stories for a brown eyed girl

He sat at the foot of the bed, and she stood in front of him. 

She lowered her dress to the ground. 

He looked into her brown eyes and saw the light of the stars that twinkled on the mountain streams in the dark nights around his small village.

He looked at her smile, her sonrisa, and it was as if the sun had risen on him. 

He looked at her brown skin, and it was as if the rich, plowed land itself was before him. 

He looked at her body, and could not breathe for a moment, for it was as if all the beauty of the world had fallen upon him.

- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2019

stories for a brown eyed girl

He looked up from the book in his lap as the Greyhound bus squeaked to a stop at the Greenville station. 

The old woman next to him fell asleep on the trip up from Charleston and leaned her head on his shoulder. 

Her face was as wrinkled as the bark of an ancient magnolia tree, and was colored the same beautiful brown as it’s trunk and branches. 

She breathed in, and the air made a soft, whistling sound through her nose. She breathed out, and it made a gentle, flapping sound through her lips. 

“Life is a symphony,” he chuckled to himself, “Of whistles and kazoos.”

“Ma’am,” he whispered. 

She didn’t move.

She kept right on sleeping and snoring. 

“Ma’am,” he said a little louder. 

Still only whistles and kazoos. 

“Ma’am,” he said a little louder still. 

This time he reached out and patted her weathered hand. She opened her tired, brown eyes and smiled a small smile at him. 

“Thanks for a lettin’ me use yo shoulda as my pilla,” she said with a gravelly voice. 

“First time I woked up beside a man in a long time. Hope my snorin’ didn’t bother you none,” she giggled. 

“No ma’am,” he said with a giggle of his own, “It was music to my ears.”

His knees and back snapped and popped as he stood up slowly and smoothed out the wrinkles in his pants and tee shirt. 

“My goodness,” said the old woman, “You make music, too.” 

He placed his hand gently on her bony shoulder. 

“We could start a band called The Human Experience,” he laughed. “People would come from all over to hear us whistle, flap, snap and pop. What do you think?”

“Yep, they’d pay us a bundle of money to hear that.”

He pulled on his jacket and waved his hand to her. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said. “Thanks for the song.”

She waved back. “Thank you,” she said. “And do me a favor. Lean on down here and let me tell you somethin’.”

He leaned down and was surprised as she kissed him on his forehead with a light, tender kiss. 

“That’s the kiss of a guardian angel,” she whispered. “Listen to life, and do not be afraid.”

He stepped off the bus and onto the street. 

Small groups of people were standing around the bus, waiting to welcome their travelers with hugs and kisses and an “I’m so glad you’re here.” 

No one was waiting for him. 

“Oh well,” he thought, “I might not be welcomed with a kiss, but I was sent out with one. And by a guardian angel at that.” 

The early sun was bright in his eyes and made him squint to see the people and buildings around him. A hint of warmth was beginning to ease the chill of the upstate morning.

He put two quarters into the slot of a newspaper rack beside the bus station and took out a copy of The Greenville News. The headline of the day read “Governor Seeks To Keep Sanctuary Cities Out Of South Carolina.”

He walked a block toward Main Street and found a small diner that served breakfast from 5 A.M. until 10:30 A.M. and meat and three vegetable plates for the rest of the day. 

Little bells rang as he opened the glass door and stepped inside.

“Buenos dias,” said a waitress. “Welcome to the Scrambled Egg. My name’s Gabby and today’s my third anniversary of workin’ here. I love it and I’ll be servin’ you today.”

“Buenos dias,” he said. 

He reached out to shake her hand and take a menu from her. 

“My name is Elias. Happy Anniversary!”

“¡Gracias! Where you comin’ from?”

“I came up from Charleston through the night on the Greyhound bus.”

“Charleston, huh? I love the low country. There’s nothin’ like wakin’ up early, just before sunrise, and takin’ a walk on the beach. Goodness. I bet you didn’t get much sleep on that bus. Come on over and have a seat at this table by the window. It’s the best seat in the house.”

“Muchas gracias.”

“What can I get for you?”

“Well, I could use a hot cup of coffee and a warm breakfast.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place. I’ll be right back with your coffee.”

He took out his notebook and pen. He wrote as he read the article in the newspaper.

“I don’t mean to interrupt what you’re doing but your coffee’s here.” 

Gabby came back with the coffee.

There was a deep kindness in Gabby’s brown eyes.

“Hmm,” she noted, “You’re writing with a pen in a notebook. Don’t see that much anymore.”

“I’m old fashioned, I guess. I still like to see the words I write on a page. Helps me see that I’m moving from one place to another and getting somewhere.”

“If you don’t mind me askin’, what’re you writin’?”

“I don’t mind you asking at all. I’m working on a story for my newspaper, The South Carolina Defender. I’m a journalist.”

“Oh yeah? What’s your story about?”

“It’s about a family I met in Charleston, a migrant family picking peaches and tomatoes in the fields and on the farms around Berkeley County. When I met them, they were living in a gutted out school bus behind the lower 40 acres of a peach farm on Johns Island. I wrote a series of articles about them last summer to try to help our readers walk a mile in their shoes.

- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2019

Gabby

Gabby took the bus home to her apartment.

“Cómo estás, Luisa?” she asked the small woman in the window seat as she sat down beside her.

“Bien,” she answered. “A little tired. I cleaned a lot of rooms at the motel today. Y tu?”

“Si, bien. Un poco cansado, tambien. I scrambled a lot of eggs at the Scrambled Egg. I can’t wait to put my feet up and rest them. What you doing this evening?”

“I’m going to cook for my family and take my daughter to help me clean the doctor’s office. Then I’ll rest.”

Gabby put her arm around Luisa’s shoulder and hugged her.

“Eres una buena mujer,” Gabby said. I’m glad you’re my friend.”

“Y tu, mi amiga. Y tu.”

Gabby got off the bus in front of her apartment on the west side of the city. She lived on the poor side of town. She and her neighbors didn’t have much money, but they did have a lot of kindness for each other.

“‘Sup Gabby. How you doin’?” asked Bryant, who everyone called Big B. He had just come home from his job as a mechanic at the auto shop.

“Hola Big B. Not much. Just glad to be home. How was your day?”

“It was all good. The squeaky wheel got the grease, as they say, today and ev’ry day.”

“One of these days I’m gonna buy a car and the only person I’m gonna let work on it is you.”

“Deal. If you need anything, let me know, okay?”

“Sure thing! Same here.”

“You could come over and cook up some steak and eggs for me, you know.”

“Ugh, anything except that. I’ve cooked enough steak and eggs today...and ev’ry day!”

“Bet. I’m jus’ kiddin’ wit’ cha. Night Gabby. Be safe.”

“Night B. You be safe, too.”

She took her key out of her pocket and opened the door to her apartment. 

It was one room. There was a holey sofa that pulled out into a bed with a small table and a lamp beside it. Three books, The House on Mango Street, The Old Man and the Sea and Poems for a Brown Eyed Girl, were on a bookshelf made out of a cut board and two concrete blocks against the wall. An ancient transistor radio was in the corner. A painting by Jasper Johns of three American flags, one on top of the other, smallest to largest, was on the wall. It was a gift from one of her regular customers at The Scrambled Egg.

The room was simple and beautiful, like her.

She picked up the small book of poems, turned on the lamp, sat down on the sofa, and stretched out her legs in front of her.

She opened the book to the poem An Ode to a Migrant Woman’s Feet.

She read,

Her feet 

were calloused and cracked  

like rocks 

in plowed ground, 

like stones 

in turned soil, 

the soil 

she walked over 

barefooted 

as her grandfather 

turned the earth 

with donkey and plow. 

She had 

the feet 

of her grandfather, 

for she had walked 

beside him 

down the long rows 

of beans and corn 

since the time 

she learned 

to toddle. 

He had 

walked 

up and down 

those rows 

until his feet 

were broken and bent 

and made him appear 

to be 

continually 

genuflecting 

to God, 

or to the wealthy land owner, 

or to the land itself. 

Her feet 

would one day 

be broken and bent 

like that.

When her feet 

were in the soil 

it was 

as if 

they were part 

of the land, 

as if 

they held the secrets 

of the earth, 

as if 

they knew the mystery 

of how seed 

and dirt 

and water 

become 

a bean 

in a pod,

a kernel 

on an ear 

of corn. 

Her heart 

was in her feet, 

her heart 

was in the land, 

her heart 

was the mystery.

Her feet spoke, 

"Estoy aquí, 

I am here, 

Estoy aquí." 

Her feet 

were signs 

to the world - 

"I am 

a human being." 

“Estoy aquí,” she whispered to the world. “I am here.”

- Trevor Scott Barton, Stories for a Brown Eyed Girl, 2019

stories for a brown eyed girl

Hilcias’ eyes opened to the smell around him.

He rubbed the sleep out of of his eyes with the back of his hand and saw a wiry man with greasy, slicked back hair smelling of body odor and cigarette smoke sitting beside him.

The man was directing a woman holding an infant in one arm and the hand of a toddler with her other hand to sit in the seat in front of them.

He was also directing a boy and a girl about Hilcias’ age to sit beside them.

And a teenage girl and boy to sit behind them.

None of them were paying any attention to the man, but he kept on talking as if they couldn’t function without him.

“Lissen yere,” he said a bit too loudly. “Git yourselfs settled down now. We got a ways to go, and we don’t need no cryin’, wigglin’, playin’ nor poutin’. Hope we’ll be thar ‘fore nightfall.”

The man had one bag, a tattered olive green rucksack that looked as if it had seen action in the Vietnam War, that must have held the traveling goods of the whole family of seven.

He tried to stuff it in the luggage bin above his head, giving it a hard whack with his bony fist as the driver moved toward him telling him it wouldn’t fit and that he’d have to put it in the storage compartment below the bus.

“Well god dammit then,” cursed the man, “Least let me git out the bottle o’ formla for the baby. It belongs to this yere girl. You can see she ain’t old ‘nough to make no milk so we got to feed this yere ‘spensive stuff.”

The teenaged girl turned bright red, her ears the color of the tomatoes he and his mamí and his abuelo picked on the farms in the summers, as the man looked away from her and back to the bus driver, who was wrestling the bag back up the aisle to the door.

The other passengers had to lean toward the windows as he passed by.

Hilcias wondered if they did this because of the size of the bag or the smell of it, for it had taken on the odor of it’s owners.

“Wait one more minute, thar,” commanded the man.

The driver ignored him in much the same way as his family did.

“Well shit,” the man sighed as he collapsed beside Hilcias.

“I needed my Bible out from thar,” he whispered. “It’s good luck to hold it when our lives are in the hands o’ somebody like that thar driver,” he winked at Hilcias.

Within a minute, the man’s head dropped back against the padded seat of the bus and was asleep.

Hilcias listened carefully and heard a crackling in the man’s lungs and a whoosh click in the man’s heart.

“Hmmm,” thought Hilcias, “This man has had a hard life. He’s too young for his body to sound like that.”

The teenaged boy who was sitting behind Hilcias leaned over the seat and put his hand on his shoulder.

He pushed until Hilcias turned and looked at him.

“Hey, you one’nem Meckicans, ain’t you? You speak English or only Meckican?”

Hilcias looked into the boy’s cloudless blue eyes.

What he saw there surprised him.

The teenaged boy’s question was a question of curiosity, not a question of suspicion.

The boy had heard those words before, though not in a question but in an accusation.

By a whole community.

“Look at them damn Meckicans,” he had heard. “They come here to ‘Merica and take everthin’ from us and don’t give nothin’ back.”

“How could I change his mind?” thought Hilcias.

Hilcias smiled at him and turned back toward the road in front of them.

- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2019

Fibonacci Poem

Brown Eyes

He 

looked 

into 

her brown eyes 

and saw the good earth. 

They were the color of the ground 

after his Papa plowed land in the first days of spring

In them he saw the trees, for they were the color of bark in the early morning sun

In them he saw the sea, for they were the color of the water as it turned with sand and shells in the broken waves along the mid day shore

He loved the plowed ground, walking through the cool dirt with bare feet; the bark of the trees, climbing the smooth branches, shirtless in the heat of the day; the sea, floating naked in the gently rocking waters of the ev’ning tide; her brown eyes

- Trevor Scott Barton, Fibonacci Poems, 2019

Romero’s Glasses

Faith

Hope

People

A hero

Oscar Romero

Protecting poor, oppressed people

From unimaginable hatred and violence

Dying but not killing, denying guns their power, risking the violence of love

Conserving tradition at first for the greatest, seeing through your glasses at last for the least, feeling the hunger of unpaid workers, knowing poverty

Holding the tears of the disappeared, calling all to view the body of a slain priest

Building up humanity, tearing down injustice

“In the name of God, stop killing...”

Death, crucifixion

Life again 

People

Love

Peace

- Trevor Scott Barton, Fibonacci Poems, 2019

A Charlie Brown Heart

I have a Charlie Brown heart. 

Every year, when I walk onto a Christmas tree lot and stand in the middle of the trees, I listen to the people around me.

- Look at this one! It'll be the biggest tree in the neighborhood!

- This'll be the prettiest tree people’ve ever seen!

- This one'll be HUGE!

But in the cold night air, under the starry sky, I'm not looking for a tree that can do something for me. 

I'm looking for what I can do for the tree. 

I'm looking for the smallest and most forgotten one. 

I pick that one to take home. 

I pick that one to put in the old, trusty stand, and wrap with strings of bright, colorful lights, and adorn with the ornaments my friends have given to me over the years and my children have made with their hands and their hearts. 

I pick that one. 

Though it’s the smallest and most forgotten one, I give it some of the biggest and most remembered parts of me. 

Yep, I have a Charlie Brown heart.

Here is the great scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Charlie Brown and Linus are on the Christmas tree lot.

Linus: Gee, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?

Charlie Brown: This little green one here seems to need a home.

Linus: I don't know, Charlie Brown. Remember what Lucy said? This doesn't seem to fit the modern spirit.

I don't care. We'll decorate it and it'll be just right for our play. I think it needs me.

This coming year, let's treat our world the way Charlie Brown treated the little green tree. 

Let's treat people the way Charlie Brown treated the little green tree. 

Let's treat ourselves the way Charlie Brown treated the little green tree.

In the end, Linus would say - 

I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.

Maybe the world just needs a little love.

Come have a Charlie Brown heart with me.