Speaking of my mother

At age 16, my mother was kidnapped by the man who would become my father in a brazen night-time abduction involving a horse, a gun, and a funeral.

The man had met the woman a few days before while she walked home from church. He’d stopped his car besides her and asked for her name. Giving the man her name was an invitation—the man asked if he could visit her at her home and talk. She reluctantly said yes. The next day the man showed up to her home and asked her father if he could speak to her. The father said yes, so long as he stayed outside and she stayed inside with the gate to the outside half open. They spoke for a couple of hours. She recalls his face: she didn’t like his face, it was reddish around the cheeks and white around the forehead. She didn’t like where he was from and she hoped he would get tired of standing outside and leave. On the second day, he asked her to be his girlfriend, to which she said no. This, of course, and they both knew it, meant that he would try to “take” her—as it was common in those days in the early 1970s (yes, you heard right, the late 20th century!). On the third day, her mother died. The funeral lasted a few days, prayers and arrangements had to be made. On the last day of the wake, she saw him circling about in a black horse. On the day of the burial, while she walked home with her sisters, a car pulled up with 3 or 4 men—all strangers—and told her to get in the car. Her sisters knew what was happening, so they waited for it to end. Two of the men dragged her into the car and took her to my future father’s house, whose family waited for her arrival with food and music.*

A few days after the incident, and after my mother’s father was notified (a moment in the event known as “las pazes”—or the peace), my future mother and my future father were married in a small civil ceremony by a municipal judge. In the presence of that judge he made her one promise: he would take her to el Norte as soon as he could.

*(That this practice was customary does not take away from the terror of that event, which haunted us both for years.)