My Heart Is In the Earth (Excerpt) by Wayne Greenhaw

Wayne Greenshaw was kind enough to contribute an excerpt from the first chapter of his book, My Heart Is In The Earth, True Stories of Alabama and Mexico, which talks of coming to San Miguel de Allende in 1958 at age 18.

I knew her only a few weeks, but it was long enough to make an impression that would last a lifetime.

I was eighteen. Filled with ambition to become a writer, I traveled south from my home in Alabama to a place very strange to me.

I caught a passenger train, the Southerner, from Tuscaloosa to New Orleans, the Southern Pacific to San Antonio, where I paid a taxi driver five dollars extra to rush me to a station across town, where a steam engine and two cars were ready to pull out and head across the south Texas desert to Laredo, where I climbed onto the Aztec Eagle and upgraded to a first-class Pullman berth for $14 American.

In the Pullman berth, I peeped from beneath the shade and saw my reflection in the glass. Outside was only darkness as we rumbled through the night. I slept fitfully, awakening several times, looking out, seeing nothing. I lay awake, wondering if perhaps we had passed my destination in the middle of the night. As my imagination worked, I shivered and pulled the covers up to my chin and closed my eyes.

When the Aztec Eagle stopped at the remote depot at 11 a.m., I stepped down with my two bags and portable typewriter. I was suddenly surrounded by children chirping like hungry, excited birds, all reaching toward me, grabbing eagerly at my bags.

No! I said. Get away!

When they persisted, I slapped at their dirty little hands.

No! I said.

They continued, grabbing and pulling.

As the train disappeared down the tracks, the tattered children carried my bags away. I ran after them, thinking my bags would disappear and I would be left without clothes, books or typewriter.

When I caught up with them, they were placing my bags into the trunk of the only car in the dusty yard. Next to the car stood a driver who asked in broken English if I needed a taxi. I looked around, saw no building other than the dusty depot and no other car. I nodded.

The children surrounded me. They poked their open palms toward me. Their large dark eyes stared hungrily, like baby birds at feeding time. I looked toward the driver, who ignored me.

While the driver slid under the wheel of his old car, I reached into my pocket, pulled out a handful of change, and tossed it toward the children.

I scrambled to get into the backseat while the children dropped to their knees and grappled for the coins.

Casa Jorado, por favor, I said.

The driver started out across the desert. No town in sight. Nothing but flat brown desert and hills in the distance.

Then came a shout behind us.

The driver slammed on brakes. The car slid to a stop.

I wanted to shout, Go! but I had already exhausted what little Spanish I knew. I felt helpless. I twisted and saw a man running toward us. He was saying something frantically. I had no idea what his words meant. He opened the door and slid inside. He turned and grinned and said something. I nodded.

The driver released the clutch and off we went across the desert in a cloud of dust.

Instantly, I wondered if I was being kidnapped. These two Mexicans were in cahoots. They would take me out into the desert -- a strange, desolate place to a boy who had known open pastures, thick forests, cottonfields and friendly villages of the South. I had never been away from home alone. Once, when I was a child, I traveled with Mama and my little brother by train to New York, where we lived near the Army post where Daddy was stationed on Staten Island. In the summertime of my youth we would travel as a family to Florida or the hills of east Tennessee. I had gone with friends to Panama City Beach, where we'd gotten drunk and acted fools, staying for five or six days. But I'd never been away for an extended time, and certainly never into a foreign country where I couldn't speak the language.

I was scared.

Then the car turned eastward. In the distance, spread over a hillside, was a town. White buildings glistened in the mid-day sun. In the middle of a labyrinth of pastel plaster walls shaped in various-sized rectangles was a giant pink steeple reaching high into the bright blue sky. It was the centerpiece of the photographs of the town of San Miguel de Allende I had previously seen in brochures advertising the Instituto Allende where I would attend classes this summer.

At the entrance to Casa Jorado, I passed through a large wooden door into a dark hallway where walls were covered with old photographs. Standing there, staring at the shadowy, faded faces of Mexicans from past generations, I heard the brusque sounds of Malaguena being played allegro on a slightly off-key piano.

At the end of the hallway the hacienda opened to a sunny garden with colorful jacarandal blooms, lemon trees, bougainvillea, and other flowering plants. To the left, through a high doorway, a young woman sat at a baby grand piano. She played the notes of Malaguena with verve, turning her dark head from side to side as though she were entertaining thousands in a huge concert hall. She was lost in the sound. When she stopped, halfway through, I applauded. She glanced toward me. Her face flushed pink. She ducked her head, turned, and fled to the far side of the large room.

Senorita? I called. But she was gone.

Behind me, from a dining room emitting the delicious fragrance of a Mexican comida with garlic and coriander and onion, stepped a gray-haired woman. Short, with prominent nose and high forehead, she introduced herself as Dona Jorado, the mistress of the house.

I learned soon that throughout San Miguel, like many Mexican towns, the streets were lined with walls. Wooden doors opened to houses or stores. Some were magnificent, some were mere hovels.

Some blocks away, I walked through the large open wooden doors in a high concrete wall studded with iron buttons. Inside the walls of the Instituto was a lovely small courtyard. In the middle, beyond a wall of bright red bougainvillea, was a trickling fountain that looked peaceful and welcoming. In the corner offices I signed papers, then was introduced to a tall man with thinning gray hair and piercing eyes. Stirling Dickinson had come from Ohio to Mexico twenty years earlier and had started an art school. After World War II he joined with a former governor of Guanajuato, Enrique Fernandez Martinez, to establish the Instituto on the estate of the Canal family that owned the first building of the compound first constructed in 1735.

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