Harriet Winslow held up the Mexican baby by the feet and whacked her on the buttocks. A good hard spanking, Harriet reflected later, which she enjoyed, in truth, but which saved the child’s life. The spanking jarred the phlegm which was choking the little girl to death, and then Harriet sucked out the phlegm, and spat it out, black and blue as the child’s tiny body.

            “It’s a miracle,” said the Mexican women at the encampment. Not at all, Harriet objected. “It wasn’t a miracle, but it may have been predestined. It may be what I came to Mexico to do.”¹

            Discussing this scene from Carlos Fuentes’ Old Gringo in Puerto Rico, I asked students to read the baby metaphorically. Who was the baby? Doctors swat newborns to make them bawl. To bawl is to breathe and live. But Fuentes had bigger babies in his sights. Teams can be babies. Coaches may “spank” athletes to jolt them out of bad habits. On a bigger stage, nations choke with rage, entitlement, or self-pity—acting like a baby. Who will spank them? The Chinese hold enough of the American debt to spank an empire in decline, if they were so inclined.

            But Old Gringo is about relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbors, so I want to think on a smaller scale. Could Puerto Rico be the baby? This island colony has seemed to be dying of obstructions. The Feds come down and pass out money with one hand, and do some spanking with the other, determined like Harriet to set things right, but driven by a certain anger about having to do this thing, because the locals were unwilling or unable to do it themselves.

            The notion of Puerto Rico as a metaphorical “baby” is delicate, given its colonial status, and recent life-threatening crises. The “bad year” of 2017 proved just how sick Puerto Rico was, and would remain, without an intervention. A terminal fiscal crisis led to the island’s finances being taken over by a U.S. oversight board. A two-month student strike in the spring of 2017 brought the University of Puerto Rico system to its knees. Then Hurricane María laid the island to waste. Some 20,000 U.S. troops and volunteers came down to bring the patient back to life. During austerity protests Puerto Ricans had clamored for the Americans to leave them alone. Like Colonel Garcia in Old Gringo, they asked, “Why couldn’t the people govern themselves here in their own land: was that too much to dream?” (78). But then in desperation after María, the cry went out for more federal aid, and faster.

            I’m using Old Gringo here to frame my second thoughts about discipline in two contexts:

1. Attempts by U.S. authorities to both discipline and “save” Puerto Rico;
2. My own efforts as a father to find appropriate ways to discipline my own children.

            So let’s look at the “spanker in question.” Harriet Winslow has a missionary complex. She came to Mexico to “save” Mexicans. She was hired by a wealthy family to teach English to their children, but the Mirandas fled the “fiesta of bullets,” just before Miss Winslow’s arrival.² Like the Feds during Operation Bootstrap, satirized in the “American Invasion” chapter of Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Harriet is patronizing, and offers advice that shows a profound ignorance of the local culture.³ Harriet’s missionary impulse is transparent. She says: “what these people need is education, not rifles. A good scrubbing, followed by a few lessons on how we do things in the Untied States, and you’d see an end to this chaos” (41).

            Harriet determines to educate the poor children. The Old Gringo, AKA writer Ambrose Bierce, has been around the block and tries warn the 30-year-old “spinstress”: “You aren’t going to educate anyone. They would likely educate you first, …and not in a very pleasant way” (42).

            Harriet is described both by her mother in Washington D.C. and by the Old Gringo as “stubborn as a mule and not very realistic” (33, 44, 46). Much of the novel is in fact about Harriet coming to terms with how much of her life is based on lies, and self-deceptions. Her “forced re-education” pushes her to rewrite her own family, racial, and national scripts.

            But missionaries are not always wrong. Like the Indians under British rule, Puerto Ricans got some things out of the relationship with the U.S. And the Mexicans got something useful out of Harriet Winslow. Driven by a Puritan work ethnic she set “a basic schedule for the elementary instruction of the children, the salvage chores of the women, and the rebuilding chores of the men” (93). The people laugh at her behind her back, but Harriet sees herself as a pragmatist: while the men were off fighting, she would teach the people to read and respect private property. When the revolutionaries returned, they “would find that the people were already governing themselves, …not talking a lot of vague ideas…” (94).

            When Harriet wakens from a siesta to the baby’s near-death crisis, the fatalistic Mexican women have no idea what to do. The baby belongs to La Garduña, the camp prostitute. But like scriptural holy men hanging out on the margins of the margins, Harriet makes no distinction. Her instincts kick in. Seen objectively, in this specific situation, her scientific understanding was “superior” to the “if God wills it” stance of the Mexican women.

            “My anger saved her,” Harriet thinks afterward. On a literal level that seems true. Why was she angry? She was angry at herself for having begun to “go native.” She is angry at General Arroyo for being so sure of himself. She is angry at the Mexican women for being so passive.

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 I remember a time when my family’s dog choked on a bone, on a farm near Abilene. The dog was going to die, but my three sisters and I just watched. Mom berated us as she reached down the dog’s throat, pulling out the bone that would have killed the dog. I never saw her angry like that before, or after. Her country knowledge came out in a crisis. Her instincts were superior to whatever I was learning in high school, or as a basketball player. None of that had taught me how to act in a crisis, or how empathy with the suffering should spur us to action. My mother had spanked us with words, and it produced a kind of awe in me at her deeper reservoirs.

            Despite her limits as an American citizen of her era, Harriet Winslow also had reservoirs. The rescue of Garduña’s daughter is mid-way through a story in which Harriet herself has got a spanking, a rude challenge to her worldview. She revises her understanding of “the fathers”—the Old Gringo carrying Quixote while trying to atone for his own missionary zeal; why her own father abandoned family, race, and nation for a mulata in Cuba; and what U.S. media and politics looked like, when viewed from the borderlands, or from the “back yard” of empire.

            Near the end of the novel, when facing reporters who are clamoring about the duty to “bring progress and democracy to Mexico” (186), Harriet blurts out:

            “No! I want to learn to live with Mexico, I don’t want to save it” (187).

            Harriet is a “synecdoche of traditional U.S. public opinion,”⁴ in her puritanism, her missionary complex, and her capacity for professing a faith in lies, within “her land without memory” (4). But under duress of revolutionary conditions, Harriet Winslow comes to re-think “what I came to do…” in Mexico.

            While teaching this story Puerto Rico, I thought about the kinds of discipline passed on by fathers but also questioned and resisted by their sons. On another level, Fuentes’ story provides one frame on “post-apocalyptic” conditions in Puerto Rico,⁵ and leads me to rethink the question of times when “a very stern discipline” is needed, as Ralph Ellison once put it.⁶ Like Harriet and the Old Gringo reconsidering what they came to Mexico to do, I will question myself about “what I came to do” as a son and as a father.

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I remember hearing my father hang his belt on the closet door at night. I was eleven, and slept a few feet from his closet. The sound of a buckle on a hook could strike terror in my heart. It wasn’t that I got frequent whippings, or was being abused. But I was willful, and beginning to defy conservative authorities. Dad was old school. He would always explain to me why he was applying the belt, if for instance if I brought bad conduct reports from school. And he would tell me that this was nothing compared to the whippings he received from his own father.

            I knew this to be true. At my grandfather’s farm house near Sulphur, Oklahoma, I used to look at Grandad’s leather shaving strop, and shudder. That’s what Dad felt on his flesh when he was out of line as a boy. But I also knew that Dad’s punishments paled, in turn, to what my grandfather Floyd received from his father John Speed Stephens, the family patriarch. All six Stephens boys feared and respected John Speed. As they worked on the family farm under the watch of Tom Barker, John Speed’s right-hand man, all Tom had to do if the boys misbehaved was mention their father, and discipline would be restored.

            I grew up determined to never lay a hand on my children. My father’s belt had mixed results. I had problems with male authority figures for some years. But I was also driven to question conventional wisdom, and to be skeptical about the status quo in all forms. This has both upsides and downsides. “Experience teaches wisdom,” they say. My father had a measure of humility, and used to say: “I wrote all my books on child-rearing before I had children.” When I had my own children, I developed a healthy respect for my parents as having done the best they knew how, faced with a challenging son.

            My firstborn Sela had a bit of a rough start, and would cry often at night. Sometimes I held her in my arms and danced to Bob Marley’s music, and that would do the trick. But bawling babies demand remedies. Occasionally I would rhythmically tap her bottom in her crib until she went back to sleep. It was not a “spanking” but it was firm enough to change her rhythm. As an adult, my mind runs back, full of doubts, more aware of how delicately babies are wired. Parents are seldom fully prepared for challenging children, as my father’s “childrearing book” joke suggests. Can we forgive ourselves for being less than perfect? Will our children forgive us?

            Samuel was stubborn and rebellious, even more so than I had been. In Kindergarden, his teacher in Oklahoma City would call me when he fought with classmates. They wanted me to come and straighten him out. A few times I took Samuel outside this mobile classroom for a spanking. But it soon became obvious that whatever I could do with my hand would hurt me more than him. And I was not going to use a belt. Spanking was not going to work with him. But I soon found that my hands were tied in any efforts to discipline my own son. I had custody of Samuel, but in endless court battles his mother tried to discredit all fatherly discipline. This was part of a larger pattern, in a society that had all but outlawed discipline for children. Samuel grew up thinking that he did not have to accept discipline from any adult.

            In today’s “hands off” climate everything is under question. Some criticisms are overdue, and some of them strike level-headed people as excessive. Adrian Peterson claimed that the whippings he got as a boy gave him the discipline he needed to be a star running back in the NFL. When it came out that he was using this stern discipline on his own sons, he was banned. But how many sons grow up without any discipline whatsoever from their fathers? Looking at an undisciplined generation, many sense that the pendulum has swung too far. Raising my third child now, I see so many children being coddled. I observe the helicopter parents hover. Part of me agrees with those who argue that we were better off when we feared our fathers, or mothers.

            I discussed this with my wife Janice, who grew up rarely seeing her father, in a Caribbean family that did not spank. Safiya has no fear of her mother and often obeys her only because there is a residual fear of her father. The threat of a spanking being brought back can be the only thing that calls her to obedience. Janice and I agree on this. She would prefer that I never give Safiya a swat. Safiya sat with us at the table and listened with keen interest as we discussed spanking, and said that it had been a long time since I gave her a swat. But Janice acknowledges that the father who has occasionally redirected the child with a brief spank, serves her purposes. There are parents who seem to raise successful children without ever laying a hand on them. But most parents go through periods of time when a spanking is needed. The relative force of such spankings, and the age at which they should end, are a more difficult issue. I am in my father’s shoes now, and foreswear all authority on disciplinary advice. I only voice second thoughts here to raise some truths that are obvious to many parents: liberal ideals are often out of step with parental reality, as well as with the disciplinary needs of children.

            Fear of the father has its place. We can look around and see the results of a society in which fathers have lost their place, or are absent entirely. In popular culture, fathers have become objects of ridicule. They did not receive and are not doing any spanking…

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In Jamaica I had a friend, an English professor, who would go on rants about cabbies in Kingston. His British sense of order was offended. All these cabbies needed to be lined up and spanked, he would say. Sela and Samuel were amused, and took to calling John “Dr. Spanky.” But his was not an isolated point of view. My colleague Victor Chang used to say that Jamaicans were an ungovernable people. They were beyond discipline. Janice, from St. Lucia, has the same urge to spank when she witnesses the lack of order and simple courtesy of Puerto Rican drivers. Perhaps this impulse to spank is the afterlife of the British presence. But it’s not necessarily colonial, or racial. The three people I’ve just described are British, Chinese-Jamaican, and Afro-Caribbean. All of them grew up in more structured environments, and they cannot let go of the sense that a lack of discipline is a cultural or societal defect. Some Puerto Ricans may also get exasperated by bad drivers. But when there is no sheriff in town, then people get used to doing whatever they want, and will resent and resist anyone who tries to come in and impose order.

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British branches of the corporeal punishment are on display as part of cultural traditions throughout its former colonies. Janice tells me that in St. Lucia whippings were called “lickings.” In Creole speech they were referred to as “licks,” as in: “he got some licks.” Physical punishment was evident in colonial and post-colonial Jamaican culture, as when Rastafarians gave Michael Manley a walking stick during his 1972 campaign, and it famously became known as the “Rod of Correction.” The colonies often take certain traditions or institutions of the motherland (like bureaucracies) to extremes. The notion that young men need to be “corrected” with the rod, the board, or the cane is a recurring theme in Anglophone literature, as in the school scenes of Cecil Foster’s No Man in the House.⁷ The sadistic turns such spankings or whippings often took in former British colonies is notable in the early scenes of the film Flirting, set in Australia. starring Thandie Newton. Boys were expected to suck it up, as part of a normal rite of passage. In South Africa, J.M. Coetzee remembers in Boyhood: “He has never been beaten and is deeply ashamed of it.” Sex and violence were closely linked: being flogged with a cane, in the young Coetzee’s imagination, was linked to access to “a world of sex.”⁸

            I did not have access to a comparative perspective when I was a boy. I was on basketball teams from fourth grade on, usually a leading scorer, but also set apart from the other boys by living in the country from sixth grade on, and by being a headstrong youth in a Christian school where most students did not question authority. Like most male athletes, we dressed together. I remember a team-mate commenting on the bruises on the back of my legs when I was a teenager. I probably made sure that they were visible. Unlike Coetzee, I felt shame for being what seemed like the only boy to get whippings. It had nothing to do with sex, although there was some sense of it accelerating my path to manhood. I may have felt a measure of pride in my “stripes.” They seemed to mark me, I sensed intuitively, for a different destiny than being a “Christian soldier,” or a faithful company man.

            After Hurricane María, I taught Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha to my freshman English students. This novella is in part about the search for an appropriate kind of discipline. Young Siddhartha first questions his father and the Brahmins, the “lazy sacrificial officials” with their “holy sacrificial chants.”⁹ With the samanas, ascetics who wander through the forest, Siddhartha practices self-denial, including “the path of unselfing through pain.” But this he comes to see as “just another illusion.” He tells his friend Govinda that “I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning.”¹⁰ He even rejects the teachings of the Buddha, who warns the seeker about being too clever. Siddhartha tries to live without discipline, focused on the arts of love, the acquisition of money, and gambling. In the end, Mother Nature, in the form of a river, provides the form of discipline which Siddhartha can accept, since like his own fate, the river was “always wandering downhill, and yet singing and remaining cheerful.”¹¹

            The underlying message, which resonated with my students the same as it did with me at their age, is that neither the imposed discipline of parents or teachers, nor obsessive self-discipline, is sustainable in the long run. The “middle path” requires us to look beyond dependency on teachers, and to accept the discipline of something greater than ourselves, which usually in one form or another is an acceptance of our limits, and mortality.

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I have been thinking about the story of Ulysses ordering his men to tie him to the mast (to resist the call of the sirens) as an allegory about different modes of discipline that extreme circumstances may require us to accept. One re-imagining of this story which has lingered in my mind is Steely Dan’s “Home at Last.” Donald Fagen penned a lyrical metaphor with a bite:

“Well the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast
Could it be that I have found my home at last”

As this lyric is repeated over a groove, the words take on ironic shades. Even when temptation is past, still we remain tied to the mast. Perhaps this is the human condition: being tied to the mast is as close to home as we can get. Home on the mast: this is when we allow others to restrain us because we do not trust our own powers of self-restraint. “Our passions form our fetters.”

            The model of Ulysses tied to the mast has inspired many writers. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, re-imagined nature as a mast that would help people focus on essentials in living, and not be “thrown off the track.” Contemplating the “whirlpools” of life, Thoreau wrote:

With morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.¹²

Thoreau believed that all of us need a discipline something like that employed by Ulysses, so that we could avoid the self-destructive temptation of over-consumption, or other siren songs.

            This leads me back to my question: can we read Puerto Rico as a metaphorical baby that needs a spanking? While doing ethnographic research after María, professionals said to me over and over that they hoped that this would be a wake-up call. No one tried to deny that Puerto Rico lacked self-discipline. The island lived like teens used to Dad paying the bills. Wreck the car and Dad will buy another one. Many Puerto Ricans read Maria as “licks” or a spanking that the island truthfully needed—just as some U.S. citizens read the Trump election as a “spanking” that ought to awaken American liberals about their failure to communicate outside their own bubble.

            Some readers will demand: how can I, a gringo, suggest that Puerto Rico is like a baby needing a spanking? I do not suggest, but repeat what other Puerto Ricans are saying. Some of my colleagues might take offense, but my students, never. This is not the first time that I have found students far more willing to accept obvious truths than their parents or teachers, who often infantilize them, as if telling them: “You can’t handle the truth.”¹³ A teacher who is not trying to impose an agenda can built up trust with students. My students see me as something of a truth-teller. They know about my critical stance towards the United States, and they know I am voicing what is being said all around them. Many people hoped for a wake-up, but no one within my earshot expresses hope that conditions will soon improve. There will likely be many Harriets spanking Puerto Rico “babies,” and maybe even enjoying it, as part of the unavoidable interventions through which this colony seeks to pull itself out of a seemingly bottomless pit.

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Changing notions of “race” and nation discipline my role as a father, writer, and teacher. Many people feel shame at what the United States has become, a decadent imperial power in decline. This includes my parents, life-long conservative Christian Republicans in West Texas. But shame can work as an unproductive form of discipline, confining one within reactive stances. For instance, many people on the liberal-left in the U.S. are ashamed of being “white.”

            “It’s a bad time to be a white man,” I joke to Janice. But begging forgiveness for being “white,” as demanded in many U.S. universities, is not going to help anyone.¹⁴ Indeed, racial politricks in the U.S. is mostly stuck in an infantile state. But hear me now: When I speak to my daughter, I do not address her as a “white man,” but as her father, and so as a member of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual community. If I accepted the false discipline of racial reaction, then Safiya would grow up without respect for me. She, like my students, speak to me through Bob Marley, reminding us: “Tell the children the truth.”

            The “white man,” Alice Walker once wrote, should “remain silent for a century or two.”¹⁵ My response is grounded in a life-long residence “on racial frontiers.”¹⁶ Knowing the deep roots of interracial community, and the “affective communities” that have arisen between colonial subjects, and anti-colonial dissidents,¹⁷ I can choose various entry points. I might start with Orwell’s police officer who had to shoot an elephant in front of South Asian colonial subjects who hated him. He came to the realization that “when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys.”¹⁸ But one can progress beyond that stage. I decided long ago to find a path beyond the reactive stances of the “white liberal guilt complex.” Neither my biracial children, nor my mestizo students, have anything to gain from my abjuring the necessity to establish appropriate forms of discipline and structure with them. We have all been “spanked,” and humbled, countless times. As Ana Tsing, an anthropologist of precarity reminds us, this has eroded the lines between the global north and south.¹⁹ Speaking to that in-the-middle collective–and accepting the discipline of that middle-ground to speak to me and through me–is my own form of “a force far greater than myself.” To paraphrase Nelson Mandela, I am a “disciplined member” of the people-in-the-middle, those who live between languages, nations, cultures, and faiths. The false disciplines of race and nation do not work for people in the middle. Having accepted this discipline, when I became a man, I put away childish things.

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ENDNOTES

1. Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985): 100. All subsequent quotes from this novel are cited by page number within the text.
   
2. Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution (Duke UP, 2013) 55. “Fiesta of bullets” is attributed to Martín Luis Guzmán, one of many “camp intellectuals” in the Mexican revolution, who became a recurring type in the genre of literature spawned by this revolution, as with Colonel Frutos García in Old Gringo.
   
3. Gregory Stephens, “When I was Puerto Rican as Borderland Narrative: Bridging Caribbean and U. S. Latino Literature,” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultural y Literatura, Vol. 25 Nº1 (Fall 2009).
   
4. Alfonso González, “La intensificación de la problemática de la frontera politico cultural en La frontera de cristal de Carlos Fuentes y Columbus de Ignacio Solares.” Explicación de Textos Literarios 28:1-2 (1999-2000): 16-22 (qtd page 18). Translation mine.
   
5. Chandrika Narayan, “’Apocalyptic’ devastation in Puerto Rico, and little help in sight.” CNN (September 26, 2017).
   
6. Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” Harper’s (March 1967); reprinted in John Callahan, ed., Collected Essays (1995): 726-54.
   
7. Cecil Foster, No Man in the House (Ballantine Books, 1971).
   
8. J.M. Coetzee, Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime (Penguin Books, 2011): 9, 7.
   
9. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, with an Introduction by Ralph Freedman (Penguin Classics, 1999): 4, 6.
   
10. Hesse, pp. 15, 21. “Another illusion” is from Bob Marley’s song “So Much Trouble.”
    
11. Hesse, p. 84.
    
12. This is from chapter Two of Walden. I’ve utilized an on-line version. In print form see Henry David Thoreau, Walden; and, Resistance to Civil Government: Authoritative Texts, Thoreau’s Journal, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism (Norton, 1992). 
    
13. Gregory Stephens, “Digital Liminality and Cross-Cultural Re-integration in the Middle East,” The CEA Forum (Winter/Spring 2016).
    
14. Lauren Cooley, “Campusnewspaper editorial: ‘Your [white] DNA is an abomination’,” Washington Examiner (Nov. 29, 2017); http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/campus-newspaper-editorial-your-white-dna-is-an-abomination/article/2641940
    
15. Alice Walker, “What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?” The Nation, May 22, 1989, pp. 291-2. Originally an address Walker delivered April 8 in Washington D.C. to The National March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives.  
    
16. Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley. Cambridge UP, 1999.
    
17. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke UP, 2006).
    
18. Gregory Stephens, “Split-Screen Freedom.” Writing on the Edge (Fall 2017).
    
19. Ana Tsing writes: “Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious [and] now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end.” Ana Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton UP, 2015): 2. Quoted in Anne Allison, “Precarity: Commentary.” Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology (Sept. 13, 2016).

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