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Hairs Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa's hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos' hair is thick and straight. He doesn't need to comb it. Nenny's hair is slippery-slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur. But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, liek little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty becuase she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes the room for you on her side of her bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread. Darius & The Clouds You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunkon sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get anf make the best of it.
Darius who doesn't like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool,said something wise today, though most days he says nothing. Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he's tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows. You all see that cloud, that fat one there? Darius said, See that? Where? That one to the nest one that look like porpcorn. That one there. See that. That's God, Darius said. God? Somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple. Cathy Queen of Cats She says, I am the great great grand cousin of the queen of France. She lives upstairs, over there next door to Joe the baby-grabber. Keep away from him, she says. He is full of danger. Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter. Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street. You don't want to know them. Edna is the lady who owns the building next to you. She used to own a building big as a whale, but her brother sold it. Their mother said no, no, don't ever sell it. I won't. And then she closed her eyes and he sold it. Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but now she does't. Cathy who is the queen of cats has cats and cats and cats. Baby cats, big cats, skinny cats, sick cats. Cats asleep like little dotnuts. Cats on top of the refrigerator. Cats taking a walk on the dinner table. Her house is like cat heaven. You want a friend, she says. Okay, I'll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That's when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad. Cathy's father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great grand cousin on her father's side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in. Four Skinny Trees They are the only ones who understand me. I am yhe only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are there. Four raggedy excuses planted by the city. From our room we can hear them, but Nenny just sleeps and does't appraeaciate these things. Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep. Let one forget his reason for being, they'd all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. Tey teach. When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be. Born Bad Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me. Lucy and Rachel pray too. For ourselves and for each other...because what we did to Aunt Lupe. Her name was Guadalupe and she was pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer's legs. Aunt Lupe of the photographs. But I knew her sick from the disease that would not go, her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone Limp as worms. The yellow pillow, the yellow smell, the bottles and spoons. Her head thrown back like a thirsty lady. My aunt, the swimmer. Hard to imagine her legs once strong, the bones hard and parting water, clean sharp strokes, not bent and wrinkled like a baby, not drowning under the sticky yellow light. Second-floor rear apartment. The naked light bulb. The high ceilings. The light bulb always burning. I don't know who decides who deserves to go bad. There was no evil in her birth. No wicked curse. One day I believe she was swimming, and the next day she was sick. It might have been the day she was holding cousin Totchy and baby Frank. It might have been the moment she pointed to the camera for the kids to look and they wouldn't. Maybe the sky didn't look the day she fell down. Maybe God was busy. It could be true she didn't dive right one day and hurt her spine. Or maybe the story that she fell very hard from a high step stool, like Totchy said, is ture. But I think dieases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. Like my aunt who happened to be walking down the street one day in her Joan Crawford dress, in her funny felt hat with the black feather, cousin Totchy in one hand, baby Frank in the other. Sometimes you get used to the sick and sometimes the sickness, if it is there too long, gets to seem normal. This is how it wasd with her, and maybe this is why we choose her. It was a game, that's all. It was the game we played every afternoon ever since that day one of us invented it. I can't remember who. I think it was me. You had to pick somebody. You had to think of someone everybody knew. Sonmeone you could imitate and everyone else would have to guess who it was. It started out with famous people: Wonder Womoan, the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe... But then somebody thought it'd better if we changed the game a little, if we pretended we were Mr. Benny, or his wife Blanca, or Ruthie, or anybody we knew. I don't know why we picked her. Maybe we were bored that day. Maybe we got tired. We like my aunt. She listened to our stories. She always asked us to come back. Lucy, me, Rachel. I hated to go there alone. The six blocks to the dark apartment, second-floor rear building where sunlight never came, and what did it matter? My aunt was blind by then. She never saw the dirty dishes in the sink. She couldn't see the ceilings dusty with flies, the ugly maroon walls, the bottles and sticky spoons. I can't forget the smell. Like sticky capsules filled with jelly. My aunt, a little oyster, a little piece of meat on an open shell for us to look at. hello, hello. As if she had fallen into a well. I took my library books to her house. I read her stories. I liked the book The Water Babies. She liked it too. I never knew how sick she was until that day I tried to show her one of the pictures in the book, a beautiful color picture of the water babies swimming in the sea. I held the book up to her face. I can't see it, she said, I'm blind. And then I was ashamed.She listened to every book, every poem I read her. One day I read her one of my own. I came very close. I whispered it into the pillow: I want to be like the waves on the sea like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump out of my skin. I'll shake the sky llike a hundred violins. That's nice. That's veery good, she said in her tired voice. You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't what she meant. The day we played the game, we didn't know she was going to die. We pretended with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead. We laughed the way she did. We talked the way she talked, the way blind people talik without moving their head. We imitated the way you had to lift her head a little so she could drink water, she sucked it up slow out of a green tin cup. The water was warm and tasted like metal. Lucy laughed. Rachel too. We took turns being her. We screamed in the weak voice of a parrot for Totchy to come and wash those dishes. It was easy. We didn't know. She had been dying such a long time, we forgot. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was embarrassed it took so many years. The kids who wanted be kids instead of washing dishes and ironing their papa's shirts, and the husband who wanted a wife again. And then she died, My aunt who listened to my poems. And then we began to dream the dreams.
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