Mama Cat

At first, the mother cat is just a cat. She's a black cat who has had a litter of kittens in the coal shed, a tiny shack on the edge of the Garcías' property where they keep the coal for boiling laundry water. The coal shed is rumored to be haunted, and the mama cat is black, so maybe that makes her a little extra spooky. She can lurk around in the dark coal shed, maybe twine around your legs like seaweed, jump on your shoulders from out of nowhere… okay now we're just scaring ourselves.

Little Yoyo, who we guess is about five, stumbles upon the mama cat and her litter of black kittens while she's exploring the coal shed one day. Yoyo knows the kitten is too young to leave its mother—it's "still suckling," and "to take it away would be a violation of its natural right to live"—but she takes him anyway (3.5.37.39).

Of course she does. She's a little girl, and dang are kittens cute. But it soon becomes apparent that both the kitten, who is mewing up a storm, and mama cat, who is angrily tailing Yoyo's every move, are none too happy about this turn of events. Yoyo starts to feel guilty, and in her guilt, does something really horrible to the kitten—she throws him out the window.

The mama cat is definitely not cool with this. That night, she appears at the foot of Yoyo's bed, "poking her face in so that the gauzy net was molded to her features like an awful death mask" (3.5.58). A black cat from the haunted coal shed, looking "spectral" at the foot of little Yoyo's bed? Terrifying.

The black cat comes back to haunt Yoyo's bedside every night, even after her Mami makes sure all the doors and windows are shut tight. Is the cat really there, or is she just a nightmare? Is it a ghost, or a real creature?

Yoyo grows out of the nightmares, but the idea of the mother cat haunts Yoyo for the rest of her life. Even now, as an adult, Yoyo sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and hears "a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art" (3.5.60).

It's obvious that mama cat is more than just a cat. And she's more than just a ghost. She's a reminder: a reminder of the horrible cruelty Yoyo was capable of even as a small child. She took an infant creature away from its mother and left it lost and homeless.

Yoyo says that this vision of mama cat points to some "violation" that lies at the center of her art. Is she referring to the violation she committed against the kitten? Is Yoyo a better artist because she knows what it's like to commit that atrocity? When Yoyo holds the kitten in her hands and looks at its "little human face," she experiences what it's like to have total, authoritarian power over another creature. Just like the dictator Trujillo. And just like her dad.

Yoyo does a cruel thing, but maybe understanding why she did it helps her to write from the perspective of people who do cruel things. Whether she's writing about Papi, or about the soldiers who come to interrogate him, she can have empathy for them because she understands that human cruelty is just another facet of the human condition. She doesn't condone or support their cruelty, but she understands it.

Or is the "violation" that shapes her art referring to the traumatic experience of being ripped from her homeland while, like the kitten, she was still too young, and being dumped unceremoniously into the wilderness of a confusing foreign country? See, Yoyo is both violator and violated in this story. That double perspective probably helps her be a better writer, too.