Before We Were Free

I look up at the portrait of our Benefactor, El Jefe, which hangs above the classroom, his eyes watching over us. [...]

Just staring at El Jefe keeps my tears from flowing. I want to be brave and strong, so that someday if I ever meet the leader of our country, he’ll congratulate me. “So, you are the girl who never cries?” he’ll say, smiling down at me.

“Are they really policemen?” I keep asking Mami. It doesn’t make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn’t we trust them instead of being afraid of them? But all Mami will say is “Shhh!” Meanwhile, we can’t go to school because something might happen to us. “Like what?” I ask. Like what Chucha said about people disappearing? Is that what Mami worries will happen to us? “Didn’t Papi say we should carry on with normal life?”

Now I’m really confused. I thought we liked El Jefe. His picture hangs in the front entryway with the saying below it: IN THIS HOUSE, TRUJILLO RULES. “But if he’s so bad, why does Mrs. Brown hang his picture in our classroom next to George Washington?”

“We have to do that. Everyone has to do. He’s a dictator.”

I’m not really sure what a dictator does. But this is probably not a good time to ask.

“That’s where I’m from,” Sammy says, puffing out his chest, as if someone is going to pin a medal on it. “Greatest country in the world.”

I want to contradict him and say that my own country is the greatest. But I’m not sure anymore after what Lucinda told me about us having a dictator who makes everybody hang his picture on their walls.

Not that I think of Sam as a boyfriend, which I’m not allowed to have anyway. Mami doesn’t approve of my being around any boys who aren’t related to me. But since my cousins moved away, the rules have both tightened and loosened in odd ways. I can’t talk about the SIM’s visit or my cousins’ leaving for New York City, but I can have Sam for a best friend even if he is a boy.

“You know how your parents will sometimes ground your brother or sister? It’s not because they don’t love him or her, now, is it? It’s because they’re concerned and want to make him or her a better person.”

The more I think about it, an embargo sounds an awful lot like the punishment chair at home whenever we misbehave.

“So how has the Dominican Republic misbehaved?” one of the Dominican students wants to know.

But that is a question Mrs. Brown won’t answer.

Sam tells me about this invention in the United States called invisible ink that lets you write stuff down so that no one can read it until the page is soaked in a chemical that makes all the letters reappear.

I wish I had a bottle of that kind of ink for writing in my diary because the truth is I feel kind of sad writing in pencil, always prepared to erase. But Sammy says that ink is probably not sold anywhere in the country, even at Wimpy’s.

“Doris, put the lid on the sugar bowl, por favor. There are so many flies.”

I look around for flies, but there are none I can see. Lorena has just come out from the kitchen with a tray to collect the empty coffee cups. Perhaps she scared them away.

Then, just like that, it dawns on me: my mother is speaking to Mrs. Washburn in code. She’s saying: We are being overheard; be quiet. It’s as if I’ve stepped into a room I’m not supposed to be in—but now that I’m inside, the door has disappeared. I feel the same way as when Lucinda told me how one day I, too, would get my period.

We are free! I want to cry out. But thinking about how the SIM raided our property, how Tío Toni had to disappear, how I have to erase everything in my diary, I know that Oscar is telling the truth. We’re not free—we’re trapped—the Garcías got away just in time! I feel the same panic as when the SIM came storming through our house.

“Suddenly, you have to be a big girl—”

“I am twelve, Mami!” I sigh and roll my eyes. Recently, if anyone talks to me as if I’m a little kid, I get mad. But I also feel sad that I’m not a little kid anymore and that I know as much as I do. I’ve written about these confused feelings in my diary, too, but this is one confusion that doesn’t get any clearer by writing about it.

“One last big favor to ask you, mi amor. No more writing in your diary for the time being.

“That’s so unfair!” Mami gave me the diary for Christmas. Telling me not to write in it is like taking away my only present.

“I know it is, Anita.” Mami wipes away my tears with her thumbs. “For now, we have to be like the little worm in the cocoon of the butterfly. All closed up and secret until the day...” She spreads her arms as if they were wings.

Not even the thought of falling in love with Sam is a consolation anymore. Overnight, all boys (except for Papi and Tío Toni and Mundín) have become totally gross. Here’s an old lech flirting with my sister. Here are Oscar and Sam drinking liquor and throwing up. If only I could be like Joan of Arc, cut off my hair and dress like a boy, just to be on the safe side. Or even better, if only I could go backward to eleven, instead of forward to thirteen!

I lift the sheet and she looks down with a questioning expression. Then a knowing smile spreads on her lips. “Congratulations,” she says, leaning over and kissing me. “My baby sister’s a señorita.”

I don’t feel like a señorita. I feel more like a baby in wet diapers. And I don’t want to be a señorita now that I know what El Jefe does to señoritas.

I admit I feel mean participating in this scheme—but I also understand that our lives are in danger. A tip from Lorena could wipe us out. It’s so unfair to have to live in a country where you have to do stuff you feel bad about in order to save your life. It’s like Papi and Tío Toni planning to assassinate Mr. Smith when they know that murder is wrong. But what if your leader is evil and rapes young girls and kills loads of innocent people and makes your country a place where not even butterflies are safe?

“I think we’d better have the nurse look at you,” she says, taking my hand.

I don’t resist. I stand and walk with her. As we cross the front of the room, Charlie Price makes a circle motion in the air to Sammy, who grins as if he agrees.

I feel like screaming, I AM NOT CRAZY! But instead, I swallow that scream, and suddenly it’s very quiet inside me.

Actually, Mr. Mancini says that people are secretly calling it an ajusticiámiento, which means bringing to justice, the way criminals have to face the consequences of their evil deeds.

I feel so much better thinking that Papi and Tío Toni were doing justice, not really murdering killing hurting someone. But still...just the thought of my own father—

Whenever I feel this way, I start writing in my diary so there’s another voice that I can listen to. A third radio, tuned to my own heart.

So I snuck off to the bathroom with my diary, and soon enough, Mami was calling me, saying it was rude for me to be off by myself, come join them and be sociable, but then Tía Mari told her to let me be, that it’s a good thing that I’m writing, that ever since I started keeping this diary, I’m talking a lot more.

It took her saying it for me to realize it’s true.

The words are coming back, as if by writing them down, I’m fishing them out of forgetfulness, one by one.

Today’s note was just to me. I guess from his hiding place, Mundín caught a glimpse of María de los Santos sitting in the gallery with some young fellow, and he wants to know what I know.

I couldn’t believe that Mundín was thinking about a girlfriend at a time like this!

But then... I’m thinking a lot about Oscar! As Chucha would say, the hunchback laughing at the camel’s hump!

Then one of them shook our hands and said, “Welcome to the United States of America,” and pointed us out of Immigration. And there was my answer to how I would survive in this strange, new world: my family was waiting for us—Mundín and Lucia, my grandparents, Carla, her sisters, and Tía Laura and Tío Carlos and Tía Mimí—all of them calling out, “Anita! Carmen!”

I guess I finally understand what [Chucha] and Papi meant by wanting me to fly. It was like the metaphors Mrs. Brown was always talking about. To be free inside, like an uncaged bird. Then nothing, not even a dictatorship, can take away your liberty.

But now that Papi is dead, it doesn’t seem so scary to die. Sometimes, I think it’s scarier to be alive, especially when you feel that you’ll never be as happy and carefree as when you were a little kid. But I keep remembering Chucha’s dream. She saw us sprouting wings, flying up and away. It has to mean more than our coming to the United States. After all, as Chucha herself would say, what good is it to escape captivity only to be imprisoned in your own misery?

What I see as I look down aren’t angels but butterflies, the arm swings connecting to the leg swings like a pair of wings, our heads poking out in between! I’m sure if Chucha were here, she would say they are a sign. Four butterflies from Papi, reminding me to fly.

I close my eyes, but instead of making a wish, I think about Papi and Tío Toni and their friends who died to make us all free. The emptiness inside starts filling with a strong love and a brave pride.

Okay, Papi, I say, I promise I’ll try.