48300

Written by Priscilla Wong

Under the hard Mexican sun, the mariachi swaggered into town like old friends returning from war, their guitars slung low and their silver buttons winking. Here I am again, full circle, the way a desperate man finds himself back at his mother's doorstep. There's something in the Indian blood here that speaks to my bones - these people who've known the earth longer than any of us. The celebrations keep their distance from my quiet corner, just close enough that I can taste the life in them without drowning. And now that warmth I spent years running from, that I walled up behind concrete and steel and silence, it finds its way through the cracks like water in drought season, seeping in against all my careful plans, against everything I built to keep it out. It comes like a thief in the night, but maybe it's claiming back what was always its own.

The cheap carnival sounds drift across the lot like lost spirits, a kind of sorrow in their tin-can echoes, but then comes that old Bigfoot melody, full of hope and remembering, the way a man recalls his first taste of summer peaches. It shoulders its way through the sadness like a bear through brambles. And always there's that Spanish talk rolling around, musical as creek water, making a man feel welcome even when he can't make out a word of it - the way travelers have greeted each other since the first dusty roads were laid down, since the first wanderer found himself far from home with nothing but strange voices for company.

What could the indigenous possibly do for me? I am a germaphobe.

The brown-skinned people carry something I never learned growing up, something that spills out of them like water from a desert spring. Their tales and rememberings come wrapped in corn husks and guitar strings, each generation passing down hope like a delicate flame. They know things my kind of folk forgot - how the universe tends its garden whether we believe in it or not, how the sun climbs up and down the sky's ladder same as it did when the first people walked here, same as it will when the last ones turn to dust. And there's something in their laughter that makes my own hurts seem smaller, the way distance shrinks a mountain to a stone. They've known pain too, God knows, but they wear it different - like an old shirt that's been washed so many times it's gone soft, comfortable against the skin.

The weight of it struck me then, how my own suffering had found its mirror in Tom's quiet pain.

All these years I'd been hunting for something - that distant echo of a man's soul - and it turned out Betty had set me on that path long ago. Betty, dark and brilliant as a polished stone, her mind reaching further than any of us were ready to follow. But I was blind then, blind as a newborn pup, so caught up in my own skin that I couldn't see past it. Even when my own heart chose a colored girl, I looked right through Tom like he was made of smoke. Tom, whose father knew the taste of chains, whose blood remembered slavery's lash.

The shame of it sits heavy now. While I was playing at love, Tom stood patient as winter, waiting for Mara to find her way to him. I'd never seen anything like it - a proud black man laying his heart bare for a white woman to trample or treasure. I was too young, too foolish to understand what I was witnessing: how rarely the great rivers of different bloods merge, how precious the moment when old hatreds bow their heads to marriage. And from this impossible joining came their colored girl, carrying wisdom in her small hands like water from a deep well I never knew existed.

By and by, I thought to myself, how might it be possible to make more people like his blessed girl. People who do not know racism, only kindness, wholesomeness.

No more racism. Gone. Honestly, as crazy as Martin Luther King himself.

Like Tom before me, I stand with my heart in my hands, wondering at the cruel joke of it all. Here I am, yellow as sunrise, falling for a woman white as Sunday linen, and suddenly I understand Tom's long waiting. The old doubts come crawling in like hungry rats - am I just some worthless colored face?

Just another Chinese boy who forgot his place?

Betty and Tom, those dark pioneers, they planted these seeds of possibility, never knowing they'd bloom in my garden. And what right have I, son of peasants and rice paddies, to love a woman whose ancestors owned the earth? My hands are rough from generations of toil, my tongue still stumbles on her language. But love, that old trickster, doesn't care for borders or bloodlines. So I hold out my heart like a paper lantern in the dark, hoping its weak light might be enough to guide her home.