A Family Recipe Vielka Ebadan

The circumstances surrounding my family are defined by an absence of choice. At age 11 my abuelita dropped out of school to begin working as a full-time maid, a job she didn’t choose to have but had to have in order to support her family. At age 27 my mother was raped and impregnated with me, a lifetime subscription she didn’t sign up for but undertook. At age 34 my tío would be woken up at 2 A.M. to chauffeur for a cocaine trafficker, a situation that he--with a gun pointed to his head--was forced to stay in.

Although we were overpowered, on Fridays we felt empowered!

Carrying a candle with my tiny, trembling hands, I illuminated the figures of my family members greeting each other after a week apart. Power outages were frequent in the Dominican Republic, but not even the darkness could disrupt a Friday Dinner: the one meal each week when my family, scattered throughout the week by work and circumstance, reunited in the kitchen of my grandmother’s two-bedroom townhouse.

“Pon la mesa, mija.”

“Set the table, my daughter,” my mother instructed me.

Reverently, I spread the hand-woven tablecloth over the wooden table constructed by my tío. I set a vase of flowers, nurtured by my abuelita, in the center of the table. The table was...