My father learned to read when he was 14 years old. He was born into the Cuban depression. His brothers and sisters all read, his mother read. They were all readers. But it was a time of abysmal poverty, gnawing hunger. And when he refused to go to school, because he didn’t like the long days and the stinging yardstick, as he said to me once, “It was not my cup of café con leche,” my grandmother found out about his truancy and his hooliganism, because he’d also been pelting his teacher with rocks on the poor man’s evening constitutionals. My father was six. And she didn’t have the time, the energy, she was a woman I suspect long ago defeated by poverty and fertility, she said, “You decide, you don’t want to go to school, you’re going to work on the farm with your brothers and sisters.” And he was delighted.
But by the time he was 14 he wasn’t reading, he couldn’t read. He had a wonderful life, though. I mean, he would tell me even, he’d say, “Don’t tell your mother,” my mother didn’t like some of these stories, “I was a wild boy. I would spend my days plundering mango groves, chasing guinea hens, going to the river, laying on the rocks like a lizard in the sun. And I’m so sorry Mi hija that you will never, ever experience the joys of a feral childhood.” These were the stories he would tell me that I loved.
But he told me once how he learned to read and why. I asked him when I was a young author and I was working more and more with children on the margins of literacy, these little border dwellers in everything from urban areas to tiny rural dusty towns. And I wanted to know, and wanted to understand the mind of, and we think of it as an insult, as a slur almost, of an illiterate person.
There were a couple of things he told me I’ll never forget. One was he said, “Do not think that because I didn’t read — I could not decode — I didn’t have an entire universe of stories inside of me. I was the hero of all of my games. I was a pirate of the river. I was fighting the Revolutionary War,” different one than yours. And so forth.
The other thing he told me was that when he did learn to read thanks to an irascible, ill-tempered baker who agreed to teach him, when my father had actually come back to throw rocks at that man, because he had insulted him, when that man taught him how to read my father said it was like the tumblers in a lock falling into place, click, click, click. And from that moment they started with Prince Valiant, syndicated from the U.S. to Cuba, and to this tiny town in Florida and within weeks he said, “We were reading the more colorful obituaries.”
And he said his brain had become a kerosene fire. He was seeing words stamped on the heads of nails, words splashed on the backs of iodine bottles, words that appeared you know on storefronts that he’s always seen but never seen before. Not decoded them, not read them. And when I said, “But why didn’t you try? Why didn’t you at some point ask?” And he said, “It was the depression.” And this is it, here it is. “Like new shoes and shiny toys I was a poor boy, I didn’t think the printed word belonged to me.”
If I would leave you with anything, what we see often among our children if we could just understand it as educators, as writers, as literacy experts, as people who just give a damn, if children do not believe the printed word belongs to them why, particularly if they have things like learning disabilities, would they go through the torturous work of learning how to read? How to read English, with its gerunds and diphthongs and thousands of grammatical rules that sometimes seem at war with each other?
You must believe, you must believe, no matter where you come from, the poorest home, paper-poor homes we call them, that the wisdom of the ages printed are there for you at any time and no one can stand between those words and that knowledge and you. No one has that right. That’s why literacy matters.
