Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: One Holy Night Summary & Analysis

Ixchel—an eighth grade Mexican-American girl—explains that it has been eighteen weeks since Abuelita, her grandmother, chased off a man named Chaq Uxmal Paloquín, whom Ixchel calls Boy Baby. Boy Baby, she says, is the descendant of Mayan kings. Ixchel confesses that she has never told anybody this story except her two friends Rachel and Lourdes. Boy Baby, she continues, promised to love her “like a revolution, like a religion,” but Abuelita has sent her to Mexico so that she is as far as possible from this supposed Mayan royalty. Now Ixchel lives with “one wrinkled witch woman who rubs [her] belly with jade,” as well as with 16 cousins.

The story of Ixchel’s fall from grace begins with her time spent selling cucumbers from the family pushcart. “I don’t know how many girls have gone bad from selling cucumbers,” she says. “I know I’m not the first. My mother took the crooked walk too, I’m told, and I’m sure my Abuelita has her own story, but it’s not my place to ask.” Abuelita, for her part, blames Uncle Lalo because she thinks he should be the one working the pushcart, not Ixchel, who is “too foolish to look after herself.” In defense, Uncle Lalo says that if the family never left Mexico in the first place, “shame enough would have kept a girl from doing devil things.” 

When Ixchel first meets Boy Baby and asks how old he is, he tells her he doesn’t know. “The past and the future are the same thing,” Ixchel writes. “So he seemed boy and baby and man all at once, and the way he looked at me, how do I explain?” One Saturday, Ixchel stations the pushcart in front of a grocery store. Boy Baby arrives and buys a mango on a stick—every Saturday thereafter, he comes to buy fruit from the cart, telling Ixchel each time to keep the change. One day he brings her Kool-Aid in a small plastic cup, and that’s when she starts to recognize her feelings for him. She notes that readers might not be so fond of him, especially since his fingernails are greasy and his long hair dusty. All the same, she waits for him every Saturday in a pretty blue dress.

One night, Ixchel stations the pushcart outside Esparza & Sons Auto Repair, where Boy Baby lives in a small old closet with “pink plastic curtains on a narrow window” and a cot blanketed by newspapers. Inside, they stand under a single exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling as Boy Baby shows her his collection of 24 guns—“rifles and pistols, one rusty musket, a machine gun, and several tiny weapons with mother-of-pearl handles that looked like toys.” As he takes them out and displays them on the bed, he tells her he wants to show her these weapons so that she’ll “see who” he is; so that she’ll “understand.” “But,” she notes privately, “I didn’t want to know.”

Boy Baby talks about his lineage, saying that the stars have predicted his future son’s birth. He claims this son will “bring back the grandeur of [his] people.” Years ago, he tells Ixchel, his father brought him to the Temple of the Magician and forced him to promise that he would “bring back the ancient ways.” As he tells this story, he lies down next to the guns on the newspaper and weeps. Ixchel touches him, but the look he gives her is cold and faraway. “You must not tell anyone what I am going to do,” he says. The next thing Ixchel remembers is the look of the moon, how “pale” it seems as it glows through the pink plastic curtains. Then something inside seems to bite her, and she whimpers softly, crying for another version of herself that seems to leap out of her body and run away forever.

Regarding this moment on the newspaper bed with Boy Baby, Ixchel writes: “So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen.” Following this statement, though, she writes, “The truth is, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t any deal at all.” After lying with Boy Baby, she hides her bloody underwear under her T-shirt and runs home while hugging herself, thinking all the while that she has now become “a part of history,” wondering if she looks suddenly different to the people she passes on the street. And though she understands that she is “supposed to feel ashamed,” she feels no remorse at all. In fact, she wants to stand on a rooftop and yell, “I know.”

Feeling suddenly wise, Ixchel comes confidently back home, laughing at her newfound knowledge until Abuelita takes one look at her and asks, “Where’s the pushcart?” Scrambling for an excuse, she tells her grandmother it was stolen, and the family searches the town for the thieves. In the following days, Abuelita learns more and more of the truth. A neighbor tells her that Ixchel takes the pushcart to Esparza & Sons every Saturday and talks to a “dark Indian” man who wheels the cart into his garage, at which point they go inside together. Hearing this, Abuelita goes to the garage to find Boy Baby, but discovers he has moved away, leaving the pushcart behind as a way of paying his outstanding rent. The family then pays $20 to get the pushcart back, and Ixchel tells Abuelita the real story, though she leaves out the bit about her sexual encounter.

Despite her best efforts to hide the fact that she and Boy Baby had sex, Ixchel’s secret becomes obvious when her period never comes and her stomach swells. When Abuelita discovers her granddaughter is pregnant, she weeps and blames Uncle Lalo, who blames the United States. Overcome, Abuelita burns the pushcart and calls Ixchel a sinvergüenza—a woman without shame. In the coming weeks, Abuelita periodically returns to the garage in the hopes of gaining information about Boy Baby—the demonio, in her words—and his whereabouts. Picking up his mail, she finds a letter from a convent in another town. She writes to this convent and asks the nuns if they know where Boy Baby might be hiding. Meanwhile, she removes Ixchel from school when her uniform stretches tightly over her stomach.

Only her friends Rachel and Lourdes know about Ixchel’s pregnancy, and Abuelita wants to keep it that way. Consequently, she arranges to send Ixchel to live with her cousins in Mexico, where she was originally conceived. When her mother got pregnant, Ixchel explains, Abuelita decided to send her to the United States so that the neighbors “wouldn’t ask why her belly was suddenly big.”

A letter arrives from the convent. In it, the nuns tell Abuelita what they know about Boy Baby: that he was born to a knife sharpener and a fruit vendor; that he’s 37 years old; that his name is Chato, meaning “fat-face”; and that his blood contains not an ounce of Mayan heritage. 

As the baby grows inside her, Ixchel can feel the “ghost” of Boy Baby circling through her innards, refusing to “let [her] rest.” Not long after she arrives in Mexico, Boy Baby visits Abuelita’s house looking for Ixchel, but Abuelita chases him away with a broom. When the family next hears about him, it is in a newspaper article displaying a picture of him held by two police officers. The paper reveals that “eleven female bodies” in “the last seven years” have been found in “the Caves of the Hidden Girl.” Boy Baby, it seems, is responsible for these deaths. Ixchel stares at the article and the photograph, unable to do anything but look at the “little black-and-white dots that make up the face [she is] in love with.”

In Mexico, Ixchel’s female cousins are hesitant to talk to her. The ones that do engage her in conversation are young and ask questions the others know they shouldn’t pose—questions about what it’s like to “have a man.” “They don’t know what it is to lay so still until his sleep breathing is heavy,” she writes, “for the eyes in the dim dark to look and look without worry at the man-bones and the neck, […] to stare at how perfect is a man.” However, she doesn’t say this to them. Instead, she merely states, “It’s a bad joke. When you find out you’ll be sorry.”

Ruminating on the nature of love, Ixchel writes about how her friend Rachel thinks love “is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it.” Lourdes, on the other hand, thinks love is like spinning a top and watching all the colors whirl together until everything is just a “white hum.” But Ixchel has her own conception of love. She remembers a crazy man who used to live upstairs. Unable to talk, he used to keep a harmonica in his mouth at all times. Instead of playing the instrument, he would simply breathe through it, “wheezing, in and out, in and out.” For Ixchel, this is what love is like.