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TORTILLAS
Sally Cole
I’ve got tortillas in the fridge right
now, store-bought, a little like
cardboard. But they’re always there, a
staple for anyone who grew up in the
desert southwest. I eat them with cheese,
hotsauce, sometimes with scrambled eggs in
a breakfast burrito, and always with the
memory of that time in middle school when
the Mexican girls fried them up for us.
The Mexican girls. Many of them came from
Guadalupe, a town adjacent to ours. They
went to McKemy Junior High and then on to
Tempe High, though many dropped out after
finishing eighth grade. At McKemy, they
huddled together in the halls speaking
Spanish to each other and feeling,
clearly, out of place. We knew only
vaguely of their history, that they had
been here far longer than had we,
descended, as many were, from our town’s
early residents. We didn’t know their
great-grandfathers had held shares in the
Tempe Irrigating Canal Company and that
Mexicans had been, for awhile, a majority
in town. We didn’t even know that they’d
once been banned from the town’s prize
venue, a swimming pool called Tempe Beach.
But we knew that now they were the Other,
slightly suspect, though we weren’t sure
why. And then, one morning at McKemy, they
were thrust onto center stage, when our
Home-Ec teacher, Mrs. Wright, announced
the day’s lesson plan: the Mexican girls
would be showing us how to make tortillas.
This was news to them. She had sprung it
on them unawares, and wisely so. Had she
told them the day before, there’d have
been an epic sick-out. And now, the look
on their faces was painful to see. What
ensued was like an old-West standoff. The
girls insisted they could never make
tortillas in the bowl they’d been
provided. It was much too small. Mrs.
Wright held her ground, producing a larger
bowl from the classroom cabinets. “Still
too small,” they claimed. Mrs. Wright
didn’t flinch, though I think by then we
had all chosen sides. We could feel the
girls’ shame, singled out as they had been
to display their ethnicity, their quaint
folkways, and we were with them all the
way. Of course, I see now the predicament
Mrs. Wright was in. This was all she’d
got. If she failed to muscle the girls
into making tortillas, she’d have fifty
minutes of class time with nothing to
teach. She had to prevail. It was quiet as
she disappeared into some closet in the
rear and then reemerged with her piece de
resistance: a punchbowl. A big punchbowl.
Game over. The girls resigned themselves
to their fate.
The tension faded a bit once they got to
work. They were fast, efficient, using
their hands, instead of measuring, to toss
flour in the bowl. They patted the dough
into circles and fried it up in pans,
clearly adept at a task they must have
learned some years in the past. None of us
had those skills, and we were impressed.
Then Mrs. Wright helped them slather the
tortillas with butter and jelly and passed
them on to us.
In
school, especially in middle school, you
are sometimes stressed, sometimes awkward,
sometimes left out, but always hungry. You
are hungry the minute you arrive at
school, hungry in the halls, hungry in the
lunch line, hungry with your hand up,
hungry with your head down, and, whatever
time of day this was, we were hungry. Then
the scent of tortillas filled up the room
and we were downing those warm, buttery
spheres as if breaking a fast. It was
quiet as we ate. Then one by one we
regained our voices. “Oh, God, those were
good!” “That’s the best thing I’ve ever
tasted in my life!” And so on. I watched
the girls’ faces as we raved over their
cooking. They should have looked happy,
but of course they didn’t. They would
carry this trauma all their lives. But why
would I?
For awhile, I thought I was an empath, who
felt others’ pain more fully than most.
Then, mid-pandemic, I was reading Op-Eds
on the murder of George Floyd, and began
to see what was really going on. One
writer described a collective trauma: the
whole world watching the black man’s
death. Yes, I thought, just as we, the
white girls, watched our classmates
suffer, Mrs. Wright standing in for the
callous cop. Then a whole new angle
emerged when a black man had authored the
piece. If you are black, he wrote, the
pain you feel is more than collective; it
is vicarious. You are George Floyd; your
neck is his neck, bearing the weight of
Chauvin’s knee; your voice is his voice
pleading, “I can’t breathe.” And so, in
that classroom, I was scooping out flour
and frying tortillas, I, the white girl
who didn’t look white, taking on the shame
of those who looked like me.
At
school, everyone knew that I was one of
the Coles, Anglo to the bone. But in the
world, with my black hair, brown eyes, and
deep-tan skin I could pass for Mexican,
Latina (today Latinx). People spoke to me
in Spanish on the street, then apologized
profusely when I didn’t understand. I had
a kind of double life—I toggled back
and forth—as I did in Home-Ec that day,
both cooking and watching myself cook,
both shamed and safe from shame, the brown
girl with the British name.
I’m glad those days are over, when a
hard-core binary defined us all:
Mexican/white; female/male. I like today’s
roil of nations, races, and genders too.
And I like tortillas; I always will.
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