Response to "Born Bad"

Actress Joan Crawford, 1935

          In the vignette "Born Bad," Esperanza captures her guilt, grief, and mourning for her Aunt Lupe who died from disease.  Esperanza begins the vignette, "Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me...because of what we did to Aunt Lupe" (58).  Esperanza then quickly jumps to describing the admiration she felt for her aunt when was healthy, "she was pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer's legs," but then shifts to describe the impact of her sickness, "her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone limp as worms. The yellow pill, the yellow smell, the bottles and the spoons." Esperanza continues to build this description and her connection with her aunt, and the reader is confused what Esperanza meant by "because of what we did," until she mentions "the game" (59).  The game seems to be an afternoon when the girls imitated their sick aunt while playing house: "It was a game we played every afternoon...you had to pick somebody...I don't know why we picked her. Maybe we were bored...tired. We liked my aunt. She listened to our stories (59-60).  To me, the girls were simply trying to understand her sickness through the game, similar to how children try to understand domesticity through 'playing house.' However, Esperanza becomes guilty with grief for playing the "game," which mixes with her sadness of her aunt's death: "We talked the way she talked, the way blind people talk without moving their head. we imitated the way you had to lift her head a little so she could drink water, she sucked it up slow out of a green tin cup...It was easy" (61). From an adult's perspective, it's easy to call what the girls did in imitating their sick aunt disrespectful or cruel, but as children simply playing, I think they were honoring Aunt Lupe's life even in sickness, when many others had probably already considered her dead.