DELHI — The issue to which I have been a repeat expert witness in federal court for some thirty years, has quietly knocked at my door again. It came up unexpectedly, as I listened intently to the Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship. I care deeply, because I am the son of a father without papers for most of his life. He was born in the second decade of the twentieth century as his family were in transit from war torn Belfast. But, to my surprise, it was my mother's family who were directly mentioned in the Court that day.
The Delaware County Historical Association comes through again. Last year I was searching for images of the Catskill tanneries, and after many blind leads, the DCHA informed me that they had one and kindly gave me a copy. At least since the late 1980s, I have been looking for images and stories of my maternal grandfather's tribe. For the past few years I have been looking for public photos of us in the Catskills. A few days ago on June 2, on Facebook, up popped a photo posted by the DCHA. They'd done it again.
We were called "The Hidden Americans." by the anthropologist Anne H. Sutherland in her wonderful book by a similar title. There, in the photograph were two of us - Vlashika, with two bears and the horn of a Stroh violin sticking out of the bundle on the back of one of them. This is an image of Ursari Roma, one of the tribes of Mom's family commonly referred to as "Gypsy."
Mom's father arrived in one of the waves of our immigration when he was a young teen. He was "from" Barlad, in Romania*, but his father was still semi-nomadic. In summer, Mom's grandfather, and some years his family were living in a wagon, at times rushing home to Romania, where his father had been enslaved. This was so his children would be born in Romania rather than nations where there would be different if not greater oppression.
Mom's natsia, or nation, the Lovari, had many things in common with the Ursari in the photograph. Both cared for animals. We Lovari mainly cared for farm animals, often horses. The Ursari cared for and lived with bears. They were part of the family. From our knowledge of the workings of animal bodies, as a side line in the pre-industrial world, we took care of ill and injured people. As my mother put it, "My grandmother was very well educated. She spoke a large number of languages and was the village doctor in Romania. She never went to school." She was a Roma "drabanji," a traditional "healer." From her family, Mom picked up a host of small laws which never ceased to annoy my Anglo-Irish father. If there was a crescent moon, the symbol of her tribal nation, she would find some excuse to quietly turn and show her right shoulder to the moon. If an image of a bird was brought into the house, and she saw it, it would have to be taken immediately out of the house by the way it came in. It was a death omen, and it had to be removed and the house spiritually cleansed. If a living bird got into the house, Mom, a chief designer at Calvin Klein, and one of the leading shoe women executives in the United States would be in full panic mode. Again and again, as a child growing up, Mom would tell me stories of family members whose death was foretold by this kind of event, including the death of my uncle who lived with us. Murra dey, chee mungal petreto cheariglako ando kur, (my mother allowed no picture of a bird in the house) I learned from an early age.
The first arrivals of our people in America began in the late seventeenth century, when we were still enslaved in Romania, and it was illegal for us to settle in most of Europe. Laws were common that we could not stay in one spot longer than forty-eight hours. "Gypsies love to travel," said no Romani person ever. We learned to travel because it was illegal for us to live in one spot for more than two days in much of the world. But the same world which hated and defamed us, needed us. During our diaspora, we learned and perfected cold smithing copper. So when groups of us were expelled from Scandinavia and England for the "crime of going about the country in the guise of an 'Egyptian,'" we became itinerant coppersmiths. Why did we travel here? We were brought over as indentured servants, to be unpaid slaves for seven years. So, many of us freed ourselves and took to the roads here, as we had done in Europe.
In the recent Supreme Court hearings, it was mentioned that from the start, the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship to more than recently freed enslaved Black Americans. During the Congressional debates of 1866, several Congress members reflected that the impact of the Amendment would grant rights to three groups of people, who were never intended to have such rights, "Indians, the children of Chinese immigrants... and "Gypsies." Interestingly, the Chinese workers were seen as undeserving as they were meant to work here and then return to China. But, like Indians, no matter how many generations of us were born here, we Roma were seen as self governing but also unworthy of citizenship.
This was no quaint relic of the past. One summer day, my car broke down in Batesburg, Lees County, South Carolina. I was with three other Roma and we knew of this place because in the 1970s, a county law was passed which unambiguously stated, "Gypsies are prohibited from entering the county." So, of course we found ourselves sitting in a diner, waiting for our van to be repaired. In many such cases we were speaking quietly in Romaness, our language. "Speak English, manusen, (guys)" I said. "No one will know we're speaking "Gypsy" Little Joe Kaslov replied. "I know, but I also know they'll assume we're speaking Arabic!," I warned.
I will not "out" my fellow hidden Americans, but some of the traditional and skilled work we do is here in farm country. One day, I hope we may find it safe to come into the mainstream, with integration and without assimilation as has been the case of our Indian neighbors. Franklin Roosevelt created a plan called the "Gypsy New Deal" working with my late friend Little Joe Kaslov's grand uncle Steve Kaslov. It sought a similar status for Romani tribes who are still self governing, but that is a long story, and one best told in person.
Accompanying the photo from DCHA was a news clipping from June 2, 1926, from the Stamford Mirror newspaper. It was about a bear escaping from a theater in Delhi and crashing through the screen door of a neighboring house, landing on the floor of the kitchen and terrifying the woman of the house. There is never an assumption of good intention or misadventure and predictably the troop was expelled from the town. After all, Gypsies love to travel.
* There is often a confusion over "Roma" and "Romania." The nation, Romania, gets its name from having been a Roman colony. In our language, "Rom" means man. So, wherever we are from, we are Romani, and it has no connection to our centuries enslaved in Romania.
