Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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accepted players in the Spanish religious community. Who ever heard of Presbyterians? Jo shook her head. Well, none of this was getting these papers evaluated. Whenever she got into an I’m-not-doing-enough-am-I-really-helping-maybe-someone-else-should-be-here-doing-a-better-job-than-I-am spiral—something that had plagued her even when she was a community organizer—she’d found that, if she buried herself in some small concrete task she had to do, the doubts would get shelved and—miraculously—sometimes somewhere in the process her subconscious (led by the Holy Spirit, of course) would suddenly suggest a solution she hadn’t thought of before which would break the whole dilemma open. So, “Time to evaluate the student tests!” she snapped to herself, and mentally told Finance to put a sock in it right now.
Jo downed the tea, poured another cup, stirred it around with the cinnamon stick, and slapped down on the table the English reading assessments that she had done individually that evening, interviewing student by student, while she had the rest of the class paired up and puzzling through a simple assignment, trying to help each other pronounce sentences like “Should I take your dog out for a walk?” “What time would you like dinner, Madam?” “How much does this cost?” “May I have a hamburger?” “Where is the bathroom, please?” “You do remember Thursday is my day off, don’t you?” in an accent somewhat recognizably North American. Jo spread the assessments out on the table, wondering whose to look at first. Maybe I’ll do Nilka’s first, so I can get encouraged, she decided, and shuffled through them for it. That’s when she saw the corner of an envelope peeking out from the bottom of the pile.
Jo fished it out. What on earth was this? It was very official looking. Oh, right, this had been on her desk when she’d arrived for class. But, with everybody milling around and asking her questions, and she trying to lay out her lesson across the desk in little piles through which she could move seamlessly along as she made the most of her three-hour class time, she’d forgotten all about it.
What exactly was this? The return address was embossed with an impressive title: “Dr. Angel Moreno Cueva de Piedra, Licenciado, Abogado, y Notario.” Jo automatically translated it in her mind, “attorney and notary public.” She slit it open and read her full name spelled out after the Spanish equivalent of “Dear”: “Estimada Señorita Josefina Anacaona Archer y Mencia.”
Oh, oh, she thought, this doesn’t sound good . . . and it wasn’t.
“With a heavy heart,” she read, “I am writing to you to inform you that your beloved Uncle, Señor Saul Inti Archer, is no longer leading us, but is now communing with Atageira, the Creator of heaven and earth, whom we also call YaYa and with YaYael, God’s Son and our Savior.
“Before his departure, since he had no children, he left with me a will, naming you as the heir of his property and along with it his position in the Province of Independencia in the Dominican Republic, which is your birth country.
“Please come immediately to meet with me and his beloved trustees at his home on the beach of Barahona, where you visited and spent many happy hours with him and your family during your growing-up years.
“I know this will come as a shock to you and, perhaps, an inconvenience, but a passing makes its own schedule, and it is imperative that you, as the only living heir, come immediately, or as soon as possible, as there are many serious issues involved that must be thoroughly discussed before you can take control of your inheritance.
“With great respect,
“I am your most humble servant,
“Angel Moreno Cueva de Piedra,
“Licenciado, Abogado, y Notario.”
The letter was signed in a tight, neat, hand.
Jo sat back in her chair in shock, holding the letter away from her as if it were itself the cause of this disaster. Her uncle dead, and she not even knowing so she could have run down to see him one last time? His property left entirely to her alone? What about her brother and sisters? They weren’t going to take this lightly. And, further, how could she just suddenly pick up and go running off in the middle of all her job responsibilities? Especially her Sunday services? The woman she was visiting in the hospital? The grant she was planning to write? Her weekly class in English, which was a key to her mission and recruitment strategy?
But all those concerns were swept aside as a wave of grief poured over her. This was terrible. She had become increasingly close to her uncle as the years went by. True, he was big and boisterous, and always extremely busy, and oftentimes even absent when she and her family duly visited each year. Usually, though, he had been there to greet them, and then he and her father and mother would leave on some business she did not understand and be gone most of the time. But Jo and her siblings didn’t mind. The house on the beach at Barahona was lovely and spacious. It had a pool and a garden and fifty yards away was the Caribbean Sea. The housekeepers were a married couple with several children about the ages of Jo and her brother and sisters, and they were like cousins to them in everything but blood, or so Jo supposed.
As Jo reached her teenage years, she had increasingly resented going, wanting to stay home in Richfield with her friends, but the visits were a family law that brooked no alteration. And that is when she began to notice that, as she was aging into maturity, her uncle, who had always managed to spend individual time with each of the children—going fishing with Ben, who was as wild as Uncle Sol was, taking Daniela shopping, which was Daniela’s passion from childhood on, and playing tennis with Ruby, who seemed to be good at everything athletic and approached all of life as a competition to win at all costs—had come to center particularly on Jo, paying her a special attention that her siblings began to resent just a little.
First, he taught Jo how to play chess. Then, he took her for walks through the hills, explaining to her many details about the plants, the livestock, the wild animals, even the insects. He showed her where water was gathered or diverted for irrigation on the mountains. And he told her much lore about the original inhabitants and, particularly, about her ancestors, the Tainos, the people who had come to take possession of the island around a.d. 900–1,000, subsuming all the preceding tribes into their rich culture. For some five hundred years they had lived in peace, visiting each other across the islands in their long, straight canoes that seated eighty rowers and could traverse the waves between Kiskeya, their name for her homeland, “The Mother of All Islands”; Borinken, “Great Land of the Valiant and Noble Lord,” but now called Puerto Rico; Xamayca, “the Land of Wood and Water”; Cu-va; and what is now Venezuela and the mainland; and on and on. And he told her a different story of the coming of Columbus and the conquistadores than the one she had learned in school: that the Tainos had welcomed the explorers as an answer to their prayers to YaYa for rescue from the invading Caribes, working their way up from South America, island by island, pillaging villages, stealing women, eating the hearts and livers of the men they captured to steal their strength and cunning. How disappointed they were that Columbus’s followers had turned out worse marauders than the Caribes, given their superior weaponry. In fact, Uncle Sol had told her the tale so many times that Jo could later repeat most of it back, word for word, to the delight of her laughing siblings.
On Jo’s twenty-first birthday, her father had insisted they celebrate this signature event in the Dominican Republic at her uncle’s beach house. By then, Jo no longer minded. So many people turned out for it that Jo was shocked. The evening had involved interesting traditional dances and areitos, the music of the Amerindians on handmade instruments and, as a crowning event, the bestowing of a beautiful ceremonial dress with long, flowing sleeves on the baffled young woman. Her siblings were all jealous.
Since then, Uncle Sol had always made certain he spent much time with Jo on their yearly visits. He followed her work as a community organizer with great interest, asking her many questions about methodologies and procedures whenever she came. He was deeply interested in her decision to switch over to ministry. He told her he approved (which was surprising to her, since he was her uncle, not her father), but encouraged her to do “YaYael’s work” in a way that did not eliminate the skills that she had developed in her social work.
“When YaYael was on earth as Yeshua, Jesus, he did much to share the good news of salvation in a healing manner