A Likely Story: "American History" by Judith Ortiz Cofer

The Puerto Rican tenement known as El Building was one block up from Straight.

At almost any hour of the day, El Building was like a monstrous jukebox, blasting out salsas from open windows as the residents, mostly new immigrants just up from the island, tried to drown out whatever they were currently enduring with loud music.

But the day President Kennedy was shot there was a profound silence in El Building; even the abusive tongues of viragoes, the cursing of the unemployed, and the screeching of small children had been somehow muted.

But the day President Kennedy was shot there was a profound silence in El Building; even the abusive tongues of viragoes, the cursing of the unemployed, and the screeching of small children had been somehow muted.

He would become part of the hierarchy of martyrs they prayed to for favors that only one who had died for a cause would understand.

The other girls picked up the “pork chop” and made it into a refrain: “pork chop, pork chop, did you eat your pork chop?”

The old woman had finally emerged from the house on the arm of a stocky, middle-aged woman, whom I had seen there a few times before, maybe her daughter.

Once school started I looked for him in all my classes, but P.S. 13 was a huge, overpopulated place and it took me days and many discreet questions to discover that Eugene was in honors classes for all his subjects; classes that were not open to me because English was not my first language, though I was a straight A student.

Enamorada was what she really said, that is—like a girl stupidly infatuated.

Since I had turned fourteen and started menstruating my mother had been more vigilant than ever.

She kept talking about virtue, morality, and other subjects that did not interest me in the least.

Every Sunday we drove out to the suburbs of Paterson, Clifton, and Passaic, out to where people mowed grass on Sundays in the summer, and where children made snowmen in the winter from pure white snow, not like the gray slush of Paterson which seemed to fall from the sky in that hue.

I had been to the island once as a little girl, to grandmother’s funeral, and all I remembered was wailing women in black, my mother becoming hysterical and being given a pill that made her sleep two days, and me feeling lost in a crowd of strangers all claiming to be my aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I had started reading Gone with the Wind. I was enthralled by it, with the daring and the passion of the beautiful girl living in a mansion, and with her devoted parents and the slaves who did everything for them.

His mother was very unhappy, Eugene said, in his beautiful voice that rose and fell over words in a strange, lilting way.

That day, he stood in front of two rows of mostly black and Puerto Rican kids, brittle from their efforts to “keep moving” on a November day that was turning bitter cold.

At El Building, the usual little group of unemployed men were not hanging out on the front stoop making it difficult for women to enter the front door.

Though I wanted to feel the right thing about President Kennedy’s death, I could not fight the feeling of elation that stirred in my chest.

My first impulse was to comfort her, she seemed so distraught, but I had to meet Eugene in fifteen minutes.

My first impulse was to comfort her, she seemed so distraught, but I had to meet Eugene in fifteen minutes.

My mother said this in Spanish and in a resigned tone that surprised me, as if she had no intention of stopping me from “heading for humiliation and pain.”

Small, neat, single residences like this one could be found right next to huge, dilapidated apartment buildings like El Building.

She looked intently at me for a couple of heartbeats, then said as if to herself, “I don’t know how you people do it.”

She seemed very angry, and I finally snapped out of my trance.

My mother was in someone else’s kitchen, seeking the solace she needed.