Read Online The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana - Free Book Online

credit from a store, and she shared it with all of us. When my mother found out about it, there was hell to pay—for all of us. I wasn’t even there when all this went down, but when I got home there was another beating waiting for me. That was what Laura was like—a troublemaker and fearless! Irma was more introverted than Tony and Laura, more on her own planet, and she also was the first of us kids to get into music. She told me that she used to peek into the room where our dad would be practicing his violin until he said,
“Venga”
—come here. He started teaching her songs and some piano, how to read music. She was a natural.
    In Tijuana, the rest of my sisters and brothers were all small and growing up—Leticia, Jorge, and Maria. I didn’t get as much of a chance to babysit or take care of them, as Tony and Laura had done for me. I feel especially bad for Jorge that I wasn’t as much a big brother for him as Tony was for me. He would have to figure out a lot of things on his own. After we left Autlán, I was either out on the streets or hanging with Dad.
    From the moment we got to Tijuana, we started to learn to survive another way, too—it was time for all of us to go to work, to start supporting the family. All hands on deck, you know? I give the credit to my mom and my dad for all that. They implanted in us some really no-nonsense, hard-core values and morals. You never borrow or beg. What doesn’t belong to you, you don’t take. What’s yours, you fight to the death for it.
    One day when my father woke us up, he had with him a couple of boxes of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and a shoe-shine box. He gave half the gum to Tony and half to me, and he gave the shoe-shine box to Tony. “Go down to Avenida Revolución, and don’t come back till you sell all of it,” he said.
    Avenida Revolución was our Broadway, the center of downtown Tijuana, where the bars and nightclubs were and where all the tourists went—American and Mexican. Tony and I would go up to them, selling gum and shining shoes. That was really the beginning of my introduction to American culture. It was the first time I saw a black man—a really tall dude with big feet. I just stared at the size of his shoes while polishing them. I began to learn a few words in English, and I learned to count. “Candy, mister?” “Ten cents.” “A quarter.” Fifty cents, if I was lucky.
    We would get just enough money to take the bus, so we had to make enough money to pay for our inventory and supplies plus enough to ride home and get there the next day. Sometimes we ended up walking because we had no bus fare—like the time Tony got a huge fifty-cent tip on a shoeshine and we decided to take the rest of the day off. We were rich for an afternoon, watching a movie and eating candy, but we forgot to save something for the ridehome. The next day, it was back to the same schedule—wake up early, help out at home, go to school, take the bus downtown, and sell, sell, sell—help Mom and Dad with the rent.
    I think I did miss out on a certain part of my childhood, as many kids do. In the first ten years I was with my first wife, Deborah, I would sneak into toy stores and buy little figurines, action figures. Thing is, a few years after that, in 1986, I was hanging out with Miles’s drummer, Tony Williams. He started his career as a teenager, and I saw that his house was full of toys that he got from Japan—the first Transformers and all that. He saw me looking at them, and I said, “It’s okay; I do the same thing.”
    “You do?”
    “Yeah. What’s this one do?” Suddenly it was not the same guy who played at Slug’s with Larry Young and John McLaughlin or who drove Miles’s band in the ’60s. It was, “Oh, man, look at this!”
    I’ll tell you, that was a revelation to me. I think Michael Jackson was like that also. There was part of us that missed out on being a kid, and we didn’t wean it out of our systems till much later. After a while,