J. Malcolm Garcia - The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream

Seven Stories Press

New York Oakland London

Copyright 2019 by J. Malcolm Garcia

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Seven Stories Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garcia, J. Malcolm, 1957- author.

Title: The fruit of all my grief : lives in the shadows of the American dream / J. Malcolm Garcia.

Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017120 | ISBN 9781609809539 (paperback) | ISBN 9781609809546 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social problems--United States. | Marginality, Social--United States. | American Dream. | United States--Social conditions--21st century.

Classification: LCC HN59.2 .G35 2019 | DDC 306.0973--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017120

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These stories appeared, some in different versions, in Guernica: A Magazine of Arts& Politics (Fishing with the King, November 2010; The Life Sentence of Dicky Joe Jackson and His Family, April 2014; Sanctuary, March 2017); The Massachusetts Review (Nothing Went to Waste: Considering the Life of Ben Kennedy, Summer 2012); McSweeneys (What Happens After Sixteen Years in Prison?, January 2013); Oxford American (Smoke Signals, Summer 2011; New Missions, Spring 2012; and Backyard Battlefields, Summer 2012); River Teeth (And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Fall 2012); Virginia Quarterly Review (A Product of This Town, January 2008); and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 (We Are Not Just Refugees, Summer 2009).

Take from my hand

Put in your hands

The fruit of all my grief

Alabama Shakes

My eyes often open when I see a limping person going down the street.

That persons wrestled with God, I think.

William Goyen

The first story in this collection, Sanctuary, came about as I followed news accounts of President Trumps initial crackdown on undocumented people in 2017. I contacted organizations that worked with immigrants and learned about a Mexican man, Sixto Paz, who had taken refuge in a Phoenix, Arizona, church for almost a year. I wondered, Who is this guy and others like him? Beyond the one or two quotes attributed to them in news stories, who are they, really? What are their dreams, ambitions, their disappointments? They are statistics. What else are they? What is our breathless, twenty-four-hour news cycle missing about them? I had to find out. I contacted the church and arranged to meet Sixto.

I often find my stories through the news and in chance encounters. In 2005, I was reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, when I met a man by the name of Michael from Texas who housed homeless teenage boys. We spent no more than an hour together, if that. Five years later, after a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti and killed thousands of people, I thought of Michael and wondered if he and the boys he sheltered survived. I tracked Michael down and then flew to Port-au-Prince and spent ten days with him as he tried to rebuild his shelter, his life, and the lives of the children he cared for.

Sixto, Michael, and the others profiled in this collection survived their ordeals. Their struggles changed and defined them, as do our own. They give meaning to our lives. They are our history and often reflect the times in which we live. They are worth telling and retelling and remembering.

The lives lurking beneath the surface of the everyday continue to intrigue me. My initial judgment of someone I dont know, based on the slimmest of informationtheir appearance, the sound of their voice, their expressionsdoes not satisfy.

We will continue to make assumptions about strangers through the impressions made by the briefest of encounters. No matter how flawed those conclusions, no matter how different we may think we are from them, most of us share a common routine. We get up each morning. We make it through each day. We sleep at night and ready ourselves for the next day without knowing what it may hold, what challenges well have to surmount, and how others will judge us.

We persevere.

J. Malcolm Garcia
San Diego, February 2019