Small story from John’s Island -
Poor little kid. He just sits over there every morning as the sun comes up. Never says a word. Just sits there watching the ocean and listening to the waves.
One time I walked over to him. 'How you doin'?' I asked. 'What's your name?' He just looked at me. Didn't say a thing.
I figured he didn't understand me. His granddaddy and momma are migrant workers picking peaches here until they move on down the coast. I thought maybe he only spoke Spanish.
Finally, he whistled. It wasn't like a normal whistle with a shrill sound and two notes. Nope, it was an unusual whistle. It had all kinds of sounds in it, all kinds of notes. I've never heard anything like it in my life. It was like he was tryin' to say somethin' to me, but I had no idea what it was. Then he looked back at the ocean and was quiet again.
I feel for him. I wonder what we could do to help him?"
Folks had talked that way about him since the day he was born.
"Poor little baby," said the labor and delivery nurses at the hospital. "Born on a day like today. And his family has no papers. What could we do to help him?"
His family had just crossed into the United States. They had ridden the train, The Beast the migrants called it, all the way from the scorched earth of El Salvador's twelve year civil war to the Mexican - U.S. border.
A coyote had brought them into the promised land and had taken them all the way to Miami.
His mamí was pregnant with him and the time had come for her to deliver. The coyote stopped in front of St. Mary's church, made the sign of the cross, and put them out on the street with nothing but the tattered clothes on their backs and the battered shoes on their feet. As a matter of fact, his mamí’s shoes had fallen apart many miles ago so she was barefooted.
His abuelo lifted the iron knocker on the church's door and let it fall back to it's iron plate. He did this again and again until an old nun cracked open the door to the night.
The nun was a good woman, full of wisdom and compassion. She had worked in the city for many years. "I've seen it all," she said many times. Or she thought she had. For of all the people she had seen as an inner-city nun - convicts, addicts, broken people, oppressed people - she had never seen the beauty and suffering in the faces of Gustavo and Maria at the church door that night.
Their eyes were light with beauty, the beauty of being in a land without war, the beauty of bringing a new life into the world. Yet their bodies were heavy with suffering. They were filthy dirty after thousands of miles of migration over the long, treacherous road. Their shoulders sagged under the weight of years of homelessness, for their first home had been destroyed by bombs and their home since then had been tiny spaces of little kindnesses people had shown them along the way.
They were quiet with the silence of the fear of the unknown.
The nun was especially struck by the sight of Maria. She was sitting on the bottom step of the church, her bare feet pressed flat against the concrete sidewalk, her arms wrapped around her swollen belly, and her face anguished in the pains of labor.
"Vamanos á la carro," said the nun. "Let’s go!”
