Free My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Page A

from the hand pump at her uncle’s house by the road and carry the pail back carefully, without spilling. For washing they collected rainwater in drums.
    The farm had belonged to her mother, but she had sold it to raise bail when her husband landed in some drunken trouble. A brother, he of the water pump, provided some help for the bedridden mother of six, but grudgingly. There had been a prouder time, and traces of it were still visible in the way that Celina’s grandmother carried herself, in her long crinoline skirts and high lace collars in the Spanish style. “Raise your head!” she demanded if she caught Celina hunching over. “You don’t have to be ashamed of anything.” She was strict and insisted on manners. Even Celina’s brothers, rough as they were and country people, knew how to be polite.
    Celina was the youngest, and her siblings raised her, their mother helpless. Aurora found work sewing. When Celina was still a toddler, Aurora, sixteen years older, was the first to marry. That’s when she leftfor San Germán, though she never really left behind the responsibilities that had cut short her childhood. She would come back every two weeks to collect piecework from women who sewed handkerchiefs, and to pay them; she was always in a bad mood, always a dark cloud hanging over her. She taught Celina to sew too. Celina had to make two dozen handkerchiefs a week, stitching the little hems and ironing them. She didn’t get paid, of course. That work was her contribution to the household. Aurora made the clothes and paid for shoes, one pair every year.
    Mario Baez, the eldest brother, who was nicknamed Mayo, fed the family. He went fishing in the mornings at La Parguera before reporting to his job loading the sugarcane wagons at the train station. When he got married, he built another little house for himself, closer to the road, and his wife, Maria, did the cooking. But Celina ate mostly fruits that fell off the trees: poking around in the grass like a little bird, looking for mangoes,
grosellas, tamarindos
 … She didn’t like fish.
    In the absence of a father, discipline was in Mayo’s hands, and he was rough about it. Celina got the belt for climbing a tree, for coming home late from school, having stopped to wade in the stream. For standing outside Tío Foro’s store, where the men were drinking, so she could listen to the jukebox. For buying candy with the three cents they gave her to mail a letter. That was a bad one; she never did that again. Her mother would get up to put
sebo de flande
on the welts, Celina crying from the pain and her mother crying too as she rubbed the sticky salve into the child’s skin. Pedro, the brother closest to her in age, never got the belt. Pedro was the dear little one, the light of Mayo’s eye. Celina was only trouble.
    She hated Mayo for those beatings, hated him with such a passion that she swore she would never go back to Puerto Rico after she left. But of course she did, and now my mother tempers her judgment with forgiveness: he was doing the best that he knew how; a girl gone wrong would have been a terrible load to carry. With their mother helpless and their father missing, it was kids raising kids and just her bad luck to have been the youngest. At least they sent her to school. She was grateful for that, and in her warm remembrances of school I sense the stirrings of her passion for education.
    When she was very small, she went to a tiny little school nearby, andlater all the way to Lajas, about an hour away if she had to walk. Walking was hard because her shoes were always too small, so she’d wind up carrying them, barefoot. But often a farmer’s cart would pass and she’d thumb a ride, with the bullocks swaying ahead of her and the sugarcane behind. When she wandered home afterward, there was the temptation of streams and the house where an old woman would wave to her to come have a snack.
    School was a pleasure because it got her out of the house, but