Sherry Chandler

I am being mentored in this enterprise by Teresa Kanago out in Spokane. I first met Teresa at a Green River Writers retreat a few years ago, where she gave me a few quick lessons in belly dancing. I hope I prove a more apt pupil in journaling.

Over at her blog, I See Invisible People, Terry champions those peoples who are made invisible by the bigotry of the majority. Last week, she featured an article from the Spokane Spokesman Review headlined “Can Russian gypsies lull theft victims.” This rather bizarre item recounts the belief that handsome gypsy men can convince women to hand over large sums of money through the hypnotic power of their eyes. According to the article: “…detectives nodded knowingly. ‘Gypsy hypnosis,’ they said.”

This article might strike some as the sort of trivial filler newspapers sometimes use. But Terry sees it differently. Her comments on her blog and by e-mail (I’ve edited a bit for continuity):

At a conservative estimate, 250,000 Roma (gypsies) were murdered in the fascist death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The true number may be in excess of one million. Yet 60 years later their descendents face the same bigotry that took their lives. I’m saddened by the number of people I know who couldn’t understand why I was upset by this story. Ignorance like that is why my grandmother told people she was Italian, French, German, anything but Roma.

From the 14th century on, the Roma were slaves in almost all of Eastern and Southern Europe. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the last slaves were freed, in the Balkans, after the Franco-Prussian War. Large numbers of Roma came to this country during that war, escaping from northern Italy, southern France, and the mid Asia-minor states, mixing in with the general refugee population.

Most, like my great-grandmother, saw it as their chance to start over in a new country without the baggage attached to their ethnic heritage. Her grandparents left Luxembourg with a boat-load of locals when the Roma slaves were freed in the late 1850s and settled in Canada and Northern Minnesota among the “mixed blood” people. There no one blinked at their dark skin, black hair and black eyes, and odd religious rituals. It was just assumed they were part Chippewa like everyone else.

This whole sad story was in my mind when I read the following passage in Wendell Berry’s introduction to James Baker Hall’s photography collection Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy (The University Press of Kentucky, 2004):

Now…the work of families and neighbors has been almost entirely replaced by Mexican migrant workers. And so, once again, our fields are farmed by a racially denominated and subordinated class of menial laborers working without either a proprietary interest in the crop or equity in the land…This looks too much like the mistake we made before. There is something inherently unkind, unstable, and dangerous in the willingness of one race or class to depend upon the hard hand labor of another. The people who work the land should own it.