The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana Page B

my fingers and get ready to punch.
    At the time I looked a lot different from the way I look now. I had fair hair and was light-skinned, and my mom dressed me like I was a little sailor kid. I mean, come on—of course I was going to get into fights. One time I got to school—Escuela Miguel F. Martinez—just after my mom had spanked me for some reason, and I had a lot of anger in me. Sure enough, some guy said something like, “Look at this guy! You can tell his mama dresses him.” Ihad the rock in my hand, and I nailed him hard! Everybody was standing around, waiting to see what he was going to do. I was looking at him like, “I hope you try to do something, because I’m ready to die.” There’s two kinds of desperation: one is born of fear and one is born of anger, and in the one born of anger you just don’t want to take it anymore. I forget his name, and I didn’t realize then that he was one of the street bullies. He never bothered me again.
    The thing is, he was right—my mom was dressing me. I used to tell her, “I’m getting beat up in school; you got me in short blue pants and stuff. This is like saying, ‘Come and get me.’ ”
    “Oh, you look so nice,” she’d say.
    “Nice? You’re dressing me like a choirboy. Mom, you don’t understand.”
    “Shut up!”
    Once my mother wanted me to wear some pants I didn’t like. She got angry and said, “You’re like a crab. You’re trying to straighten everybody else out, but you’re the one who always walks crooked.” That stayed with me. I said to myself, “I’m no crab, and now there’s no way I am going to wear those pants.”
    It took a while to convince my mom, and I talked to my dad to help me out. Slowly they came around. They were so involved in trying to make it to the next day, so concerned with food and getting the washing done—it wasn’t like we sat down to break bread and talk about these things. All of us kids had stuff like that to deal with, and we just had to get through it.
    It was toughest on Tony. He was a teenager and new to town. And he was dark-skinned, but I was fair-skinned and had light hair back then. When we would go out together, they really picked on him a lot. “Hey, Tony, how much do they pay you?” He didn’t know yet to ignore them. He’d say, “Who pays me for what?”
    “Aren’t you babysitting that kid?”
    “No. He’s my brother.”
    “No, he ain’t—look at you. He doesn’t look like he’s part ofyou!” They’d start laughing, and he had to answer them somehow, and the fists would start flying.
    The worst that happened was a few years after that, when Tony got hit in the head with a hammer in some street brawl. He told us that he could have avoided it, but his friend wanted to come home the same way they had gone into town, back on the same street where they had gotten into an argument with some guys. He survived, but that was what it was like. Welcome to Tijuana.
    I’m glad I’m not the oldest in my family. The ground was tested by Tony, Laura, and Irma before I came along, and whatever was going on with Mom and Dad, Toño—that’s what we called him—got the brunt of it. He got the main bruises because my mom and dad didn’t know yet how best to deal with kids. He was like my buffer and second father and has always been in my corner—my first defender and my first hero. I’ll always be so proud of him.
    I love my family, man. They’re all so different, each one of my sisters and brothers. Laura, she was in charge when my mom and Tony weren’t around, since she was the oldest girl. She was like the scout and would be the first to check things out when we moved into a new place—very curious and mischievous. She was an instigator, too, like, “Let’s cut school and go get some jicamas!” Or “Let’s go pull some carrots out of the ground and eat them!” Like I needed convincing. “Sure, okay—sounds good to me.”
    I remember one time Laura decided to get some candy on