The Beat of My Own Drum (9 page)

“No!” I cried. “I’m not doing this!” Then I raced to the door. Unlocking it, I turned and told him firmly, “And don’t you dare ask me again.”

He never did.

The sexual abuse had finally stopped.

Unfortunately, the physical and emotional torment at school and on the streets was only getting worse. It was sometimes so bad that my entire neighborhood felt to me like a battleground.

Fortunately, I had a best friend by then. Her name was Connie, and she lived just down the street. She was Mexican with two sisters and two brothers. Her father was a professional boxing coach who trained a famous fighter by the name of Yaqui Lopez.
We went to see him fight a couple of times, and I was seriously impressed. I longed to learn how to knock someone out with my clenched fist!

Connie and I didn’t go to the same school and we didn’t become friends right away, but I ran home past her house every day (often pursued by a gang), and we ended up friends for life. The running-home part started in the fourth grade when two girls from my school, who were two years older than me, constantly picked on me. They’d taunt me on an almost daily basis, pushing and shoving. They progressed to proper beating, punching me in the stomach and knocking the wind out of me, or slapping me across the face really hard.

Another time they told me to tie up one of my friends so that she’d be beaten. I didn’t want to, but I was afraid, so I did. She was such a nice girl and would never have done the same to me, but she understood how it worked. Still, I must have disappointed her. I know I disappointed myself.

One day, during recess, I was playing tetherball with another friend named Rebecca when I spotted my tormentors approaching. I could see they were ready to pounce, scowling at me with their fists already clenched.

Oh, no. Here they come again
, I thought. It was just like with my cousins—that same sense of helplessness and inevitability. But this time I couldn’t face another beating or public humiliation and I panicked, so determined was I not to be touched by anyone I didn’t want to touch me.

As they closed in, a thought suddenly occurred to me. If I picked a fight with Rebecca, they might back away. Without saying a word, I shoved my friend, hard. She regained her balance and looked back at me, shocked.

“What did you do that for?” she asked. I can still see her hurt expression and the confusion that flashed across her face.

“Cuz!” I yelled, knowing my would-be assailants were watching. Then, out of the blue, I threw a punch that Yaqui Lopez would have been proud of, making direct and painful contact with Rebecca’s jaw. She fell back and began to cry.

I saw her glare up at me in tears, and I was filled with shame. I didn’t know who I was anymore. My guilt was immediate and consuming. Before I could apologize, though, I realized that my strategy had worked.

“You crazy, bitch!” one of the bullies cried, laughing. “You just hit your best friend! We ain’t gonna mess with
you
no mo.” They walked on by.

Later, when I tried to explain and apologize, Rebecca claimed she understood, but our friendship was never the same, and I was devastated that she never forgave me. Who could blame her? I couldn’t forgive myself, either. I was disgusted that I had chosen to lash out at her just to avoid being hit myself.

Despite my success in fending off those particular bullies, my insecurity on the playground remained. Other kids continued to provoke and tease me. Sometimes they’d claim it was because I was too skinny or too much of a tomboy or too ethnically unidentifiable. Mostly there’d be no reason at all.

My growing talent in sports provided me with a welcome distraction. It gave me immediate goals, positive attention, and a means of releasing the emotional tension that was rising in me like sap. I especially loved running track. Like Moms, I was good at it and relished the challenge of beating boys.

Then, quite unexpectedly, a boy became a new distraction in my life. His name was Luis, and he was Brazilian. We were eleven years old and crazy about each other. To my surprise, I went through yet another radical personal transformation—from thinking that I never wanted to be anywhere near a boy again to wanting to be with Luis all the time.

Our “dates” were mostly over the phone, while we both watched the same television show. Whenever
Love, American Style
came on, he’d call. Moms would hand me the phone and, already excited, I’d say “Hi, Luis!” Then, together, we’d watch the whole episode, giggling at the jokes, analyzing the plot, and deepening our bond. With him and yet alone: that was as close as I could allow myself to get.

Luis was so sweet, but we were too young to have a relationship. Besides, I had developed very old-fashioned ideas about getting married and having kids. Based on Moms and Pops’s marriage, I’d formulated an idealistic model of how a relationship should go before it eventually led to a church.

Or maybe I just wanted to be careful. I’d seen and experienced too much.

I allowed Luis to kiss me several times, little pecks on the lips, but that was it. He was my first kiss. I liked him; he made me laugh. It was fun to have an official “boyfriend,” and while I enjoyed being near him, I had a wall up when it came to physical affection.

I never told him about my history. I never mentioned what had happened to me.

Poor Luis, he never even got within a mile of first base, let alone past it. Neither did my next boyfriend, Monty, who lived nearby and had the greenest eyes. He looked as if he could have been in the Jackson 5.

Fond as I was of both boys, I wasn’t ready for anything physical. That would have felt too strange. It was too soon and I was way too young.

Even in junior high, when it seemed everyone was doing a lot more than kissing, I was hesitant. I could be quite the flirt, but I didn’t want to get too close to anyone. I wanted to wait for the right relationship, and I told myself that I should be in love when I gave it up to the right boy.

I didn’t plan on falling in love anytime soon.

Instead I threw my energies into running and—increasingly—fighting for my freedom to walk the streets. I was attending so many track meets that my skin went really dark in the sun. The consequence of that was that I was then beaten up for my color.

Sometimes the girls would get mad at me for having what they called “good hair.” Because of my mixed background, if I blow-dried my hair it went straight and not in an Afro like theirs. That alone could trigger a whole new wave of bullying and teasing.

Often there was no reason at all. I’d get attacked out of nowhere. It was always stressful, humiliating, and scary.

I was at the end of my rope, desperate to avoid being hurt anymore. No matter how tough I tried to be or how quick my defensive moves, I couldn’t win a fight if I was outnumbered. That was when my survival instinct kicked in. I decided to get even better at outrunning my tormenters. If I could run faster and farther than they could, I could escape.

This served me well in my neighborhood, too, where the threat of violence was also lurking around every corner. I was especially afraid of the East Twenty-first Street Gang, who hung around looking for victims. Moms often sent me to get bread or milk at the corner store, so I had to plan my trips carefully. I’d take the money she gave me, then peek out the front door to check that the coast was clear before running to and from the store as fast as I could, on a self-preservation kick she had no idea about.

Sometimes the gang would catch me and pull my hair until I cried or hurt me so I bruised, and I’d have no choice but to tell Moms and Pops. Whenever I did, they’d confront the bullies and their parents, though both would deny any wrongdoing.

And while the adults talked, one of the bullies would punch a fist into his palm to show me that I’d pay for being a tattletale.

Yet again, I was on my own.

I wasn’t the only target; my brothers and other kids were
grabbed and beaten or tied to telephone poles to be slapped or punched. My friend Connie was among them, and we’d often share our miserable stories in the sanctuary of her room. The corner store and my house were the only safe zones; everywhere else, we were fair game.

As I grew into my teens, I began to wear my growing anger and frustration like a suit of armor. I was hormonal and frustrated. I felt victimized, stigmatized, and ignored. Mostly I’d argue with friends, my family, or my teachers just for the sake of it. If they told me the sky was blue, I’d tell them it was red. I’d argue the time of day just to push up against anyone in authority.

Increasingly, I began to direct my anger toward sociocultural issues. We may have lived in the liberal Bay Area, where the law had banned segregation, but society still allowed it.

Our community especially was becoming more and more violent, or perhaps it was my awareness of violence that was growing. We heard frequent reports of fights, stabbings, and race riots. Once in a bleak while there’d be a shooting in our neighborhood, and sirens became a familiar background noise again. Squad cars constantly drove by, and it always seemed like someone was getting arrested on every other street corner.

Despite the police presence, our community felt unsafe, and it was the question of race that seemed to be at the epicenter. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 when I was a child, was extremely active, and its influence was growing. I became fascinated by it, along with the wider civil rights movement. I longed to stand up in public and raise my fist in the Black Power salute.

Hungry for more information, I read everything I could about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman—two women who inspired me with their courage and conviction. I saw them as models for my own emerging aspirations.

Secretly, I reveled in the idea of creating revolution. It made me feel stronger as a young girl on the brink of womanhood.

I was fighting for my right to be heard.

I longed to make some noise.

I wanted a voice.

My biggest problem was that I had a hard time knowing exactly where I was placed within the community. People couldn’t easily tell what race I was by looking at me, so I didn’t “belong” to anyone.

I knew Pops was born to Mexican parents and Moms was Creole, but in school and on the streets, I was pressed to come up with an answer to the question “Are you black or are you white?” There was no gray. No in-between. “Mixed” wasn’t an option—another reason for my persistent discomfort.

I was just me.

I knew I wasn’t white, but I wasn’t brown, either. I considered myself black, even though many of my relatives looked white or brown.

Faced with such a stark choice, I picked black, because that’s where I felt most comfortable. I not only grew up in a largely black community, but my family spoke the slang of the “hood.”

I wasn’t the only one who was confused in our family. Moms’s parents’ birth certificates categorized them as “Negro,” yet they had fair skin. On my birth certificate, it says “white.” My brother Peter Michael came home from school one day and Juan teased him by saying, “Hey, do you know Moms is black?”

Peto replied, “Don’t you say Mommy is black, ’cause she’s not!” Then he started crying and yelling.

It wasn’t until I was in my midteens that I even realized I was Hispanic. Up until then I honestly considered my family African-American—one of those that had a little light and a little dark. The day it hit me that I was something else was the day one
of my father’s relatives invited me to play soccer on a team named Guadalajara. He took me to a rough part of Oakland for a practice game, and when we got there I couldn’t believe how many Mexicans were in the park. I’d never seen so many in one place at the same time. Had they been bused in specially across the border?

“Where did they all come from?” I asked incredulously.

Before he could respond, the team crowded around to meet me and all started talking at once with strong Latino accents. Incredibly, they seemed to know who my father was.

“Oh, your dad is Pedro Escovedo!” they told me. I rarely heard him called Pedro at home and was surprised that they’d heard of him.

When I nodded and smiled and replied in English, they laughed and said, “Speak Spanish!”

“But I’m not Spanish!” I said apologetically.

They looked shocked and said, “Yes you are!”

“I don’t think so!” I replied, blushing, but then it dawned on me that I kind of was.

Up until that point I’d attributed being Latino to having an accent and being part of an entirely different culture. My father grew up speaking Spanish because, before the orphanage, he lived with his grandmother in Mexico, and she only spoke Spanish. She made him sleep on the kitchen floor and she kicked him around a lot. He never spoke Spanish after that.

I don’t know why I was in denial about being Hispanic. I think I was ashamed of being Mexican because I’d heard that they were the lowest of the Latin race. I’d had to dress in satin to go to a quinceañera (when a cousin turned fifteen), and I went to soccer dances where all the men wore cowboy boots, hats, and jeans and were short in height. But despite that, I liked tall, bowlegged men with Afro haircuts who looked
fine
. I made fun of the Hispanics with my friends until the day it dawned on me that I was Mexican.

Caught in an agony of indecision and still constantly picked on by black girls, I realized that they thought I was white. I couldn’t win. I knew the rules of the game, and I also understood that it would only get worse the longer it went on. I tried to run at first, and I also tried to fight back, but I always seemed to be outnumbered.

It got so bad that I took to carrying a screwdriver or a set of keys to defend myself if I had to. Occasionally, I even carried a switchblade knife to wave or point at someone if anything happened, although I’m relieved to say I never used it.

There is an expression that goes, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Worn down by fear, I reluctantly decided that if I couldn’t defend myself, then I might as well try to befriend them. Some kids join gangs because there’s no love at home: the gang becomes their family, and they’ll die for that family—and often do. Some join because it’s the easier option and they like feeling in a position of power.