Once Liliane tried to get me to go to Casa de Nuestro Mundo for Borinquen extravaganza: poets and performance artists from the island and all us Nuyoricans. I told her I wasn’t going cause I wasn’t into being snubbed by white Latins from Ponce or San Juan whose legitimacy was founded on how well they spoke Spanish and how uncolored they were. Like most descendants of slaves from any place, Liliane was committed to the notion that slavery some other where in some other tongue was less pernicious than what she knew. I read Guillén to her, Luis Palos Matos, Pedro Albiza Campos, Jose Luis González. I read to her in Spanish all about the scum, the vicious degradation of our people by Spaniards, criollos, and their precious mulattos. But like a child who’s gotta have her hands held in the fire to know it burns, off she went. And the Spanish-speakin’ white boys went crazy, when the spanglesh-speakin’, maybe only English-speakin’, maybe not white enough mainland Ricans performed. She had to get out the way of flying chairs and fists cause the white boys, los blancos, felt their true heritage violated by the hybrid: by the colored hue of the language we created and our skins as telling and African as the bata. One more illusion lost. I just asked her why she thought I callt her mi negra. Why from me the word would never hurt: negra, mi negra, Liliane. Don’t you understand bringin’ one bloody colored Rican in the house, bathing him, nursing him, giving him money to get out of town is not gonna free Puerto Rico. Gettin’ bullets taken outta the limbs of independisto’s women, that ain’t gonna free Puerto Rico. It ain’t gonna free you neither, negra, mi negra bella, when they land on your bell in the middle of the night or an O.D. or with the hell beat out of em by some more radical independistos or anti-independistos. They was too out of it to know more than somethin’ happened, man. Can you and Lili help me out? This once, man, okay? Liliane’d always go to some corner and begin some ritual or other with candles and fruit, pictures of the Virgin Mary, Santa Barbara, Santa Cecilia, San Raphael. She’d hum her rosary and look at me til I felt my bones ache from the hurt welling from her eyes, or her mouth. Her mouth hadda way of curlin’ round itself, like when ya eatin’ pomegranates I’d see her like that with her lips, makin’ shapes like she was tryin’ to drink me, all my juices, and I’d forget whoever was round and I’d have to have her talk, just for me, just the way our language is, and sometimes she’d curse me, push or throw one of her sacred objects, but she would talk and she would go get the cassette for me. Then her face was calm. Then I knew, she’d let go of everythin’ but me. I’m smilin’ now, cuz once the music was on, her eyes closed and I told her what she’d see and she answered me, in my tongue. Sometimes, she almost prayed in my tongue and then I’d tell her a story. I’d hold her and tell her, keep your eyes closed and listen. Escuchame. Escuchame cariña.