The Sign in My Father’s Hands

By Martín Espada b. 1957 Martin Espada

—for Frank Espada

The beer company

did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,

so my father joined the picket line

at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,

amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.

But the cops brandished nightsticks

and handcuffs to protect the beer,

and my father disappeared.

In 1964, I had never tasted beer,

and no one told me about the picket signs

torn in two by the cops of brewery.

I knew what dead was: dead was a cat

overrun with parasites and dumped

in the hallway incinerator.

I knew my father was dead.

I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy

who did not hear the question in school.

I sat studying his framed photograph

like a mirror, my darker face.

Days later, he appeared in the doorway

grinning with his gilded tooth.

Not dead, though I would come to learn

that sometimes Puerto Ricans die

in jail, with bruises no one can explain

swelling their eyes shut.

I would learn too that “boycott”

is not a boy’s haircut,

that I could sketch a picket line

on the blank side of a leaflet.

That day my father returned

from the netherworld

easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,

and the brewery cops could only watch

in drunken disappointment.

I searched my father’s hands

for a sign of the miracle.

Martin Espada, “The Sign in My Father’s Hands” from Imagine the Angels of Bread. Copyright © 1996 by Martin Espada. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Imagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996)

Biography

Poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney: Martín Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for Latino rights and reclaiming the historical record. Espada’s critically acclaimed collections of poetry celebrate—and lament—the immigrant and working class experience. Whether narrating the struggles of Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as they adjust to life in the United States, or . . .

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