“It seemed that the more I knew about people, the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.”
Rudolfo Anaya, “Bless Me, Ultima,” 1972
Antonio was almost seven when Ultima came to live with his family in rural New Mexico.
She was a curandera. A healer, a midwife, a spirit guide. A witch.
Antonio assists the strange but fascinating old woman as she helps the people in the village navigate the boundaries of life and death. She teaches him about the local herbs that heal sickness, how to sense spirits, how to be present with people on their worst days.
Meanwhile, within his family, the restless wanderlust of his father’s vaquero heritage vies with his mother’s agrarian tradition, the wilds of the vast llano discordant with the rhythm and permanence of the river valley. Yet they are bound together — by devotion to their children and love for each other.
That tension plays out in the little town of Guadalupe, with its priest and its tavern and its bullies and its friends and the bridge that takes Antonio over the river every day.
…
Great coming-of-age books are sincere and unsettling and hyper-specific.
We are changed by the revelation that our sense of place, our comfort and center, is terrifyingly fragile. And shaped by the people who were there and aren’t anymore — what their attention and love and frustrations meant to us. Anaya brought me back there, to when I was still forming. When I had never been more comforted and never felt more insecure.
The particular chocolate swirl cookies my great-grandmother Pearl always kept in her pantry for me. What she looked like in her casket, the first dead person I’d ever seen. The smell of my dog, Flint. The year the creek flooded, and the water covered the roads for miles. My dad bringing a dead screech owl into the house, telling my sisters and me how it had swooped out of the thick, humid night and embedded itself in the grill of his truck while we marveled at its strange eyes and mouth. The terror of hell the preachers at youth camp instilled in me; my baptism in my grandfather’s lake; my questions on why I was born into the one true religion, and getting no good answers.
There is strange magic hidden in our hearts, made up of the seeds and the detritus of everything that came before. The older I get, the more I accept mine; the more I can trace how it shaped me. And the more curious I am about everyone else’s.