The House on Mango Street Read Free Page A

jar, or from a title I picked up and pocketed, the stories always insist on telling me where they want to end. They often surprise me by stopping when I had every intention of galloping along a little further. They’re stubborn. They know best when there’s no more to be said. The last sentence must ring like the final notes at the end of a mariachi song—
tan-tán
—to tell you when the song is done.
    The people I wrote about were real, for the most part, from here and there, now and then, but sometimes three real people would be braided together into one made-up person. Usually when I thought I was creating someone from my imagination, it turned out I was remembering someone I’d forgotten or someone standing so close I couldn’t see her at all.
    I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor thestory, gave it shape so it had a beginning, middle, and end, because real life stories rarely come to us complete. Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad, are mine.
    I meet Norma Alarcón. She is to become one of my earliest publishers and my lifetime friend. The first time she walks through the rooms of the apartment on North Paulina, she notices the quiet rooms, the collection of typewriters, the books and Japanese figurines, the windows with the view of freeway and sky. She walks as if on tiptoe, peering into every room, even the pantry and closet as if looking for something. “You live here …” she asks, “alone?”
    “Yes.”
    “So …” She pauses. “How did you do it?”
    Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. Moving away to go to graduate school. Traveling abroad alone. Earning my own money and living by myself. Posing as an author when I was afraid, just as I posed in that photo you used on the first cover of
Third Woman
.
    And, finally, when I was ready, after I had apprenticed with professional writers over several years, partnering with the right agent. My father, who sighed and wished for me to marry, was, at the end of his life, much more gratified I had my agent Susan Bergholz providing for me rather than a husband.
¿Ha llamado Susan?
he asked me daily, because if Susan called it meant good news. Diamonds may do for a girl, but an agent is a woman writer’s best friend.
    I couldn’t trust my own voice, Norma. People saw a little girl when they looked at me and heard a little girl’s voice when I spoke. Because I was unsure of my own adult voice and often censored myself, I made up another voice, Esperanza’s, to be my voice and ask the things I needed answers to myself—“Which way?” I didn’t know exactly, but I knew which routes I didn’t want to take—Sally, Rafaela, Ruthie—women whose lives were white crosses on the roadside.
    At Iowa we never talked about serving others with our writing. It was all about serving ourselves. But there were no other examples to follow until you introduced me to Mexican writers Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. The young woman in the photograph was looking for another way to be—“
otro modo de ser
,” as Castellanos put it.
    Until you brought us all together as U.S. Latina writers—Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marjorie Agosín, Carla Trujillo, Diana Solís, Sandra María Esteves, Diane Gómez, Salima Rivera, Margarita López, Beatriz Badikian, Carmen Abrego, Denise Chávez, Helena Viramontes—until then, Normita, we had no idea what we were doing was extraordinary.
    I no longer make Chicago my home, but Chicago still makes its home in me. I have Chicago stories I have yet to write. So long as those stories kick inside me, Chicago will still be home.
    Eventually I took a job in San Antonio. Left. Came back. And left again. I kept coming back lured by cheap rent. Affordable housing is essential to an artist. I could, in time, even buy my own first house, a