George Washington Gomez: A Mexicotexan Novel by Americo Paredes

Author:Americo Paredes [Paredes, Americo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2011-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

11

As Guálinto advanced in school, so did his uncle’s fortunes, spurred by a dead man’s dream. If his life had followed the path marked out for him by alien hands, Feliciano García would have been a cowboy as long as there were cattle in south Texas. Or he could have become a field hand, or at most a sharecropper such as his neighbor José Alcaraz. His sister, born like him in a one-room shack with a dirt floor and one packing-case door as only opening, would have been content with little.

But Gumersindo Gómez, the redheaded dreamer who had been María’s husband, had given his only son a great man’s name. The name of a Gringo but a great man, nevertheless. And Gumersindo had confidently declared that his son would be a great man. And he had put on Feliciano a burden of guilt and responsibility, to see that the son would fulfill his destiny. Gumersindo’s words, spoken once playfully and again as he lay dying, took an almost religious significance for Feliciano and María, a momentousness that grew with the years, as time made the memory of Gumersindo Gómez more nebulous and therefore more heroic. Feliciano, driven by remorse, had worked hard to make Gumersindo’s dream come true. To give the boy the advantages he would need to reach the goal his father had foreseen. And when the boy went to school and did very well in his classes, the fact aroused in his family not so much surprise and admiration as self-confident pride. They had known all along he would be like that.

Feliciano endeavored to make as much money as he could, by all means possible, in order to realize Gumersindo’s dream because he knew that dreams are more likely to come true if one has money. There were many factors in Feliciano’s increasing prosperity—hard work, luck, Judge Norris and the Blue Party, Santos de la Vega. That and his mother’s fierce determination to regain for her children something of what had been lost to her grandparents when the Gringos came. Her parents had only dim memories of their own as to what life was like before the Delta became part of Texas, but they passed their parents’ memories down to her generation. That was why her children had learned to read, write and figure at the escuelita in San Pedrito and why she had saved what little money she could throughout her life, a nickel or a quarter at a time.

She must have died in the most wretched despair, thought Feliciano, embittered by the failure of all her efforts. Her two remaining sons fugitives from Gringo law, her only daughter a widow. If she could only see them now, living in circumstances that even her grandparents could not have been able to enjoy. She would have marveled at the house, added to and improved with Feliciano’s money but originally bought with his mother’s life savings. Feliciano felt he could justly be proud of the house his family lived in.

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