Under-Stand
d.m. Chávez-Solis
Soquorro, Aunt Soqui for short — don't call her Soquorro. She hates that. It means a cry for help.
When she was a kid, the boneheads on her block saw her coming and yelled, "Soquorro! Soquorro!" She crochets, she paints in oils, she volunteers at the hospital, and Soqui makes purses out of everything, because she can't throw anything away. It's a Depression-Era survival thing, and it's because of her mom. My grandmother.
Josepha, Cheppie for fun. One of my older cousins, when he was a toddler, couldn't say the name — it came out Chepa — so everyone started calling her Gramma Chepa. But I call her Cheppie since she's deceased and can't harm anyone anymore.
Chepa was abusive to her kids, my dad and his sisters, when they were growing up — and was a bit of a bag lady later, before anyone called them that, and a hoarder before hoarders got exploited on cable TV. I recently found and reconnected with my dad's sisters, including Aunt Soqui.
Dad went by Manuel, though his real name was Joseph. Yes, Josepha named her first and only son, not one of the daughters, after herself. But he made everyone call him by his middle name, Manny for short. Chepa used to beat him, breaking wooden hangers on his head. I wonder about the damage that did to a child’s growing brain, my father's growing brain, and what his mother’s cruelty and betrayal did to his heart, and possibly, if you check the research, to his DNA.
The sisters told me that Cheppie used wooden spoons on their heads. Dad would get thrown in the cellar, where it was dark, and there were rats. He didn’t mind the beatings so much as the cellar. There was also the blue bathroom. She’d lock the girls in there with her, one at a time, when they couldn’t learn to tell time. She would pull their hair and beat their heads with a wooden spoon.
Anyway, Aunt Soqui made a purse out of a banana skin, not too long ago, and hung it over the breakfast bar in her kitchen. Since high school I’ve been obsessed with the work of a graphic artist, Corita, who made word-art lithographs in the Sixties and Seventies, quoting and riffing on clever but serious wordplay, including e.e. cummings’s, “Be of love a little more careful than of anything.” Corita scribed onto a dayglo heart in one of her political art pieces, “To understand you must stand under…” I’ll get back to the purse. A little more on Corita, first.
She was also a photographer, and she taught art classes. You can do a search on her. She’d send her young students out with their sketch pads and these bits of card stock paper. They had cut out little two-inch square openings in the cards. The assignment was to use the cutouts like frames, to look at their world, as if through the lens of a camera, you know, like an aperture that lets in only so much light, or illumination, Corita might say, or understanding …so they could hyper-focus on details out there — to see inside of things, in a way, regular things, in creative new ways, and sketch what they saw.
Painters and other artists use the aperture technique to get a fix on their compositions in nature or in the studio, wherever. Corita was taking it to ordinary urban and suburban settings in an extra-ordinary way. She taught students about symbols and signs, about the symbolic meanings of things, then she had the kids focus on public signage, for example, on the shapes and spaces between words and their surroundings along city streets.
I was thinking about Corita, and e.e. cummings, when I hunkered down, super low, and took pictures from under the purses that were accumulating over Aunt Soqui’s kitchen bar, pictures of what were, then, her latest colorful and multi-textured inventions. I could have used my fingers to make an L7 square, and look through the opening, composing, an artist would say, from the shapes and colors I saw there. I was using a camera, so I let the viewfinder lead the way.
It was like being in an amusement park, in a way, the colors and shapes jumping out at me. Some of those first purses were kind of whimsical, putting it nicely, I’m not going to lie. But some had potential and were the beginnings of purses that have become oddly stylish.
Since the first purses, Aunt Soqui has made hundreds of them out of banana skins, orange peels, watermelon rinds, mushrooms, you name it. She dries and cures the materials using salt and sand, then rehydrates them with old-tech leather lubricant, so they become something that no one’s ever seen. Then she sews panels together, and gives them away.
“I get it, but I don't,” said my cousin last week. “That woman lives in a mansion and makes purses out of avocado peels and eggplant skins? That’s a little too whut-ever for me. Sorry, not sorry.” It’s not a mansion, but it’s pretty nice for McAllen, Texas.
“Well,” I said, “scientists and crafters have been making meat and leather out of mushrooms for a few years now.”
You can’t talk to Soqui for five minutes without her telling you how she considers herself blessed. I think it’s because she’s grateful for whatever she gets, and for everything that happens to her, even the hard stuff. Like the purses, she puts it all to good use. Very crafty. Very resourceful. “I can even make use of my old arms,” she’ll say, volunteering to hold and feed AIDS Babies at the hospital for a few hours a couple of days a week. She’s been doing it for decades.
“Pray to God but Row for Shore,” the old saying goes. Soqui loved it when I told her that one.
“Don't throw anything away,” she replied. “Because you can always use it for something later. Even if you can't, you should save it and give it away or donate it. Someone else can always make use of it.”
Soqui didn’t seem to mind at all when she offered me one of her purses and I turned it down. “Well, if I’m being honest, since it’s hard for me to lie,” I said it in the gentlest way I could, “I really have no use for a purse made out of orange peels and pineapple rinds.”
She said, “Okay,” and she set it aside. “Someone else will use it.” And so they did.
By the way, I’m Diane, short for Diana. My mom named me after a retro Fifties song, of all things, and after a little girl who was trapped in a flaming car and died of her burns. In medieval art you see Diana the Huntress everywhere. It feels like bad karma to me. I’m not a vegetarian, but I’m mindful and I don’t waste food, especially not something an animal gave its life for. I also have a few nicknames given to me by my dad. My favorite is Gardemmeh.
That one means, Goddammit. Talk about bad karma. Who calls their kid, Goddammit? It’s a long story I'll have to tell you some other time, because I have all these purses of Soqui's to put online, and about two-hundred and fifty more, at the moment, to gift away. She’s a bit compulsive. So are my dad and my brothers. So am I.
The Louvre called a few weeks ago, you know, from Paris. I told them, “No. They're not for sale, but my aunt says you can have one for free.” They asked for a better photo, so I sent them one I took from under the bar in Aunt Soqui’s kitchen.
They blew it up huge and hung it high on a wall next to one of Corita's political lithographs. Of all the gin joints in all the world. Imagine that. Now everyone who wants to, can stand under the photo and look up. But I wouldn’t guess that’s what Corita, or Frederick Douglass, or the Barrigan Brothers, or Dorothy Day, or Peter Maurin, or even e.e. cummings could have meant or imagined, literally, or metaphorically. Do you?
Since then, the phone’s been ringing off the hook, so to speak. We had to add another line. Aunt Soqui calls herself the tutti-frutti-green-tea flavor of the month. She likes to say things like tutti-fruiti and hoity toity. Everyone wants a free purse now, but I don’t know if anyone really wants to understand.
