My late brother Tom’s second mother (in law) died on Monday in D.R. Teresa Prestinary, of Monte Cristi and New York City, made 105. She had five children of her own but she raised plenty more on both islands. Per her grandson Jamie who told me that on vacays in D.R. he ran into hombre after hombre who thought of her as his own matriarch. I lived up the block from Mama Pres (when she was in New York rather than D.R.) and was often underfoot in her apartment or at my brother’s and sister (in law) Maria’s place across the street. In all that time I never heard Mama Pres say a cross word to anyone ever. The last of 20 children she seems to have been treated as a late gift from God by her family in D.R. So she grew up to grace everyone she met. She had a special connection with my wife (who is the first of 20 children). I can see them now shucking corn on my parents’ porch in the Berkshires, taking the breeze, and laughing together. Maybe they were talking about the odd DeMott fam they’d somehow got mixed up with. Or maybe they were recalling rites they’d performed to ward off witchcraft by Santerian drug-dealers who’d made my wife’s life hell when she opened a $10 clothing store on 140th and Bway back in the ’00s. (The two of them had tested my two year old son’s pee to see if it had prophylactic powers after my wife found chicken blood spattered on her store’s door.)
Mama Pres helped ease me into the city when I first came to New York in 1979. She made me dinner every night during my first season here, though meals were more catch as catch can on Claremont Ave. than back in D.R. A story of my brother’s evokes meal prep en le casa Prestinary in Monte Cristi:
It didn’t take much time, after the morning pots were scrubbed, for the task of cleaning the pebbles from the rice for the next meal to begin. The burlap bag held a hundred pounds of it, and it was fresh from el campo. If it was going to market in the city, the bag would have been culled better. Instead, it sat near the sink, not in a damp spot, but too close to the door. The supply disappeared at a rate three times faster than the amount that could have been consumed by the family, even calculating its extended nature. The mystery was occasionally confronted with some elderly commentary from the rocking chairs, but then it subsided. Everyone would eat. The cats. The dogs. The two shy, barefoot girls around the way.
The servant seasoned the beans under the wheel-chaired matriarch’s wise tutelage, despite years of repetition by both on every step. He watched the rapid process with interest, from the quantities of onions, garlic, and spices and the timing of their entry into the hot iron, to ongoing decisions about the quality specimens from those particular quantities, and what portions would be put aside for more pedestrian uses. They all enjoyed the debate as to ingredients best used to turn the savorable beans into delectable epigrammatic wonder. And, no one made black beans like Mama when she was on top of it. Funny with beans. Some days that flavor is just not there. A perfect avocado, meaning just about any one in that town, and a ripe guineo from the bottom of the racimo hanging a hundred-full in the yard, made lunch a guaranteed delight — simple and often meatless as it was, and even if the day’s beans fell short of spectacular. Throw that crunchy salt on, and look out. Not everyone got the avocado or the banana and some settled only for the con-con rice crackled hard in corn oil and stuck to the pan.
He figured he’d wait for la comida al media dia up top…Above the galleria was an open roof with some hardy lawn chairs and a breezy, mountain-still view of the town and ocean beyond. He plugged a boom box into a long extension cord he’d brought a couple years back from the local hardware store and numbers joint on his last visit for the express purpose of making his private beach party flow at the push of his button.
He felt like a swinger right away and didn’t want to jump around through tracks to find the right one so he put on Orchestra Baobab which guaranteed life at the first song and then everlasting. There are records like that. But are there more or less of them as one moves on in years? There are different reasons the answer to that can move around too. Aint life grand? The orchestra’s Latin beat ditties exploded from the minds and ears of Senegalese percussionists, and overflowed with African voices as rich as five-flowered honey from the Loire Valley. These cuts always made the instant dance steps happen when the servants smiled by. His DJ self loved that Baobab. He was alone up there and tapped his feet with his heartbeat…
I’m sure Mama Pres tapped along with Baobab downstairs. I remember getting locked on Celia Cruz and mucho meringues in her apartment, but her ears were open to sounds beyond the given. She dug Mark Knopfler’s calm (but not wan) white Anglo soul songs. Here’s one for her and Tommy, though I’m not sure it will do much for Maria. I’ve sent her a 4 hour doo-wop mix. But she’ll need much more than her choice cuts to get through this…