Chapter Four: A Childhood Greeting for the New Immigrant Neighbors

The Miami streets steamed with anxiety. Rashes of new immigrants have flooded them, a steamroller of culture and language sweeping the roads inside the traffic-clogged, square grids of Miami’s neighborhoods.

The scent of sweet Cafe Cubano and grilled meat sandwiches called media noche filled the air of a small new enclave christened Little Havana, commonly known as Calle Ocho. It was 1960.

Catholicism broke the foothold of the Protestant and Jewish immigrants who came several decades earlier. Churches named after saints sprung up among the coconut palm-covered flat lands of a new Latin populace.

It appeared that the island of Cuba drifted northward, its fast Latin beat, old and young, glorious among a gluttonous pursuit of American freedom.

Amid a cultural metamorphosis, a small caterpillar of a city strung along the Southeast Florida coast recast itself into an international Latin butterfly megalopolis.

Miami came into its own in America. The magic of multiculturalism arrived.

Scores of upper and middle-class Cubans brought a sense of knowledge, adventure, and skepticism to American life. New language minority next-door neighbors babbled in their native tongues, as locals turned their ears the other way, not open to playing with a language and culture unknown to them. That is, except for the Hammerstein family.

My neighborhood, picturesque, had just been planted with leafy trees that could handle South Florida’s heat and humidity. From a water-focused perspective, the neighborhood began where Biscayne Bay meets Coral Gables and Coconut Grove on its western shores. That’s the location where the bay feeds into the Coral Gables waterway, a spider web of canals that runs through the suburban jungle. Sunrise Harbor is a mini-Venice-like neighborhood of four canals, each running west to east from the Coral Gables Waterway, which sits near the Coral Gables-Coconut Grove border.

The entire area had limited development; a house here and there, but mostly vacant lots covered with Australian pines in the 1960s. My house was across the street from the end of the first canal that led to the waterway. Our front yard looked out on a weed-infested area that led to the seawall of the canal; its wood-planked docks lined with mostly white Chris-Craft boats scattered on each end.

Peeking out my window, I spotted my mother, Eleanor, on the front lawn with a mug of coffee in one hand, and picking up the newspaper with the other, as the wind muted her voice and formed rivulets in the pair of pajamas, pink with navy polka-dots that adorned her svelte body.

“Good morning!” she belted. I couldn’t view the person she was greeting.

She shook off the thick dew from the newspaper’s cellophane bag with one hand while balancing the coffee with the other.

I grabbed a pair of shorts off the lime-green shag carpeting of my bedroom and scuttled out to the wooden front door of our Coral Gables, Florida home. Then I skipped through the small courtyard outside to get to the iron front gate of our Miami modern home.

The wind rustled. The red flowers of the bottlebrush trees fluttered as I passed.

Once I got outside past the front gate, both women, my mother and the new neighbor, were animated in conversation like two beautiful cartoon princesses, each standing with a newspaper under their arm.  Mother had put our newspaper under her arm while still holding an empty coffee mug.

I stared at the two women and mumbled, “Oh boy! A new neighbor. I hope they have kids!”

I approached my mother as she outstretched her arms, the newspaper falling on the grass. I picked up the paper. Her arm grasped my shoulder adoringly, pushing me toward her side.

Then she bent down while smiling at the other woman and advised softly, “We have a new neighbor who just moved in next door. Please say hello and welcome them to the neighborhood!”

“This is my magnificent son Marvin. He’s five years old and wondered if there are any kids in your family,” Eleanor said proudly.

“Hello,” the neighbor said to me, reaching out her hand. “I’m Magdalena.”

She patted my head as I sank into my mother’s stomach.

Moving slowly away from my mother, showing a scintilla of independence, I asked, “Do you have any kids?”

Magdalena stooped down to my level, replying, “I have a daughter a little bit older than you.” She patted me on top of my fluffy curly hair. “She’s seven.”

“That’s old,” I said.

“You’ll have to meet her sometime,” Magdalena remarked with a jovial smile. “Her name is Dominque.”

I was excited. I liked girls better than boys. “Yes,” I quirked. “I’d like to meet her.”

The conversation the three of us had was pleasant, though after a while, I grew uninterested. Magdalena told us that she had flown in from Cuba because of problems with the government.

Peering up at both of them, I uttered, “Can I go now?”

Eleanor replied, “Oh yes, I have to make Marvin and his brothers some breakfast before they’re off to school.”

Eleanor grabbed my hand while I asked, “I can’t wait to meet the girl.”

“Her mom told me that she spoke both English and Spanish.”

“What’s Spanish?” I asked.

“It’s another way people speak when they come from somewhere else.”

About a half-hour later,  the doorbell rang. My mother and I went to the door. It was Magdalena and her little girl.

Dominique introduced herself, saying, “I’m Dominique. I’m seven years old and I’m your neighbor too.”

Her hair, pushed back to a tight braid, looked like a giant caterpillar on her back. She was about six inches taller than me and had a smile as wide as Florida’s peninsula.

My mother requested that the two of them come inside for a quick cup of coffee and glass of milk.

I was already dressed for school, as was Dominique.

“I have a bit of time before I walk the kids to the bus stop,” Eleanor remarked. “Sit down.”

Magdalena grabbed a chair to sit down. Eleanor pushed out a chair from under the table for Dominique, waving her hand for the little girl to sit down.

Eleanor lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Upon exhaling, she rasped, “Lovely to have you two here!”

“We came here from Havana, Cuba,” Magdalena explained, her smooth pale skin moving to show tiny signs of passing the time — a few early creases spread from her eyes and ran up and down from either side of her lips.

The word “Havana” caused her face to transform, making her look less beautiful by revealing a hurt like some angry person had shaken her.

Magdalena changed the subject. “We’re so happy to be in Florida. This is a beautiful neighborhood, and I’m looking forward to a good life here in America.”

My mother had been to Havana on her honeymoon and recalled it fondly, and reverted to the conversation about where Magdalena and Dominique immigrated from.

“Havana is gorgeous,” she said. “Big troubles there, though.”

“Oh sí,” Magdalena agreed while her face became distorted with mixed feels about what was said. “Batista is gone. Castro has taken over.”

My mother remarked sadly, “I know.”

Dead silence took over the kitchen.

I had no idea what they had been chatting about. “Maybe they were talking from a different place,” I thought.

I didn’t even know what a Cuban was. Still, the day Magdalena came, I had a good picture in my head that Cuba was a place where people spoke differently and that several children arrived in our neighborhood who didn’t speak English and could be from there.

When it came to Eleanor’s turn to share a little about our family, I felt proud to be an American. We learned to pledge allegiance to our flag in school, and that the United States is the greatest in the world.

The conversation reverted to Florida. “All right, Magdalena,” Eleanor lamented, “Florida is paradise, God’s country. I’m a New Yorker, born and raised, and it was hell, too cold and too damp with so much snow. “Excuse my language, honey,” she interrupted herself, looking over at Dominque and me.

“My husband, Harry — you’ll meet him — found a great job,” Eleanor said, the words swishing to the motion of her flipping wrist. “He’s an accountant — started his firm. I have children, and living here is a dream. I love it. You will too.”

Magdalena looked puzzled. So did I. Simply, my mother talked funny.

Reflecting on Eleanor’s language use reminded me that it was similar to that of a Stepford wife. She enunciated her words in the same way a college professor in literature spoke, as if she were Gertrude, Hamlet’s wife. She preferred not to miss one syllable, probably due to the desultory reading she engaged in for several hours a day.

“Reading,” she had often told me, trying to get me to change my mind about how much I hated reading, “Makes you smart.”

I grabbed my primer Dick and Jane readers, saying, “Mom! It’s time to catch the bus to go to school. The new neighbors agreed as Eleanor quickly escorted them out of the house.