Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our
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Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

craborchardreview.siu.edu
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22.03.2013 Views

Carne Norte Sundays 78 ◆ Crab Orchard Review Luisa A. Igloria It comes from Brazil or Argentina, nowadays even Taiwan or the United Arab Emirates, far-off kingdoms where expatriates like us with the occasional hankering for some taste of home, hunker over bowls of garlic fried rice topped with a spoonful of sauteed carne norte and onions (a little goes a long way). We like best how you can take off the rectangular roofs and their quarter-inch rims with a little key. We scroll round and round, tearing off a bit of the red label where the black and white cow stands in a too-green meadow. No one is put off by the lining of lard, the pink striations in the compressed faux side of beef. Did I say home? Tin roof, hard rain, noisy dining room, all hands talking at the same time. The slowest get the drippings from the pan.

Donna Hemans Lucky My mother has become an icon of sorts. A Jamaican woman, a nurse, she has learned to fly a plane late in her life, and in her first solo attempt, the tiny plane she was flying developed the sort of mechanical difficulties that would scare even an experienced pilot. But my mother brought the plane down smoothly, landed it on a highway cleared of traffic, and walked out into the midst of television crews and newspaper and wire service reporters ready to cast the day’s latest hero onto the world. She held her head down, modest in that moment of glory. My mother, who wiped her hands of mothering the day I turned eighteen, is the new shadow on my life. On my eighteenth birthday, my mother turned to me and said she was done mothering. “I raised two self-sufficient children,” she said. “I don’t expect to be bailing you out for the rest of your lives.” We had dinner, and then she went to fly a plane, her first solo flight. Those who know me are now expecting me to exhibit my mother’s bravado, as if that brand of heroism is excreted in breast milk and lies latent until an appropriate future moment. What seeped into me is her manner of speaking, the milk of the mother permanently imprinted on the child. Try as I did to sound like American children, I couldn’t. Somewhere in my childhood in this very same America where I was born, my mother implanted the idea that we, my brother and I, were not fully Americans, and would never, ever be truly African-American, no matter which slang we picked up, no matter which style of clothes we wore, no matter what letters or numbers or designs my brother tried to shave into his hair, so we should just as well accept that we were Jamaican and she would be raising Jamaican children even this far away from the Caribbean island. By way of explaining all this, she said that when growing up she was never allowed to speak Jamaican patois in her parents’ presence, so she grew up speaking the King’s English (which king, I don’t know), and sounding sometimes like a foreigner in her own country. Foreigner as she was, taunted as she was, that is what she expected of us. Anyhow, my mother’s reincarnation from nurse and wife and Crab Orchard Review ◆ 79

Carne <strong>No</strong>rte Sundays<br />

78 ◆ <strong>Crab</strong> <strong>Orchard</strong> <strong>Review</strong><br />

Luisa A. Igloria<br />

It comes from Brazil or Argentina, nowadays<br />

even Taiwan or the United Arab Emirates,<br />

far-off kingdoms where expatriates like us<br />

with the occasional hankering for some taste<br />

of home, hunker over bowls of garlic fried rice<br />

topped with a spoonful of sauteed<br />

carne norte and onions (a little goes a long<br />

way). We like best how you can take off<br />

the rectangular roofs and their quarter-inch rims<br />

with a little key. We scroll round and round,<br />

tearing off a bit of the red label where the black<br />

and white cow stands in a too-green<br />

meadow. <strong>No</strong> one is put off by the lining of lard,<br />

the pink striations in the compressed<br />

faux side of beef. Did I say home? Tin roof,<br />

hard rain, noisy dining room, all<br />

hands talking at the same time. The slowest<br />

get the drippings from the pan.

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