From "Itchy, Brown Girl Seeks Employment" by Ella deCastro Baron
The Best of San Diego City Works Press
Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
Itchy, Brown Girl Seeks Employment is a daring experimental memoir about coming from an immigrant Filipino family, about being a woman, about having a lifelong condition, and about being a writer and storyteller in the form of a resume by Ella deCastro Baron and can be bought here.
First Miracle
He pours water from a glass into a silver-plated pitcher and prays and prays, with his hands sweeping invisible cobwebs at the ceiling, trying to get a clearer channel to the heavens. Another pastor swings his arms high and low, sweet chariot, bellowing out “thankya lawd thankya lawd in advance” for answering our “humble prayers.” I barely see over the wooden pew back in front of me, being only five or six years old. Occasionally my neck needs a strain-break, so I look over at my Sabbath school girlfriend, she at me. She asks me why my eyes are slanted up at the ends. I point to her ears and ask why there are toothpicks in the earring holes. We both shrug together. She pats my lace butterfly sleeve shoulder (courtesy of the Spanish fashion influence on the Philippines and hand-me-downs from immigrant cousins) and I point-touch my finger at the ends of her all-over braided hair. Some girls at the military base school have different colored beads at each braid’s end, but the girls at our church always have tiny pieces of foil instead.
It should be the end of the service—every week it changes, depending on the weather outside or the way the preacher clears his throat before each sermon or maybe the groundhog finds his shadow and prophecies three more hours...he tilts the pitcher out and over, and what do you think spills out but red, red wine? The girls at my sides clap with me, and we smile big thinking, wow, this is how they felt when Jesus did it the first time at the wedding!
It is harder than usual to walk past the pastor at the door. I don’t think I’ll get to shake his big, root beer-colored, tough-skinned preacher hand this time with so many of the other brethren patting him on the back for his demonstration of faith.
It won’t be until I begin middle school that I’ll realize we are the only non-black family in our church, and that it isn’t really “normal” for most churches to have more than one color of brothers and sisters under one steeple.
It is quite a day for a miracle.
The Baker’s Dozens
A twice-told tale about how God created Filipinos
God was baking cookies in his oversized self-cleaning oven, cutting out shapes of us humans. The first batch, Auntie assured us, he forgot to set his timer. They came out barely cooked, too pale to whet the appetite. So, we were told, while the ten-cup rice cooker burble burble popped behind us on the Formica counter, God said to himself, “I will sprinkle these cookies in Europe.” Next batch, God lost track of time—maybe ten or twelve good minutes after the DING, putting the rest of the eggs into the catering fridge, caught too long admiring his stainless-steel reflection in the door. “Shoot,” he said, half-distressed, “these are overcooked. They’re dark, and they won’t cool down chewy anymore.” He swept his hand over them, and they fizzled invisible from the cookie sheets, instantaneously alighting on continents all across the equator.
There are variations on the last batch, because some tell it with one more bunch before the last. Auntie says with the next to last, God was rushing to set his timer, and this time he sat right in front of the oven door, its light on, so he could watch the “mass of yum” plump, spread, and begin to brown slightly. But, he forgot something again—the eyes—so he pulled the new population out before they could finish cooking, pressed his thumbnails in the eye spots, and angels piled them in wicker baskets, heading East towards Asia.
Finally, when he got to the last batch, he ordered his archangel to hold all his calls, summoning Moses and Elijah to answer any emergency questions that always came just as all seemed at ease, and he set to his finest batch. He set not two, but three alarms, calling Mary Magdalene to pop her head in from the sun deck when her watch read the same time’s up. He pulled up his favorite antique stool, hand-carved by his one and only carpenter. Chin in his hands, face close enough to be warmed by the oven’s blushing cheeks, he hummed the ancient hymn How Great I Art.
“Alas,” he sighed, when the three alarms crowed and Mary nodded through the window from outside, “my perfect batch.” He had to admit, he didn’t plan to use almonds for their eyes, but he ran out of chocolate chips and raisins with the other batches. Almonds were all he had left. He smiled proud as punch, looking over his globe as he fanned the cook- ies cool with his robe sleeves. Nowhere inspiring spun into view, so he tapped once in between the Pacific and China Seas, and out sprouted one of his largest archipelagos, over 7,100 islands boiling out of the sea, burble burble POP, just like rice cooking.
“Ahhhh yes,” God rubbed his hands together, inhaling the sweet- ness of his fresh-baked, perfectly browned, almond-eyed cookies. “These islands will be mysteriously fantastic for this batch—exotic and whatta place for drama! There, yes there I’ll release this last multitude. I’ll call them Filipinos.”