Once More to the River: Family Snapshots of Growing Up, Getting Out & Going Back

Freedom Ride

Freedom Ride

My bus is called. Outside the station, the noon air smells of exhaust and escape—the oily heaviness of leaving or being left—and I get in line behind the other passengers traveling from the Valley to San Antonio.

A solid, middle-aged woman with a bad dye-job and perm grabs my bags and tosses them into the cargo hold beneath the bus. The driver takes my flimsy accordion of tickets, rips out the boarding pass, and lets me on.

Moments later, as people are still getting seated, I hear my mother call out to the driver. She wants to make sure I haven’t gotten on the wrong bus.

“No, ma’am,” he assures her. “This bus is going to San Antonio.”

“It’s that I heard it was headed to Reynosa,” she says.

The last thing my mother wants is for me to wind up in Mexico, which, in her news-saturated imagination, is about as good as sending me across the river to be made into breakfast tacos.

Never mind that I’m in my 30s and have been living in the tough city of New York for more than a decade. This ride to San Antonio stirs up all her wild fears of bus-jackings and, more than likely, the dirty old men who hang out in station bathrooms.

I stand up, searching for my mother through the windows, hoping she won’t decide to come into the bus for a weepy farewell. Other than her voice still ringing in my ears, there is no sign of her. I spot my father standing inside the station. A moment later, my mother joins him. They remain by the windows looking out.

The driver, whose nametag reads “Jesus,” stands at the front end of the aisle and counts the number of available seats. His forehead sweaty, he runs his fingers through his gray hair as if trying to untangle a problem.

The baggage handler boards the bus. Her face is splattered with freckles and moles, and her jaw drops as she makes an announcement, first in Spanish and then English: “There is one person here who has a ticket for tomorrow. Please raise your hand.” No one moves.

“There are also five of you who were supposed to leave on the 9:15 and didn’t. Please show your hands.” Nothing.

“Because of you, there are people who bought tickets for this bus and aren’t able to get on because there are no more seats. Por favor, board those buses you have tickets for; otherwise we run into these kinds of problems.”

She comes down the aisle and stops next to a vaquero wearing diamond horseshoe rings on both hands. His straw hat and bag take up the seat next to him. She tells him to please remove his bag. When it looks like he’s not listening, she grips his things, stuffs them into the overhead bin, and then turns to everyone and huffs that we should remove our belongings from the empty seats so that other people may sit.

As she comes further down the aisle, she stops at a quiet old lady with a long, gray braid down her back. She looks like someone who, up until now, has only traveled by huarache or burro. The baggage handler calls to the driver, “This woman’s got tortillas all over her seat.”

She must have bought them that morning at a tortillería and was trying to air them out so that they wouldn’t stick together. The driver tells the old lady to please pack up her tortillas so that another passenger can sit.

A young mother and her little girl are forced to take the final two front seats across the aisle from each other. The passengers on either side of them refuse to move. The disabled vet is willing, despite the fact that he’s wearing a combat boot on one foot and a cast on the other. But the woman in the other seat won’t sit with him. So mother and child sit apart.