Big Eyes for Details of Life

The turn of phrase “being in the moment,” though overused by the overwrought, feels custom-fit for memoirist Esmeralda Santiago, who summons her powers of concentration, detail and memory as both deflection and map to guide her through the most chaotic, dizzying spots of a life that refuses to stand in one place.

That skill to render the most minute details of her before and after lives has bequeathed her two richly evocative memoirs--”When I Was Puerto Rican” (Addison-Wesley/Vintage, 1993) and the latest, “Almost a Woman” (Perseus Books).

The books not only detail the footsteps she’s taken from living in the lush tropics of rural Puerto Rico to the two-dimensional monochromatics of sooty Brooklyn, but also the other, oftentimes more treacherous paths Santiago has traveled--those toward finding a place in the world.

These memoirs are about physical territories, yes, from sphere-round to plane-straight, soft to hard, country to city, but as well they are about psychological open spaces through which we meander: Those of language, of racial or cultural identity, of individualism.

But this isn’t what Santiago set out to do, she assures--at least not in a formal sense.

“I was . . . “ she pauses as if too bashful to reveal the truth of circumstances “. . . discovered,” she blurts out in a voice a shade above a whisper, then settles into her back story, an explanation about getting from point A to point B.

“I had been writing essays. Opinion pieces for different newspapers and there was a piece that I wrote about my mother that appeared in Radcliffe Quarterly. An editor, Merloyd Lawrence, saw it and contacted me and asked me to send her other pieces. She read them and . . . said she wanted to give me a contract to write a memoir! A what!?? I had no idea what that was. If I had decided to write a book, it probably would have been a novel. My first reaction was: I haven’t done anything! I just didn’t have a sense of this story having interest beyond my family.”

But what details Santiago had been collecting all those years--the cherubs on the ceiling of her family’s first Brooklyn apartment, her grandmother’s fancy black lace dress or family friend Luigi’s solemn face and sleight-of-hand card tricks--those images, those stories began to take the place of a personal journal or a family photo album, both of which had been lost in the innumerable moves that her 10-children-three-adult household made.

“I was a very observant child. My mother always talked about my big eyes looking,” she remembers, speaking from her home in upstate New York. “I would listen very carefully, look at things, remember details. I’ve been able to capture our life. For those [reminders] my family says, they are very grateful.”

In the first installment, Santiago reanimates her Puerto Rico childhood, a span of time in which her parents’ bickering was the sound-scape for her relatively simpler memories of life on an island near-paradise. Within that book’s last few chapters she sums up her New York coming-of-age years in a blur of fast forward.

“Almost a Woman” slows those last few frames down a bit for perusal, casting a broad beam not just to reveal a pat “story of immigrant,” but how that change, that shift imprints on the psyche--the interior.

“Being a writer is like being a collector,” she says. “Instead of baseball cards, I collect memories, colors. And I carry my collection everywhere I go.”

With those “big eyes,” Santiago stores everything away: The library picture books that helped her with her English; the way the welfare clerk sizes up her just “leyof” mother; how the term “Hispanic” has become an ill-fitting catch-all, diluting her specificity; and most significantly, just how wide the moat of difference is between her existence and those carefree characters in her favorite comic book, “Archie.”

“Like Archie and his friends,” writes Santiago of the Americans she went to school with, “they were not Italian or Jewish, Negro or Puerto Rican. They had short, easy-to-remember names like Sue, Matt, Fred, Lynn. They were the presidents of clubs, the organizers of dances, the editors of the school paper and yearbook. They looked like the actors on television.”

What becomes clear early on to young Esmeralda is that the acculturation process is more than simply learning language--it is about becoming culturally ambidextrous. It is a ballet of balance. It isn’t conjugating verbs and other rote mechanics; it’s reading between the lines of the larger culture to get at the submerged messages.

She’s digested her mother’s warning to beware of men; not to get labeled a fool nor loose, but has also watched her mother enter into romantic unions as precarious as the family’s weekly income. She’s listened to teachers and other assorted grown-ups tell her to strive to be the best she can be, but then the writing on the wall is not to go too far. Don’t leave us all behind. Don’t break rank. The messages, conflicting, become a confusing cacophony.

And so it was the time spent inside of self, reading, writing in her journal--a gift, fittingly, from her deaf cousin LaMuda--that allowed her a practice space, a place to train her voice. In that quiet space she could map dreams and construct a sense of who she was outside of expectations nipping after her. Santiago acknowledges with just-yesterday gratitude that her life buoys were teachers who actually managed to see her when she could barely envision herself. Being picked out of a crowd as someone gifted with curiosity and ambition, she began her first step out of the narrow boundaries when she auditioned and was accepted at New York’s High School of Performing Arts (which led to a part as an extra on the film version of “Up the Down Staircase,” and staring roles in two Broadway children’s musicals all before she was 21).

“The drama department taught the Method developed by Stanislavsky . . . ,” writes Santiago. “Actors explored their deepest selves for the emotional truth. . . . I refused to venture into my deepest self, to reveal my feelings. . . . If I did, everyone would know I was illegitimate, that I shared a bed with my sister, that we were on welfare. . . . I simply could not abandon myself to the craft. I didn’t have the skills to act while acting. Because the minute I left the dark, crowded apartment where I lived, I was in performance, pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”

Inadvertently, what it took for Santiago to have a better understanding of the “someone” she is was the process of writing these two books. “Until I wrote [‘Almost a Woman’], I wasn’t really aware that the people I knew, the people I gravitated toward, who were also immigrants--from all different places--were going through the same process. Being around these people made me feel less invisible, less isolated.”

From one, her best friend, Shoshana, who had emigrated from Israel, she acquired what probably was the most important armor--bravery. “She really inspired me to give up my fears. She was suffering. We were struggling with the same issues, but it wasn’t something that was going to stop my life. Yes, I was struggling with the language, the culture, the environment, but none of these issues was more important than the others.”

Now a mother of two teenagers who, between book projects, works with her husband making educational films, Santiago measures success by helping at least one “little Esmeralda” better understand the borders society draws around race and culture and identity, and that how, with a little courage, you can step outside those lines.

When she was young, “I would hear the kids shout: ‘There goes the actress!’ It still makes me shake my head. Instead of being proud and helpful . . . you’re not allowed to take that step, your leaving threatens them. . . . But you don’t have to leave your past behind when you leave your neighborhood.”

Surprisingly, for a life marked with so much strife and struggle, there is much joy and light to bask in within Santiago’s prose.

“At the darkest, darkest moments, when I would be leaning over a subway platform thinking, ‘I’m going to jump. . .’ I would pull myself from the brink with the thought, ‘Things might get better. And if you kill yourself now, you’ll never find out.’ It was really that simple. It was this sense that things would change. . . . For me it was the curiosity to find out what’s next.”