Edgar H. Thompson   
Emory & Henry College
P.O. Box 34
Emory, VA 24327
1-276-944-6215
ehthomps@ehc.edu 

 

 

Deliverance from the Worst of Circumstance: The Biographical and

Poetic Writing of Jimmy Santiago Baca 

 

     How can purity prevail when the odds seem to be stacked against you? How do you engage in the divine comedy, that ironically is life, which all too often involves the descension into a personal hell from which you climb into an unexpected new world? The answer to these questions for Eldridge Cleaver in his book Soul on Ice was writing, the word. He saved himself through his writing. The same is true for Jimmy Santiago Baca. His two biographical works and three of his books of poetry, vividly illustrate his descension and subsequent ascension and redemption. Baca discovers his voice through his writing and reconnects with or perhaps truly discovers for the first time the essence of his cultural roots (Slavitz, A Place to Stand, xi)--which, I believe was instilled in him by his maternal grandmother. Words, poetry, gave him a way, the tools and the map, to prevail and emerge from the worst of circumstance.

     Part Apache and Pueblo Indian Baca’s mother abandoned by his family when she left them to be with another man. Baca’s father was an alcoholic. Some adults reached out to him, like his teachers and his high school coach, but they misread his distance and lack of warmth, not understanding that Baca essentially could not read and, therefore, could not succeed in school, even though he wanted to do so. Probably the only true adult nurture and positive attention he received growing up came from his grandparents, from whom he was separated when he was very young. He then lived in orphanages and homes for the indigent, from where he gradually evolved onto the streets. On the streets, he was negatively affected by his brother and other peers, most of whom did not have evil intentions, but whose actions and associations led Baca in a bad direction. Once on the street, he came to believe that no one--man, woman, or child–wanted him around (Place, 43). His search for attention, particularly love, was not successful. He didn’t really understand how to give it or to receive it. For instance, his girlfriend Theresa hated him because he was faithful to her, which cramped her style (Place, 41). She would hit Baca, and ask him to hit her back, in an attempt to make him become as bad as she was ( Place, 40). How would any reasonable person respond to this situation? Given no appropriate support or direction, Baca fought, drank, got into drugs, and never learned how to care, or then accept it when given to him (Place, 30-34). Physical pain made him feel alive, gave him a reason to live (Place, 93). He got involved in some heavy drug deals and was finally arrested and sentenced to the harshest penalty available, 5-10 years with no parole, at least five of it flat time, day for day, with some accountability for other time served. He was 21, and figured he would be 26 when he got out. It was a harsh reality, especially since he figured he

was convicted mostly because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me in it. I sat back in my wooden chair as they signed the paperwork and stared down at the arm rests, studying the various layers of paint, the chips and cracks. How many hands had gripped them? I wondered. What lives were attached to those hands, what dreams were shattered, what sorrows were they trying to squeeze out of their souls? (Place, 102) 

His subsequent description of his trip to the jail, how “the familiarity of the summer streets [he] had once driven had a desolate, barren sadness” to them (Place, 103), reminds me of my bus trip from the airport in San Antonio, Texas to Lackland Air Force Base and basic training, which was like a trip to jail. I feel personally what Baca means when he says “the sights and scenes [were] all the more unreal. Life would go on without me” (Place, 103). Worse, “running had always cleared my mind, had always been my escape from the violence in my life: over the next well, across the ditches, under branches, fleeing like a fugitive, hiding in trash cans, alleys, neighborhood nooks, and abandoned houses. The reality was that for a very longtime, I would not have space to run anymore” (Place, 105).

    In prison, though he wanted to go to school and to better himself, he finally came to the realization that this was not going to happen. His friend Macaron gave him some advice, and Baca’s description of this advice summarizes the essence of his time in prison, not his feelings of anger, anguish, or despair, but how he had to approach his time in prison, particularly his many stints in solitary confinement:

When you wish to scream, the heart says, Be silent. When you feel hurt, you numb yourself. When you’re lonely, you push it aside. Strip yourself of every trace of the streets, because it will hurt you here. Here, you have no feelings, no soul; only your heart will help you survive. Forget everything except survival. Don’t ask why–there are no reasons. There is no future, no part, only the moment; you will do what you have to do. You didn’t exist before coming here; your life before here never happened. The only thought that drives you on is to be alive at the end of the day, and to be a man, or die fighting proving you are a man. That’s the code of the warrior. (Place, 131) 

Once he reaches this state, he begins to reflect on his past, and memories revisit him. For instance he remembers the time when his mother ‘s brothers beat up his father, and his mother told his father “I am finished with you” (Place, 146). Given what happened to Baca after this event, readers shouldn’t be surprised that Baca felt finished with life, or finished with any hope for a life with quality in it.

    Memories kept rising. Of particular note to me is the memory of his time with his maternal grandmother. In a documentary about his life there is a portion that features his grandmother. In Spanish, she recollects that Baca “ran everyday to the railroad, and no matter how we spanked and scolded you, you would run to plan on the tracks. . . . You wanted to go after those trains and I was scared when you ran alongside them. Once you threw your rosary on top of one of these flat cars and waved it good-bye. Yes, how you loved things that ran and went on and on” (Working, 30). There is something about this passage that captures the quality of his cultural origins and the spirit that I think saved him in prison. As he reminisces about this time in his life, and all of the details that come forth, he realizes that “as a child I had lived in her world and drawn from her spirit, the mirror that gave me my face. When I was near her, I too was gentle and caring, and raucous with joy as a yearling colt cavorting on canyon slab rocks, outrunning the wind” (Working, 32). He remembers the men in this community: 

I used to watch the men in our barrio build adobe and clapboard houses for neighbors, how their hands worked the earth with love, with such dignified attention to their tasks. . . .  Work became a celebration of hands, of fingers that could move and bend, grip and push. Intelligence, wood, mud, voice, eye, were all precious, all gifts, but laughter was the highest gift, and courage and endurance. . . . These men always followed careful pathways through their days. . . . It was a mythic life they lived. Yet these gentle heroes were regarded as ignorant and vicious by those who did not know their hearts.” (Working, 33)

The return of images such as these, combined with inheriting his grandmother’s love of his word play (Working, 32) provide the source for his climb out of desperation and oblivion into a meaningful life. Writing became an almost out-of-body experience back “to the source of life, where one [could] be what he [dreamed], through the faith of the poem” (Working, 76). He goes on to describe this experience in Working in the Dark as a state where he

[becomes a] part of the poem, traveling through it, [and the experience becomes] an experience as powerful as that of the embryo coming from beyond his mother’s womb, from a darkness beyond through an unbearable loneliness, to ignite his being into life. I am born through the coupling of words and my birth-cry is the poem. Words are my birth-slag. In writing I lose all sense of where I come from and who I am, and I wander, driven by the instinct of the moment, awestruck in the storm of dissolution and becoming. (64)

Notice how this power overtakes him, how his imagery explodes poetically even though he is writing prose, as he finishes the above passage:

I am a bird fluttering in a courtyard bath; the rising sun against my face, I am the stained-glass cathedral window of La Virgen de Guadalupe. I am evening light that purples and blues the dry leaves drenched in moonlit rain, the sparkling debris swirling in matter, forming the world. (Working, 64) 

    Baca could not read or write when he got to prison, so when he received a letter from an unexpected source, a man named Harry who eventually befriended him through the mail, it took Baca hours to figure out what Harry was saying to him. After a day’s effort Baca composed a reply. Examine the text of the letter:

Hellos Mr. Harry, my name is Jimmy Santiago Baca I’m in prison. Well your probably thinking who thise person is. Well everything started like thise. See I been here for two year or more. I didn’t gravateted from high school. I am triendy to ge my [GED] but I cuudent. I like it a lot. That’s why I’m asking for some advies how can I get good at it. . . . (Working, 184)

From this beginning and with the help of a dictionary that Harry sent him, Baca taught himself to read and write:

A stream of ideas flowed through me, but they lost their strength as soon as I put them down. I erased so often and so hard I made holes in the paper. After hours of plodding word by word to write a clear sentence, I would read and it didn’t even come close to what I’d meant to say. After a day of looking up words and writing, I’d be exhausted, as if I had run ten miles. (Working, 185)

This grueling, inauspicious start led to poetry of the kind that expressed his rediscovered understanding of the power of his Hispanic origin, of the barrio from where he came, the men and people he remembered from his childhood. Here is a portion from “Song of Survival” which is at least 30 times longer than the one stanza I am including here. Notice how as he looks at the walls of his prison cell that he “sees” his people. Notice the way images of his childhood when he lived in the community of his grandmother flood into the poem: 

 

The mortar of these callous walls, what fingers

          mixed it? From where was sand taken? From

          places where Indians made their fires,

          holy fires, where buffaloes clouded the land,

          where trappers and pioneer families stepped,

          where newly freed slaves trampled, where holy

          dancers hummed on heated dust, and seeds

          were sown to bloom fresh fruit

          offered to passing beggars and Spanish kings,

          from this dust came life,

          came imprisonment and oppression, also . . . (Immigrants, 71) 

 

This is quite an advancement, a miracle in a way, but then the oppression and deadness of prison can lead to something good when there is a vision and heart and a determination to somehow overcome what is in front of you, letting the heart give your life power and direction.

    Baca’s poetry develops the themes described in his biographical writing. For example, in Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems after “Song of Survival” his poem “Through the Streets” and “A Desire” vividly describes the places outside the prison walls that have affected his life. However, regardless of his friend’s Macaron’s advice, his poems are full of hope. Consider the images in the following poem:

“The Day Brushes Its Curtains Aside” 
 

           I lie there awake in my prison bunk,
           in the eye-catching silence
           of prison night. 

           I study the moon out my grilled window.
           I figure this and that,
           not out, just figure, figuring more,
           the inner I go, through illimitable tunnels, 

           roaring great, myself back back back. 
           I lie still, listening to water drops
          clink and pap pap pap
           in the shower stall next to my cell. 

           In that airy place we call the heart,
           I move like a magician
           in colorful stage lights of my moods,
           my bright dreams, and blue light
           circles a tear on my cheek,
           and lips with her name. 

           From flowers in my hands
           her face appears. In cards
           she is the queen. These are tricks
           and I am the magician. 

          Tomorrow morning I will crawl out of bed,
          knowing I cannot escape the chains
          they’ve wrapped around me. 

          I will crawl out of bed tomorrow,
         as though I had stepped out of a box
         on stage. It was no illusion,
         when the word plunged into the box,
         I smiled at the crowd,
         as it went deeper and deeper into my heart. (Immigrants, 79)  

 

    In “I Applied for the Board” even though he is turned down, he is still trying to go to another place, to redeem himself:

            . . . a flight of fancy and breath of fresh air
            Is worth all the declines in the world.
            It was funny though when I strode into the Board
            And presented myself before the Council
            With my shaggy-haired satchel, wiry
            With ends of shoestrings and guitar strings
            Holding it together, brimming with poems. 

            I was ready for my first grand, eloquent,
           Booming reading of a few of my poems–
           When the soft, surprised eyes 
           Of the chairman looked at me and said no. 

          And his two colleagues sitting on each side of him,
          Peered at me through blue metal eyes like rifle scopes,
         And I like a deer in the forest heard the fresh,
         Crisp twig break under my cautious feet,
         As they surrounded me with quiet questions,     
         Closing in with the grim sour looks, until I heard
         the final shot burst from their mouths
         That I had not made it, and warm blood
         Gush froth in my breast, partly from the wound,
         And partly from the joy that it was over. (Immigrants, 83)

 

This purity grows and helps him to survive and transcend the evil of his past. His poetry explores and charts every aspect of his life symbolically.

    In the poem “Immigrants in Our Own Land”, Baca describes how convicts come into prison with hope but end up being alienated from all worlds, their new one in prison in addition to the one they left behind (Immigrants, 12-13). This themes is further illustrated by the poem “New Warden” where a supposedly real new warden’s approach to running his prison and governing the disenfranchised is to follow the notion that “freedom [is] the greatest cure/ For any and all ailments” (Immigrants, 28-29). At first readers, as would new convicts, believe the new warden is serious, and what is described makes a certain sense, but as the poem continues and the possibilities intensify and move to the extreme, the satire becomes obvious. What seems reasonable at one level will never happen in a prison because, as much as any other reason, it just doesn’t seem to be possible in that context. 

    In Martin & Meditations on the South Valley, he explains and brings to life what living in the barrio is like, full of all of its complexities and yet richness and human textures. For instance, in one poem “Eddie blows his head off/ playing chicken” to prove his worth, his masculinity. Life is crazy, of little or no value for people like Eddie, who have no religious belief to sustain them, no direction, to provide order for their lives (Martin . . . , 63). Baca talks about the importance of elders in the barrio society, how “As a Nino I believed/ god carved my grandfather in a few minutes./ He was rough cut–“(Martin . . . , 74). He talks about how people both stay the same and change. He describes El Paulo, a former gang leader, who still wears sunglasses and looks cool. He is now a janitor and still a leader, but now his “gang” is a group of “neighborhood parents” (Martin . . . , 73) who are fighting against injustice. He yells at the civic leaders on these parents behalf, “ Listen cuates, you pick your weapons/

We’ll fight you on any ground you pick” (Martin . . . , 73). The richness of life in such a place, with its secrets and its mysteries, and its constant changes are captured by the following image Baca creates of what happens after they have cut down on ancient elm tree:

Where the tree had stood

a silver waterfall of sky now poured down.

Still air.

Red dusk. I felt I had just killed

an old man. (Martin . . . , 943)  

 

Black Mesa continues this saga, as the titles of some of the poems suggest: “Dust Bowl Memory,” “Perfecto Flores,” “The Other Side of the Mountain,”“Spring,” “Green Chile,” “Sweet Revenge,” “A Good Day,” “What’s Read and What’s Not,” Choices,” Family Ties, “Personal Prayer,” . . . . In the final poem, “Black Mesa” he catalogues images and events that illuminate life in this place and time, and that provide a summary of where his life has brought him by the end of this book. Consider the following excerpts: 

 

 

Excerpt 1 

 

Rito was murdered here

by sheriffs,

brown beret Chicano activist

who taught children in the barrio

our own history,

tried to stop

them blasting Black Mesa.

And now, under my hiking boots his blood

crossbeds minerals

and forms into red crystals,

ceremonial Chac-Mool plate

on which Aztec warrior Rito

sacrificed his heart to the Sun 

 

Rito believed in a justice

whose history

is without margins. (Black Mesa . . . , 119) 

 

Excerpt 2 

 

I believe that whenever tragedy

happens in my life, I can stand on my feet

again and go on. (Black Mesa , 120) 

 

Excerpt 3 

 

I have a vision of mountain range

proportions,

to speak the heart’s language.

To write the story of my soul

I trace in the silence and stone

of Black Mesa. 

 

My hope breaks this hour’s crust

and ferments

into tomorrow’s darkness, into

another year of living,

to evolve with the universe,

side by side with its creative catastrophe. (Black Mesa , 121) 

 

 

The cycle has come full circle, the beginning of an unknowing life, the descent into evil and despair, and the ascension into a life fully lived and realized.

    Baca started publishing poetry while he was still in prison, and when he was released, he learned how to live like a poet and make a living through readings, residencies, and grants, He empowered his life as a man with words. Would that all of us find this kind of voice. Would that other young men and women in the same track from which Baca emerged find their voices before they find their hell on this earth.  

 

References Cited

Biographical

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. A Place to Stand. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

—. Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1992.

Poetry

—. Black Mesa Poems. New York: New Directions, 1989.

—. Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems. New York: New Directions, 1999.

—. Martin & Meditations on the South Valley. New York: New Directions, 1987.