| Vol. 2, No. 2 | Summer 2003 |
Boundary Riders
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In Australia and New Zealand, “boundary riders” maintain the fences enclosing sheep and cattle. Mancio's story tells of other boundaries, other riders.
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In 1967, Black Panthers armed with shotguns and M-16 rifles marched into the California state legislature to protest a bill making it illegal to carry unconcealed weapons in public. Millions of American leaned forward in their chairs that night to watch the outrageous drama on home screens and the FBI immediately accelerated its attack on the organization. The word spread to law enforcement officials across the country that Black Panthers were enemies of the United States and should be brought down.
In the same period, eighteen year old Mancio Rodriguez, down on his luck and desperate, drove a stolen car fast out of Chicago and headed for Texas. Steve Liuzo was the name on the registration card in the glove compartment. In San Antonio, he pulled the car into the parking lot of a mall, left the keys in the ignition and walked away. Let the police find some other fool behind the wheel. At the bus station he bought a ticket to Laredo where friends would help him get over into Mexico. He was young and alone, thin and wiry, a hot-head with a low flash point. He had a shaved head, a raggedy beard, and wore heavy, dark glasses. His color was light brown, just off-white. He spoke English without an accent.
Two policemen approached him in the bus station and asked for identification. Rodriguez said his papers had been robbed and asked if they had a problem. The police smiled and asked if he had a name. His own name would bring his record up so he scrambled for a new one, came up with Steve Liuzo. They searched him. There were jazz albums in his bag and marijuana in his pocket. He was arrested for possession. And to the police everything about him was routine and unexciting until they saw the black panther prowling on the ivory handle of his pocket knife. Panther? Public enemy? Wanted by the FBI? They took him to the San Antonio County jail.
The large cell on the eighth floor had fifty bunks for fifty men. Most were “pochos” and most were watching as police walked the new man, Steve Liuzo, to their door. Pochos are Mexicans working in the United States, men of riverbeds and borders, crop harvests and trouble, beans and a little English. “Pocho” in Spanish means “faded” or “blended”, someone of two cultures, someone still Mexican but Americanized. A man who returns to his village in the mountains of Oaxaca and is heard to say, “Vamos a la party!”
Beside the pochos, there were five blancos, white men, and three llantas. In Spanish, a “llanta” is a tire, tires are black, so black men were called “llantas”. Most of the pochos, llantas, and blancos were serving 3 months to a year for robbery and assault.
Jab was a llanta who refused to use the word. “Call me an African, call me a Muslim, call me an African-American but don't call me a tire!” He was in his bunk reading when Liuzo entered the life of the cell. Reading and watching was what Jab did most of the time. And Jab saw right away that the new man did not arrive in handcuffs and he knew that everyone in the cell would also see their absence and be instantly suspicious of the new boy, whoever he might be. Men have a price, spies are in demand, watchfulness is necessary. Jab also saw that the new man had a slight difference in his walk, a touch of swing, a hint of jive, and he was sure that wherever else the young man had been, he'd been around black people.
He kept an eye on Liuzo over the next few weeks, saw his moods switch from talkative and friendly to surly and clamped down tight, his anger surface and quickly fade, he saw fear and worry drain the boy's hunger and leave him staring at his tray.
At breakfast one morning, Liuzo left two untouched doughnuts sitting on his tray. One of the black men saw and asked if he could have them. Liuzo passed them over. Leaving the dining room, a pocho, a boundary rider maintaining fences, crowded close and asked Liuzo why an Italian would favor llantas over pochos.What did he have against Mexicans? Why was he prejudiced? He called Liuzo a spy and a faggot and told him a lesson was on the way.
Liuzo had been around and was not easily intimidated. Though no great boxer, he was strong for his size and could hold his own as a brawler. One-on-one, he usually came out alright. He barked at the pocho and walked away.
Five men, all pochos, jumped Liuzo that afternoon, had him down and were tearing him up when guards came yelling down the hall. The pochos heard them coming and retreated rapidly to bunks. When police came through the door, Liuzo was still on the floor trying to catch his breath “What happened?” they asked. “Nothing,” said Liuzo, “Nothing happened.” The guards went away but someone, seeking favors, passed a note with five names on it. So five pochos were sent to the hole, to bread and water, isolation. And each of the five assumed, quite falsely, that Liuzo had been the informer.
Following the attack, Liuzo did what he could to get close to Jab because Jab was the quiet man the others talked about, the man with a reputation as the fixer with strong contacts on the outside, the man who might be the help he needed to stay alive in that godawful place. Burn scars covered large parts of Jab's forty year old face and body and because he refused to talk about how he got them, the rumors never stopped. “Got napalmed in the war”, they said, “scorched in a riot, lit by his lady, burned by the KKK so don't mess with the dude because he's hard.”
Liuzo would fall in line with Jab at meal time, drop by his bunk and ask about whatever he was reading, mention that he had worked in Chicago, knew some black musicians, loved jazz. Told him, truthfully, that whites in the States kept him at a distance but black people had opened doors and let him in, shared their music, sometimes their homes, even called him brother.
Liuzo stayed as close to Jab as Jab would let him which was not too close. Finally, tiring of the young man's game, Jab put it to him, “Tell me something close to truth, Liuzo. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don't think your name's Liuzo, I don't think you're Italian, and I know you're not a Black Panther.You're still a kid but you speak English like an American and Spanish like a Mexican which says to me that you grew up both places. You got nothing going for you. Nobody's come to bail you out and nobody's come to visit. You're all alone. For the last week you've been hanging around me like a rain-soaked puppy. But if you want to keep hanging, there's only one way---you come clean with me. Who are you, where do you come from and where you think you're going?”
Mancio felt weight sliding off his shoulders, relief rising, something promising going on. Jab was asking him to talk, break silence, end loneliness, finish with deception. Mancio responded eagerly, told Jab about his birth in Puebla, the early years in California, the wandering and the working, the drugs, the stolen car, the name Liuzo. And he asked, “What are the others saying about me?”
Jab's voice was sharp, “They don't say anything about you. They don't care about you one way or the other. They want relief from boredom and you're defenseless so they call you anything that comes to mind but they don't really care if you're a faggot or a spy or the man in the moon. Why should they care? Why should you care? Why's it so important to you what they call you? They say “faggot” and you get stupid, you want to tear their heads off. They say “spy” and you reach for a club. If you want to get out of here in one piece, you got to start using your head.”
Liuzo got calmer and things got quieter around him. Some noted that he wrote well in English and was useful to have around. Others discovered his fluent Spanish and thanked him for help on letters going home to Mexico. Some still kept their distance but most had other things to worry about and paid little attention to him.
Hernandez was the exception. Hernandez had Liuzo permanently on his mind because, he said, the younger man had cursed him over cards. The argument about cards was real but the real background was that Hernandez had been accusing Liuzo of spending time with Jab because he loved “the llanta's big, foaming dick”. So when a problem with the card game surfaced, Liuzo broke wide open, called Hernandez a “worthless pervert”, and threw the cards in the fat man's face.
Unfortunately for Liuzo, Hernandez had a thriving drug business on the outside, money on the inside, and therefore no shortage of friends and followers. One of his minions was a heavyweight professional boxer in the other world, the world beyond the county jail, and Hernandez made it clear that if the man wanted his money to keep on coming, it was necessary for him to mash-up Liuzo. The boxer, a huge pocho, obediently organized six others, cornered Liuzo and accused him of the worst thing they could imagine, “Te gusta que te meten la verga!”, they sneered. “You like them to stick their vergas in you, you faggot!”.
La verga is the penis, the virile organ, the mark of the male, the man, the bull. Dried and twisted, the verga of the bull becomes the “vergajo”, the pizzle whip, the flogging instrument commonly used in slave days to beat, punish and break the unruly. The word “verga” therefore echoes with tones of mastery, domination and brutality. A “real man”, they say in Mexico, is “muy verga”, meaning not only that he's well sexed but even more that he is masterful and actively subjects others to his will. He is a bull and a bull is not passive, not open, not weak like a woman.
The boxer's accusation was that Liuzo, though endowed with a penis, was not a man. He was a “woman” or “cow” because he was the passive, pleased receptor of the verga, especially the verga of llantas, blacks, the very men who as slaves were beaten by the huge, dried penis of a bull but who now have the reputation of being especially desired by women and faggots like Liuzo because they're so bullish, so well hung, so sexually powerful.
In spite of Jad's warnings, Liuzo's immediate and never questioned reaction was to fight. He had to fight. Any man, he believed, would fight, fight to prove he was a fighter, fight to prove he was not a woman, fight to establish his manhood because this was nothing trivial they were saying, nothing that would ever go away because nothing less than “himself” was at stake, the manself given him by God and nature.
And so he fought, fought with fists, headbutts and a broken chair, fought and took a terrible beating, the beating expected because no one man can beat a professional boxer with six pocho helpers. They broke one of his arms and many teeth and blood from his opened face ran down across the floor. Jab and a few pochos carried his body to his bunk. They laid him down, they washed the blood from his broken face and they let him sleep. And when he woke in the night, it was, strangely, the boxer who was sitting by his side offering cool water. The boxer who had almost killed him was now the brother telling him he had fought well and there would be no more trouble from him or the other pochos because he had proved himself and also, it was clearly understood, because no one wanted more trouble with the law and nothing but trouble was coming if they fought again.
And the boxer asked quietly, “ I can count on you?”
And Liuzo nodded “yes” and pressed the boxer's hand, pledging himself to manly silence. A strange and wonderful peace then come over him because he knew it was finally over, finished, and he had won. They had beaten him but they had not jammed their vergas in him, and having them “meter la verga” was what he had feared the most. They had honored him as a bull of a man and worthy of a fight, worthy of a man's beating. They had not treated him as “woman”, not looked down on him as “cow”. And he knew the word was already being spread that hostilities were over, that he had fought well, taken a beating, and kept the code of silence. Already they were saying that Liuzo was “muy verga”, a real man.
He woke up on a strange bed in a strange room. White walls, white curtains, dark women in white uniforms moving quietly. A woman's face appeared above him, “You're in the hospital. You're going to hurt but you'll be all right.” He stared at the ceiling. He tried to move but the pain was too sharp, too frightening. He took a few short, quick breaths and closed his eyes. Someone was doing something to his arm. Later, he didn't know how much later, he woke up in the same white room. One of the dark women gave him a pill and water, told him he was looking better.
Three days later, he was sitting up in bed when Jad walked in. Liuzo was surprised and pleased. “How'd you get in here?”
Jad shrugged, “How you doing?”
“They say I'll live.”
They talked about his room, the comforts of it; his body, the pain of it. Jab brought news from the eighth floor: Hernandez had a bad accident in the shower, a few new men were on the scene, someone needed him to write a letter. Mancio said, “I don't know how soon I'll be coming back.”
Jab talked to him quietly, as if others might be listening, “You're not coming back. You'll be released as soon as you're well enough.” He handed him a small card, “If you don't know where to go or what to do when you're on the street, get to Detroit and go to this restaurant on Woodward Avenue. Use my name. They're Italians, your people, they'll treat you right.”
Encuentro en Vera Cruz
Stirred by bells from Moorish domes
iridescent grackles
flashing bluegreen light
crackle awake a Vera Cruz morning.
In the zocalo below
I know La Negra Graciana
will soon be passing with her harp.
She, too, shines: sharp.
Rostro reminiscent of the Kush
from whom she comes,
her golden notes , voz, and glinting smile
caress old longings to life.
Hermana mia,
gracing this port of entry
with her memories
invites us to follow su propio rumbo
a Boca del Rio, dentro de la selva
siguiendo Yanga,
su son creciendo alitas
arriba a las montanas
endonde reside nuestra libertad
con los cimarrones,
negro y alumbrando toda via
la luz
de nuestra lucha continual.
Toma una copa de son con nosotros.
It will fill you up.
'Pues, estamos contenta, Graciana y yo,
speaking of what was and still needs to be
hasta el mesero viene
y dice a Graciana:
"No. No puedes tocar aqui."
But she is famous
has played Paris
with CD's to show.
What does that mesero know?
Only that she's not
employed by the 'house.'
We ignore him.
Dos mujeres, negra y independente:
junto en nuestra lucha continual.
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REMEMBERING JUNETEENTH
Dionne Brand " They had been taken. Plain. Hard. Rough....No blizzard of aquamarine could soothe them, not even teeming with fish. They had had enough of aimless boats and bodies tangled bone-white exhaling colour to black coral. And enough of distance, too, distance without cover, without a sky, without a hiding place....There were no interiors, no outposts, no relief. And belonging? They were past it. It was not wide enough, not gap enough, not distance enough. Not rip enough, belonging. Belonging was too small for their magnificent rage. They were not interested in belonging. It could not suffice. Not now. They saw with the bloodful clarity of rage. So they saw everything, heard everything, abandoned distance, abandoned time. And saw everything.” |
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POETS NOTICE:
TED JOANS LIVES
1928 - 2003
IN HIS OWN WORDS:
“ Surrealism is my point of view. We live our poem. It is not conventional, nor is it popular. We are often more than other people: involved in the geopolitics of water, air , and flora. We speak to and embrace trees. We are not better beings, but merely butter flying (slippery), therefore lickable and likeable to worthy others who, too, be surrealized.” –
personal correspondence, 8 December, 2002
AND OURS:
The last time I saw Ted Joans, Black Beat poet, was in Algeria in 1969. Already an elder of international stature in the Black Movement, he had come from Paris for the Pan-African Cultural Congress being held in Algiers. I was part of the D.C. delegation from the U.S. We were among dozens of African-Americans from the spheres of politics and the arts eager to palaver with our brothers and sisters from the Continent and to make or own offerings.
Our motto then could well have been "Live free or die." Now, two survivors of that time, Ted and I met up again in Oaxaca, still on the same path, still alive.
He and his wife, artist Laura Corsiglia, were visiting for a month, with plans to return for longer. But before they left, they wanted to have a reading and exhibition of artwork inspired by their time here.
On the Tuesday night of the event, the small bar and restaurant, La Nueva Babel, was packed. A gathering of local students, poets, writer / artist friends, and people who knew his work by bing of the same generation, came out for an evening to remember, share, and learn.
In a room enlivened by Laura's metamorphic line drawings, Ted Joans took the mike and the spirit of BeBop, by turns sweet and hot, gripped us. He spoke of his meeting Graciela Iturbide, one of Mexico's premier photographers, and read the poetry her work inspired him to compose. He spoke of the merger of the surreal and everyday life, the arbitrariness of power, and the poet as the one who can transform the contradictions through acts of imagination. He made his connection to Oaxaca, to Mexico, to Africa in the Diaspora personal and organic.
Framing his performance (in English, Spanish, and Our Thang) with his classic poem from the 60's, "You have nothing to fear from the poet but the truth...", he took his audience on a readtrip through Juchitan to Ougadougou, Abidjan to Timbuctu, reminding us that the world is round and there need be no borders between people of good will.
By the end of the night, three generations from at least five countries had come closer to speaking in tongues to the rhythm of their hearts thanks to Ted Joans.
The Beat go on, and he, with it.
Congratulations to the cast of DEF POETRY JAM, winners of the 2003 TONY AWARD for Special Theatrical Event, in particular to nephew Steve Colman and friend Suheir Hammad .
