Resistance Is Futile: Gypsy Assimilation in America - Essay Example

Resistance is Futile: Gypsy Assimilation in America Q: Can you please and, if you don't mind, the year you were born A: My is Gail Lovell Hancock, and I was born in 1941. Q: A lot of people claim to be a Gypsy. It has become one of those trendy, almost meaningless words. A: Actors like to use it a lot. Q: Exactly. Anybody who wants to seem exotic- A: Or who just moves around a lot. Q: So what exactly do you mean when you say are a Gypsy. A: I was born into a Gypsy clan known as the Romanies. If you look up Romany in books, you will see and I guess you might expect to see you will see that they were known as travelers, and they originated in Romania, or that area. Czechoslovakia. Middle Europe. I have never done the genealogical, you know, looking into family history. Maybe, probably, I suppose, if you go back far enough, my ancestors lived there or somewhere around there in Middle Europe. I only know for sure that my grandfather came from Wales. Q: Do you know when that was And why did he choose America A: I don't the exact year, but he came over when he was twenties. As for America, I don't know exactly, but if I had to guess I would assume he was just doing what everybody around him did. As far I know he didn't leave because of harassment or anything like that. America just represented a better place, probably, but again I don't know for sure. He came with quite a bit of my extended family. A Gypsy family is quite huge. Even as recently as the 1970s or even the 1980s, I knew third and fourth cousins like they were brothers or sisters. Well, maybe not that close. But certainly I had spent as much time with a third or fourth cousin as most people do with first cousins. And, well, there was intermarriage as a fact of life. My sister was married to a man-I can't remember the exact relationships now, sorry, but my niece and nephew became their own second or third cousins as a result. Gypsies up until recently engaged in exclusive intermarriage with their kind fairly much up until the 1960s. I had another sister who died a few years ago who was the first in my family's line to marry outside the family. And I became the second. Q: What do you know about your grandfather's life in America A: Not a whole lot. He was dead by the time I was born. Q: What about your parents Well, my father and my mother fairly much knew each other since they were very young. My father was born in Indiana, not in any particular town to the best that I know of, and my mother in Chicago. Well, Joliet, not really Chicago. My father was born in 1907 and my mother in 1913. It's funny, but I really don't know much about my parents' life as children. I do know my mother was what they would call a little hell raiser. If she had lived outside the traveler's atmosphere, I suppose she would have been a flapper. She began smoking when she was thirteen, and almost waited until she died to give it up. She used to sneak away from the camps and the occasional houses the family lived in to meet up town boys at the picture show. My father, well, like I said, I never really knew that much about his childhood. Q: What do you mean by camps and occasional houses A: I think there might be a misconception that travelers, which is what I remember being called when I was young, not Gypsies, never stayed in the same place for very long. I have pictures I can show you of my mother and father and aunts and uncles and the whole big extended family actually in wagons that they used to travel. My mother and father were kids in those pictures, by the way. Even so those photographs date back to between 1910 and 1920. They traveled all over the country with the men going into town to do any kind of work necessary, while the women stayed in the camp working or doing Gypsy things. I told you my mother was a palmist, and there were always at least one palmist in a traveler's camp. Q: What were these camps like A: You ever seen an old western movie where people going out west set up camp and circled the wagons Traveler camps were not really that much different even as late the 1930s. Smaller wagons and automobiles. People cooking over an open flame outdoors. Usually, since they traveled together, the camps were fairly large. An average Gypsy camp might be made up of as many as thirty families, meaning you would have over a hundred people including kids. This was back when there was a lot more space, of course. Today it would probably be next to impossible for a camp to be set up. Q: What about criminal activities A: I won't lie to you. In the early days there was a fairly lot of shoplifting and scamming going on. As for what they stole, you name it. Food being at the top of the priority list, of course. This was before Wal-Mart, remember, so when I say food I mean they would literally go to nearby farm and steal chickens or even pigs. Anything that was needed would be stolen. And if wasn't needed, it would be pawned. You could still find some real travelers getting kicked out of towns as late as the sixties. By then, of course, things had really changed. I think the change started in the 1940s, and certainly things were much different in the 1950s than the 1930s. But, yes, to answer your question, certainly there was criminal activity. Even before the Great Depression, you had the men going into town and conning townspeople. Q: What kind of cons A: Well, let me assure you, none of these men were Robert Redford or Paul Newman. Not that kind of con games. The typical Gypsy con involved contracting type work. You know, I never saw it up close because the women weren't allowed to take part. At least, none of the girls I knew were. Or maybe they just weren't interested. I don't know. The men would drive a truck into town and start doing things like cleaning snow off driveways or promise that they could do some cheap roofing and then, well, rip them off. Q: They sound like contractors. A: Who do you think taught these contractors how to play that game (Laughs.) That's not fair, my son's best friend is a contractor. But you are right. The con as I understood it was to get as much money upfront and then skip town. But that was before my time. Most of my cousins and the people in the family when I was growing up in the late 40s and 50s were fairly honest. Blacktopping was the thing then, and it was fairly easy to get blacktopping material. They would lay asphalt or repair roofs. They'd be gone all day. Q: Did the women do anything illegal A: (Pause.) Well, you've put me in a spot. If I say my mother was running a palm reading scam, which sounds kind of bad. And, the God's honest truth is I really don't know what went on in her dookering room. Q: Dookering room A: Dookering is the name for what goes inside the palm reading room. I told you that you'd learn some new words when this was all done. My mother was a palmist, but many of the traveler women would go into town and trade and barter for things. I had heard stories about begging, but I never saw it. Might have been before my time. Q: What about the old clich of Gypsies coming to town to steal children A: (Laughs.) Goodness. My mother had six children, her sister had four and my father's brother had five. Believe me, travelers had no reason to steal children. We are apparently a fairly fertile race. (Laughs again.) You know, now that I think of it, I honestly can think of only two or three people in the family who never have any children. Hmm, maybe it was the townspeople who stole babies from the Gypsies. Q: How were they treated in town, when your parents were young A: There's always good and bad. As late as when my mother was in her seventies, there was a councilman trying to get a law passed that would have essentially put her out of business. The travelers were like anybody else, any other ethnic group. Some people found them fascinating and different and exciting, while others thought we were sent here by the devil. I guess you could say that back in my parents' day, they had it easier than, for instance, black people. I have never heard of any Gypsy or traveler or however you want to describe it being lynched or killed. Run out of town Sure. All the time. They were thrown in jail and then run out of town, but they were planning on leaving anyway, so it was not exactly a great misfortune. Of course, this was back in the days when they would set up camps like I told you. My mother spent her childhood years traveling from town to town. By her teenage years, around 1925 or 1926, the family had settled in Portland, Oregon. She lived there until she and I my father married. And she was, I think nineteen, then. By that time the Depression had come along, and most the family traveled. To give you an example of just how traveling the travelers actually did, I was born in Billings, Montana. One sister was born in Atlanta. Another was born in Chicago. Another was born in Stockton, California. And both my brothers were born in Mobile, Alabama. Q: Sounds like you got to see a lot of the country. A: My family got to see a lot of the country. I saw a fairly good share myself, but not like my mother and father or even my oldest sister. By the time I came along, things were changing. Our lives were settling down. Q: You were born just a few months before Pearl Harbor. How did World War II affect the Gypsies A: Not at all. At least as far I can remember. I may be dead wrong, but as far as I know I never heard of anyone in the family going off to war. Obviously, I can't remember myself, but I don't ever remember hearing anyone talking about the war. You've got to understand that until, well, I guess the 1960s, when my brother was drafted and sent to Korea, it was like living inside a bubble. We lived in America, but we lived outside. Does that make sense Q: Yes, but explain exactly what you mean by "living in a bubble." A: Well, take World War II. Blacks served in the war, right They were segregated, but they served. Did Indians serve You know, I honestly don't know about that. But I can tell you that Gypsies, at least the Romany that I am related to, did not serve their country. Most of them, to be quite honestly, probably didn't even have ID. I know for a fact that many travelers never had a Social Security card and even to this day I have a sister, and she'sum.seventyseventy-four years old, who has never had a driver's license. And she's never driven. The paperwork that so many people take for granted like Social Security and even bank accounts and things like that-they just didn't have them. Q: So by "living in a bubble" would you say you mean something along the lines of living underground A: Well, they were. I don't mean like a terrorist or, you know, some kind of sixties' radicals. Nothing like that. Probably the only ID a lot of them had had, at least into the 1950s or 1960s, were fingerprints. They may have been fingerprinted when they were arrested for their con games or if they got a drunk and disorderly, and that happened a lot. A lot. Gypsies love their alcohol, let me tell you. But, and, you know I think this may say something about being clannish and being tight-knit and even being in that bubble, I never met a new a drug addict among the travelers until I guess the 1980s, and that was my own brother. Drugs were never big among us, even during the 1960s. But getting back to being underground. Until families really started putting down solid roots in the 1950s and especially the 1960s and until they started marrying outsiders, it was like a country within a country. Q: What made them settle down and stop moving around A: That would be something for a sociologist. My own guess is that it was the same thing that made other people settle down. After the war was over, the soldiers came back and married and moved to the suburbs. As far as my own family is concerned, there were about five or six areas that most of the clan settled in, with pockets to be found all around the corridors connecting them. The biggest areas were around Atlanta, Chicago, Portland and Dallas. We were on the artery that connected Atlanta to Dallas down in Mobile. And the way it usually worked was that most of them still lived in trailers that could be hitched up to a truck. They'd spend winter in Atlanta or Dallas or along the corridor, and then come summer, hitch up, and head to Chicago. You couldn't do blacktop work in the winter in Chicago was the reason for that. Q: What about school Was staying in school part of the reason for waiting for summer A: By the time I was going to school, I didn't know anyone who wasn't in school too. I know back in my mother's day and, of course, before that, school was a luxury, not a necessity. All my sisters and cousins graduated from high school. That said, I don't think that making sure a kid stayed in school to the end of the year was a major reason for deciding when to leave. That older sister who never learned to drive that I was telling you about Many the time her kids started school in Atlanta and ended in Chicago. Q: Tell me about your mother and palmistry A: She used to tell my kids and my nieces and nephews that she had a crystal ball hidden in the dookering room. She didn't. Like I told you, I don't know what went on in there. I always assumed that my mother was essentially not unlike like a psychologist that people go to find out things about themselves to feel better. I am fairly certain that my mother possessed no more psychic power than anyone else, but try telling that to her customers who would come to her religiously over and over again. Q: How far away from the clich of the palm reading Gypsy was the reality A: Oh, my God! Well, it's just silly isn't it And yet, I suppose it probably isn't any sillier than anything else. You know, you sit down and you watch a movie about a certain group and you just naturally think it must be true, but really how often is it ever close How many Westerns really tell the truth about Indians I have never seen any portrayal of any Gypsies in a movie or a TV show to be close to what I experienced. It's not just the fortune tellers, which is how they are always portrayed. It's the whole culture. Well, that maybe isn't entirely true. There was an episode of the "Andy Griffith Show" I can remember because it did strike me as close in terms of being what life was probably like about fifty years before. The show was set in the 1960s, but they had the Gypsies in these old wagons that almost looked like they were from the 1800s. Fortune tellers are always draped in jewelry and look like kind of crazy in the movies. No palmist I have ever known, my mother included, looked like that. Q: Did you ever seen King of the Gypsies A: I think I saw it on cable once about twenty years ago or so. Q: What did you think Was that an accurate depiction A: Well, that's the problem. There are different types of Gypsies. All kinds. Even among us there were two completely different types. In the south where I grew up there were the Romanies, us, and the Turks. And we had no common ancestors and nothing in common. And I don't mean by Turks that they were Turkish, or, well, Muslim. They may have been from Turkey, I don't know. But they weren't Muslim Gypsies. I don't know what they were. As best I know, there were never any intermarriages between the Romanies and the Turks. The Gypsies in that movie, if I recall correctly, were New York, I think. Maybe they were Turks. I don't know where they were from, what kind of clan or anything, but that movie had nothing to do with us. Q: Was there a king of the Romanies A: If there is, I never met him. (Laughs.) I'll tell you, among the Romany I know, they were too lazy to fight over who as king. I hate to say it, but it's true. The women really did all the work. Even later, when the workers were actually doing work instead of just pulling cons and scams, the woman did all the work. Even my father was proof of that. He was not a worker. But he was, I honestly think, a brilliant man. My father was talking about things long before they ever happened. He was lazy and I'll be the first to admit to that, but he was not stupid. He was already reading. People used to say he was crazy because he'd talk about how men were going to sent to the moon, and this was in the thirties. I remember as a kid my father sitting down and talking about how computers would one day be everywhere. And this was in the 1950s! He had the chance to invest in Polaroid before it went public and he just didn't have the money. He could have been a successful photographer, he could have been a chronicler of the Gypsies. But he was lazy. Just too lazy. Q: How has the Gypsy life that you grew up in changed in the 21st century A: Oh, completely. Completely. It is nothing at all like it used to be. Instead of living in trailers, we all live in houses now. For instance, back in the 80s, most of the Gypsies of my family living in the Atlanta area lived in trailer parks. Today they live in houses in suburbs like Acworth or Douglasville, and those houses are not cheap. The kids of those men who made their living blacktopping or running scams today work with computers and in banks. That bubble we used to live in burst a long time ago. Today the Gypsies, or again, at least the ones I'm familiar with, my family, my extended family, are Americans living in America, not Gypsies living in a bubble inside America. Q: But you had already burst through that bubble long before, didn't you A: Well, it began changing in the 1950s. I married outside the family in the 1960s, and my husband worked on an oil rig, and by the time my child was born I had settled into domesticity. You wouldn't have known there was any Gypsy blood in us if you just happened across us playing outside. But my family was different. Kind of unique. Me and one of my sisters became the first to marry outside the family, and our other two sisters married within. One moved to Atlanta and the other to Chicago. The sister who married outside moved to Jackson. He sold insurance. The other two husbands were blacktoppers. Me and my oldest sister lived in houses. The other two sisters lived in trailers. By the 1970s one of the other sisters was in a house, but it took until just a few years ago for the last one to move from the trailer into the house. None of my nephews became blacktoppers and, in fact, one of the kids from Jackson is an executive at Ford. Obviously, the world changed for Gypsies, too. I believe the proper word here would be assimilation. We may have been the last culture to become fully assimilated. Well, except for the Indians, I suppose. Q: Now about the Gypsy language and those words you promised to teach me. A: Well, you might have some trouble with the spelling, since I never have actually seen any of these words written down. Oh, I imagine somewhere out there is probably some kind of book that has them written down. If you can find one, I'd love to see it. So just spell it phonetically. That's what I would do. You would be a gorja. A gorja is simply a non-Gypsy. Someone who isn't a traveler. Two travelers have a kid and he's a full-blooded Gypsy. Now you take someone like me who was a full-blooded Gypsy who married a gorja and has a kid, that kid is called a ref. Umm, let's see. A musker is the name we used for the police. You can bet you heard that one a lot growing up. A man is a moosh. I don't know on earth you spell that one. Oh, here's another tough one. A man is moosh, and a woman is called a joovel. Now how you spell that, who knows And a dog is a jookel. Divya is crazy. Dikky-kai is look over there. Usually dikky-kai would be used like, what, um, you know, if you were eavesdropping. You might say dikky-kai at the musker moosh talking to the divya joovel. Okay, what did I just say Q: Look over there at the policeman man speaking to the crazyOkay, was that the word for woman or dog Well, it had to be woman, right. Talking to a crazy dog doesn't make sense. A: And now you know how to talk like a Gypsy. Um, let's see. How about a few naughty words for your classmates. Soove is the act of lovemaking and if I were you I wouldn't use that lightly around other travelers. Hinger is a word, a very nice word, forwellexcrement. Freckles is a nice word for testicles. Every culture has nicer words for naughty things, I suppose. Q: One last question. Did you ever think about following in your mother's footsteps Was palmistry passed on from generation to generation A: It was, but it wasn't for me. I was curious about what went in Mama's dookering room. Everybody was. But I never felt particularly psychic. At least, I never felt psychic enough to think I could be a palmist. You know, as far the following in the footsteps goes, the men did it more than the women. Probably because footsteps of most Gypsy women were the same as gorja women. Cooking. Cleaning. Raising the kids. But the boys would almost always follow the men into the blacktopping and, you know, whatever else they did. But as for me, no. Look, to be perfectly honestly. I was just your average 1950s teen. Wearing poodle skirts and drinking sodas at the Woolworth's. Of course, that was easy since the Woolworth was almost literally right across the street. Had I been born twenty years earlier Who knows. Maybe things would have been different. I'm not exactly what you might call a typical Gypsy, you know, a stereotypical Gypsy. By the time I was born that was all changing. I wish you could have interviewed my mother. That would have been some interview. The business of America since its inception has always seemed to revolve around the necessity of assimilating all cultures. The clich is that America is a melting pot and the process of melting is one that transforms one thing into something else. The essence of the original form may still be there, but in reality it is something less than it was. Most ethnic groups long ago were successfully integrated into the American ideal, but the Gypsies remained one of the last holdouts, clinging tightly to their tradition and heritage. What struck me most intensely about this interview was the revelation that not only did Gypsies manage to "live in a bubble" well into the twentieth century, but that the few media representations about them only touched very lightly upon the reality. Only a handful of films have ever been made about the Gypsies and King of the Gypsies remains the only best-selling book. As the interview subject made clear, however, that book and the subsequent film version offers information about just one particular segment of the Gypsy subculture, which only serves to heighten the fact that this culture still remains a mystery to most Americans. One of the most interesting effects of conducting this interview was the gradual realization that almost everyone thinks they know what the life of Gypsies are like to one degree or another, yet very few people actually have any authentic idea of the truth. Listening to Gail's words and comparing them in my head to the ideas of Gypsies that I myself have always had based on media representations really presented what I came to recognize as quite striking contrast between reality and perception. I was also struck by connection between the shadowy life led by this ethnic group and how the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies extermined during the Holocaust tend to be completely overlooked and forgotten. To look at Gail Hancock and the photos on her walls would never lead anyone to assume she was a Gypsy because there are no signs that conform to the stereotypical and misinformed view that most people have about them. Only after Gail reveals the large sign hanging on a wall that used to stand outside her mother's house advertising fortune telling and psychic readings does it become apparent that she is not just another average, white middle-class grandmother. The story of the Gypsies is, ultimately, the same as the story of all immigrant groups who arrive in America with their heritage intact, but watch as it slowly disintegrates through a culture serving up McDonald's Happy Meals and Wal-Mart falling prices in every neighborhood. Sources Crofton, Henry Thomas, and Bath Charles Smart. The Dialect of the English Gypsies. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2008. Encyclopedia of World Cultures: Europe (Encyclopedia of World Cultures). New York: Macmillan Reference Books, 1992. Interview with Gail Hancock. Read More