Margarita Engle

The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba.

City life is a whirl of poetry readings and forbidden tertulias, gatherings where young and old, rich and poor, male and female, dark and light— runaway slaves and freed ones, former masters and former servants—all take turns sharing secret verses rooted in startling new ideas. Each evening, I go home with a mind that glows in the light of words, which leap like flames...

Books are door-shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone. But my mother believes that girls who read too much are unladylike and ugly, so my father's books are locked in a clear glass cabinet. I gaze at enticing covers and mysterious titles, but I am rarely permitted to touch the enchantment of words. Poems. Stories. Plays. All are forbidden. Girls are not supposed to think, but as soon as my eager mind begins to race, free thoughts rush in to replace the trapped ones. I imagine distant times and faraway places. Ghosts. Vampires. Ancient warriors. Fantasy moves into the tangled maze of lonely confusion. Secretly, I open an invisible book in my mind, and I step through its magical door-shape into a universe of dangerous villains and breathtaking heroes. Many of the heroes are men and boys, but some are girls so tall strong and clever that they rescue other children from monsters.

Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper. Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones. The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule. Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s quijada, to make the blunt teeth rattle. Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks. A cow bell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra. On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.

The Glass Frogs you can't see us not like those golden frogs flashing their beauty because we're not here pretend we're not here you can't eat us we'd taste like clear air we're transparent invisible until night when stars pass through us moonlight flows into us we start to sing we need to sing we love to sing sing sing sing

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.

Henry from the island of Jamaica Jamaican digging crews have to sleep eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses like the ones where big wooden crates of dynamite are stored. My hands feel like scorpion claws, clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day, then curled into fists at night. At dawn, the steaming labor trains deliver us by the thousands, down into that snake pit where we dig until my muscles feel as weak as water and my backbone is like shattered glass. But only half the day is over. At lunchtime, we see sunburned American engineers and foremen eating at tables, in shady tents with the flaps left open, so that we have to watch how they sit on nice chairs, looking restful. We also watch the medium-dark Spanish men, relaxing as they sit on their train tracks, grinning as if they know secrets. We have no place to sit. Not even a stool. So we stand, plates in hand, uncomfortable and undignified. Back home, I used to dream of saving enough Panama money to buy a bit of good farmland for Momma and my little brothers and sisters, so that we would all have plenty to eat. Now all I want is a chair. And food with some spice. And fair treatment. Justice.

Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved ones behind. They don't even know if anyone survived. When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba, she fills the twining words with relatives. But when I ask my Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood in a village near snowy Kiev, all she reveals is a single memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond. Apparently, the length of a grown-up's growing-up story is determined by the difference between immigration and escape.

On an island of music in a city of drumbeats the drum dream girl dreamed of pounding tall conga drums tapping small bongó drums and boom boom booming with long, loud sticks on bit, round, silvery moon-bright timbales. But everyone on the island of music in the city of drumbeats believed that only boys should play drums so the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet secret drumbeat dreams. At outdoor cafés that looked like gardens she heard drums played by men but when she closed her eyes she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind-wavy palm trees in a flower-bright park she heard the whir of parrot wings the clack of woodpecker beaks the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts and the dragon clang of costumed drummers wearing huge masks. At home, her fingertips rolled out their own dreamy drum rhythm on tables and chairs… and even though everyone kept reminding her that girls on the island of music have never played drums the brave drum dream girl dared to play tall conga drums small bongó drums and big, round, silvery moon-bright timbales. Her hands seemed to fly as they rippled rapped and pounded all the rhythms of her drum dreams. Her big sisters were so excited that they invited her to join their new all-girl dance band but their father said only boys should play drums. So the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming and drumming alone until finally her father offered to find a music teacher who could decide if her drums deserved to be heard. The drum dream girl’s teacher was amazed. The girl knew so much but he taught her more and more and more and she practiced and she practiced and she practiced until the teacher agreed that she was ready to play her small bongó drums outdoors at a starlit café that looked like a garden where everyone who heard her dream-bright music sang and danced and decided that girls should always be allowed to play drums and both girls and boys should feel free to dream.

Harry Franck, from the United States of America - Census Enumerator I came to Panama planning to dig the Eighth Wonder of the World, but I was told that white men should never be seen working with shovels, so I took a police job, and now I've been transferred to the census. I roam the jungle, counting laborers who live in shanties and those who live on the run, fugitives who are too angry to keep working for silver in a system where they know that others earn gold. When islanders see me coming, they're afraid of trouble, even though I can't arrest them anymore—now all I need is a record of their names, ages, homelands, and colors. The rules of this census confound me. I'm expected to count white Jamaicans as dark and every shade of Spaniard as semi-white, so that Americans can pretend there's only one color in each country. How am I supposed to enumerate this kid with the Cuban accent? His skin is medium, but his eyes are green. And what about that Puerto Rican scientist, who speaks like a New York professor, or the girl who says she doesn't know where she was born or who her parents are—she could be part native, or part French, Jamaican, Chinese ... She could even be part American, from people who passed through here way back in gold rush days. Counting feels just as impossible as turning solid mountains into a ditch.