time and then time again

As concerns craft, Baca’s A Place to Stand can be compared to Woman at Point Zero and Frida; all three, albeit in different ways, open with an end, working backward to reveal how it is we get to the sort of end. Baca’s Prologue and Epilogue frame, and while I’m tempted to explore their function and impact to what comes between, it’s what comes between I’m most interested in here. Most specifically, I’m interested in Baca’s movement through time (at the level of paragraph, sections within chapters, and from chapter to chapter) and how this impacts pace and what’s thread throughout.

From the age of five we begin, Jimmy not remembering much before that age (7). The age of five takes up only a paragraph before a memory at the age of six is recalled. It’s also here that we are introduced to Jimmy’s propensity to slip into reverie: “I was six years old, in my crawl space under the shack – or La Casita, as we called it – where it was cool and quiet. I was drifting in a reverie when I was jolted back to the present by a door creaking open above me” (8). The story of what Jimmy witnesses – his mother and a man not his father having sex – is brief, but it functions to move the narrative to a snapshot of the dynamic between Jimmy’s mother and father. Then, Baca takes us all the way back to before his mother and father meet – to mother’s history, which includes her father dying from alcoholism – and then we get mother and father meeting, marrying after going steady for several months, then we get to 1952, the year of Jimmy’s birth, which coincides with when his father’s drinking and staying away for periods of time became issues (9-11). I summarize this here to draw attention to where our attention as audience is pointed. Because this back story is given such little time, we know this is an integral part of the story, but it’s not The story. Chapter One continues on in this fashion, a sort of speeding through to get to where we will spend the majority of our time – behind bars, both literal and figurative ones.

The jump from the first chapter to the second is an eight year one, and we learn it was at thirteen years old that Jimmy “found [him]self behind bars for the first time, in a detention center for boys” (20). Even though the subsequent years move quickly like in chapter one, the years are marked for us. But, before we get to those years and what they entailed, Baca flashes forward and then pulls back; before Baca tells us Jimmy is fifteen and Mieyo is sixteen (35), before we know Jimmy’s last year in Albuquerque was at seventeen (36), we are well aware of what’s to come: “Fighting, drinking, and getting high, driving around, this was [Jimmy’s] life for three or four years. We’d rent a cheap apartment in a bad section of town, get drunk, burn down the apartment, and take off, a bunch of wild kids in cars prowling affluent white neighborhoods, looking to steal something or break a car window just for something to do” (34).

On one hand, this example of flashing forward in fast forward is like a tease, like, hey, here’s a bit of what the next few years will look like. Keep reading and maybe I’ll tell you a bit about them. This seems a risky move – what if we don’t care/aren’t yet invested enough in the character to keep reading? Though I suppose, in looking back, at that point (getting some info about the next few years) we would not yet know that we’d fall back a bit in time.

What this abandoning time to return to it later at the craft level does is drive this theme of abandonment which turns into abandoning, escapism. When Jimmy leaves Albuquerque, he doesn’t know why or to where: “There was so much I couldn’t explain about what was happening, but one thing was certain: No one wanted me around. I was falling apart…All I knew was I had to keep moving, because then I didn’t have to think about how messed up my life was” (43).

This escaping, this abandoning is a constant in the text, made all the more present and urgent by Baca’s crafting of time and memory. Baca slowly reveals the past through looking back, like when Jimmy is counting money and he tells Lonnie how poor he was (74). Like when Jimmy stands before the judge for sentencing and remembers the slaughtering of a pig at age fourteen (101). Like when Wedo and Jimmy stop at a truck stop during their transfer and Baca moves into a new section that begins with Jimmy riding with his father in the red and white Ford (106). Such slips into reverie shift when time begins to slow down: “Memories structured my day and filled my cell. It was as if all the sorrow, fear, and regret I’d carried in my bones suddenly was swept away and my heart lifted itself into a realm of innocence before all the sadness and tragedy happened” (139). Where before memories seemed to just come, Jimmy makes efforts to remember to pass time, and Baca signals this by blending, for example, jail cell with Estancia (139, 168).

There are other significant events that happen, which function to mark time and how it does/does not pass. Take the Mieyo visit for example. After Mieyo comes and then sends a typewriter, Jimmy doesn’t “remember how much time passed after that” (197). Writing begins playing her starring role: “Poetry and music blocked out all other life. I was in my own world, swirling in the magic of language and imagination. Days, weeks, and months went by, but I hardly recognized them. Only my writing marked the passage of time” (197).

And like deciding which details to not include to speed the pace up and like including reverie to slow the pace down, Baca utilizes poetry and its structure (by his choice to insert whole pieces of poetry) and other correspondence to further play with pace; these breaks from prose can slow things down (or speed things up), which seems to directly speak to Jimmy’s experiences behind bars and/or walls.

All this attention to movement of/in and out of time, abandonment and abandoning, leaves me pondering authority because of two seeming contradictions. The last chapter, chapter thirteen, opens with direct address of time. We learn Jimmy didn’t keep track of time as others had: “I had five flat years to do, and from beginning to the end I had resigned myself to doing them day for day. The days never hurried or slowed, they settled like heat waves at dawn that evaporated like mist at dusk. Whether it was Friday or Monday, March or December, one year or three, it didn’t matter. But now, looking down at the new convicts, I realized that in a few months I was going to be free. I had nothing out there, no one and nothing waiting for me” (246-247). So. The days never hurried or slowed? Doesn’t this statement contradict how we’ve been led to move through the text? Does Baca’s crafting of pace contradict Jimmy’s experiences? Also, Jimmy reveals again that he has nothing or no one, but then Baca makes a move again, back in time to reveal Jimmy’s letter love affair with Virginia – so, wasn’t there something/someone he had?


michellelouise