The Crying Girl in Red
How a photograph taken by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Moore prompted reflection on some underrated rock stars in my life.
By Rebecca Pirrie | Writer
Martha.
Martha says she wears black Asics sneakers because they are the only shoe that supports her twenty-thousand steps-a-day lifestyle. The only reason I know the brand is because she told me; you’d never be able to catch a glimpse of them. They are just blurs as she sprints past the front lobby of the Sioux City Comfort Inn from one dirty room to another. “Housekeeping is a sport,” I’ve told her on many occasions, to which she laughs and yells back, “Si,” over an arm load of soiled sheets.
On my second day as the front desk agent at the sixty-year old hotel, I saw Martha crying. I hadn’t realized it at first, her back to me as she maneuvered a vacuum across the carpet.
“A guest is here, but do we have any clean rooms?” I started to ask her, but when I saw her stress in tear trails down her cheeks, I dropped the question before it could hit her.
She swatted at her face. “You no tell anyone you see me cry! No one think I’m weak,” she said, the vacuum never ceasing its movement over the floor.
Martha could have been spotted bawling in the toiletry closet and still no manager would question the strength of this forty-eight-year-old Hispanic mother. If the hotel barely survived the past fifteen years, it’s only because of Martha’s determination to keep the clean pillowcases rotating, even if she has to pull twelve-hour shifts alone to do it.
I liked it when Martha stayed twelve hours. It meant she’d be around late into the evening and I wouldn’t be alone under Comfort Inn’s leaky roof, left to fend for myself against construction workers that stumbled in from the Lucky 7 pub down the street. They’d stop to visit me on their way to their rooms, still in their grungy neon vests, and they’d beg me to join them in their rooms and ‘enjoy their Jacuzzi tub’ even though I knew the only tubs we had were hair-clogged and speckled green with mold stains. One guy said I’d get more tips if I just released a few buttons on my Comfort Inn navy polo. Another told me I wasn’t a ‘ten out of ten’ as far as strippers go, but he’d gladly give me a band if he saw me on the pole.
I could handle those boys since they were scarcely older than me, not thirty years my senior like the truckers that lingered by the front doors talking with big cigars on the sides of their mouths.When one of them, aged fifty-five, approached me in a cloud of tobacco, I wished there was a lot more than a waist high counter between us. One guest, a regular, frequently came down from his room without a shirt, his nipples like skin tags against his leather chest, and he’d ask me, “So, how do you fancy older men?”
“They leave you here all alone, sweet thing?” Another man always said, rubbing his dirty beard as he took inventory of my thighs in dress pants. These men would call me at night from their room phone, requesting another towel, reporting a burnt lamp bulb, just so I’d have to climb the stairs to meet them at their room. When there’s only one employee at the hotel, the front desk agent serves as the maintenance man, housekeeper, and manager. I stopped playing Mrs. Maintenance after I had to reach my arm into someone’s dirty bath water to unclog their tub, meanwhile a sopping man in a towel stood over me trying to peer down my shirt. When I felt his wet body dripping onto the back of my neck, I knew I’d made a mistake in coming. After that, I stayed three steps away from guests’ doors, gripping the lobby TV remote behind my back as my weapon. Some nights I locked myself in the laundry room and jumped when the phone rang.
When Martha was around, I felt safe. She was five feet of bold energy. Nothing bad could happen to the hotel (or me) as long as Martha’s feet were still moving across the hall. I wished I could channel her confidence. I rehearsed tough-talk I’d heard her use so that someday, I could sound strong like her. There was something she had that I didn’t.
Sometimes when the guests were tucked away in their rooms, she’d still stay late in the laundry room folding towels and letting the clock run on her overtime pay. The laundry room, always brimming with linen mountains that touched the ceiling, was the only piece of that college summer job I looked forward to. When I had day shifts, Martha and I spent our lunch break folding towels rather than eating because as long as the world is moving, so is Martha. I loved hearing about her wild romance with her husband of thirty years, her cooking advice, and her stories about the drug dealers and pimps she’d seen cuffed and escorted from the hotel property over the years. Once, the conversation veered towards Mexico, a place I knew nothing about besides what I’d seen from the Disney movie “Coco,” but a place Martha calls home. She talked about her father that still lives down there. That was the second time I saw Martha cry.
“He’s sick. He cannot remember me,” she said, and her hands froze between the folds of a washcloth. Her father didn’t have family caring for him, and she said she felt guilty for leaving. Years ago, she explained, one of her uncles killed another uncle to inherit the family land. Martha’s family could have been next, so her husband and five children fled to the States. Now that her father’s health is deteriorating, he is unable to change, feed, or bathe himself, but none of her family members will take care of him because of old grudges.
It was stories like these that showed me how she earned this tough backbone.
“I’d shower him every day if he lived with me,” she said, wiping her cheeks. But to depart from Comfort Inn and Sioux City, Iowa would mean forfeiting her children’s education, and that is the whole reason she spends sixty hours a week folding these towels.
A tear slipped from her chin to the washcloth, and then she cursed for letting her weakness escape.
When she posted a photograph of a small crying child on Instagram, I knew that she didn’t just choose this post for the way the blood-red colored T-shirt of the girl matched her Instagram theme.
Alejandra.
Alejandra was my sophomore roommate in college, a five-foot painter with blood-colored lipstick and curly hair that reached her bum. Originally from Guatemala, she cooked me authentic tacos that ruined Chipotle for me. She moved to Fargo, North Dakota when she married her husband, Vinnie. He’s her perfect equal in both height and creativity. The two post on social media incessantly: pictures of his tats, her paintings of Chance the Rapper, Rocket (her puppy), or her OOTD (outfit of the day).
When she posted a photograph of a small crying child on Instagram, I knew that she didn’t just choose this post for the way the blood-red colored T-shirt of the girl matched her Instagram theme.
“But how do I describe living in the only place I’ve called home when they say we don’t belong?” She asks in her caption, and though it’s directed to her seven hundred followers, I feel the question as though it is addressed to me. It transports me to a memory I have with her.
When Alejandra and I still lived together, it was during the 2016 election. Huddled in a Buffalo Wild Wings booth, she furrowed her brows at the mustached news anchor commentating on the election like it was a sporting event. Instead of a football or baseball game, every screen broadcasted the voting results, which says something about what everyone in that restaurant cared about. My Parmesan Garlic wings were of much higher concern to me than whoever was elected into office. Whether the winner wore a red tie or blue pencil skirt, I’d be going to bed the same way that night and every night to follow.
It didn’t occur to me that not everyone had that same luxury.
“My parents are undocumented,” Alejandra confessed after the results were announced. She burst into tears. “I don’t know what this will mean for me.”
Suddenly, my appetite was gone.
The Photograph
John Moore, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, spent years in Mexico photographing the journey of immigrants, the life of violent gangs, and the daily life of border patrol. When a woman and her four-year old daughter were stopped at the border by the patrol officers, he snapped a shot. The result was a small girl, her red shirt outlined against the dark night, her face so distraught it sent waves throughout the nation. The photo won the World Press Photo 2019 contest and was the subject of headlines. Without stating any political affiliation, John Moore’s photograph stirred up strong opinions on both sides of the immigration issue.
When Alejandra re-posted John Moore’s photograph on her Instagram, the image lingered all day like a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not unlikely that this shot and I had crossed paths before, but I could scroll past its significance when it was not attached to a friend’s account. Now, with a personal connection, I was back in that Buffalo Wild Wings booth: guilty, empathetic, unsure what I could do. My automatic response was to substitute Alejandra as the little girl. It was easy, not just because of the red shoes that match Alejandra’s favorite pair of converse, but because the girl projected the same fear I’d seen in my friend.
What I find interesting is that no matter how wild my imagination, I am unable to place myself in those little red sneakers. I can’t get over the injustice of that.
Dad.
My father and I watch the same news channel in the morning, FOX NEWS, because respecting your elders means sacrificing domain over the remote. We see the same caravan full of dehydrated, dilapidated families on the screen, and generate opposite emotions. His irritation festers until he can hold his tongue no longer, saying something about “a door” or a quote he heard from Sean Hannity. I’m smart enough to eat my cheerios in silence, offering neither support nor conviction. I wonder how his tone might soften if he knew a Martha or an Alejandra.
My father is a pastor and a teacher, two jobs that require ample amounts of empathy. When his sixth grade students ask, “Are we your favorite class, Mr. Pirrie?” He always responds, “No. I dislike all my students equally.” The middle schoolers always get a good laugh out of this. Even though my father pretend-growls at them like a bulldog when they show up late to his science class, they still run across Walmart when they see him at the checkout line.
“Hey, Mr. Pirrie! Remember me? I was in your sixth grade class four years ago!”
He greets them warmly, asks them what they’re doing with their lives now, and Micah or Jennifer or John will tell him that he was always their favorite teacher. Mr. Pirrie always pushed them to do their best.
When they walk away, my father shakes his head the same way. Even now, his face aged with new contours, he still makes the same expression in HyVee after Jacob, a now high school dropout, waves across aisles to his favorite teacher.
“Good kid,” my father mutters to me, placing the plastic bags in the cart. “It wasn’t his fault his father was a loser. His mother was an addict, you know, so she got him on stuff when he was twelve .” He sighs. “Poor kid was never given a chance.”
On the drive home, my father spends the first few miles in silence. He devotes these minutes to Jacob, mourning, praying, shouldering a responsibility he feels he has as an educator. Could he have done more?
When I see the photograph of the crying girl on Instagram, I consider sending the picture to my father. I get so far as to copy/pasting it into the text bubble, because surely there’s no Sean Hannity quote that can nullify the significance of the child’s expression. My better judgement gets the best of me. I know there would be a response to follow and it would not be the reply from a radically changed man, but from a resolute father I hold so much love for. The comeback would only add to the sting.
Still, I wonder if my father’s reaction to the news is synonymous to his bulldog growl at his students. He plays no favorites, but if the little girl in red was his student in the Target checkout line, maybe he’d feel responsible.
Alejandra
“Here’s to 20 years and 18 months of waiting” is the caption to Alejandra’s instagram post. She holds Vinnie’s hand in front of US Department of Homeland Security, and though today is a big day for her, she does not smile in the photograph. Maybe it has to do with all that waiting. Maybe she doesn’t smile because she’s got thousands of other dreamers on her mind.
Jony
Jony was the kid that showed up late to Freshman move-in. His four flatmates, all friends of mine, laugh at the memory, about how they doubted he’d be coming at all. Then, late one night, this kid the size of a refrigerator came bounding through the door holding black garbage sacks of clothes. He smiled wide at his four new roommates. “Hi guys,” he said in a thick accent. “I have a big screen TV,” and that was the moment the boys knew they’d love Jony.
Jony gives bear hugs that lift you off your feet. He loves so much that his cheek muscles are thick from smiling so often. Whenever I stopped by his room freshman year, he told me, “You’re hungry,” and would take personal offense if I didn’t eat the whole package of Aunt Annie’s Chocolate Chip cookies he offered me. Jony took care of people. Jony was the kid who picked up his drunk friend late in the night to ensure he got home safe. Jony sent funny facebook videos to roommates having a bad day. Jony dropped out of college to raise money to send back home to his family in Mexico.
“I’m going to bring them here someday,” he told me sophomore year, months after leaving school. He didn’t look like a college boy anymore. He had a fresh cut and tattoos and a job driving a forklift at the factory that worked him over time.
Every time I saw Jony, I made a point of asking him about his family. He’d swell with pride when he talked about his sister coming to school in the states. He smiled his wide, Jony grin when he envisioned his parents working in America, their family together again.
“Someday.”
It’s not enough to like, comment, subscribe to someone’s life. I share eight hour days building trust with these students, coworkers, friends. I don’t want to be the lucky version of two different lives.
The Photograph.
In every interview about the photograph of the crying girl, John Moore doesn’t commit to any extreme political view. He will, however, state how relationship is the first step to understanding, in all aspects of every argument.
People aren’t printed blue or red at birth. They emerge from the soil where they were planted. They sleep in the best bed they can afford for themselves. We all want the same good things for our children. This sameness erases lines. It eliminates the desire for any sort of divide at all. It breaks down walls.
If relationship is the path to understanding, and understanding leads to empathy, then with empathy, we find ourselves also grieving.
Why shoulder a burden that is not ours? That’s why we ignore photographs that convict us with feeling. We don’t know what to do with them, so we place them in a box of things not to talk about at Good Friday family supper. I don’t want to create waves in a life that could be peaceful, for me, at least.
Acknowledging the photo, commenting on Alejandra’s picture, asking Jony about his family: these were things that made me feel good about myself and the situation, at least for a little while.
But I meet others.
I switch summer jobs to pay my college bills, and I meet other housekeepers; Roberta, Phen, Jennifer. I’m studying to be a teacher, and that empathy that creates holes in my father’s skin is starting to gnaw at me as I meet my students: Sudeys. Sarha. Habon.
I am tangled up in these personal connections. My empathy has grown into something I cannot quiet. And with these ties, the photograph has only become more potent. It’s not enough to like, comment, subscribe to someone’s life. I share eight hour days building trust with these students, coworkers, friends. I don’t want to be the lucky version of two different lives. I want to grieve injustice. I want to feel it as my own. I want responsibility. But with so much that needs to be said, I’m still rendered speechless.
Martha
Martha’s daughter shows up at the Comfort Inn wearing hospital scrubs. She delivers dinner to her mother in a greasy paper sack. It’s nine p.m. and Martha and I are the only two left at the hotel.
“Come eat,” Martha offers, separating her dinner into two portions on a paper plate.
For the first time, we eat across from each other with no unfolded towels in our laps.
“How is your father?” I ask her. I’m hoping that this time, I’ll be better at consoling. Better than the first time, better than the time in Buffalo Wild Wings with Alejandra.
Her face is covered with scars, early aging spots, freckles, all telling a unique story no one else has lived. “He take it one day at a time,” she says, placing half of her hamburger onto my plate. “Like me, I am that way. One day I wake up, and who knows, it be a better day.”
If I can mourn with her, I can hope with her. I can mourn and hope until I’m finally able to speak about it at Good Friday family supper.
