Fruits of the Same Tree

Prologue: Parts of a Tree

Before I was born, my mother and father took a boat and sailed from San Juan, Puerto Rico to the lower east side of Manhattan. I always thought it was funny that they traveled thousands of miles to go from one tiny island to another. But of course it wasn’t just a trip to a different place; it was a journey to a different culture.

My parents came from a small town nestled among the vast mountain ranges and deep lakes of central Puerto Rico. It was a place of creeping, misty shadows that swallowed the tall peaks during the night. The morning sun always gave them back though, the steep, slippery roads snaking their way to the exposed green crowns.

Most of my father’s family still lived in Adjuntas. It was a tiny village consisting of a church, the courthouse and a few grand houses surrounding a small, unpretentious plaza. My grandparents had settled high in the mountains hidden amongst the deep and silent swimming holes and screeching macaws. Their wooden house grew with the family, warty and crooked, sprouting bedrooms off the kitchen and the back porch. It sat upon a mound growing out of the bottom of three giant mountains surrounded by narrow streams of cold, rushing water. I loved to walk upstream, my toes numbly gripping the loose stones, to the gap in the boulders where the water magically bubbled out. Papi said the little spout was fed from the rain that fell into the hole at the top of the mountain and dribbled down for us to drink. One of my favorite things to do was to catch the clear water in my cupped hands; I imagined I held only frigid air. But still I’d hurry to take a big slurp before the water seeped between my fingers.

We visited my grandparents every summer. Papi flew down with us but after a few days went back to New York. He had to work at the metal factory where they made trophies. Late in the summer, when the drawn out days broiled hot even in the high altitude, Papi would come back to get us and we departed as we had come, together. While he was gone, we lived with my grandparents on the small farm set upon the mound between the mountains.

My grandfather was a short, bandy-legged cowboy. He wore a battered straw hat whenever he walked the mountain paths. He’d wake up earlier than the sun and guide the cattle to the grassy fields and every afternoon he’d set out again to bring them home. Sometimes, he would take the older boys with him, to shepherd the bulls down to the corral. He would never take the girls though, which I thought was very unfair. But Papi explained that Abuelo was old country, he thought girls were best left at home. I set out one summer to prove him wrong.

It was still early in our visit, our skins pale and our tongues still hungry for the deli foods from the lower East side and the glorious weather and lush countryside had yet to make its annual transformation. I still felt the hard sidewalk under my feet and the ghostly, brush of strangers on the street. I walked too fast for my cousins and spoke too familiarly for my aged aunts. I schemed. That early in the summer, I was still a New Yorker. So I decided to shadow Abuelo and the boys, as furtive as a wild hare springing silently from bush to bush, until finally I would triumphantly reveal myself and graciously receive compliments on my sneakiness. I made my move one morning just as the dawn was peeking over the easternmost mountain.

My cousin Alvaro caught me hiding behind a tree even before the house was out of sight. He went straight to Abuelo. I ran down the path, Abuelo’s scolding words ringing in my ear as I slipped back into the quiet house. I spent the day planning what I would do differently.

The next day, I started out before Abuelo and the boys, and had almost made it to the point where it was too far to send me back alone when Angel caught me crouching behind a boulder. He pushed me down so hard, I thought I would roll down the hill all the way to the house. As I slumped back to the farm, kicking rocks and tufts of grass, I decided that I liked Abuela more than Abuelo. And the bulls were mean anyway.

My grandmother’s brown hands were as wide and wrinkled as a dried palm leaf. But pliant, like the long vines that can be twisted and bent. Those vines can never be broken either; they have to be cut. I was thinking that when I saw Abuela wring a chicken’s neck. She had tucked the chicken under one arm and with a flick of her right wrist, suddenly had a chicken head in her knobby fingers. It was a very neat job. Mami said it was easy to kill a chicken when you had ten children in the house. Times were difficult back then. No doctors, no money. She did everything she could to feed everyone. That’s why we decided to move to Nueva York. For a better life.

Yes, that’s true, Papi said sadly, but it was hard leaving the family.

But you got us, Papi! I would remind him.

Yes, I have you, querida. All of you.

Abuela would gather us around her in the evening hours, after we had eaten a plate of rice and beans for dinner. It was that time in the evening when the little frogs called coquis would start to chirp. Abuela would tell us stories, sometimes about real people and sometimes about the spirits that walked the mountains. Sometimes, she talked in riddles that I couldn’t understand until later, just as I was falling asleep. By morning, it would make sense, as though she had told me the story in my sleep.

One of those evenings as we sat around her, chicks around a hen, Abuela told us that our family was like the mango tree, the very biggest one that stood on top of the mountain. We were the parts of the tree, all of us she said, and together we could withstand the dry season and the violent storms of summer.

How are we parts of a tree, Abuela? I asked her.

Abuela drew in the dirt between her feet, using a stick as a pencil. Abuelo and I form the trunk that holds the rest of the tree up. Our children are the branches - she drew nine squiggly arms reaching up to the sky - and each of you is the fruit that springs from the branches. You will grow sweet and bountiful on the strong branches and you will one day feed the world. I thought about that and puzzled over the number of branches, wondering why she drew only nine instead of ten.

And what part is Tio Luis?, I asked about Abuela’s youngest son. He didn’t have a wife or children, so maybe he wasn’t a branch yet. Maybe he was a twig. But I was wrong.

Luis is a leaf. He floats above the ground looking down at life.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t have a job; all that floating around, I added.

That is so, mi hija. Who can grow a family so far from the tree?

But Abuela, I said slightly alarmed, we live far from the tree too, thinking that while I lived in New York, most of my family still lived in Puerto Rico.

Yes, but you will scatter your seeds in the same forest.

And that was true, because our cousin Teresa, who had been born in New York like me, had married a boy from Adjuntas. They had already grown a baby mango. Her name was Luz.

We children ran off then, a dozen of us, cousins and brothers and sisters. We were the fruits of the same tree, growing from different branches. I looked at my grandmother one more time before I ran off. She was squatted over an open fire, plucking a freshly killed chicken. She pulled quickly at the tough skin, coming up with a handful of feathers. This is how I remember her always; brown hands working, an unlit stub of a cigar sticking out of her mouth chewing on it like a piece of leather. It is a memory set in my mind forever, even long after we had flown back to my other island home thousands of miles away, to New York City.