For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’ve been thinking about the tragedy of the immigrants who died in the back of a truck in San Antonio over the weekend. I’ve been thinking about the horror of it, and I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to set it aside and think about something else. I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know their names or their faces. They were 300 miles away.
But in thinking about it I remembered two immigrants that I knew briefly many years ago. I knew their names and their faces. I knew they had families who loved them and cared for them and prayed for their safety. And I knew enough about being human to have some thought for their well being so far from home.
I don’t know what the best answer is for dealing with immigration, but whatever it is it has to begin with one inescapable fact: these are humans. Not “workers,” not livestock, not products, not cogs in an economic engine. These are humans. These are people.
In light of the human tragedy of this past weekend, I’d like to share this memory of two immigrants. I wrote this several years ago for a writers group, but maybe it was meant for today.
Freddie and Jessie
At least once every December, when the cold winds have stripped the last brown leaves off the trees and the gray thunderstorms of fall have been replaced by crisp blue winter skies, I think about Freddie and Jessie.
It was the Fall of 1974 when Freddie and Jessie rolled into North Texas in a dusty, two-door muscle car to work as hands at the stable where my brother and I and a few of our friends kept horses. We were suburban kids blessed with good schools and parents with good jobs and enough spare cash to let us buy and care for horses. Not fancy polo ponies that needed a lot of expensive attention, but good-enough saddle horses that could be pastured on vacant land nearby or kept on the back 40 at stables that were fighting hard to hold back the urban sprawl.
I was a chameleon in those days. One day I’d be doing the horse and rodeo two-step with my brother and our friends on the rag-tag high school rodeo team, and the next day I’d be trying to emulate the jazz-rock sounds of “Chicago” with my friends in the high school band. I’d wear jeans and boots one day, bellbottom pants and platform shoes the next. I didn’t know who I was, but who really does at age 16.
On one of those days when I was being a cowboy we drove to the stables in our lime green Ford Pinto and there they were, Freddie and Jessie, two desperados straight out of a Robert Rodriguez movie. They looked like rough customers to be sure, until you spoke to them. There was a shyness, a dignity about them, that comes with being a stranger in town. Today we might call them “illegal,” but nobody cared about that back then. We knew they had come north to earn some money to send back to a mailbox in a small Mexican town.
Freddie appeared to be the older and smarter of the two, but perhaps that was just because he knew our language better than Jessie and spoke for the two of them most of the time. Freddie had a charming smile beneath a wiry jet-black moustache and it seemed to me that at least one of the girls in our group might have been smitten with him. But Freddie had an air of wisdom and responsibility about him that went with the fact that he had a family back home. He was there just for the work.
The guys in our group liked them too because they looked every bit the cowboys that we wanted to be. I can still see Freddie in torn, faded jeans and jean jacket with a well-worn straw cowboy hat and a large rodeo buckle on his belt. I seem to remember Jessie in a dirty red gimme cap with the logo of a farm implement or feed company.
Jessie was the taller, larger of the two, but his broad, boyish face and thin facial hair revealed that he was younger and perhaps not too much older than we were. If we tried to talk to him he’d smile and then look for Freddie to help with the translation.
They lived together in a little bunkhouse at the stables with their car parked on the thin grass just outside. Freddie was the driver and when they pulled out of the lot there was the crunching of gravel as he slowly accelerated and hopped up onto the blacktop highway.
The memory of these two men always surfaces in December because that was the time of year when my grandparents drove up from the Gulf Coast for Christmas. They came to town early to help my mother prepare Christmas dinner and get the gifts bought and wrapped, and there were always meals to cook and cookies to bake during the days before the Christmas feast. On one of those days my grandmother pan-fried some pork chops and vegetables, and when she heard us talking about Freddie and Jessie she made sure to cook enough for us to take to them at the stables. She put them in a metal pie pan and covered them with foil, and my brother and I drove over in the Pinto and delivered them on a day that feels like Christmas Eve or perhaps the day before that. I remember Freddie’s big grin and Jessie’s kind smile as they received our gift.
And then I don’t recall anything else because one day not long after that they were gone. Perhaps they moved on to another job, perhaps they were fired. Or maybe the pork chops and the sounds of Christmas made them homesick and they drove south and crossed the border to be with their families.
The frayed edges of the suburbs have since been filled in by more and more people. The stables have long been replaced by affluent neighborhoods and shopping centers. The horses we rode are long dead, and the cowboys and cowgirls have scattered to the winds to become veterinarians and policemen and office workers and writers. And Freddie and Jessie have receded into a faint memory that comes once a year with the cold winter winds.