Heritage...

Fans, I will continue about my parents. My mother has had a hard life, especially in her childhood. She was one of the oldest daughters,she has one sister, four years older. Well, out of the eight remaining children, for whatever reason, she was the only one who never attended school. She was sent to work in the tobbacco fields, at the age of 8. The fifty cents a day she got was collected by her father. When he saw that it could bring him problems, he took her to a house to serve as a maid. There she had to wash clothes,dishes, iron care for the pets (two dogs) and in the room, for the dogs, she slept in a cot. In this house she dislocated her arm, yet with her arm in a sling, she still had to do her work. From there, she was taken to a house where the only daughter of the lady, was getting married. She liked my mother and one night even put her wedding dress on her (which my mom took as a bad omen) to show her how pretty she looked. She was sad to leave this house but she was sent to another and by then she was fifteen. In this home the husband didn't work and he tried to "force" himself on mom. Luckily, the lady came home to get some paperwork she'd forgotten. My mother always wore "hand-me-downs" from my grandmother. When she was small she once received a glass doll and was so thrilled, she ran to show it to her sisters and fell. Yes, it broke into little pieces. She'd receive, most of the times for the Holidays, ribbon (to put in her hair) or yards of fabric (to have her mother sew a dress for her) but these were rare occations. That's the reason why, when she met my dad, she thought he'd take her to a better way of living. Yet, he took her to live at his mother's house, till both my sister and I were born. When my sister was eight months old and I was sixteen months, my parents came to New York City to stay with relatives,in search of the "American Dream".