Enemies at the Gate?

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A man with the body of a boy peddles up the pitted road. His wheels send small puffs of hopeful dust up to God and crush harvester ants that do not recognize the border between safety and peril.

He leans his rusted bike against the fence and rattles the gate with the tentative gesture of one who would ask for something. A woman comes out, just as tentatively.

“Please, lady, work for me?” he implores with head bowed, braced to sustain the blow of another no.

Awash in conflicting monolingual ignorance, basic questions and answers are elusive; subtleties seem impossible. The woman wonders: How did you come to be here; do you understand I have a child and a mortgage and hence no piles of money laying about; but do you camp in a barranca, under an oleander hedgerow, it’s toxic leaves for your pillow; do you endure usurious fees for sending meager earnings home to family; do you suffer here, yet remain?

“OK, Señor, trabajo para usted.” Giving him work is easier than not, easier in many ways.

She points to the neglected fruit trees, the tools. He understands the task. And she flees inside to avoid his simple poverty, her unsettling discomfort. But he soon follows her with a quiet knock on the door.

“Perdone, please, lady, sandwich for me?”

She puts out food and cash and flees even further — to spend four times the man’s pay on cheeses, meats, on produce marked up for the honor of being out of season, harvested by his compatriots on distant lands.

When she returns from the market, he is gone, his dishes stacked neatly, the napkin folded, and much more work completed than requested.

Embarrassed by her suspicions, she resists checking the jewelry box and instead puts away her bounty and forgets about the man.

Until another day.

He returns to rattle the gate and ask again for work. She points again to the trees, the tools, and goes in to cook for him while he toils.

“Señor,” she comes back out, “food — comida.”

“¿Es para mí?” He is surprised; he had not asked to be fed this day.

He looks into her eyes for the first, fleeting time, revealing his dark brown sadness and one opalescent orb that does not see the physical world around him. “Gracias,” he says. “Dios te bendiga.”

She wants to hug him, but the line between them is formidable. Instead, she touches his gnarled hand and carries his blessing inside, and she ponders what it is about him that frightens people into hate. Do we imagine this man with the body of a boy and an eye that cannot ogle our opulence becomes, in greater numbers, a ravenous beast, greedily consuming our rich resources, stealing our comforts, rending from us what is manifestly ours?

And what if he did not migrate across the border, if others did not follow him, even then, could we possibly believe our schools would suddenly be adequately funded; our healthcare system would tend to all our ills; our emergency rooms would no longer bear the brunt of ailing, child-bearing indigents; our jails would become under-populated; our social services would enjoy a surplus of unclaimed resources; the graffiti, the roadside litter, the illicit drugs, the sins ascribed to the unwanted would all be swept up and away in a wave of homogeneous consideration?

No, she imagines, in the immigrant’s absence, people still would complain about misspent funds, about inequity in the allocation of the nation’s resources, about things and people and motivations we don’t understand. Still we would bellow our fear, our frustration, our prejudice, drowning out his soft supplications for labor and a sandwich.

The man comes to the woman’s gate to work and to eat — and to hope — the same reason we all rattle the gate.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photograph of migrant worker camp, 1939, courtesy of Library of Congress.)