Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.
In deciding what form each sister’s voice would take, I chose the diary form for María Teresa’s voice. It captures her youth, her freshness, and importantly, her entries provide the texture of the Mirabals’ daily lives. In order to acquaint myself with the form’s myriad possibilities, I read diaries of children in concentration and detention camps and in hiding during WWII. Of course, Anne Frank’s diary was an inspiration. (Incidentally, all this diary reading led me, a few years later, to write Before We Were Free, about a young girl, Anita, in honor of her literary progenitor, growing up in the Trujillo dictatorship.)
While Minerva leaned towards poetry and activism, Patria’s towards liturgy and religion, Dedé toward the larger sweep of her family’s story, someone would have to tell us what they ate for breakfast. What did they wear for this outing or that? Who were the cute boys? What did it smell like after a rainfall? Gossip, recipes, as well as larger quandaries and questions. One of the huge pluses of doing research in situ is you are picking up a lot more than just facts and information. Sights, sounds, little anecdotes you wouldn’t even know to ask about.
María Teresa grows up in the course of the novel, and her concerns, as reflected in her diary entries, become more profound. As the baby sister, she tags along her older siblings, especially Minerva. We get a first-hand report of events that would otherwise be scarce or be mere background to her big sisters’ more important adult concerns. Chatty María Teresa fills us in and that helps us see, hear, smell, taste, touch the life she and her sisters are living.
In this chapter, María Teresa is readying herself for her first communion, and she is beginning to question what her catechism classes are teaching her. What is a soul? One of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare from Anthony and Cleopatra where Cleopatra exclaims, “I have immortal longings in me.” That’s why we write poetry and tell stories. The heart fills to the top and spills over onto paper or dance or compassionate solidarity. In an early poem (from my Housekeeping series) I connect this feeling of overflow to ironing! As a young girl being taught the “household arts,” ironing was my favorite: it provided me with “a way to express my excess love on cloth.” Any art, no matter how humble, can provide a space and place for love to go, connecting us to everything and everyone, springs that feed us all.
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