More Room Judith Ortiz Cofer

Instructor's Notes

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Judith Ortiz Cofer

Tanya Cofer.

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Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, Judith Ortiz Cofer is the Regents' and Franklin Professor of English language and Creative Writing, Emerita, at the University of Georgia, and she has won numerous awards and honors for her work. Ortiz Cofer'southward many books include A Dearest Story Offset in Castilian: Poems (2005); Phone call Me Maria (2006), a young adult novel; The Meaning of Consuelo (2003), a novel; An Island Similar You: Stories of the Barrio (1995), a collection of short stories; and 2 books of verse, Terms of Survival (1987) and Reaching for the Mainland (1987). In the following essay, Ortiz Cofer explores the significance of her grandmother getting her own room in the home she shared with her husband and many children. This slice appeared in Silent Dancing (1990), a collection of essays and poetry.

AS Yous READ: What details does Ortiz Cofer provide to show the significance of her grandmother and of her grandmother'south room?

My grandmother's house is like a chambered nautilus;° it has many rooms, nevertheless it is not a mansion. Its proportions are small-scale and its design elementary. It is a house that has grown organically, co-ordinate to the needs of its inhabitants. To all of us in the family it is known as la casa de Mamá. Information technology is the place of our origin; the phase for our memories and dreams of Island° life.

I recall how in my childhood it sat on stilts; this was before it had a downstairs. It rested on its perch like a great blue bird, not a flying sort of bird, more like a nesting hen, just with spread wings. Grandfather had built it soon after their marriage. He was a painter and housebuilder past trade, a poet and meditative° man by nature. As each of their viii children were born, new rooms were added. Later on a few years, the paint did not exactly lucifer, nor the materials, then that there was a chronology° to it, like the rings of a tree, and Mamá could tell you the history of each room in her casa, and thus the genealogy° of the family forth with it.

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Her room is the centre of the firm. Though I have seen information technology recently, and both adult female and room have macerated in size, changed by the new perspective of my optics, now capable of looking over countertops and alpine beds, information technology is not this picture I carry in my retentiveness of Mamá's casa. Instead, I see her room as a queen's chamber where a small adult female loomed° large, a throne-room with a massive four-poster bed in its middle which stood taller than a kid'south head. Information technology was on this bed where her own children had been born that the smallest grandchildren were immune to accept naps in the afternoons; here besides was where Mamá secluded herself to manipulate individual advice to her daughters, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking downwards at whoever sat on the rocker where generations of babies had been sung to sleep. To me she looked similar a wise empress correct out of the fairy tales I was addicted to reading.

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Though the room was dominated past the mahogany four-poster, it as well contained all of Mamá's symbols of power. On her dresser instead of cosmetics there were jars filled with herbs: yerba buena, yerba mala,° the making of purgatives° and teas to which we were all subjected during childhood crises. She had a steaming cup for anyone who could not, or would not, become up to face life on any given solar day. If the acrid° palatableness of her cures for malingeringrand° did non get you out of bed, then it was time to call el doctor.

And there was the monstrous chifforobe° she kept locked with a petty gilded central she did not hibernate. This was a test of her dominion° over us; though my cousins and I wanted a look inside that massive wardrobe more than anything, we never reached for that little key lying on top of her Bible on the dresser. This was besides where she placed her earrings and rosary at dark. God'south word was her security system. This chifforobe was the identify where I imagined she kept jewels, satin slippers, and elegant sequined, silk gowns of heartbreaking fineness. I lusted afterwards those imaginary costumes. I had heard that Mamá had been a great beauty in her youth, and the belle of many balls. My cousins had other ideas equally to what she kept in that wooden vault: its secret could be money (Mamá did not manus cash to strangers, banks were out of the question, so in that location were stories that her mattress was stuffed with dollar bills, and that she buried coins in jars in her garden under rosebushes, or kept them in her inviolate° chifforobe); there might be that legendary gun salvaged from the Spanish-American conflict over the Island. We went wild over suspected treasures that we fabricated upward just because children take to make full locked trunks with something wonderful.

On the wall higher up the bed hung a heavy silver crucifix. Christ's aching head hung directly over Mamá'southward pillow. I avoided looking at this weapon suspended over where her head would lay; and on the rare occasions when I was immune to sleep on that bed, I scooted downward to the rubber middle of the mattress, where her body'south impression took me in like a mother'southward lap. Having taken care of the obligatory religious ornament with a crucifix, Mamá covered the other walls with objects sent to her over the years past her children in u.s.a.. Los Nueva Yores ° were represented by, amidst other things, a postcard of Niagara Falls from her son Hernán, postmarked, Buffalo, North.Y. In a conspicuous gold frame hung a large colour photograph of her daughter Nena, her husband and their five children at the entrance to Disneyland in California. From us she had gotten a black lace fan. Father had brought information technology to her from a bout of duty with the Navy in Europe (on Sundays she would remove it from its claw on the wall to fan herself at mass). Each twelvemonth more than items were added every bit the family grew and dispersed, and every object in the room had a story attached to information technology, a cuento which Mamá would bestow on anyone who received the privilege of a day lonely with her. It was almost worth pretending to exist sick, though the bitter herb purgatives of the body were a big price to pay for the spirit revivals of her story-telling.

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Mama slept lonely on her big bed, except for the times when a sick grandchild warranted the privilege, or when a heartbroken daughter came abode in need of more than herbal teas. In the family there is a story about how this came to be.

When one of the daughters, my mother or i of her sisters, tells the cuento of how Mamá came to ain her nights, it is usually preceded past the qualifications that Papá's exile from his wife's room was not a effect of antagonism between the couple, but that the deed had been Mamá'due south famous bloodless coup° for her personal freedom. Papá was the benevolent° dictator of her body and her life who had had to be banished° from her bed so that Mamá could improve serve her family unit. Before the telling, we had to concur that the old human was non to blame. We all recognized that in the family Papá was as an alma de Dios, ° a saintly, soft-spoken presence whose main pleasures in life, such as writing poetry and reading the Spanish largdue east-type editions of Reader's Assimilate, always took place exterior the vorteten° of Mamá's crowded realm. Information technology was non his fault, later all, that every yr or then he planted a baby-seed in Mamá's fertile torso, keeping her from leading the agile life she needed and desired. He loved her and the babies. Papá equanimous odes° and lyrics to celebrate births and anniversaries and hired musicians to accompany him in singing them to his family and friends at extravagant piyard-roasts he threw yearly. Mamá and the oldest girls worked for days preparing the nutrient. Papá sat for hours in his painter's shed, also his study and library, composing the songs. At these celebrations he was likewise known to give long speeches in praise of God, his fecund married woman, and his dear island. As a middle child, my mother remembers these occasions as a time when the women saturday in the kitchen and lamented° their burdens, while the men feasted out in the patio, their rugrand-thickened voices rising in song and praise for each other, compañeros ° all.

It was subsequently the birth of her eighth kid, after she had lost three at nascence or in infancy, that Mamá made her decision. They say that Mamá had had a special way of letting her husband know that they were expecting, one that had begun when, at the start of their spousal relationship, he had built her a house too confining for her gustation. So, when she discovered her beginning pregnancy, she supposedly drew plans for another room, which he dutifully executed. Every time a child was due, she would demand, more space, more space. Papá acceded° to her wishes, kid subsequently kid, since he had learned early that Mamá's renowned temper was a affair that grew like a monster along with a new abdomen. In this fashion Mamá got the house that she wanted, but with each kid she lost in heart and energy. She had knowledge of her body and perceived that if she had any more children, her dreams and her plans would have to be permanently forgotten, because she would be a chronically ill woman, like Flora with her twelve children: asthma, no teeth, in bed more than on her feet.

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And and then, afterwards my youngest uncle was born, she asked Papa to build a large room at the back of the firm. He did so in joyful anticipation. Mamá had asked him special things this time: shelves on the walls, a individual entrance. He thought that she meant this room to be a nursery where several children could slumber. He thought it was a wonderful thought. He painted information technology his favorite color, sky blue, and fabricated large windows looking out over a light-green hill and the church spires beyond. But nothing happened. Mamá'south belly did not grow, yet she seemed in a frenzy of activity over the house. Finally, an broken-hearted Papá approached his married woman to tell her that the new room was finished and ready to exist occupied. And Mamá, they say, replied: "Proficient, it'southward for yous."

And then it was that Mamá discovered the merely means of nascence control available to a Catholic woman of her time: cede. She gave upward the comfort of Papá'due south sexual love for something she deemed° greater: the right to own and control her own body, so that she might live to encounter her grandchildren—me among them—so that she could give more than of herself to the ones already at that place, and so that she could be more than a channel for other lives, so that even now that time has robbed her of the elasticity of her trunk and of her amazing reservoir of energy, she still emanatesouthward° the kind of joy that can only be accomplished by living co-ordinate to the dictates° of one'south ain heart.

Questions to First You Thinking

Considering Meaning: Why did Cofer's grandmother want to have her own room? Why did Cofer'due south grandfather think she had asked for this room?
Identifying Writing Strategies: Cofer offers bright, detailed descriptions throughout her essay. What main impression do these descriptions create of the grandmother and of her room? (For more on how a main impression is conveyed past descriptions, see Chapter 5.)
Reading Critically: Cofer includes just a cursory bit of dialogue in paragraph x of her essay. Where else might she take added dialogue? What might be the benefit of these additions?
Expanding Vocabulary: 1 definition of secluded is "withdrawn from or involving little human social activity." How does Cofer's utilize of the word secluded in paragraph 3 broaden and enrich this definition?
Making Connections: Cofer describes her grandfather as "a chivalrous dictator of [her grandmother's] body. . . a saintly-soft-spoken presence" (para. 9). How do you lot think he conforms or fails to adjust to "dominant conceptions of masculinity" as described in "The High Cost of Manliness"? What effect does this have on the relationship between Papa and his family unit?

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Periodical Prompts

Write nearly a room that stands out in your memory. For example, it might be your childhood sleeping accommodation or a room in the dwelling of an influential friend or relative. Effort to re-create the room by using the types of vivid details that Cofer does.
In paragraph 6, Cofer writes of stories being fastened to diverse gifts that her grandmother had received. Tell a story related to a possession that is important to you.

Suggestions for Writing

Cofer suggests that by getting her own room, her grandmother dramatically improved her life: she achieved "the kind of joy that tin can just be achieved by living according to the dictates of one's own eye" (paragraph eleven). Write well-nigh something (such as a fulfilled request, an consequence, a new relationship, or a stroke of luck) that dramatically changed your life for the better. How, specifically, did your life change? Why has this change been so important or meaningful to you lot?
Compare and dissimilarity the attitudes of Cofer's grandmother and grandfather about the benefits versus the burdens of having more than children. Do the grandfather's attitudes seem dated to you, or practice yous call back they persist in any way amidst today'south fathers? Support your conclusions with examples.