanish I was told that I sounded like aGringa. Being the outsider had already turned my brother and me intocultural charneleons. We developed early on the ability to blend into acrowd, to sit and read quietly in a fifth story apartrnent building for days

and days when it was too bitterly cold to play outside, or, set free, to runwild in Mamii"'s realm, where she took charge of our lives, releasingMother for a while from the intense fear for our safety that our father'sabsences instilled in her. In order to keep us from harm u,'hen Father was

away, Mother kept us under strict surveillance. She even walked us toand from Public School No. 11, which we attended during the monthswe lived in Paterson, New Jersey, our home base in the states. Mam6freed all tlrree of us like pigeons from a cage. I saw her as my liberatorand my model. Her stories were parables from which to glean the Truth.

"Marfa La Loca was once a beautiful girl. Everyone thought she

would marry the M6ndez boy." As everyone knew, Rogelio M6ndez wasthe richest man in town. "But," Mam6 continued, knitting my hair withthe same intensitv she u.as putting into her story, "this macho made afool out of her and ruined her life." She paused for the effect of her use

of the word "Macho," u.hich at that time had not yet become a popularepithet for an unliberated man. This word had for us the crude andcomical connotation of "male of the species," stud; a macho was whatyou put in a pen to increase your stock.

64 * Judith Ortiz Cof",

I peeked over my comic book at my mother. She too was underMam6's spell, smiling conspiratorially at this little swipe at men. She was

safe from MamS's contempt in this area. Married at an early age, an

unspotted lamb, she had been accepted by u good family of strictSpaniards whose name was old and respected, though their fortune hadbeen lost long before my birth. In a rocker Pap6 had painted sky blue sat

Mam6's oldest child, Aunt Nena. Mother of three children, stepmother oftwo more, she was a quiet woman who liked books but had married anignorant and abusive widower whose main interest in life u/as accumu-lating wealth. He too was in the mainland working on his dream ofretnrning home rich and triumphant to buy thefinca of his dreams. She

was vraiting for him to send for her. She would leave her children withMam6 for several years while the two of them slaved away in factories.He would one day be a rich manr and she a sadder woman. Even nowher life-light was dimming. She spoke little, an aberration in Mam5"'s

house, and she read avidly, as if storing up spiritual food for the longwinters that awaited her in Los Nueva Yores without her family. Buteven Aunt Nena came alive to Mamii"'s words" rocking gently, her handsover a thick book in her lap.

Her daughter, my cousin Sara, played jacks by herself on the tileporch outside the room where we sat. She was a year older than I. We

shared a bed and all our family's secrets. Collaborators in search ofanswers, Sara and I discussed everything we heard the women say, try-ing to fit it all together like a puzzle that, once assembled, would reveallife's mysteries to us, Though she and I still enjoyed taking part inboys' games-chase, volleyball, and even uaqueros, the island versionof cowboys and Indians involving cap-gun battles and violent shoot-outs under the mango tree in MamS's backyard-we loved best thequiet hours in the afternoon when the rnen were still at work, andthe boys had gone to play serious baseball at the park. Then Mam6'shouse belonged only to us women. The aroma of coffee perking in thekitchen, the mesmerrzing creaks and groans of the rockers, and thewomen telling their lives in cuentos are forever woven into the fabric ofmy irnagination, braided like my hair that day I felt my grandmother'shands teaching me about strength, her voice convincing me of thepower of storytelling.

That day Mam6 told how the beautiful Marfa had fallen prey to aman whose name uras never the same in subsequent versions of the story;

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood t, 65

it was Juan one time, Jos6, Rafael, Diego, another. We understood thatneither the name nor any of thefacls were important, only that a woman

had allowed love to defeat her. Mam6 put each of us in Marfa's place bydescribing her wedding dress in loving detail: how she looked like a

princess in her lace as she waited at the altar. Then, as Mam5. approached

the tragic denouement of her story, I was distracted by the sound of myaunt Laura's violent rocking. She seemed on the verge of tears. She knewthe fable was intended for her. That week she u,as going to have her wed-

ding gown fitted, though no firm date had been set for the marriage.

MamS ignored Laura's obvious discomfort, digging out a ribbon from the

sewing basket she kept by her rocker while describing Maria's long ill-ness, "a fever that would not break for days." She spoke of a mother's

despair: "that woman climbed the church steps on her knees every morn-ing, wore only black as a promesa to the Holy Virgin in exchange for her

daughter's health." By the time Marfa returned from her honeymoon withdeath, she was ravished, no longer young or sane. "As you can see, she is

almost as old as her mother already," Mam6 lamented while tying the

ribbon to the ends of my hair, pulling it back with such force that I justknew I would never be able to close my eyes completely again.

"That Maria's getting crazier every duy." MamS's voice would take alighter tone noq expressing satisfaction, either for the perfection of mybraid, or for a story well told-it was hard to tell. "You know that tune

Maria is always humming?" Carried away by her enthusiasm, I tried tonod, but Mam6 still had me pinned between her knees.

"Well, that's the wedding march." Surprising us all, MamS sang out,

"Da, da, dara . . . du, da, dara." Then lifting me off the floor by *yskinny shoulders, she would lead me around the room in an impromptuwaltz-another session ending with the laughter of women, all of us

caught up in the infectious joke of our lives.

Possibilities for Writing1. The longest and most elaborate example Cofer uses is that of

Maria La Loca. Explain the significance of this example, andidentify and explain the significance of another example thatCofer includes.

2. Cofer uses a number of Spanish words and phrases in "Casa,"some of which she translates and others of which she leaves

66 *, Judith Ortiz Cof",

untranslated. What is the effect of these Spanish words andphrases? What would be gained or lost if they had been omitted?

3. Use the following quotation as a springboard to write aboutidentity as a theme in "Case-": "lt was on these rockers that mymother, her sisters, and my grandmother sat on these afternoonsof my childhood to tell their stories, teaching each other, and mycousin and me, what it was like to be a woman, more specifically,a Puerto Rican woman."