All the Stars Denied by Guadalupe García McCall

Author:Guadalupe García McCall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Published: 2018-10-01T16:48:19+00:00

A poem from Estrella’s journal

Tuesday, December 1, 1931

AGAINST THE FENCE

Three gray cinder blocks, one stacked on top

of the other, push backward, hold up

broken planks so rotten they spit out nails no

matter how hard the hammer hits them.

A dog barks, sniffs, digs at their side, but they

are rooted to the ground by grass that has been

allowed to grow all summer. Mired in mud

from recent rains, the blocks lean over, fight back.

Chapter Fourteen

When night came, the guards stopped walking around the corral. They rested their backs against the fence, crossed their legs, smoked cigarettes, and relaxed. We couldn’t see them, but we could smell their cigarette smoke. We could hear them whistling or mumbling to themselves, until one of them called out to the others because there were civilians walking by and they didn’t want to look like loafers.

I walked around the corral until I found Ángel, the oldest of the group of orphan children. If what Señor Martínez told me was true, I wanted in. My mother was all for it too. I just wanted to make sure we’d get away with it. I didn’t want us getting arrested in the process.

“Will they do it?” I asked. “Will they run out of here all at once if you ask them?”

Ángel, a slender boy close to my age and almost as tall as my father, smiled. “Of course,” he said. “If there’s one thing they’re tired of, it’s being obedient. They’re done following orders.”

It occurred to me that his life was probably hard long before he got stuck here with us. “Was it hard, being in an orphanage?” I asked.

“Well, there’s not a lot of loving-kindness there,” he said. “But then again, there’s not a lot of loving-kindness for us anywhere else in that country, is there?”

“No, there isn’t,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ángel said. “We take care of each other. You’ll see. We’ll walk out of here all at once if you think that’ll make a difference. You and your mother and anyone else who wants to can join us.”

“Excellent,” I said. “When the tower clock strikes midnight, we’ll go. All at once, one right after the other. Otherwise, it won’t work. We have to overwhelm them. Push through, no matter what.”

“Clock. Midnight. Got it!” Ángel went back to his side of the corral and started to spread the word first to his friends, and then to anyone else willing to listen. Before I knew it, all manner of people — men, women, and children — were walking by, pointing to the tower clock across the street from the corral, and giving me the thumbs-up.

When midnight came, Ángel hooted and his younger friends, Sergio and Rogelio, joined him in raising the signal. I moved to the gate with Mamá and Señor Martínez, followed by far more people than I expected. At least a hundred people joined us at the gate, crowding the small space. Ángel opened the gate.

Wasting no time, I lifted my arms high and said, “Go!” Together, we rushed through it, though we could only fit about four people at a time through the cow-sized gate.

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