Free Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain Page A

anything that wasn’t rice and beans. The general store stocked cans of Campbell’s Alphabet Soup and boxes of corn flakes, and sometimes, as a special treat, our mother bought us some. We ate the corn flakes in handfuls, without milk, and could go through an entire box in half an hour. Shelly also Iiked sweetened condensed miIk, which she drank directly from the can, tipping it up against her nose.

    We walked to school with Maely after breakfast, barefoot but with neatly combed hair. Kindergarten, first and second grades met in a whitewashed room with the same teacher, round Don Carmen. The day began with the ringing of the huge bell in the school yard. We found our places at the low wooden desks, then stood together to recite the Lord’s Prayer. If not for my time in Belize I would never have learned it, and although my Spanish faded, it has stuck firmly in my mind, the words inseparable from the singsong in which we all intoned them. After the Lord’s Prayer we belted out the national anthem: ‘Oh Land of the Gods by the Carib Sea, our tran-quil haven of dem-o-cra-cy!’
    English is the official language of Belize, and though everyone speaks Spanish or Mayan at home, school is taught in English. It is an English ever so slightly unfamiliar; ‘Don’t vex me now,’ Don Carmen said when a student misbehaved. Or he might ask one of us to ‘fetch’ the chalk. At home on Long Island I’d struggled hopelessly over phonetics worksheets; in Don Carmen’s class, because of my English, I was the star pupil. It was in Belize that I finally learned to read.
    The texts were Dick and Jane primers, yellow and cracked. In San Antonio, Dick and Jane read like fantasy. Spot, their pet, bore no resemblance to the lean, mangy dogs with narrow faces who fought and copulated in the dusty streets. And it was impossible to believe that Dick and Jane had ever had head lice, or used old newsprint for toilet paper, or been struck with a ruler. Don Carmen’s corporal punishment, if the class grew noisy, consisted of going around the room with a ruler, making us stand and slapping each of us on the palm; the slap was called a ‘cookie.’ This was a joke by San Antonio standards, where fathers used belts to discipline their children. But I was so scared the first time I held out my palm that when I sat down I missed the chair, landed hard on the concrete floor and began to cry.

    The village ran on sugarcane. At five in the morning when the cane trucks rattled down the hill and turned onto the road near our house, Shelly and I would wake in the dark to see their headlights slide along the walls. During the day, while Shelly, Maely and I copied Don Carmen’s handwriting off the blackboard and Balbina washed laundry and made tortillas, Froylan worked in the cane fields. The price of sugar had shot up and all the young men and some of the old ones had switched from farming corn to cane. They worked land that they carved out of the jungle and leased from the government for a few pennies a hectare. The cut cane went to the sugar refinery in nearby Orange Walk. There are two ways to harvest sugarcane: You can cut it green, or you can burn the field first to scare off the snakes and get rid of the dead leaf. If you burn cane it goes sour quickly, so it needs to be rushed to the refinery before it spoils.
    There were few vehicles in San Antonio: a military jeep, Don Roque’s tractor, my uncle’s red Volkswagen. The men who owned cane trucks took lavish care of them. Each truck had a name. My mother painted a singing bird on the door of one called the Troubadour. They came through town loaded with cane and chased by a gang of children. Sugarcane looks like bamboo. The inside is white and fibrous and sweet. We once passed a loaded cane truck parked in frontof the school andShelly grabbed one of the ropes, clambered up to the top and began throwing canes down to the rest of us.
    When Froylan came home from cutting burned cane, the sweet smell of