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(Or, The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Señor Pavo)

“Don’t name it,” my Grandma Izzy ordered. “It’s not a pet. It’s for eat.”

But of course, it had already been named as soon as my father and his three brothers woke up and saw the long-necked bug-eyed squawking bird with a rope around its neck tied to the kitchen steam pole. Of course they named it, “Señor Pavo! Señor Pavo!” Mr. Turkey! Mr. Turkey!

It was March 1944. After three years of World War II and food rationing, there was hardly a scrap of meat to be had in all of New York City, never mind in El Barrio. But on one still-frozen morning, in a second-floor railroad apartment on East 106th Street between Park and Madison Avenues, there did appear a live and intact young turkey.

My Grandpa Ezekiel was a blackout warden, one of the guardians who walked the city streets every night after lights out. For someone who’d been classified as 4F, unfit for the military (due to asthma, flat feet and a punctured eardrum), it was an honorable way to serve one’s country. He’d check building after building to make sure not a sliver of light escaped the mandatory black curtains each apartment had to draw after sunset. Armed with only a flashlight, he’d inspect every doorway and vestibule to make sure no stray Japs or Nazis had parachuted in to spy on, or even worse, blow up El Barrio.

There was another advantage to being a blackout warden, one that I’m sure was foremost in my grandfather’s mind when he applied for the job. As that March night slowly edged toward gray dawn, either in some nameless back alley or perhaps even smack in the middle of Madison Avenue, a live turkey pullet somehow “fell off the back of a truck” and into my grandfather’s waiting arms.

Grandma Izzy was ecstatic, or what would pass for ecstatic for her. She had come to Nueva York with my grandfather in 1928, which made them the equivalent of Mayflower Puerto Ricans (the great island diaspora would not begin until after the war was over). And like many pioneers, they found the natives were not particularly welcoming. For the past sixteen years, she had endured not only poverty, prejudice, and multiple pregnancies but the bombardment of constantly being told to go back to her country by fellow emigrants, (and/or their descendants) who were too ignorant to realize that Puerto Rico actually belonged to the United States, so if anything, she had more right to be here than they did.

Now after three years of eating little else than rice and beans, which, to put it bluntly, even she was damned tired of, there was a Real American Thanksgiving tied up in her kitchen. Grandma Izzy was truly grateful, not only for the promise of meat, but also for the chance to show up the a quién qué tu crées (who do you think you are), blanquitos (white people) who lived on the ground floor below.

Who did they think they were, those Blanquitos? That, of course, wasn’t their name. That knowledge has, alas, been lost to the ages, but according to my father, these “Blanquitos” were the last Irish family left on the block. As would soon occur in countless other New York City neighborhoods, a changing of the guard had begun. As Latin families moved in, the Ingladesas, Judeos, and Italianos moved out—seeking safety in Washington Heights, the South Bronx, or, at the very least, six blocks east on Pleasant Avenue—as close to the East River as you could get and still be in Manhattan.

By all accounts, the Blanquitos were no worse than any other family in the Barrio. Mrs. Blanquito was clean, soft-spoken, and amazingly cheerful, considering she had nine (yes, nine) children, who were actually better behaved than some of the other neighborhood tribes. Her boys wouldn’t play with my father and his brothers, but didn’t fight with them either, which in a neighborhood like Spanish Harlem in 1944 was something of a miracle. Her husband, the gangly, affable Mr. Blanquito, who suffered from sporadic bouts of employment that interrupted his steady job of drinking and disappearing—only to reappear days later propped against a door, sprawled on the front stoop, or collapsed belly up once or twice under a tree in nearby Central Park—was, for the most part, a decent family man.

To answer Grandma Izzy’s question, “Who do they think they are?” the Blanquitos knew exactly who they were. They were a family whose patriarch was too poor, too drunk, and too clueless to move his wife and kids away from a place they no longer belonged. That, of course, didn’t stop Grandma Izzy from letting Mrs. Blanquito know, every chance she got, that even though meat hadn’t passed the lips of most of the Barrio residents in months, and even though she came from that island, her family would be having turkey on Thanksgiving Day. “Don’t worry,” she must have said, “I’ll make some extra arroz con gandules and give you some.” The subtext being: unlike Mrs. Blanquito’s shameless sinvergüenza of an esposo, her husband had provided for her family.

My father, Rodolfo Valentino (named after the silent film idol but God help you if you ever called him anything but Rudy) would soon turn twelve. His brothers, Freddy, Papo, and Junior, were thirteen, eight, and nine. The first operative mission of PETA, fifty years before it would become a household word, was about to begin.

People use the phrase “eat like a bird” to describe someone who picks at his or her food and eats very little. But in order for a bird to grow, unceasing amounts of nourishment must be continuously shoved down its eternally slavering, insatiable maw. At least that was the case with Señor Pavo. He needed to be fed day and night in order to (a) assuage his endless squawking and (b) gain enough weight ultimately to feed a family of soon-to-be seven, with, hopefully, some leftovers.

Where did this endless supply of turkey provender come from? The proud wartime tradition of child labor. My father and his three brothers woke up at 6:00 A.M. every morning, rain or shine, to trail behind the produce, ice, rag, seltzer, and knife-sharpening trucks—that were still horse drawn in those days—to collect stray manure to sell to the Victory Gardens. The gardens took up every available backyard, empty lot, courtyard, and fire escape (and were being replanted for the fourth year in a row). The boys would have just enough time to circle the neighborhood and exchange their load of fresh horsepoop for cash before heading off to school. After school, they would scour the streets for discarded tinfoil, another valuable commodity, provided by the Greatest Generation’s chain-smoking gum chewers.

And so the daily chores went, until spring became summer, summer became autumn, and FDR was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term. My father and his brothers had helped Señor Pavo blossom from a scrawny pullet into a full-size Tom. Every morning Mr. Turkey would trill in recognition when he saw the boys. Not only had they taken turns feeding him over the past eight months, but also holding him in their laps as they stroked his feathers and sang:

Qué dicé Señor Pavo?

“Gublé gublé gublé!

Manaña es el dia por las gracias,

“Gublé, gublé gublé!”

(What does Mr. Turkey say?

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”)

On the other hand, whenever Señor Pavo saw my Grandma Izzy, he would leap up and try to nip a chunk out of whatever body part he could reach.

On the fourth Wednesday of November, I can only imagine my grandmother whetting her long knife as she berated the boys for making a pet out of her dinner.

“Mira—Señor Pavo—he’s going tomorrow. I told you not to name him.”

The boys shed innocent tears as they climbed into their shared bed. My grandmother most likely dreamed sweet dreams of breast meat, drumsticks, and comeuppance as she paraded that turkey in front of the Blanquitos while she offered them her pot of arroz con gandules—a dream that turned into an open-mouthed nightmare when the next morning she found the rope coiled mockingly next to the kitchen steam pole and Señor Pavo gone.

My father would tell me this story three times, the last, a month before he died. The night before Thanksgiving Day, he woke up scared and breathless in his pitch-black room with an indescribable and unshakable sense of fear. He went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and saw Señor Pavo on his mat next to the steam pole, his eyes glowing in the light from the icebox. My father got down on the floor to pet and sing to him one last time.

What does Mr. Turkey say?

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.

“Gobble, gobble…”

Minutes later, my father returned from the front stoop and brushed the leaves off his bare feet as he crawled back into bed with his brothers. He woke up again that morning to the sound of my grandmother applying cocotazos to the backs of his brothers’ heads. He knew he would be next, but he didn’t care.

Grandpa Ezekiel came home from his shift in the middle of Hurricane Izzy wielding her chancletas in one hand and the plancha cord in the other. He looked at the steam pole and then at his sons, took a breath and said, “Isabel, there’s nothing we can do. Just make some extra arroz con gandules. And save some for the kids downstairs.”

So Grandma Izzy resigned herself. Gone was her chance to have a Real American Thanksgiving; her family would have to endure yet another holiday without meat. But as she tended her caldero of rice and pigeon peas, something even more astonishing than the disappearance of Mr. Turkey materialized—the unmistakable smell of roast beast wafting up the stairs. The Blanquitos had received a true Miracle on 106th Street: a freshly roasted turkey on their dinner table and a smile on all their eleven drawn faces.

Later that afternoon Mr. Blanquito told my father he swore he saw the Virgin Mary, or something like it. Upon waking up from his latest three-day bender on the apartment building’s front stoop, he found a turkey curled up next to him. Tamed (and affectionate) from his short life of being hand-fed and petted by his adoring handlers, Señor Pavo didn’t even squawk when Mr. Blanquito scooped him up and brought him inside. I can’t say if he was silent when the knife fell.

Grandma Izzy followed her nose downstairs where two cultures, both known for their love of language and confrontation, came face-to-face. Accusations, insults, and ethnic slurs must have flared until both sides realized they were in the same boat and a truce was reached. There was a greater war going on, and they were each just a family struggling to survive the best way they knew how.

Grandma Izzy went upstairs to fetch her arroz con gandules, and in that late afternoon of the fourth Thursday of November 1944, eighteen people from two different cultures sat in the Blanquitos’ apartment and gave thanks. Which in a neighborhood like Spanish Harlem in 1944 was somewhat of a miracle in itself.

And did they all eat…it? Of course they all ate it! There was no tolerance for alternative lifestyles back then. No grumbling about animal rights, food allergies, or growth hormones. There was a war going on.

At the end of the kids’ table was twelve-year-old Elizabeth, “Betty” Blanquito, sucking the marrow out of a drumstick, inhaling Grandma Izzy’s arroz con gandules, and batting the lashes of her big green eyes at my father as she listened to him tell (and retell) the story of “The Heroic Liberation and Sacrifice of Señor Pavo. At the grownups’ table, Mr. Blanquito nodded in satisfaction—meat-drunk. He would, after this conversion, stay off the sauce for six months, long enough to hold a job and move his family, at last, the six blocks east to Pleasant Ave.

As for Betty Blanquito and Rudy, they kept what used to be called “company” on and off for the next eight years until one summer afternoon my father looked out a window and saw…my mother.