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By Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez
For Oakland, forever.
When Jesus walked He walked on concrete. Barefoot over sidewalk glass and sewer slits. His body a crisp white t-shirt and his blood pooled on the street. His disciples followed in basketball shorts– stomachs bloated with rice dinners and heels pruned with weight. They carried crosses around their necks in gold. Even if they faded silver, even if their skin shaded green. Loyalty weighs more than pride– at least that’s what my Mama says. After He vanished they kept on walking. Over glass. On ash. Through the smog, to the smoke.
Bethlehem is in Oakland, on the corner of Foothill and High. It’s beneath an overpass, plump with bodies that stand together in something like worship. Their eyes follow cars turning in discs, ears pierced with zirconia and rubber squealing on pavement. As they walk toward it they listen to crashing, a bumper swerves and strikes a hydrant. Water shoots up like a Fourth of July sparkler and the first summer rain smacks down onto Foothill. Air cakes beneath Air Forces– the last time they ran this fast an ice-cream truck circled the block, a pitbull raced down Bancroft, a gun shook ripe and ready.
People say Oakland is beautiful for all the wrong reasons. Somewhere in that manmade lake someone is drowning. Somewhere in Piedmont’s gutters there’s blood. East Oakland became East Oakland because it was East, pushed to a thumbnail edge and hidden beneath skin. But you’d never be able to tell now. Now people from all over come to find hostels. Walking backwards into a nativity not to witness birth, but to witness murder. To see pools of red cradled in their white palms. White people fled violently and returned violently, and now everybody has to become nocturnal just to see faces as dark as theirs against the sky.
So they push forward in darkness to witness birth. They leap over wire fences, their ankles grazing barbed wire, their skin bloody and unafraid. Everybody’s stepped on worse: their mama’s needle, their daddy’s toes. Through the cement they see smoke a block down. When they find the mouth of the 880 their heels skid to a stop.
They point their fingers like smoking pistols. Shoot sharp fingertips at glistening spinning rims, their round silver reflecting off of their chrome teeth. They gather with broad bodies in an open circle, their sneakers wet between a four-way intersection. Atop them, cars sandwich along a freeway shoulder, drivers stand atop the hoods of their cars, legs dangle from the ledge of the highway. Everyone gasps with every sharp turn, night air whistling between gold teeth. Their chests swell with lungfuls of exhaust, they cough black for days.
Kids are round-mouthed and wide-eyed. They watch cars loop in circles wide like mango seeds, tight like peach stones. Everything cycling like sirens on a cul-de-sac, white fingers pointing at brown bodies, oranges sold on the side of the street, mothers mothering mothers, bullets perforating skin, their father’s hand on their mother’s face.
Hands are tight on a steering wheel and heads pop out from a sunroof, howling to a moon no one’s looking up to see. And then a fist hooks like a needle, and a nose runs like tap water. Then, a pop. Hail Mary and Joseph, blood mixes holy on the street. It stains a white t-shirt both in unity and separation. It’s July but it never thunders in Oakland. When the shot rings, they all know what the sound is.
Everyone scatters. Trails down Foothill, Bancroft, and High. When they sprint home they run in the center of the road and stop to catch their breath on a street divider. They wink an eye up to the moon, jab their fingernails up to scale. They eye constellations, study them before they disappear into a dawn of light. Before everything is interrupted with the newscast forecasting brown violence– a bleaching reminder that the streets get cleaned come sunrise.
They slow their run to a walk for the first time in an hour. They balance their feet on yellow dividing lines, approaching their porches with their shirts scented of salt and gasoline. One of them shifts— Did you see that swerve? All of them nod, all of them cross themselves, all of them say amen.
What Would I Want? Sky (creative nonfiction)
Para mis estudiantes.
Second Tuesday of the school year and my students are chanting their weather poem on the hopscotch tiles. BART trains pass above them. Today is Tuesday yesterday was Monday tomorrow will be Wednesday the season is summer the weather is sunny and cold. They keep asking me about the sky– what makes clouds so big and why does the sun look
like an orange and what makes the sky the color blue? They’re learning about weather patterns but don’t understand the inconsistency of the summertime. Honestly, me neither. They kick their new shoes on the slate and look up at the sky cracked in two colored halves. Then they stare at me with eyes wide like pitted stomachs. I blink. All I know is that the weather hopscotches on the sky. They glance up and watch the sky match their capped teeth and say– hey teacher, what if it rains? So I shrug– yeah what if it rains, what would come down? And they tilt their heads and laugh: baby dogs, what if it rained baby dogs? I always wanted a dog but my dad said maybe when I turn six. You have a dog? So does my cousin. The dog is brown like me. No, no what if it rained money? Big, big money! One wipes milk from his mouth– what if it rained police? It rained police and robbers, and in the air the police shot the robbers. He sets his milk down to point his fingers like a gun. His hands are dripping white. They look at me and say teacher what do you want it to rain, you play the game. I look at the chalk lines on the concrete. I can’t say all the things I’m thinking: we’re bilingual in this classroom but there’s no language that exists to say you imagine it raining their child support checks. Money, big big money, so fat it could power-wash the windows of this school so that when they looked outside the sky would stand uninterrupted. What if it rained fathers black and blue with bruises they give themselves in the mirrors of gas station bathrooms– sprinkled mothers tired from loading their backs with their children’s fathers and tired from loading their hands with their children’s children. Poured parents dark blue as new denim and rained their children who carry their blues but lighter: that’s how it works, right? We all carry blue– it demands to be carried. What if it rained true red and true blue uniforms– no burgundy, no navy– because Oakland didn’t draw lines and draw blood the way that it does. It should rain contraband bandanas and rosaries confiscated in the drawer of the principal’s office. Pour the tire marks and bullet casings on the street behind the playground. What if it rained the mural a few blocks down from East 12th behind the McDonald’s behind the Dollar Tree behind the unhoused encampment that says “I LOVE MY OAKLAND.” It should pour the people this city belongs to and we should be drenched guilty in blood and then stand stiff in a drought. What if it hailed BART trains shooting faster than bullets– my student’s pistoled fingers pointing at its slate and the train pointing back all the names that expired on its platforms. What if it rained the cushioned seats on BART that feel like sleeping on my Mamá Mamá’s couch when the sideshows dragged outside– and honestly that’s why I’m upset there are plastic seats on the new trains. I never said goodbye to her house and now I drive by it all the time because school is just a block away. Whoever sleeps on that couch slept where I slept and really that’s intimacy. What if it rained every goodbye I never got to say and in the downpour I finally got to shake my father’s hand. Not like when I shook it at the church when my Mamá Mamá finally died, but shake it enough to understand I’d be shaking my own hand. What if it rained my face and what if it rained my father’s face and what if it rained Jason’s father’s face. Jason who pulled on my pant leg on the first day of school and said– teacher, I don’t know where my dad is but he usually says bye to me before work and he hasn’t in a week, where do you think he is?
It should rain me standing there with my face puddled on the classroom floor and my hands still. I should’ve said something. I should’ve done better. I look down into their eyes, discs of brown in all the blue, and realize I can’t say all that. They didn’t ask for all that. It starts sprinkling. I cut recess short. They line up with their hands hooding their faces and I think of my Mamá Mena saying that every time it rains, my guardian angel Gabriel is crying from all my misbehaving. I don’t know what I did wrong but lately I’m seeing blue everywhere. Blue in the tongues, blue in the moms swallowing baking soda, blue in the grandmas checking their blood sugar, blue in the tías crossing themselves. It starts pouring and I think maybe this is God spitting. Even God has to spit, even His spit sticks down. Everyone ducks inside and I say it should just rain water. None of them are listening anymore but my mouth is silver like theirs, running wide like a faucet. Water water water— how many sounds are in water, sound it out, you can do it. Wuh-awh-t-urr— is that four our five? Show me with your fingers. It should rain water. I close the door all kinds of shut, afraid water will hit their heads, afraid something bigger will flood the classroom. They settle on the carpet and listen as puddles form on the black top, the only swimming pools any of them have ever seen. I look at their round faces that shift like moons and know that this ending is not an ending but just a filler. A silver cap on a growing tooth. Next year more eyes will hollow my stomach when they ask about the sky. I’ll pull dried liquid glue from my palms and still see my own skin– if it’s not in the sky, it’s in my hands. I’ll pray, I’ll swim, I’ll sit in the school parking lot. I’ll watch rainwater inch onto my car tires and panic. I’ll think of doing something new.
I’ll blacken my heels running. I’ll purple my knees talking to God. I’ll close my eyes from being tired and find my insides painted blue.
Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez is a writer from Oakland, California. Her is primarily focused on the intersections between the Latinx experience, urban communities, and personal trauma. She is primarily a fiction writer, but experiments with other forms of writing including flash fiction and memoir. Alongside writing, she is currently a bilingual fifth-grade teacher in San Leandro, California. She is passionate about literacy for young folks and narratives about students of color. You can follow her at @carolinaixta on Twitter and Instagram.