|
Their mother, my grandmother, was born in Oriente province in 1902.
Orphaned as a child, she began to sew professionally at thirteen, helped
raise her younger siblings, and was forced to marry before the age of twenty.
Supporting her five children as a seamstress and withstanding frequent abuse
from her husband, she managed to finish high school at forty. When she saw
that her second daughter, my mother, was strong enough to fend for herself,
she encouraged her to leave their town and never come back. My mother, then
seventeen, took her first train ride to Havana, began to work and study,
and in one year brought her mother and siblings to the capital. Eleven years
later my mother boarded her first plane and went to the United States with
twenty five dollars and a suitcase of clothing my grandmother made for her.
Nine years after that, she sent for my grandmother. In all my childhood
I never heard her express regret at having left. Yet just after her eightieth
birthday, suffering from loss of hearing and memory, she boarded a plane,
flew to Barcelona to meet distant cousins, checked into a hotel, lay down,
and died in the night. |
|