The Wild Book by Margarita Engle

Author's Note
    The Wild Book
is fiction inspired by stories my maternal grandmother told me about her child hood. I have added numerous imaginary aspects, and certain events have been altered or condensed in time. For instance, baby Rubén was not born until 1914.
    Josefa de la Caridad Uría Peña was known to all who loved her as Fefa. Born in 1901, she grew up on a farm during the chaos following Cuba's wars for independence from Spain and the subsequent U.S. occupation of the island. It was a time of lawlessness, when bandits terrorized the countryside, kidnapping children unless their families agreed to deliver ransom money in advance. It was also a time when poetry was a treasured aspect of daily life. The kidnapperpoet who threatened the Uría family was their trusted farm manager. Well past the age of one hundred, my grandmother still remembered the verse he wrote "in her honor":
     
Al verla tan jovencita

y de tanta educación

le busco la proporción

que busco entre las demás

y en este jardin será

una rosa de Borbón.
     
Seeing her so young
and so accomplished,
I seek a measure
of her place among others,
and in this garden she will be
a rose of Borbón.
     
    My grandmother always chuckled when she told the story of her father's reaction to the scoundrel's threat. My great-grandfather said he had too many children to pay a ransom for all, and since he believed in equality, he refused to choose favorites. Rather than pay for some, he paid for none. Fortunately, Fausto was caught and went to prison before any of the children were actually kidnapped.

    Fefa (upper right) at a picnic with her family in 1914.
     
    Word-blindness
was a medical term used in the early twentieth century for what we now call dyslexia, a range of conditions now known to be completely unrelated to any form of blindness. With patience, courage, and the help of reading specialists, dyslexic children learn to read and write beautifully. Many are exceptionally brilliant people who go on to accomplish great things. Throughout her remarkably long life, Fefa always wrote letters to her loved ones. She wrote slowly and carefully. She had the most elegant handwriting I have ever seen.

Acknowledgments
    I thank God for blank pages.
    I am profoundly grateful to my
abuelita
for telling me stories about her childhood, and to my daughter, Nicole, for asking me to give her greatgrandmother's life a home on blank pages. I am thankful to my mother for filling in factual details and then allowing me to change them.
    For the encouragement of companionship, special thanks to Curtis, Victor, Kristan, Jake, Nicole, and Amish.
    Gracias a los primos
for leading the way up the steep stairs of La Torre Manaca-Iznaga.
    For help with my humbling effort to understand even a tiny fragment of the complexity of reading disorders, I am thankful to Jossie O'Neill, the International Dyslexia Association, the Dyslexia Foundation, and LD Online. Any errors in my portrayal of reading disorders are mine, not theirs.
    For wonderful teamwork, I am deeply grateful to my brilliant editor, Reka Simonsen, and to everyone else at Harcourt, especially Betsy Groban, Jeannette Larson, Lisa DiSarro, Adah Nuchi, and Kerry Martin.

PHOTO © MARSHALL W JOHNSON
     
    M ARGARITA E NGLE is a Cuban American poet and novelist whose work has been published in many countries. Her books include
The Surrender Tree,
a Newbery Honor book and winner of the Pura Belpré Award, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, the Américas Award, and the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award;
The Poet Slave of Cuba,
win- ner of the Pura Belpré Award and the Américas Award;
Tropical Secrets; The Firefly Letters;
and
Hurricane Dancers.
She lives with her husband in Northern California.