A Cup of Water Under My Bed

“Before language, there is love. Before love, memory.”

Hernández’s memoir begins with the author being sent to elementary school, where she learned English, rejected Spanish, and pulled away from her family. She recalls memories of her childhood, before “the beginning of the end” (4), where everything in her life, good or bad, happened in the Spanish language.

“Terrible things happen in Spanish.”

Hernández associates the Spanish language with tragic memories from her childhood, including her father’s excessive drinking, anger, and abuse, behavior that is not exclusive to her family in their Union City, New Jersey neighborhood.

“The white women’s grandmothers are dead. When they mention Poland, Ireland, or Germany, it sounds like they are talking about a sock they have lost in the laundry. They are white now. American. They have no history, no songs, no past. But they do have power.”

Hernández’s family moved from Union City to Fairview, New Jersey which has a predominantly white population. She notes the distinction between herself and the white women who teach and work at the school she attends. Although they are also the descendants of immigrants, their positions within US society are different than hers, as their whiteness affords them power and status that the author and her family do not have. This power, however, also comes with a loss of connection to one’s history and culture, something that Hernández has not lost.

“Spanish is flaca and defenseless, so I start pushing her around, then hating her.”

Spanish, which she refers to as weak, is an easy target for Hernández as she rebuffs her family and their culture. Rejecting her parents’ language is a way for a teenaged Hernández to gain a sense of independence as she stands at the juncture of two figurative borders and tries to make sense of her ethnicity and identities.

“If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you. They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.”

Hernández argues that white Americans’ strategy is that if they must live alongside non-white people, they will make people of color more like them. One method of doing so, she argues, is through ESL programs that strip them of their ethnicity.

“I am so young. I think language is all a woman needs.”

As a child, Hernández tries to give her mother instructions in English. Yet her mother’s lessons are repeatedly interrupted by other obligations to her family. Hernández believes that if her mother could only learn English, the language of assimilation, her life might be easier. Upon reflection, however, she recognizes that her mother’s hardships are the result of so much more that her lack of English-language skills.

“It is the first time I have known someone my age writing about loving and hating where you come from, about the terrible things a father does and the awful things the world does to him, and the mother standing by in that bitter silence.”

Hernández has a revelation about her identity during a writing workshop at New York University that helps to shape the work that appears in her memoir. Tension characterizes the story of her relationship with her family, as exemplified in her early rejection of Spanish and her complicated, yet loving, relationship with her abusive father.

“At first it is ordinary, a man wading into the ocean, enjoying himself […] But the longer he’s in the ocean, the less he chuckles, the stronger the undercurrents become.”

Hernández compares her father’s bouts of drunkenness to a man caught in an ocean’s undercurrent. Although he drinks to mask his unhappiness, the initial euphoria alcohol brings soon gives way to deeper rage from which he is unable to escape.

“The sweetest part of my father is his candy dish.”

Hernández’s relationship with her father is profoundly impacted by his alcoholism, violent rages, and distance. When she learns about his devotion to the Afro-Cuban syncretistic religion Santería, she understands him better. The candy dish he leaves out with offerings symbolizes a way that the author can feel closer to her father and see him in a compassionate way.

“The consensus is palatable: only a man who has suffered like this can know what we need and keep us safe from harm.”

Hernández writes about her family’s spirituality and the rituals in which they engage, including the veneration of Saint Lazarus. Saint Lazarus is one of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Bible. When he falls ill and dies, Jesus resurrects him from the dead. He is, thus, often shown as a suffering saint in his iconography. It is this suffering with which Hernández’s family identifies as they honor him as an intercessor with God on their behalf.

“Us. My future is always plural.”

Hernández feels intense pressure to excel in life and always considers her family and their reactions when making choices about her life. Her future is not her own but is enmeshed with her family’s future.

“No one here can afford to believe in dreaming, in planning, in the pursuit of happiness. The good stuff in life is bestowed by God, by luck.”

Hernández acknowledges the sense of hopelessness that those in her family and community feel because of lack of opportunities. Those who toil in the textile factories, like her parents, are faced with long, demanding hours of physical labor, work shortages, layoffs, and factory closings. Watching her parents struggle to find and maintain stable work shows her that one’s actions and effort do not determine the future; good things come and go in an arbitrary way that is beyond one’s control.

“The women who know never tell us to leave or to make demands. They accept that we are trapped in cages, bound to this man, this country, these factories. And yet, they teach us to make the cage tolerable.”

The card readers and fortune tellers never tell the women in Hernández’s life to leave their abusive spouses or untenable circumstances. Instead, taking as a given that there is no path for their clients to leave their circumstances, they provide readings that make the unpleasantness of their lives more bearable.

“It was not knowledge I was seeking, not a definitive version of the truth, but rather the solace of a woman’s words.”

Hernández lets go of her resentment of the “women who know,” whom her family often consulted. She realizes after one of her own consultations that these readings are not about spiritual knowledge but about finding comfort from maternal figures.

“I am also not sure why the women in my family are so startled about a woman going off with another mujer. Besides discussing how Colombian men don’t work, all we ever do at home is talk about women.”

Hernández grows up in a primarily female household. When her mother and aunts launch into gossip about a local woman who left her husband for her female lover, she finds the story romantic, while the others see it as a scandal. Because they spend so much time conversing about women’s lives, she is surprised that her female relatives are so shocked that two women could fall in love.

“Does love follow the lines of race and class?”

Hernández posits this question after she leaves her first boyfriend, a working-class Colombian immigrant for an American-born middle-class man, the kind of partner the women in her family encouraged her to pursue. Is she destined to seek a partner who has class, race, and gender privilege? 

“And it is hard, I imagine, for people who have not experienced this to understand the weight of that silence and how the absence of language can feel like a death.”

Hernández laments the inability to discuss her relationships with women with her family. Although they know she is bisexual, this is part of her identity that she is unable to discuss or share with them. The silence is akin to death, because a component of her being, which she compares to a limb, is nonexistent when she is with her family.

“He knows what it’s like to live with both genders; I know what it’s like to love the two.”

Hernández writes about her relationship with a trans man named Ezra and explains what they have in common. Both have lived with different identities and know what it is like to exist in a liminal state.

“This is what I admire about my people, about our language. We believe there is a way to love what bruises.”

Reflecting on her troubled relationship with Tía Dora, Hernández writes that her aunt can be cruel and loving at the same time. For example, she attaches diminutives to otherwise demeaning or insulting terms.

“I was too young then to understand that health care was privatized, that factories needed people like my mother and my father and my tía, that even Bill Cosby needed us. It was our work that made his day possible.”

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Bill Cosby was a symbol of progress and success for people of color in the United States. Hernández recalls her youthful naiveté in which she did not understand the dynamics of labor exploitation and the nature of classism in U.S. society.

“We belong to a community based in part on the fact that we are all doing somewhat badly. When someone does a little better, there is an unspoken betrayal.”

Hernández acknowledges what links the people of her Latino community: struggle. Envy, she notes, is quick to raise its head when someone achieves success, because it means they have abandoned the others.

“It will take years to understand that writing makes everything else possible. Writing is how I learn to love my father and where I come from. Writing is how I leave him and also how I take him with me.”

Hernández’s memoir is filled with scenes in which she metaphorically or physically leaves her family. Yet she is always connected to them, and they have a shared history that crosses space and time. Writing is a method by which she remains connected to her family, but it also provides a space for her to analyze and critique her relationship with them.

“There is a hierarchy of pain, and it is no longer confined to the pages of my college textbooks about political theory. It is here in Mr. Flaco.”

The “hierarchy of pain” that Hernández has studied becomes reality when she works at the New York Times. The editor she unaffectionately calls “Mr. Flaco” embodies it. He is openly racist and questions why she should publish an editorial on Colombian amnesty when others in the world also suffer.