Joyce Carol Oates has a long history with prisons—she’s sprinkled them throughout her stories, tweeted about their poor conditions, and edited a collection of stories by incarcerated men and women. At least one of her novels is banned in some facilities. So she was the perfect judge for American Short Fiction’s 2019 Insider Prize, our contest for incarcerated writers. In the fiction category, she selected “Mother’s Son” by F.R. Martinez, calling it “intense, lyrical, nostalgic — a kind of prose poem of memory and regret.” As you’ll see in his biography below, Martinez spent much of his career outside prison composing music, and there is something indeed musical about his prose, the way it returns to an initial phrase and becomes richer and more meaningful through repetition.
We hope you enjoy the story. You can also read this year’s winner of the memoir category here.
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves—our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
— The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
She said they came at night. That’s what I always remember hearing her say, ever since I could remember anything anyone said, looking up from my toys on the floor when she was cooking or sewing. “They came at night, in the middle of the night.” She was consumed by the injustice of it, the sadness, the anger, something taken from her she’d never get back. “In the middle of the night, mi hijo. Think how terrible that is.” Night was scary. Darkness. Headlights in the road outside. The isolated farmhouse. The men calling for her husband, a dozen of them, a priest leading them. That was Spain, 1936. There was talk of war in the air, talk of traitors that needed to be eliminated. Socialist traitors who would betray God and country.
She was telling me this in Cuba. It was 1956 or ’57, I’m not sure exactly when. I wasn’t keeping track of dates then. It was night, and she was at the sewing machine I think, and both her feet worked the machine’s single pedal after she threaded the needle. Sewing to make a little money on the side, more to have her own money than to help my father because he was stingy and would keep a tight rein on household expenses. But that’s something I figured out years later, long after she passed away, now that I’m the same age she was when I was a young man, her constant translator back then since she never learned English.
My first memories are of her, her hand on my back when I was still in the crib to soothe me. I was a nervous baby. I was always nervous. I have a nervous disposition, though sometimes I don’t realize it. Sometimes I feel sick and it’s because of my nerves. My blood pressure is always skewing high, like hers. Maybe it’s because I came as a late child. She was 46 when I came, at nine pounds. I couldn’t have been easy for her. I only brought her more suffering, more anguish.
“This is me, see?” She showed me the Bible in her and my father’s bedroom in the night table drawer in our apartment in Cuba. It had a picture of a pale and feminine Jesus crucified on the cover page inside. But that wasn’t what she wanted me to see. There was a list of the Church martyrs in there and one of them was St. Justine. Her name was Justa, so she identified with this martyr. I was a child. I didn’t know how to read too well yet, but I could process the word ‘Justine,’ her name. I wasn’t sure what a martyr was or a saint. Years later I’d see that name in one of the Marquis de Sade works. Also, I was more interested in the crucified Jesus and the way he was looking up at the heavens. I imagined this same sad tormented look was on Justine’s face when she was being tortured or whatever it was she was put through, this pleading look. I was attracted to that. Sometimes I’d sneak into that bedroom and get the Bible from the drawer just to look at the Jesus, the suffering Jesus, the nails, the wound in his side.
My mother listed her woes for me many times when I was a child, maybe because no one else would listen. Or maybe because, since I was a child, her child, she thought she’d pass this family history on. Or, perhaps, though I’d rather not think this was it, as a child I could raise no questions to the things she was telling me. An adult might want to probe certain issues about her first husband’s politics, about the Spanish Civil War, about other things she might not want to get into. As a child I was completely passive, innocently so, a perfect listener, hanging on every word, internalizing all of it. I wanted to be like Jesus taking her pain into myself. I’d sit on the floor and play with my soldiers and cowboys or rock in the rocking chair, sometimes in her lap or at the kitchen table where she’d teach me how to read with newspaper comics. Sometimes we took an afternoon nap together. Sometimes she’d read comics to me in bed. She smelled of freshly cooked food.
What she’d gone through was a constant litany. She sighed a lot and sang sad songs when my dad wasn’t around. My dad’s politics were the complete, polar opposite of her first husband’s (the one that had been taken). My father was pro-fascist. I don’t know how she ever could marry him. Maybe because she felt she needed a man to help her survive in Cuba where she’d had to live after escaping from the mess in Spain.
“They came in the middle of the night for him, for José.” I heard this story so often that it’s imprinted in my subconscious. It’s in my blood stream. “The town priest was with them. I knew the priest. He said he’d bring José back after they talked to him. But why do you want to talk to him in the middle of the night? I asked. José told me to stay out of it. It’s men business, he told me.”
She was young when it happened, in her late twenties. Their life on this isolated farm owned by her first husband’s family had been idyllic. There was a waterfall, a mill. José had built a generator. My sister was born there. José had lived in La Habana in Cuba when they’d first met. He saw her on a bus and followed her home even though it was miles out of his way. My mother had come to Cuba from Spain in the late 1920s to live with her sister. As the youngest of eleven children she was running away from getting left behind and stuck with taking care of the old folks. She was only sixteen. She was rebellious. No girl left their home in rural Spain at sixteen back then, and certainly not to go live in another country. José was also rebellious, coming to Cuba to study electrical engineering and then being swept up with socialist ideas and wanting to return to the old country, to his family farm and village to help bring about necessary social changes.
“Those men came and took José away from me. I didn’t want him to go. I never saw him again. They found his body in a town miles away weeks later. He’d been tortured and shot dozens of times.” She told me all this without tears, with an intensity I’ve never forgotten, her voice cracking a little when she told about the way the body was found. “I was afraid for my life. They had taken him and his cousin. His cousin never turned up. José’s mother lived on the farm with us, and when he was killed she urged us to leave but probably because she was afraid they’d come back and kill all of us. When José and I got married we should have just stayed in Cuba. None of it would have ever happened. But he was a good man, and he was hard-headed. In the first few years, before the politics started getting ugly, it was nice. I was happy. Very happy on the farm in Galicia. I’ve never been that happy again.” I wanted to make her happy, to fix her sadness. I guess many children feel that way. I also felt that if she continued to be unhappy it would be my fault. I remember promising her that I would study to be a doctor so that I could take care of her. My mother was the center of my universe. My sister was an adult and she lived in the U.S. She came to visit every Christmas, but other than that it was my mother and me with my dad as an occasional distraction.
“They came in the middle of the night and took all my happiness away. I had to run away with your sister [Technically my half-sister although I was forbidden to ever say that]. We had nothing. No money. No food. I had to beg. My own family turned their backs on me. So I went back to Cuba.” There she went to work for wealthy families as a house maid and put my sister in a sleep-away school run by nuns. She always felt guilty about that and my sister often played on my mother’s guilt. There was a lot of guilt in my family. After the Civil War was over, she tried going back to Spain. She dragged my sister off with her. Things there were terrible and dangerous. For a while she lived by working the black market but eventually she returned to Cuba and married my dad a couple of years later.
I don’t know whether my bad dreams had to do with all the things she told me happened to her and my sister or with my own nervous disposition or with the fact that we were in the middle of another social revolution. Cuba in 1956-57 was a violent place to be. Magazines weren’t censored. They showed pictures of what Batista’s troops did to the insurgents as well as accident and crime-scene photos. The black and white pictures festered inside me, blood as black ink, broken bodies tossed in ditches, people riddled with bullet holes. But also pictures of smiling young women in bathing suits. How all that came together, the fusion inside my head, is impossible to untangle. I do remember she’d find me masturbating; I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. She told me if I didn’t stop she’d castrate me with the kitchen knife; she said that’s what they did to hogs. I’d seen her strangle chickens. She had a cruel farm girl streak. She used to beat me when I was bad, seriously beat me. She hit hard with wooden spoons or coat hangers. I had welts. I was afraid of how fierce she became when she was angry at me and the things she said, the names she called me. It was like she was taking out everything that had happened to her on me, using me, threatening me with abandonment, shackling me to her sorrows only to punish and berate me. Was I willful and disobedient? I probably was. I know I was precocious and overly curious. I was full of myself and smart but mostly because, when she wasn’t breaking me down, she was pumping me up, feeding my narcissistic nature, dressing me in outfits she made for me. Years later I realized I was turned on by seeing images of tortured women, and of course, crucified ones. Even in the throes of arousal I could see where all of it had come from, but it was something that lived inside me and would not go away.
“They came in the middle of the night.” That fear was passed on to me. I absorbed it. I welcomed it. I received it. I wanted it. The fear. The terror. The knowing death was near and if I woke up screaming as a child after reading stories of brutal murder (those sensationalist Cuban magazines were my reading primers), it wasn’t because I feared being murdered but because I feared the fear, the paralyzing sensation of terror, nameless and formless, that seeped under the door, oozed through the windows and found me whenever it wanted to because it was inside me.
Things lived in the night that would come for me and find me. They always have. Dreams, fantasies, illusions. My mother’s loss continues long after her passing. It goes on. Once, while mincing onions in Cuba with one of those devices that have a circular plastic handle you press on, she had an accident. The handle must have come off and she slammed her hand into the metal stud underneath. It almost went through her hand. She screamed and I came running from my room where I’d been playing. There was blood all over the floor. She was pale. She showed me the wound. All I could think of was the crucified Jesus.
She lived bravely and taught me fortitude and persistency. She taught me that human beings are not reliable or trustworthy, that things can fall apart at any moment (It was a priest, after all, that led that murderous night raid). I didn’t have a Bambi childhood. There were bombs, fires, and people being shot in the street. My mother loved me as well as she could, worked herself to the bone for my education and well-being. I was not grateful. Like her, I was rebellious. I wasn’t grateful because the other thing she’d passed on lived like a snake coiled inside me and I couldn’t get rid of it. I was embarrassed by her as a young man in Miami, her and my sister, the fact that they never learned English, never understood American ways. Were ignorant. I rejected their love not only for adolescent angst but because I was helpless to reshape myself. My mother had shaped me, molded me. She’d baked me like the pastries she made for me, juicy Cuban/Spanish empanadas. I was something to be consumed. I consumed myself.
The most extreme thing I could become to escape her was to be a musician, and that’s what I did. Music was something I could wrap myself in and use as a shield. Music and words. Life would not harm me behind that shield. I was morbidly shy. I hated social situations, broke out in sweats. My sexual identity was consumed by extreme and violent ideas and passions which I indulged only in fantasy. I could have gone way off the rails if I’d thought of ever indulging those any other way. But the pictures in my head, the ones that came in the middle of the night but also in the middle of the day, persist like light burned into the retina. They could never be real and I’ve accepted that. Real is way too painful. Real is not seductive.
My father died first. He’d come to us in Miami in the mid 1960s, broken by the Cuban revolution, losing his health and his mind. Years later, when my mother was dying in the hospital from some unspecified virus (and I always thought it might have been something related to the Spanish influenza she’d survived as a child but which might have lingered in her blood just waiting to pounce) which the doctors said she might have caught while on a trip to Argentina to visit my cousin, I was playing with a band in New Jersey. I came to Miami on the first flight I could get and stood at her bedside. She caressed my hand and smiled. Asked me how I was. “These doctors,” she said, “they come in the middle of the night and wake me. I just want to go home.”
But she didn’t go home. Her time came a week later, early in the morning, and I bent over her as she lay dying and kissed her cheek and said, “It’s okay. You can go now. You don’t have to worry. We’ll be okay.” Because she’d kept clinging to life, the life that had torn her apart, and I didn’t want her to suffer any more, not for my sake or my sister’s.
I’d never hear her sing her sad songs again.
This was years ago, and I hardly think about it. But it goes on inside me, the night those men came and killed José, his cousin, and my mother’s happiness. They got away with it, with impunity, lived their lives after the grotesque damage they inflicted. Her numerous attempts to get justice in the Spanish courts after the war ended in 1939 came to nothing. She tried for years to reclaim her and my sister’s inheritance, the farm in Galicia, but it was taken over by José’s surviving relatives after his mother died. They wanted nothing to do with my mother. Such is the debris of a civil war.
As it stands, I am the inheritance, the living remnant of that night, and all I can do is go on and survive. I leave no heirs but my music, my poems and writings, all of which may well end up in the trash after I’m gone.
The nightmares have long ago faded. In the end everything fades, everything passes.
Even the things that come in the middle of the night.
Cuban-born writer and composer F.R. Martinez immigrated to the U.S. as a result of the Cuban Revolution. He grew up in Miami then moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School where he studied with David Diamond and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree. He went on to compose music for film, television, radio, and theater. He is the recipient of two Emmys (in conjunction with the writing team at Children’s Television Workshop, currently Sesame Workshop), and a Grammy for the Sesame Street album Elmopalooza in 1998, on which his song “Mambo I, I, I” is performed by Gloria Estefan. He worked with several other notables such as Cindy Lauper, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Trini Lopez, and various Latino music stars of the late twentieth century. In 1998, along with writer Luis Santeiro, he was the recipient of the Richard Rodgers Award offered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the musical Barrio Babies. He worked for Disney on the show “Handy Manny” as a composer, completing background music and songs for 100 shows. “Handy Manny” was also nominated for an Emmy in 2009. With the Charleston Symphony Orchestra he worked on various projects including one for Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. He’s been creating poetry and fiction since the age of twelve and has only returned to a more serious involvement with writing in recent years. In 2016, his poem “300 Min” received an Honorable Mention from PEN AMERICA. In the past five years, he has completed over a hundred poems and five novels as well as a number of short stories. He is looking to publish more fiction and poetry and would be grateful for sample copies of literary journals and submission guidelines. For his mailing address please contact insiderprize[at]americanshortfiction.org.
Joyce Carol Oates is the acclaimed author of over fifty novels and the recipient of national and international honors and awards for her work, including a National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize. She has also written a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught in the Program in Creative Writing since 1978.
Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah are assistant editors at American Short Fiction and co-direct the Insider Prize. Emily is a Fulbright Fellow, and the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in The Common. Maurice is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where he reports on the U.S. criminal justice system.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, most recently the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. An associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin and an American Short Fiction advisory board member, she also runs a creative writing program at the John B. Connally Unit, a penitentiary in southern Texas.