Legend has it that three panthers “with slow and sullen steps” once roamed
the countryside where I grew up. Landscaped by sweeping farmlands and
rolling hills stippled with cow pastures, it’s a place where many townsfolk
trace their agricultural roots back to settlement days. Tempest winds made
my street waft with the odor of chicken shit from a nearby poultry farm.
Patches of unbroken forests still exist and are enjoyed by backpackers.
Last year, close to my childhood home, two hikers found human remains
inside a boot. Skeletal scraps turned the area into a crime scene. A
Western style Barry Dolan jacket from the 70s, a Wrangler corduroy or jeans
brass button and some teeth were exhumed. The body had been buried 15 to 30
years ago. As a girl I ran to those backwoods for safety. After fireworks,
high school couples went there to kiss or drink beer purchased with fake
IDs. Sometimes boys disregarded NO and tugged down my classmates’
zippers. Other times, girls were the aggressors with clueless, nervous lads
more familiar with a cow’s teat than a budding breast.
For several years my parents lived in a Quonset hut on wheels secured in
place with cinderblocks. Inexpensive land lured them there to the bedroom
community of Buffalo that eased Dad’s work commute. We were the Irish
family, the outsiders not considered proper townies because we didn’t have
cousins living down the street or an uncle who owned the local grocery
store or gas station. Dad carried a castoff briefcase and was clueless
about farm tools. His inexpensive suits stood out in contrast to the faded,
vegetable-stained, time-softened dungaree overalls worn by locals.
Every day except Sunday, before the sky sprung into shuffling shades of
heirloom tomatoes, Pa, a farmer down the street from our house, would start
his tractor. Whether you drove, biked or walked past Pa, he’d give a big hello-howdy with his hand unfurled like an American flag on a
windy Memorial Day. Over the sputtering rhythmic roar of his trusted John
Deere steed, he’d thunder a chipper Good day. Without fail, Dad
was Good day’d as he drove by in our rust-speckled, two-door
family style Chevrolet to the city for work.
Pa worked his land and supervised his field workers. Asparagus and
strawberries were the first of the row crops to be picked and placed into
quart or bushel baskets mostly by men who wore bandannas tied around their
heads, or knotted around their necks.
Sometimes, as I walked past the fields on my way to play in the cemetery,
pickers would look at me with stolen glances as though someone had cautioned them good. Their expressions were familiar to me. I’d
learned to do something similar whenever my parents were in rampage and I
hoped to disappear, vanish into thin air.
I was four during the 1966 Puerto Rican farm worker uprising when migrant
workers organized to protest police brutality and discrimination. Farmers
were accused of ignoring poor housing and difficult labor conditions. As a
little girl, Mom told me that the dilapidated wood shacks bordering cow
pastures I pointed whhat-that at were shanty dwellings
for farm laborers. Most of those buildings had no indoor plumbing and were
too small to house much more than mattresses on bare floors.
Dairy cows, with nicknames like Buttercup and Daisy, received greater
consideration and care. The herd was milked at 5am inside sterilized barns
hitched to freshly whitewashed grain-filled silos, then taken outdoors to
drink clean water and feed from galvanized steel troughs. Clumsy,
cloven-hooved, stout rectangular bodies, with four legs and tufted tails
glazed in manure, grazed in sun-warmed pastures wet with morning dew. Shade
trees and lean-to sheds shielded the black and white prized Holsteins from
the heat.
*
Dad’s first job was a door-to-door salesman for Encyclopedia Britannica.
His briefcase had a spring clasp that I toyed with because the sound was
intriguing and made me feel clever. Similar to many generational farmers,
he didn’t have a college education. But that didn’t stop him from turning a
cardboard shoebox into an enterprising Rolodex that built a business. He
was a middleman distributer who peddled machinist parts to automotive
plants throughout Western New York.
The early years of Dad’s business were lean. We survived on food stamps,
shopped at Ames Discount Store, and made do with what we had. But I never
felt poor since everyone around us was also scraping by. Over the years
though, Dad’s hard work earned him enough money to buyout another company,
continue to grow and improve our lifestyle. Our lengthy gravel driveway was
blacktopped and configured to park four cars at the main entry point to
Dad’s office. Dad bought Mom a Continental Mark VII and drove a Cadillac.
Once he purchased a red El Dorado, not realizing it looked like a
pimpmobile. Mom thought it was too flashy and kids teased me about it at
school.
Townsfolk from our one-stoplight village didn’t stifle their laughter
during Dad’s powder blue and shamrock green polyester leisure suit phase.
His can’t miss garb contrasted with the agrarian attire of locals
and stirred up snickers. Our outsider status also made it a bad idea for
Dad to run for town supervisor. The half page ad he took in the PennySaver
to announce his campaign included a black and white family photo. Whenever
I look at that snapshot it declares our household as you betcha off-kilter.
Dad’s success had been chronicled in our town’s historical record and
demarked with genuine pride. His business, a licensed Home Care Agency sold
during my parents’ contentious divorce, had expanded to other cities in New
York and to Cleveland, Ohio. This fact was dug up while researching the
native plants from the countryside of my youth, in a town that was equal
parts tumbleweed-fictitious Mayberry-like and one capable of hostility and
inequality.
A link I clicked mentions the uprising by Puerto Rican farm laborers. The
read contrasts the fable of wandering panthers with English Quakers, who
prior to the war of 1812, settled our oft snow-covered rural town, a region
250 as-the-crow-flies miles west of Albany, New York. Germans and Italians
from Buffalo came to work on the farms and in the canning factories built
near a railroad line. The community saw itself as wholesome and welcoming.
It was and it wasn’t.
Our town had benefitted from the work of Puerto Rican farm laborers, but
they were weeded out of the archives. On the page they vanished, replaced
by a homespun remark about the hamlet’s former prominence in the production
of butter and cheese. Public record yanked their roots out of existence.
This didn’t sit right with me. Dad’s inclusion and the denial and erasure
of Puerto Rican workers from the town’s history felt false. It wasn’t
unlike the violence that was often overlooked in the house where I grew up.
On any given night, my parents could get into a heated row. Police would
arrive and provide stopgap relief by telling Dad: Jack, why don’t you go for a drive. It wasn’t a question, but an
official warning. Behind his back we frequently called him Jackass. I’d
watched enough Adam-12 on television to know that if things got out of
hand, guns could be drawn. Dad drove off.
Now and then, a second patrol car would idle in our driveway with blue
flashers circling and lighting up our front yard. Walkie-talkies, clipped
to the officers’ belts or shoulder straps, crackled with jumbled words that
were eerily cartoon sounding. Alpha and bravo were the
easiest words to discern and remember besides on Shirley Road … repeat, on Shirley Road.
Mom tended to be the one racing to open the door, hoping the officers would
enter and see shattered glass on the floor or furniture in disarray. One
time Dad punched a hole in the hollow closet door by the entryway and she
stood by it with a content Vanna White, Wheel of Fortune hostess expression
on her face. Come in, she insisted, as though they were insurance
adjusters assessing the damage for her claim. Sometimes, as she picked up
glass shards, she’d ask if they wanted coffee. Her bizarre behavior
confused me until I was older, say 8, and accepted, not denied, that she
had been baiting Dad and poisoning my mind against him for years with Your father bedtime soliloquys. Delineating his manhood
deficiencies, she spoke of the dresses he wore, his affairs with
secretaries and his odd friendships with men. Left out of her tales was how
she helped Dad into his gown and zipped him up. Nevertheless, during
altercations I screamed don’t, stop you’re hurting her and dialed 911.
If Dad answered the door, that meant he hit her and we were all frightened.
A slap was meant to bring her to her senses, but then he’d get carried
away. During a troublesome encounter, he sometimes shoved her. It was a
warning for her to stop pursuing whatever they had started brawling about. Enough Tish. Her name was Margaret but everyone called her Tish.
Why couldn’t she just shut up?
*
Dandelions and seed heads spackled our yard. Neighbors mowed their lawns
into flat surfaces raked free of leaves and removed pervasive weeds using
herbicides. Our yard languished long and lazy with an upright fringe that
swaggered and swayed—a mishmash of Kentucky bluegrass, ryegrass and fescue
on full display, garnished with splotches of dandelions, daisies, prickly
lettuce, purple thistle, white clover and scattered clumps of wild garlic
that wandering deer liked to munch.
Held in my hand, a dandelion turned to seed head and fastened to summer’s
soft, slumbered scent. The ray-bonnet crown was no longer the yellow of a
rubber ducky afloat in lukewarm sudsy water. The weed had journeyed from a
sun warrior shade, the circumference of a quarter, into a white puffball
abstraction—a geometric fairy token. Science used terms: taproot,
cotyledon, floret, feathery filament (pappus) and seed head—adding actions:
emerging, pushing up and dispersing. Puffball. Monks-head. Irish daisy. FFF – FFF – FFF—releasing dreams into the air.
Dandelions are the only flowers that represent three celestial bodies: sun,
moon and stars. Sun at their blooming, moon when they are seed heads, and
stars when they disperse skyward. Thought of as pesky weeds that take over
lawns, gardens, meadows and soccer fields, they are the bane of golf
courses. Sink a spade into the ground to dig the basal rosettes of
dandelions or pull up a clump with bare hands and find roots that resemble
parsnips. Try to eradicate the plant and it will return, springing from its
grave to rise upward and face the sun.
*
On July 3rd, 1966 there was an altercation in our friendly town between a Puerto Rican named Carlos and the chief of
police. Prior to the scuffle, Pablo, another Puerto Rican, had been stopped
and beaten for a traffic violation. Carlos went to the courthouse to bail
him out but was denied any information. As he was leaving, he mumbled
something under his breath. The judge then instructed the police chief to
stop him. Carlos was told to freeze, but he kept going. The chief ran after
him and clocked him in the head with his gun. José tried to step in but he
would later testify that another white man with a gun told him: Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.
Rumors circulated that migrant workers were planning to retaliate. They had
gathered bricks and bottles of gasoline as well as bats and stones to stage
a violent riot. Jorge Colón, a migration division officer from Rochester,
drove over to meet with town officials and the police force of three men
and two additional summertime officers. Colón arrived at Mike’s Rustic Bar
on Main Street, an Italian family tavern opened in the late 1930’s. It was
one of the few establishments that served Puerto Ricans in the area. He
wanted to evaluate the situation and seek a peaceful resolution. A Puerto
Rican nicknamed “Superman” boasted that, in addition to bricks, 20 guns and
pistols had been stockpiled. Others at the pub discussed the most effective
way to burn town buildings and police cars by using Molotov cocktails, the
poor man’s grenade.
As a mediator, Colón listened to their grievances: discrimination, poor
living and working conditions, denied medical care and education, enforced
curfew, a ban against starting a business and police brutality. The mayor
mentioned it was the first time he had heard about the farm labor working
conditions and conflicts. In an interview with a New York Times
reporter he stated:
They walk by here on the road and I wave at them and they laugh and
smile. One time I was going to throw away an old bed – it was my
mother’s I guess – and I offered it to them. You should have seen them,
carrying it down the road on their heads. Real happy, you know!
His wife added:
The place is a paradise compared to what they’re used to living in … Of
course you or I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I believe they
like it fine
.
Fine
—meaning a place where shanty shelters were clustered together. The
structures were full of holes and lacked running water. At another
encampment, a barn had been converted into barracks and cow dung wafted
heavy in the air. The New York State Department of Health found violations
in 23 of the 33 camps. They were crowded, dirty and without bathrooms,
potable water, or mattresses. Some existed with fire hazards and open
sewage. None of this information is found on the town’s historical webpage.
The town’s truncated history nullifies the fourth wave of immigrants.
The uprising started the day before July 4th, Independence Day.
Vague memories of town fireworks still linger with me. Exploding contours
of chrysanthemums and fading glittery trails of swishing horse and flapping
fish tails diffused high in the air. Twinkling shooting stars, spinning
fiery pinwheels and stray sparks of fiber optic balls radiated scraggy,
squiggling streams of colorful blazing light, pummeling and punishing dark
skies. The crackling cacophony made my heart pound—the same hammering
wallop I felt the time I saw Dad straddle Mom’s body on our couch, his
necktie wrapped around her throat as she gasped for breath.
Police addressed domestic violence in our home as though it was a private
negotiation between consenting adults. It often took a neighbor desiring a
good night’s sleep to call in a dispute that nudged an officer to issue the
edict: Jack why don’t you go for a drive. If it was the sheriff
that came calling, he favored an austere, though muscled, Dr. Phil tactic
that suggested my parents cool off and give it a rest.
Dad registered the reality not by those words, but by eying the sheriff’s
thumb drum-tapping the firearm resting pretty in its black leather holster.
Sometimes officers who responded to a “spousal squabble” at our house
arrived too late and we weren’t spared the menacing kitchen scuffles
between our parents where knives and forks became weapons.
For years, in our household, an assembly line of authorities reacted mostly
like embarrassed babysitters giving timeouts to volatile adults. Domestic
violence was sidestepped and treated with near slapstick comedy
acceptance—think Ralph Kramden’s: One of these days Alice—Pow! Right in the Kisser!
Officers strived to avoid involvement and they didn’t think about child
endangerment. With their tacit policy of a blind eye to a black eye, they
seemed eager for their shifts to end so they could grab a beer in town.
Bemoaned into toy-like walkie-talkies, I’d overhear: row — just another one of Jack’s and Tish’s rows, everything’s fine.
Of course you or I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I believe they
like it fine
.
*
The police chief and the other man involved in the July 3rd
scuffle were charged with second-degree assault, and a niece of the village
clerk reported that the police chief beats up his wife occasionally. Regardless, a judge from a
neighboring town found both men innocent. He also asked the District
Attorney to summon a grand jury to determine if anyone should be charged
for inciting a riot. Carlos and José are never mentioned again.
A follow up investigation, relying on the statements of storeowners,
concluded that there were no discriminating practices, farmworkers were at
fault due to their failure to communicate, and the strife was sparked by a
lack of recreational facilities.
Eventually advances in harvesting equipment whittled away picking jobs for
crops like potatoes and corn. Pickers were left with strawberry and grape
fields and stacking bales of hay in barn lofts. To survive, many took
graveyard shifts at a canning factory in a neighboring town while others
left for employment at Bethlehem Steel or the New York Central Railroad.
Some Puerto Ricans stayed and found solace in drinking. Income often came
from welfare and food stamps. Drunkenness, disorderly conduct and knife
fights became common, especially among those that had relocated to rundown
apartments on Sherman Avenue just down the street from the beer tap. Anyone
from that area of row-like housing was considered Puerto Rican.
I had become friends with a girl that lived on Sherman Avenue and whose
last name was Sherman. Though her surname suggested Anglo-Saxon ancestry,
her skin, hazel eyes and home address left her teased and with few friends.
I didn’t tell my parents that she lived there. They used to say that they
were open-minded, but I was concerned that they would have discouraged the
friendship. One day my mom agreed to a sleepover at my friend’s place. I
packed a t-shirt to sleep in and clean underwear. En route, when I told her
where to drop me off, she pulled to the soft shoulder of the road and
asked: How well do you know her?
As I climbed the rickety stairs to my friend’s apartment, neighbors opened
their doors to peek at me, staring in a way that let me know I didn’t
belong there. Instead of closing their doors, they kept them opened a
crack. I knew I was being defiant. Some people in our town called it
“crossing over the tracks.” I tried not to show I was scared even though
they too were fearful. It took only one white person to cause an avalanche
of trouble for them, and they didn’t want that. They just wanted what
everyone else had.
*
During the 1966 Puerto Rican farm worker uprising I was four. And thirteen
when Sheriff’s Deputy William R. Dils responded to a burglary-larceny
investigation on Sherman Avenue. A 19-year veteran of the force, beloved
and respected by everyone, Dils was set to retire at the end of the year.
On November 5th, 1977, Sheriff Dils, 52, was fatally shot in the
abdomen through a closed bedroom door by a migrant worker who escaped by
jumping out of a window. A massive manhunt was set in motion with
bloodhounds, helicopters, and door-to-door searches. Barns and haylofts
were combed through to hunt down the Puerto Rican assailant. Our town went
on lockdown. I was startled and frightened by the mammoth response.
For years I understood that the shooting of a cop would launch a cavalry of
law enforcement. But I never pieced it together with our town’s intolerant
history—the mentality of them versus us—until now. Yes, there was a killer
on the loose, one rumored to have used a sawed-off shotgun that blasted a
huge hole in the bedroom door. However, the racial slurs and shunning
distance many kept from Puerto Ricans depicted an undercurrent of racism
that had always been there. Dating a Puerto Rican would brand you a slut
and bar talk often included the local loudmouth mumbling it would be great to run all the Spics out of town. In 1966, the
owner of Roeller’s Grill, the next town over, stated for a New York Times
reporter:
This is America, and they don’t speak American. So they get nothing to
drink.
The tension that swept through this tree-shaded village in 1966 is still
palpable. In 2010, the place where I grew up again became a breaking news
story and again it was on Sherman Avenue. A 23-year-old developmentally
challenged woman, with a mental capacity of an 8-year-old, died at the
hands of her mother after years of being tortured at home. The town faced
an indictment of pubic opinion when the District Attorney’s office
questioned whether residents could have done more to assist this girl.
The mayor spoke about it being a tragedy where each and every one of us
must look at ourselves and ask ‘How could this have possibly occurred?’
Others talked about being torn and hurt at
reading on the Internet what bad people we are and things like that
. The murder of Sheriff Dils was again raised. The area is known as a
bedroom community for professionals, employees of two nearby state
prisons and a smattering of migrant workers
. But you’ll not know of Puerto Ricans from the town’s historical
documents.
People talked about the town being tainted by one house on Sherman Avenue.
They didn’t understand how the girl could have fallen through the cracks of
Adult Protective Services. There were rumors of mistreatment. The girl’s
mother claimed that her daughter had been molested in the past and she
rarely let her out of her sight. A neighbor shared: She (the
mother) used to snatch (the daughter)
up by her hair every so often if she was outside and not supposed to be
outside.
Another added I had never seen her (the girl) before.
About the family
: The kids were fine. They never complained. They looked healthy. They
never smelled bad.
So many ways to say:
Of course you or I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I believe they
like it fine
.
*
When I turned 21, I moved to New York City and fell in love with a place
where you can get lost and be found. In 1811, an iconic grid plan for
Manhattan streets was established. This master plan, created to provide
order and convenience while maintaining control and balance, made me feel
secure. Even there, between cracks in the sidewalks and broken pavements,
dandelions popped up.
Dandelion seeds are dispersed through wind, water, animals, explosion and
fire. They are the sun warriors that rise to celebrate summer before
turning into seed heads resembling small tufted luminous moons.
Transformed, and a child’s heart survived—taproot secured into the ground.FFF – FFF – FFF—fluttered out seeds that smacked of stars. FFF – FFF – FFF—floating possibilities of freedom.