Katya Cengel | The Atavist Magazine |November 2023 | 1,709 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 145, “The Truth Is Out There.”

Bruce Champagne stood in a small clearing next to a stump. It was mid-November 2022, and snow was already visible on the nearby mountains. All around Bruce were stands of reeds known as phragmites, some so tall they reached well over his head. Just a short walk away, through a swampy area, was the western edge of Utah Lake.

Bruce, a retired cop in his sixties, had come to this no-man’s-land to research a mysterious sighting. A few years back, an elderly couple living in a house on a nearby bluff saw something they couldn’t explain. The couple refused to recount their experience over the phone, so Bruce visited them at their home in Saratoga Springs, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. They told him that they went into the backyard one day because their dog was barking. Not far away, near a stump in the field behind the house, they saw a figure. A creature.  

It appeared to be six or seven feet tall. It was dark, hairy, and humanlike. The creature stood up, paused, then walked away, disappearing into the reeds. The whole thing lasted three or four seconds.

After he heard the couple’s account, Bruce measured the distance between the backyard and the stump. It was 60 yards, a range at which, Bruce knew, the couple would have been able to see the contrasting shades of clothing or skin. But they said that the creature was uniform in color. Bruce also noted that it was May when the sighting happened, which is when carp spawn in Utah Lake. Perhaps the animal, whatever it was, had been feeding.

Now Bruce was weighing whether it was worth placing game cameras in the area. He’d installed them at dozens of sites over the previous decade; a blue dot marked each location on a map on his computer. He told me that retrieving data from the cameras, usually after 30 days or so, felt like Christmas morning. Except in this metaphor, Bruce’s gifts always turned out to be socks and underwear. He spent a lot of time watching footage of deer and squirrels, because the cameras never caught what he was looking for: the relict hominoid Sasquatch, popularly known as Bigfoot.

Bruce considers himself a cryptozoologist, someone who searches for and studies animals whose very existence is disputed. Unlike some of the more eccentric types in the field, Bruce is organized and methodical. He has published papers every bit as dry as those in other areas of study—they just happen to be about relict hominoids, sea serpents, and lake monsters.

His specific obsession with Bigfoot began when he was a kid, more than 50 years ago. In fact, it was right around the time his father disappeared. Bruce is reluctant to allow that the two things might be connected, but it’s hard to see it any other way.

Bruce hasn’t looked for the truth about what happened with his father nearly as hard as he’s looked for Bigfoot. Still, the truth keeps finding him and his family. Over the past five decades, revelations about a man who left home one day and never came back have taken Bruce and the rest of the Champagnes by surprise—again and again and again.

1.

Bruce’s parents met in the Navy. Alan Champagne, the oldest of five from an East Coast family, joined up right out of high school. Lynn Marie Brown enlisted after a brief stint in college studying art. An eccentric young woman who loved science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, Lynn was 19 when the couple married. After several more years in the Navy, including a posting in Japan, Alan and Lynn settled in Bakersfield, California, a sprawling city of oil wells and orchards populated by the descendants of dust bowl migrants. It was where Lynn had grown up.

Alan found work in the communications sector and then as a probation officer. He attended and graduated from college while working. Lynn took care of the children. There were four boys—Bruce, Brad, Brian, and Barry—and one girl, Deirdre, whom everyone called DeeDee. The boys all had the same middle name: Alan.

Bruce was the oldest. His dad took him shooting, and Bruce used his father’s Winchester 12-gauge. Once when they went fishing at a bass pond, Alan oared out in a rowboat to dislodge a fish his son had caught when it became tangled in some underwater weeds. He could have cut the line, but Alan wanted to make sure Bruce saw the fish he’d caught.

Alan also liked to fish in the ocean. Bruce didn’t go on longer fishing trips, like the one his father scheduled in the late winter of 1972. On Friday, March 10, Alan drove two and a half hours from Bakersfield to Morro Bay, a small community about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was meeting a group of friends who worked in law enforcement; they would be gone for the weekend.

Morro Bay got its name from the 576-foot volcanic plug sitting at the mouth of the narrow channel connecting the bay to the Pacific—morro means “snout” in Spanish. The harbor, completed in the 1940s, was a popular launch point for recreational fishing and boating. But there were times, especially in winter, when big swells made navigating the foggy channel treacherous.

According to the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol logbook, word that Alan’s fishing trip was in trouble reached shore at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. Someone reported that they’d heard a voice calling out for help from a sandspit stretching like a spindly finger up the bay’s western edge. The voice belonged to 15-year-old Steven Stranathan. The boat he was on that morning had capsized.

Steve had been excited to embark on his first fishing trip with a group he called “the guys.” It included Steve’s stepdad, Jack Stranathan, 58, a deputy sheriff and veteran of the Navy and Coast Guard; Joseph Boydstone, 64, a doctor at a Bakersfield jail; and Harry Morlan, 58, and Irlan Warren, 39, both probation officers like Alan, who at 32 was the youngest of the adults aboard.

Steve would later remember kneeling next to Alan just before the accident happened. They were on the cabin deck of a boxy, 28-foot leisure craft made by a company called Land N’ Sea. It was part boat, part travel trailer. It belonged to Jack, who was down below steering. The vessel was more than a mile south of the entrance to Morro Bay and a few hundred yards from the sandspit. The seas were rough. As the boat battled the waves, Steve joked to Alan, “Well, if we go, at least we’ll go laughing.”

The next thing Steve knew it was dark. The boat had split in two and capsized, and he was in the water trying to swim. The cowboy boots his stepdad had mocked him for wearing on the boat were dragging him down. Steve kicked them off, then wriggled out of his Levi’s, flannel shirt, and parka—everything but his underwear. He swam toward the surface. The water got brighter, then brighter still. Steve wondered if he’d make it. Just as he felt sure his lungs would explode, his head burst out of the water.

Steve saw his stepfather floating lifeless nearby. He also saw Harry Morlan clinging to the engines at the stern of the overturned hull. Steve and Harry managed to swim to the sandspit, where another body had washed up: It was Joseph Boydstone. Steve dragged him from the surf.

Soon a Harbor Patrol boat arrived. By 9 a.m. the Coast Guard cutter Cape Hedge was conducting a shoreline search of a five-mile area. Rescue personnel found debris from the boat: two fenders, a canopy. Irlan Warren was also found, alive. Irlan said that after being flung into the water, he swam to the surface. Sometime later, he was able to grab the boat’s propeller shaft and wait for rescue.

The only man unaccounted for was Alan.

At 10:57, an Army helicopter was dispatched to the scene, followed by one from the Navy. By 11:05, a Coast Guard plane had arrived. The pilots made low passes along the ocean side of the sandspit but found nothing.

Meanwhile a dozen firefighters and harbor patrolmen headed toward the white and yellow hull, which by then had beached. Scattered among the driftwood and kelp on the sand were ripped sections of fiberglass, a yellow seat cushion, and a paper plate. Using axes, a crowbar, and a power saw, the men cut a hole in what Land N’ Sea claimed was a “virtually unsinkable” boat. Someone reached into the boat’s cabin and pulled out a leather sandal and a gray plastic box. The crew shone a flashlight inside but couldn’t get a clear view. A rescuer was lowered headfirst into an opening, but if Alan’s body was inside he couldn’t see it.

The Navy tried to flip the hull upright. A rope was slipped under the bow and the other end was attached to a chopper. Three times an attempt was made to lift the wreckage, without success. Shovels came out, and men loosened the sand around the hull. On the fourth try, the helicopter was able to lift the hull and then slam it back down, right side up.

It was now 12:40. The tide was coming in, the ocean lapping at the men’s ankles. From the hull they pulled a waterlogged suitcase, a pillow, and a dented teakettle. Scouring the beach once more, they found a sleeping bag and a tabletop. But there was no body.

There never would be. Which was strange.

“We do have probably a disproportionate amount of accidents out here just because the coast is rough,” said Eric Endersby, who recently retired as director of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol. Endersby didn’t work the 1972 rescue, but he knows the history of the bay as well as anyone. He said that boating accidents resulting in death are rare. But what’s even more unusual is someone disappearing after a wreck. “If somebody’s lost in the surf, even if they sink, they eventually wash in just because all the wave energy pushes them,” Eric said.

“In my thirty years,” he continued, “we’ve never not recovered somebody.”

 Twelve US presidents — Washington, Jefferson and Clinton among them — lost fathers early in life. From the start of the 19th century to the outbreak of the second world war, 67 per cent of British prime ministers lost a father before their 16th birthday. “That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class,” writes Gladwell.

Perhaps these public figures, behind whatever resilience was forged in their early misfortune, wrestled with the same paradox. Bereaved children carry with them a mark of exception. But to live in the shadow of a lost parent is to also live with a pervasive feeling of absence and abandonment. In the decades after my father died, I often sensed a thin line between purpose and futility. It would never be possible to emulate the taintless ghost I held in my mind, and so the line between self-belief and self-loathing often felt thinner still.

By the time I was rewatching these videos as a teen, Dad never yelled at me. I’d learned how to keep him calm: Don’t complain. Don’t speak to him when he’s focused on a task. Be where he wants you to be at the precise time he wants you there. Do what he tells you to do immediately. Don’t talk back, don’t cry, don’t be noisy, don’t ramble about your obsessions — besides football. He liked to hear me talk about that.

As I’ve become an adult and struggled to manage my own temper, I’ve realized that Dad, like me, craved a calm and predictable environment, and his atypical eldest son’s chaotic energy destroyed his sense of equilibrium. I don’t fault him for this. His impatience, his need for control, his fury — these traits were a part of him long before I showed up. From what I can tell, we all have little or no control over who we are or how we operate. Our personalities just happen to us.

Gamblers get into trouble, not least vortices of debt, because they cannot help pitting themselves against fate. They know that luck is capricious, evasive, flighty, which is part of its dangerous appeal; but they’re also convinced that they can somehow divine it.

Those who study the phenomenon of loss aversion point out that what someone is willing to lose is always related to a reference point, and usually that reference point is the status quo: most people will put up with some degree of loss if it doesn’t upset their world too much. But if the point of reference is less stable the logic shifts. If you believe, as my father did, that you were born to have riches beyond compare then you will risk much more to lessen the gap between reality and expectation. If like me, however, the bar of your expectations is set differently, calibrated for reality, then your approach to risk is more calculated.

I wish that I could go back and tell my younger self that the world is kinder than I knew, or believed it to be. That opportunity did sometimes come knocking out of the blue. That emotional precarity is a state that one might gird oneself to wait out instead of put to the test, while expecting to fail. But I guess there are always some things one needs to learn the hard way. That cannot be learned in any displaced arena, or field of play, or even a funhouse palace, however defanged or neutered to protect against real loss.

Silver Falls, once an idyllic swimming hole and recreation spot for families in Texas, no longer exists. But why did the waterfalls go dry? Alemán went back home to investigate why, and on the trip unexpectedly uncovers memories of his father, who died in 2005 at age 50.

She struggles to put words together to tell me about a separate incident involving my father. It turns out my dad once saved a drowning child at Silver Falls. He pulled a 6- or 7-year-old boy out of the water and performed CPR. The boy’s parents were hysterical. Screaming. “They were sure he was gone,” she says. “He just pulled the boy out, right?” I say, puzzled. “No! Your dad brought the boy back,” my aunt emphasizes. “He was as limp as can be.”

I’d never heard this story, but it didn’t surprise me. My grandfather tells me a similar story from many years ago about my dad spotting an injured hiker stranded on a ravine, most likely in the Guadalupe Mountains, when he and his girlfriend were on their way to Mexico for a trip. He was able to flag down help and get aid to the woman. My dad died in 2005 at the age of 50—too young. But since he’s been gone, his stories keep finding their way to me.

I wanted to be that kid. I wanted to like cars and the smell of gasoline. I wanted to like making trips to Home Depot to search the aisles as if looking for ourselves: our eyes in the shades of paint, our skin tones in the wood, and our hearts in the steel frames of rolling red tool chests. I wanted to look like Dad, to think like Dad, to be like Dad. I wanted to have the same last name as him. But none of those things were possible. 

Watkins had stumbled into the heart of a dysfunctional system — the slow rolling of the process through inertia both intentional and not. From the outside, Watkins’s difficulties seem extreme, but it is entirely normal for individual cases to take multiple years to resolve.

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Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | excerpt from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir | October 2019 | 11 minutes (3,065 words)

Puerto Rico, 1985

Papi and I waited in the town square of Ciales, across from Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the Catholic church. He was quiet, stern-faced, his picked-out Afro shining in the sun, his white polo shirt drenched in sweat. Papi was tall and lean-muscled, with a broad back. He’d grown up boxing and playing basketball, had a thick mustache he groomed every morning in front of the bathroom mirror. Squinting in the sun, one hand tightened around his ring finger, I pulled off Papi’s ring, slipped it onto my thumb. I was six years old and restless: I’d never seen a dead body.

My father’s hero, Puerto Rican poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer, had just died. People had come from all over the island and gathered outside the parish to hear his poetry while his remains were transported from San Juan. Mami and Anthony, my older brother, were lost somewhere in the crowd.

During the drive from Humacao to Ciales, I’d listened from the backseat while Papi told the story: how Corretjer had been raised in a family of independentistas, how he’d spent his entire life fighting for el pueblo, for the working class, for Puerto Rico’s freedom. How he’d been a friend of Pedro Albizu Campos, “El Maestro,” who my father adored, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader who’d spent more than twenty-six years in prison for attempting to overthrow the US government. How he had spent a year in “La Princesa,” the prison where Albizu Campos was tortured with radiation. After his release, Corretjer became one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent activist writers.

In the car, Mami had lit a cigarette and rolled down her window, her cropped, blond waves blowing in the wind. She took a long pull from her cigarette, then let the smoke out, her red fingernails shining. My mother smoked like the whole world was watching, like she was Marilyn Monroe in some old movie, or Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface. Every time we left the house, my mother was made up from head to red-pedicured toes, her hair colored, her eyes dramatically set in eye shadow and a thick coat of mascara, with lipstick to match her nail polish.

While my mother smoked, not paying attention to my father’s story, Anthony slept beside me in the back, his mouth half open. My brother had no interest in stories, but I lived for Papi’s tales of magic and Boricua Robin Hoods, imagined myself as a character in them, riding a black horse into battle, slicing conquistadores in half with my razor-sharp machete.

It was my father who’d taught me to tie my shoelaces like rabbit ears, to catch fireflies at dusk, to eat ensalada de pulpo bought from chinchorros on the side of the road in Naguabo and Luquillo, to play chess. He’d told me stories of coconut palms that bowed to the sun, of jíbaros like his uncles and grandfather, who got up before daylight to cut cane in the cañaverales. Stories of machetes, sweat, and sugar, before paved roads and indoor plumbing and English. Stories of women: Lucecita Benítez, one of Puerto Rico’s most famous singers, who sang about race and liberation; Lolita Lebrón, who fought among men, taking up arms after La Masacre de Ponce; Yuíza, a Taíno cacica who would be resurrected, rising from ash and clay and blood to avenge the death of her people. His tales were spun of history and wind and poetry.

The funeral procession approached, a caravan of cars led by a white hearse—every car flying a Puerto Rican flag—moving slowly uphill toward the plaza, closer to the church, where arrangements of roses and lirios and carnations already waited. The crowd grew, hundreds of people approaching the square, some of them waving Puerto Rican flags. Papi watched them, never looked away, even when I yanked his hand this way and that way or when I tugged on the hem of his shirt, even as I picked up pebbles and flung them across the plaza at the pigeons. Not even to wipe the tears from his eyes. I wanted to ask about his tears, to remind him of what I’d heard Mami say while Anthony, during one of his tantrums, thrust himself against the walls of our apartment, then the floor: Los hombres no lloran.

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Papi and I moved through the crowd, the two of us zigzagging in between couples and families and students in their school uniforms, all of them waiting for their turn in front of the open casket. When we’d finally made our way to the front, I saw the man in the casket for the first time: in his seventies, balding, patches of white hair on the sides, pale, white mustache. I tried to memorize the lines around Corretjer’s mouth, the shape of his forehead, the arch of his eyebrows. I wanted to trace my fingers along the creases of his unmoving face, commit them to memory.

I don’t know how long Papi and I stood there in front of that open casket, as if in a trance, as if waiting for the rise and fall of Corretjer’s chest, my father voiceless, sweat trickling down his face. But I was sure of one thing: that I wanted everything my father wanted, and if he loved this man, then I would love him, too.

Months after Alaina was born, Anthony in the second grade, Mami working at a factory in Las Piedras, I spent my days at home with Papi. Abuela took care of Alaina while Mami worked, so I had Papi all to myself. He’d sit up in bed, reading to me from Juan Antonio Corretjer’s Yerba bruja or Hugo Margenat’s Obras completas or Julia de Burgos’s El mar y tú, a mug of café con leche in his hand. My father, who’d been a student at the University of Puerto Rico, had spent his college days writing protest poems and studying literature and the work of independentistas and activists.

I loved books because Papi loved books, and his were the first I tried to read. I was a kid trying to learn my father’s secrets, whatever mysteries he’d found in those pages that kept him from me for so many hours each day. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña didn’t involve a masked superhero using her spider powers to save innocent people from muggers or mad scientists. Or that Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros was not about a society made up entirely of dogs.

In my father’s books, I got lost in stories: children who sprouted eagles’ wings, a baby born with the curled tail of a pig, a man who spent a hundred years on an island prison mourning the loss of his lover but never aged a day, a woman who carried a pistol into a government building and opened fire.

***

One morning, I woke to find Papi in the bedroom I shared with Anthony, sitting at my desk, his back to me. He pulled dollar bills, wrinkled and folded, from a black garbage bag, unfolding them, lining them up in stacks. Our bedroom was cramped with our twin beds, Alaina’s crib, stacks of Papi’s books in a corner, our toys littering the floor. From my bed, under a nautical bedspread sewn by my mother, I watched him counting and bundling and fastening them with rubber bands, until the desk was covered with money.

There was another morning, and another, and another, and I learned not to ask questions, not to let slip what I knew about the money, about Papi’s hiding places: the top shelf in our closet, which Anthony and I couldn’t reach, the small suitcase under my parents’ bed, my father’s toolbox.

Every afternoon when my mother came home from the factory, my father left and went to the little plaza in El Caserío. And every afternoon I begged him to take me along, but he refused. I could play outside, but la plaza, he said, was no place for a girl.

“How come Anthony always gets to go?” I would ask Mami, yelling, slamming my fists on the kitchen counter. Anthony was never banned from any place, always got what he wanted because he was a boy.

But Mami, she didn’t take no shit. She’d pull me by the arm, the half-moons of her sharp fingernails biting into my skin, and shut me right up. She’d leave me sobbing, longing for something to lift this burden of girlhood.

***

One afternoon, outside our apartment building, I kicked off my chancletas and ran around on the front lawn, barefoot, looking for moriviví. It grew all over the neighborhood, a small plant with leaves that closed like tiny fists when you touched them, faking their own death, reopening when left undisturbed. I leaned down to touch it, running my fingers over it, until my friend Eggy, who lived two blocks over, showed up on his bike.

“Wanna go for a ride?” he called from the street. Eggy was my best friend, always wandering the streets because his mom didn’t pay him or his brother Pito any mind. He was brown, a dash of freckles across his nose and cheeks, his Afro always unkempt, his T-shirts always either too small or too big, with holes on the front. Eggy was too smart for his own good, always knew everybody’s business: whose husband crashed their car into a barbershop, who kissed who behind the elementary school, which boys got caught looking up the girls’ skirts on the playground.

I glanced back at our building, our balcony, our apartment’s open windows. Mami had told me to stay where she could keep an eye on me, but Papi was in the plaza, and I was dying to see what he did there, why girls weren’t allowed. So I climbed up on Eggy’s handlebars.

“Don’t drop me!” I said.

Eggy pedaled hard, making a left toward the building across the street, then past his building. We rode around to the back, the wind slapping my head, my curls blowing in my face. I held on to the handlebars, my bare feet in the air.

When we finally got to la plaza, a small square surrounded by two-story buildings, shaded by ceiba trees and flamboyanes, I hopped off the bike.

Next to one of the buildings, children’s clothes were drying on a clothesline. A homeless man slept on a discarded sofa, baking under the sun. Four hustlers, three men and one woman, played dominoes around a makeshift card table made from a large paint bucket and four milk crates used as chairs. Papi was standing among his stone-faced friends. Tecatos walked up to Papi, said something I couldn’t hear, handed him money, then disappeared behind the buildings.

“You know what they’re doing, right?” Eggy asked.

“What are they doing?”

“Your dad is selling them perico.”

I knew what perico was, just like I knew what tecatos were—Eggy had told me. His mother, he’d said, had sold all her jewelry and their TV to get perico. She would’ve sold the food in their fridge, if they’d had any.

Eggy got off his bike, leaned it against the building.

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I looked for my brother among the men, feeling betrayed, wondering how much he knew, if this was a secret he and Papi shared, something else they kept from me. But Anthony was not around.

My face hot, upper lip sweaty, I turned and started walking back home.

“Where you going?” Eggy called after me.

I kept walking, ignoring his question. Bare feet on the grass, then the sidewalk, on tiptoes, trying not to step on broken glass while crossing the street. As I reached the front of my building, I found one chancleta there, right where I’d left it. The other one gone. I leaned down and ran my fingers over all the moriviví. They each shriveled, leaf by leaf, dying their fake deaths. And me, pretending I’d been there all along, in case Mami looked out the window, stepped out on the balcony, asked where I’d been.

***

During the warm nights in El Caserío, I lay in the hammock on our first-floor balcony, listening to the coquis’ songs as they echoed through the whole neighborhood. Every night, at all hours, Papi’s friends came asking for him. I fetched my father when I saw them approaching, watched as he took their balled-up dollar bills and handed them their baggies over the railing. Some of them came by every day. Some of them, a few times a day.

I was rocking myself in the hammock when one of them strolled right up to our balcony, a man with a curved, jagged scar on his face extending from the corner of his lips all the way up to his eye.

“Is your father home?” he asked.

“No,” I said, even though my father was home. I lied without hesitating, without knowing why. Maybe I thought I was protecting my father. Maybe I sensed that something about this man was dangerous.

“Do you want to see what I’m holding?” the man asked, stepping closer. He looked past me, through the door into our living room. “I have something for you.”

I got up out of the hammock and walked over, thinking that maybe he’d hand me a few crumpled dollar bills to give my father. I wanted so much to believe him. But when I looked at his pants, down below his waist, he pulled out his dick.

It wasn’t like the ones I’d seen before—my brother’s, a baby cousin’s, or Eggy’s, which I saw once when he pulled it out and started pissing on a dead toad. Eggy’s had been no big deal. I’d been more interested in the toad, its carcass torn open and full of live maggots. Those other ones had been small, shriveled-up things. But this was something else. This was a grown man’s dick, swollen and thick and veiny. Horrifying.

At first I thought it was a mistake, that he’d meant to pull something out of his pocket and it somehow slipped out. But then, the smile on his face, the serrated edges of his sickle feather scar. I stumbled back.

“Papi!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. The man tore past the side of our building toward the cañaverales behind El Caserío.

Papi came out to the balcony, barefoot, wiping sleep from his eyes. But how could I explain what had just happened? From my mother, I’d learned that a girl’s body was special, that I should stay away from men, who were not to be trusted, that I should not let boys see my private parts, or let them show me theirs. How could I explain what the man had done without admitting that I’d stupidly let him? Years later I’d remember this moment, how I’d thought it was my own fault. How, ashamed, I thought of it like a secret that needed to be kept.

Standing there, heart pounding in my chest, I said nothing as my father rushed over, as he wrapped his arms around me, as he asked, “What’s wrong?”

I held my stomach, willing the tears to come, as Papi asked again and again, “What’s wrong? Where does it hurt?”

But I kept it to myself, just cried and cried, wilting like moriviví in his arms.

***

I adored my father. He was the center of my universe, and I wanted, more than anything else, to be the center of his. That whole year, I had Papi mostly to myself during the day. But when I didn’t, at least I had his books.

In my father’s books, I would learn about the genocide of the Taínos, about our island’s Taíno name, Borikén, which then became Borínquen, and later, Puerto Rico. About Africans who were brought through the Transatlantic slave trade, including part of our black family, although most of my father’s side came from Haiti right after the Haitian Revolution, and settled in Naguabo. In my father’s books, and in my father’s own stories, I would find our history:

Ponce, 1937

After Pedro Albizu Campos’ first imprisonment in La Princesa, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and civilians organized a march in protest. Puerto Ricans wanted independence from the United States, and from Blanton Winship, the US-appointed governor, who had not been elected by the people. They secured all the necessary permits, invited a marching band, gathered with their families after church. Men, women, and children headed toward the parade, where they would celebrate Palm Sunday with music and palm fronds.

Hundreds of people marched as the band played “La Borinqueña.” They were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear who shot their Tommy Guns directly at the crowd of unarmed civilians. Under Winship’s orders, the cops surrounded the demonstrators, leaving them no route for escape.

The shooting lasted about thirteen minutes, some people say. Others insist it was fifteen.

The police murdered nineteen people, and wounded about 235, including a seven-year-old girl, a man shielding his young son, and an eighteen-year-old boy looking out his window.

Witnesses said that as the cops walked by the dead or dying, they beat them with their clubs. Most of the victims who lay dead on the street, the evidence showed, were shot in their backs while running away from the gunfire.

Although an investigation by the US Commission on Civil Rights found that Governor Winship had ordered the massacre, none of the murderers were ever convicted, or even prosecuted.

This was our history, I would eventually learn. We’d come from uprisings against colonial rule, slavery, massacres, erasure. We’d carried histories of resistance, of protest.

And I would also learn that my father, even though he spent his days selling perico, was imagining some other life. All that time lost in his books, all those nights writing poetry and painting, every single dollar he stashed away—Papi dreaming of another place, where his kids could play outside, where he didn’t have to sell dope anymore. One day, he would tell me all his secrets, all the stories not meant for children: the other woman he’d loved, the baby who died before I was born, the army days. And I would write it all down, determined to remember.

Prohibido olvidar.

* * *

Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, Longreads, the Fader, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and included in The Best American Essays 2016. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Miami Beach with her partner, the writer Lars Horn. Ordinary Girls: A Memoir is her first book.

Published courtesy of Algonquin Books.

Longreads Editors: Sari Botton and Katie Kosma