knit. She closed her eyes and smiled out of her diamond face while spitting plastered hair out of her mouth.
I is the luckiest girl in the world right now, she thought. It might have people with more money and thing. But right now, as I feeling this water on me and hear them birds how they make sweet sounds, it ain’t have nobody with more luck than me.
She returned downstream to bathe. With a scrap of cloth, Estrella creamed her body in a slop of suds. The whiteness of the soap against her dark complexion made it seem as if she were about to hide herself in snow.
Her waist was tightly tapered, and her breasts were little banks of mud with twigs. She had no cleavage, and standing up her bosom looked the same as when she lay down; but her hips were matriarchal and her buttocks had deep clefts, and when she sank into the stream to rinse, emerging from the slick of suds to walk toward the bank, she was the vision of a goddess coming through the clouds.
On the bank, she wrung her hair as if it were a towel and lay down on her stomach in the grass beside her dress. With her face against her folded arms she listened to the sloshing water and, above her head, the flap of lifting wings. And for the first time in her life, she experienced what it meant to have the privacy in which to read.
From her basket, which was placed beside her head, she took her only toy, a wooden doll with missing arms that she’d never named, and read the story of another girl who’d led an awful life. Her reading voice was mumbled and self-conscious, and she didn’t fully understand what punctuation meant, as such she ran through periods and rear-ended sentence openings like a granny at the wheel.
When she read, she overlaid her life against the tale of Cinderella and felt a smoky joy, a kind of bluesy satisfaction, which in Sancoche was called memweh , for which there is no good translation. In English, the closest feeling is nostalgia. But this is not enough. Memweh is nostalgia for a person or a thing that might have existed in another life, a vital kind of sadness experienced as a grope, like swimming upward from deep water into light and breaking through the surface only to be covered by a wave, then sinking with a glimpse of something beautiful that propels you to grope upward once again, a lament for the amnesia of the middle passage, a search for a suspected loss that only negritos fully understand.
How I never meet nobody like a prince? Estrella thought, caught up in the tidal cycle of memweh . I wonder if it have men like that in truth. It would shock them if a man like that come sweep me off my feet, I tell you. Old Tuck and my grandmother would lose their mind. That would shame them, boy. I tell you. They think I ain’t going come to nothing in this life. But watch me. When I get to town and get my shoes and get a job and work and save my money and put myself together with my shoes that match my bag and my bag that match my frock, I going meet a man who going make me feel like that white lady at La Sala that day. Me and my husband, all we going do all day is write each other notes. Even when I see him face-to-face, I going slip one in his pocket so he can read it later. For no reason. Just for so.
But in nearly fifteen years on earth, she’d never seen a man who looked like her do anything that anyone considered princely, had never seen a woman of her color being treated in a way that made her think of queens.
She’d seen negritos giving women what Carlitos knew as “talks,” frilly conversation on a sheet of innuendo, seen fellows making women tremble with their bluff. But she’d never heard a loving word from a negrito if it wasn’t in a song, or witnessed a negrito read a book, or heard about negritos who would do these things. Not even in a rumor or a tale.
When she thought of all of this, Estrella gave herself an explanation—like fashion, all things go in and out of style, and maybe, long ago, before her time, negritos
I is the luckiest girl in the world right now, she thought. It might have people with more money and thing. But right now, as I feeling this water on me and hear them birds how they make sweet sounds, it ain’t have nobody with more luck than me.
She returned downstream to bathe. With a scrap of cloth, Estrella creamed her body in a slop of suds. The whiteness of the soap against her dark complexion made it seem as if she were about to hide herself in snow.
Her waist was tightly tapered, and her breasts were little banks of mud with twigs. She had no cleavage, and standing up her bosom looked the same as when she lay down; but her hips were matriarchal and her buttocks had deep clefts, and when she sank into the stream to rinse, emerging from the slick of suds to walk toward the bank, she was the vision of a goddess coming through the clouds.
On the bank, she wrung her hair as if it were a towel and lay down on her stomach in the grass beside her dress. With her face against her folded arms she listened to the sloshing water and, above her head, the flap of lifting wings. And for the first time in her life, she experienced what it meant to have the privacy in which to read.
From her basket, which was placed beside her head, she took her only toy, a wooden doll with missing arms that she’d never named, and read the story of another girl who’d led an awful life. Her reading voice was mumbled and self-conscious, and she didn’t fully understand what punctuation meant, as such she ran through periods and rear-ended sentence openings like a granny at the wheel.
When she read, she overlaid her life against the tale of Cinderella and felt a smoky joy, a kind of bluesy satisfaction, which in Sancoche was called memweh , for which there is no good translation. In English, the closest feeling is nostalgia. But this is not enough. Memweh is nostalgia for a person or a thing that might have existed in another life, a vital kind of sadness experienced as a grope, like swimming upward from deep water into light and breaking through the surface only to be covered by a wave, then sinking with a glimpse of something beautiful that propels you to grope upward once again, a lament for the amnesia of the middle passage, a search for a suspected loss that only negritos fully understand.
How I never meet nobody like a prince? Estrella thought, caught up in the tidal cycle of memweh . I wonder if it have men like that in truth. It would shock them if a man like that come sweep me off my feet, I tell you. Old Tuck and my grandmother would lose their mind. That would shame them, boy. I tell you. They think I ain’t going come to nothing in this life. But watch me. When I get to town and get my shoes and get a job and work and save my money and put myself together with my shoes that match my bag and my bag that match my frock, I going meet a man who going make me feel like that white lady at La Sala that day. Me and my husband, all we going do all day is write each other notes. Even when I see him face-to-face, I going slip one in his pocket so he can read it later. For no reason. Just for so.
But in nearly fifteen years on earth, she’d never seen a man who looked like her do anything that anyone considered princely, had never seen a woman of her color being treated in a way that made her think of queens.
She’d seen negritos giving women what Carlitos knew as “talks,” frilly conversation on a sheet of innuendo, seen fellows making women tremble with their bluff. But she’d never heard a loving word from a negrito if it wasn’t in a song, or witnessed a negrito read a book, or heard about negritos who would do these things. Not even in a rumor or a tale.
When she thought of all of this, Estrella gave herself an explanation—like fashion, all things go in and out of style, and maybe, long ago, before her time, negritos
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