not native fruit

poetry of ancient/indigenous language

shelly de paul, a teacher of the lenape language in pennsylvania and online, has said that she finds the ancient languages powerful.  Words have power.  And that she began her study of lenape in order to write poetry. 

this is a sentiment I can definitely get behind.  i've also been wanting to find my poetic music in lenape.  i'm sure it will come.  in fact, it's already happening.

also, i've had a breakthrough in terms of communicating my feelings about my connection with the lenape.  i've been a bit sensitive to intimations on the part of 'others' that i may be a lenape wannabe, etcetera. 

what i've realized is that i've realized how much more our native heritage meant to my mother and my grandparents, and their parents.  it meant a lot to them, enough to keep it a secret from me, but to enjoy the secret secretly among themselves.  i've realized how much more it meant to me than i ever recognized or acknowledged, surrounded as i was by the land and the community of the lenape remnant in the philadelphia area. 

i can't not acknowledge that. 

not only have these realizations, recognitions and awakenings filled in many of the blanks in my story, but they have reduced my anxiety and my need to please others.  there's some way in which this experience has made me more whole, so it must be good.  therefore i will continue on this path.

that's simple, that's clear.  this clarity helps me.

'weli kishku' ~ have a nice day!

blended culture and sequelae

interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. Her family is from Kentucky and Ohio and has no memory of any native american ancestry, but as i shared with her my idea that because our white ancestors shared a history with the native peoples, some intermarriage and also a shared lifestyle, we have a different cultural development from what is euphemistically called the 'dominant white culture.' 

reading about native americans enlightens me as to the values and world-view of my own ancestors who were not primarily european-based in their orientation, neither were they 'indian-haters' or any other kind of 'white-supremacists.'  I still feel the person who has come closest to articulating who my ancestors were is Brewton Berry who wrote, "Almost White."  i see my ancestors as a blend of european-american and native american.  For example, we did not value autonomy as some kind of measure of maturity or character-development, but valued our kinship-based community first.  we adopted people into our families.  I remember a european-immigrant friend becoming absolutely livid that my cousins, aunts and uncles couldn't possibly be my cousins, aunts and uncles because they were not blood relatives.  Hey, we were short of blood relatives, so this seemed good to me, and i just accepted it as the way things were.  Yet something about it really offended my friend.  In her eyes, it was some sort of act of dishonesty.  As for my friend, I think maybe she and her family were confronting their own issues as immigrants, fears of no longer being 'a people.'  Nowadays they make annual trips back to the old country. 

actually, i find that the people most sympathetic with my point of view tend to be african-americans who seem to have no problem 'getting' that i have varied racial tributaries in my background, that I may look white but am not exactly.  even when i was a kid the african american kids would say things like, 'you don't seem white to me,' or 'you look white, but you don't act white.'  anyway, if i deny my native american ancestors it seems disrespectful to them.

i think part of the reason this is particularly a problem for me now is that i live in a different world from the one in which i grew up - and the older i grow, the more i realize i will be living in this world for the duration - a world in which there are a lot of upper middle-class whites, and a large number of asian-americans, hispanic-americans, african-americans, and both immigrants and foreign students (UC Berkeley) in that order.  by default it would seem that i ought to belong with the upper class whites, yet these are people whom i feel i do not understand.  so this is my problem. i'm supposed to belong to a group with whom i have nothing in common - my appearance places me there, and probably also my address.  my original family, both blood-ties and adopted, are for the most part deceased or live far away, so i am struggling to understand myself in this environment.  i feel so fortunate to have my partner who is from a similar background to mine and also from the same regional world.  we've carried our origins with us through being able to share our values, place- and people- memories, and so on.

right now i'm reading 'native american postcolonial psychology' by eduardo and bonnie duran.  they outline the importance of taking culture into consideration when working with native americans, and i find that what they write would apply to our people too.  this book is really helping me understand why i don't connect with so much in terms of the dominant expectations of behavior and thought in our world, even though I am perceived by most people to be white. 

My mother's mother's people were from the mountains of Pennsylvania, a former stronghold of native americans in our region.  I was brought up to believe they were Irish, but there is one of those 'Cherokee great-grandmother' myths floating on that side of the family that there is native blood.  However, I have only the most circumstantial evidence supporting that claim.  there is something to it, but just what, i don't know.

On the other hand, my mother's father's mother was definitely descended from the remnant of the Unalatchtigo Lenape people whose identity was watered down (and disguised) as 'Moor.'  'Moor Indians.'  Apparently the Unalatchtigo dialect was very similar to the Unami Lenape dialect that is currently being taught online out of both Oklahoma (land to which the Lenape were removed) and Pennsylvania (where a remant remained, marrying in with each other and European-Americans, accounting for why these Lenape look less Indian than the ones in Oklahoma who primarily married other native americans of varied tribes).
 
In any case, I am enjoying learning Lenape because it helps me to feel my connection to that land back there where I'm from.  I feel some kind of very deep connection to it, it's sort of like a language in itself to me, and the Lenape language feels to me like the original speech of the world - but maybe it's only like that for me and a smattering of other people, not for the whole world.  hard to believe, but possible.  *smile*

I'm also reading another excellent book called 'Yesterday's Self' about nostalgia, and how it can either hinder or help a person's adjustment to a new environment, as in the case of refugees, immigrants, exiles or people who, for whatever reason, have left an environment and culture that was very meaningful to them, for another new world that offers multiple difficulties in terms of identification and assimilation.  It's just really helpful to me to read a book that addresses issues of identity, since this is so up for me in this lifetime.

wm penn and lenapehocking

The Philadelphia Inquirer has just run an article on William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' aka 'The Peaceable Kingdom,' Penn's name for his vision of a harmonious European-Native American sharing of the land, which you can read here. 

I think this Pennsylvania dyad - Lenape versus Quaker - with all its karma, must have been a very powerful element in my great-grandparents' union in 1872, and perhaps also fueled the intensity of their impression on succeeding generations.  My great-grandfather, Alfred Whittingham, was a descendent of 'First Proprietor' Quakers who pushed the Indians off their land, albeit in a genteel manner. I have not been able to trace his grandfather William Whittingham past a 1759 birthdate, but I know that British Thomas Livezey, a great-grandfather of William's wife Rebecca, purchased his land directly from William Penn, and that he needed to live in town (Philadelphia) for some time before the Lenape - who must have felt most unfairly treated - had finally cleared off land they knew was theirs, but which William Penn believed had been sold to him, and which he in turn had sold to Thomas Livezey.

My great-grandmother was the descendent of Indians (and probably pirates of a Moorish caste, hence the surname Carney) who were known as Moor Indians, and according to Weslager were a remnant of southern Lenapes.  When my great-grandfather, Alfred, decided to 'do right' by Mary, he was shunned by family members, and I would guess also lost status in the community, which resulted in his no longer getting elected as county clerk.  He had lost a leg in the Civil War, but the local folks voted him in to the job of Clerk.  His wife went on record in the Pension File that he had asked her to keep their relationship under wraps until after he was elected the first time, so it is no secret that his liaison with her was unpopular.  They elected him twice more, perhaps out of pity for the poor cripple, but when he made it clear that he was going to live as husband-and-wife with the outcast, the elections ceased.  They had to survive on his pension and perhaps her needlework, which was artistic and expert, yet in the depositions, most neighbors denied knowing the couple 'well.'  They would only aver that they knew Alfred and Mary had set up housekeeping and were living as husband and wife, raising several children, over the course of more than twenty years.

People often say, well, just look at the wedding license to get genealogical information -but there was no wedding license until 1897, twenty-five years after the supposed marriage, and it was issued in Camden New Jersey, capital of government record-keeping known to be sympathetic to the Moors, and on it she was listed as Mary Whittingham. So, Mary Whittingham married Alfred Whittingham.  She wanted to keep her maiden name out of it.  The whole difficulty with her claiming the pension after his death was based on the fact that she was using an assumed name when she met my great-grandfather. She wanted her Moor Indian identity kept out of the proceedings (and out of her life), but she did mention it once in the hundred plus pages of the civil war pension file's depositions. 

Perhaps this is why I feel so driven to write about my great-grandparents, to re-hash so much of what happened, even in my own life, that relates to her presence in the family - because it was a Big Deal Once Upon A Time, although never acknowledged to me. In a certain way, I feel that Alfred Whittingham tried to bridge that gap between 'Quakers' (European invaders) and 'Indians' (in our case, 'Moors').  This couple tried to do the impossible, and faced a great deal of resistance, especially within the family.  My impression is that they were both very spiritual people, and they had that in common.  Yet he was literate and 'pedigreed' (or almost so - there is some question about the 'purity' of his great-grandmother, Lydia Roberts), while she was 'illiterate' and 'peculiar, almost as if she were foreign.'  They were both very formal, almost rigid about behavior.  If that sounds unlikely, in her case at least, I will mention that I recall Meridel Le Sueur described her Iroquois grandmother the same way.  In order to live down the stereotypes, some of these native women became more 'proper' than the 'properest.'  This part of the native-american story is not often told. 

By the time we get to my grandparents, I don't think the 'Indianness' was so much the issue - there are rumors of native blood on my grandmother's side as well, and she did have a traditional Lenape utility basket, although she could have bought that, but I don't think so - rather, the issue may have been that the elder woman, Mary, was from the southern clan of the Moor Indians, most likely Unalachtigo, rather than Unami or one of the more northern clans which were more likely to be part of Katie's family.  Even my husband's father once said, right before we were to be married, that those Unalachtigos were the ones you wanted to keep away from. (meaning me, I suppose)  So all sorts of clan rivalries may have played a role in my grandmother's sense of superiority towards her mother-in-law. 

My grandfather, Joseph, was a man who held within himself the perfect balance of 'exotic' (moor) and 'proper' (descended from Englishmen).  He was adored by his family, but tubercular, and died leaving his wife and daughter to sort out their color-issues without the benefit of his halo of respectability or the warmth and mischievous humor of his native blood, which my mother remembered so fondly. The appellation of 'Moor' implies an African origin, even though most likely it was pirate rather than slave.  There were many many antipathies among these small splintered remnants of conquered peoples mixed with the blood of the oppressor, and with each other.  I think my mother's frustration with these endless divisions were part of what prompted her to try to opt for the white-identity, especially for me.  Just to get me out of it.  It didn't entirely work, however, since I still lived in a mixed-race environment in which I was elected to play the white role, not a very popular part, and  I'm still not sure how successful my performance was. 

The point is, there still seems to be work to be done on these issues that were a part of my mother's family, and it seems in addition that I am the person who needs to do it.

lenape nation of pennsylvania/writings of Mabel Dodge Luhan

Reading essays from "At Home on the Earth."  Discovered Meridel Le Sueur, whose essay "The Ancient Peoples and the Newly Come" was very moving to me.  I haven't read much about the mid-west.  It's always amazing to me that people often think I'm from the mid-west - and it's true my father was Scandinavian, but not a farmer, rather a seaman from Denmark, and he wanted to keep as close to the sea as possible! - was not a land-lubber at heart by a long-shot.  So he settled along the Delaware River, near its mouth in Delaware Bay.  He liked the semi-indigenous people of that region.  By the way, if you'd like to see a wonderful video produced by the University of Pennsylvania about the Lenape people, called the Prophecy of the Fourth Crow, click here.  It's a YouTube kind of thing and lasts about six minutes.

The people pictured would be the native people of our area.  I cannot become a tribal member because I can't prove my ancestral relationship to the tribe, but that is all right.  There are many of us who can't make the paper trail connections, but we know what our heritage is.  Even if I didn't have ancestors from the local native american mix (Nanticoke, Powhatan, Lenape, Shawnee, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannah, etc) I could still be a 'Friend' of the Natives because it was the culture I grew up in.  I could not agree more with the motto of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, "Lenape Culture - The Root of Pennsylvania."  For me, this is true.  For me this is the root of the culture I was brought up in, although we labored to assimilate into what we thought was white culture.  We had a sort of 'dual' culture, but the root culture was Indian.

Yesterday, I remembered a doll that came briefly into my hands.  Let me tell a little story here: in our neighborhood a number of my friends had cloth dolls that were black girls on  one side and white girls on the other.  Or dolls that you could turn upside down to make black or white, each with a different pretty skirt.  My husband says he's never seen a doll like that, but he didn't have sisters.  I'm just assuming these dolls were all over, but maybe not.  Who knows? Did you have a doll like that?  Do you still have it?  Anyway, I told my mother I wanted a doll like that, and she said she thought she might have something like that on hand - not exactly the same, but similar - and she produced a small, poorly made cloth doll that frightened me.  On the back of the doll's head, if you pushed the hair aside, there was a small brown face.  It really scared me!  I didn't like the doll, and after not too long a time, it disappeared from my stash.  Don't know what happened to it, but my mother seemed keen on 'getting rid' of things that related to the other cultures we were part of. 

Anyway, can you imagine my surprise when I read about the first doll pictured at the University of Pennsylvania exhibit on the Lenni Lenape?

Anyway, the realizations, etc, keep coming although at a slower pace.  I've begun studying the Lenape Language - also a feature offered by the Lenape Nation of Penna website.I think I've mentioned before how much my mother loved the various native words that were part of our street names, etc, in Philadelphia, and I have found that the sound of spoken Lenape resonates inside me very deeply.  I'm thrilled to have found a venue to study it more.

I've been thinking of my father, and how he fell in love with the people of our area, and married my mother and produced me, when I just happened to read another essay in "At Home on this Earth," this one by Mabel Dodge Luhan who was a wealthy back-Easterner - she felt great discontentment with her own 'native' culture and went through three marriages before she discovered New Mexico, fell in love with a Pueblo Indian named Tony Luhan, married him and lived with him there for forty years until her death.  I love some of the things she writes about the Pueblo, because this is exactly what I found in so many of the people I grew up around: "The Indians all fell into their own soft speech together, a language that was a blending of outdoor sounds, like running water and the wind in the trees, but that was particularly musical from the kindness in it, often falling into tenderness that was very caressing to the ear.  There always seemed to be this loving kindness in them, not sentimental at all but the expression of the smooth concord of their lives."

Mabel Dodge Luhan struggles in this scene to experience the world 'directly,' not through the mediation of the 'great works of art' that she felt sepated her from her own experience of nature.  She writes, "It had begun to appear to me that there had always been a barrier between oneself and direct experience; the barrier of other people's awarenesses and perceptions translated into words or paint or music, and forever confronting one, never leaving one free to know anything for oneself, or to discover the true essence in anything.

"This landscape made me think of a painting by Constable with its thick, soft, faraway clumps of trees, and then I was impatient because I did not want to connect this new world with the old.  I wanted it to be itself alone and not a part of any past I had ever known.  I did not want to be reminded of old familiar things.

"The grassy banks of the ice-cold pale water were as untouched as though no one had ever been there before; no footprints, no vestige of humankind, marred that empty hermitage.  Tall trees stood with their trunks plunging deep into the grass and white violets and wild strawberries were thick in the cool shade.  Everything in this garden was composed like poetry, and romantic like poetry may be.  'Shakespearian,' I thought, and then quickly dismissed the analogy.  Was one to be forever reminded of something else and never to experience anything in itself at first hand?  My mind seemed to me a waste-basket of the world, full of scraps that I wanted to throw away and couldn't.  I longed for an immersion in some strong solution that would wipe out forever the world I had known so I could savor, as though it were all there was to savor, this life of natural beauty and clarity that has never been strained into Art or Literature.  No - everything in the world outside had been distilled into art, defined by ruthless, restless, wordmongers, or other artists in transformation, and they had used it all up.  I did not want that old world any more.  I knew unless I found a new fare I would admit 'actum est' and give up."

Interesting to me, because I went through this exact same phase when I was younger and discovered the wastes of the California desert east of the Sierra, and of Nevada.  I associated this 'awakening to what is' with a spiritual change in myself, less as an aesthetic change, and also interestingly, I associated this change with my husband, whom we had reason to believe was part-Indian (Lenape, like me), and with the natural environment of California with its empty miles of seacoast, its grassy hills, granite mountains and its high desert terrain.  His consciousness seemed already capable of appreciating an environment that to my mind, distorted as it was, was nothing but empty desert or wilderness.  (My mind was 'distorted' by the stereotypes of the mainstream culture of my time, which had no appreciation for desert-terrain, thought it was okay to blow up atomic bombs in it, even though there were people living nearby, not to mention animals and plant eco-systems.  During this period, I lived a kind of 'double life' - what I really felt inside, and what I felt obliged to express and engage in in the outside world.)  I'm finding that as I embrace my innate Lenape cultural-consciousness - and flesh it out by familiarizing myself with the culture as it has been preserved by those who never forgot their true identity - I feel more 'oneness' within myself. 

Well, I hope you can see how the flow of this post holds together.  Wanishi! :-)

mocassins, parkas, passwords

I'm reading the autobiography of Mourning Dove, whose English name was Christal Quintasket.  I don't think I've ever heard a prettier name in my life.  I love her book, but I realize that what she describes as her Indian life is not the same as my recent ancestors who knew themselves as part-Indian.  Our people are more accurately described in 'Strong Medicine Speaks' by  Marion Gould and Amy Hill Hearth.  The 'Indians' I knew were those who managed not to be removed, those who had assimilated to at least some degree, enough to pass as 'white' or 'colored' back in the day.  (Please excuse the use of terms.)  Strong Medicine's people had stuck together as a cohesive group enough to claim ancestral lands in southern New Jersey and achieve tribal status.  Our people were more of a remnant.  They may not have lived in tipis or long-houses, or lived surrounded by the skins of animals, etc, etc, but they kept some of their values, knew they were outsiders by the standards of the mainstream culture, and celebrated their difference to varying degrees.  Strong Medicine does a good job of communicating that in her book.  In the case of my mother's father's people, they called themselves 'Moors' and that's what set them apart, or 'represented' their identity as native americans.  As it turns out Spanish ships were in the waters of the Chesapeake - that's why Jamestown was settled forty miles up the river, so it all makes sense, even without the pirate-theories.  My grandfather took the Moorishness quite seriously, but the people today don't seem to.  Even my mother questioned the connection to Moors, but the DNA test certainly seems to support it.  

I've been thinking about other aspects of growing up in our neighborhood.  For one thing, as a child one of the few things I was given that was brand-new were a pair of beaded mocassins.  These were, I was told, very important - they were *my mocassins.*  They used to slip off my feet, however, which annoyed me, and so I said I didn't like them.  Here's this little alien blonde girl, and my mother says to my grandmother very seriously and with some note of disgust, "She doesn't like her mocassins."  I think my mother just decided I had to be raised as white.  Hence she began correcting her mother, "Remember, Mother, you are not to say Kittatinny.  You have to say Blue Mountains from now on."  And my grandmother slid her eyes in my direction with that resentful look.  I guess I think back on all this stuff because when I look in the mirror, I too have a doubt about my native american ancestry.

I look so European, and my father was direct from Europe.  But he wasn't an immigrant.  He didn't belong to any immigrant community.  He didn't have any relatives in this country, or even country-men, with the exception of one cousin who moved here in 1957 and married an American.  He was a seaman and could have settled anywhere.  His top choices were: Brazil, Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Delaware River Valley.  Anyway, I think I've written all this before.

Saying you were German, Irish, English, or Scotch were like 'passwords' in our neighborhood and behind them you could hide your native american blood.  But many of us wore mocassins at home.  We all wore parkas and duffel coats - even my mother gave in and bought me a parka.  Plenty of the kids played lacrosse, whatever their ancestry.  All the little boys carried knives.  I suppose these were holdovers of the old culture in the new, because after all Philadelphia grew up in the context of a Native American community that was not exactly wiped out by the newcomers.  For many years, the two communities existed side by side, mixing at many points, but with the native community moving out onto the fringes, gradually moving further and further into the mountains, mixing it up with other Native communities, whether through cooperation or warfare. The European kids did not usually wear parkas, mocassins, etc., another clue to ancestral identity among those of us who did.  Also, our boys had a higher rate of being carted off to 'reform school' than any other group.

Since I've been engaging in this process of research, I've become much much more aware of the huge loss involved in the Americanizing of the Americas.  It can feel really quite overwhelming at times, but I am heartened by the attitudes of many Native American leaders today who are definitely taking the high road of forgiveness, embracing a sort of mutual-assimilation process (which has been the case all along much more than we generally acknowledge), and have a beautiful vision of a new creation - or a re-creation - of the Native American peoples.

more moor

      You know, one of the nicest things for me to realize, is that I don't have to 'cultivate' my moorish heritage, or seek it out.  I've already been living it my whole life.  The beauty is that I can just relax into 'being me.' The difference is that I can appreciate more fully and more consciously now what it's all about, and why I am the way I am.  Sure, there are still many unanswered questions, but I begin to believe that these questions can only be answered through the action of Grace/miracle.  I don't find that anyone out there really knows anything more about my family's heritage than I do, and often seem to know less.  I certainly can't explain the way my people were and what they handed to me.  I only know it as an experience, my experience.

Speaking of experiences, I've been absent from the site for a while because I've had that flu that is going around.  I'm feeling better now.

I watched a program on kqed last night about the choreographer and dancer Jerome Robbins.  At the end of his life he believed his depression had to do with being alienated from his own heritage and trying too hard - putting in too much time and energy - to assimilate as an American.  I would imagine nearly all Americans have to deal with this to some degree or another.  One of my friends - whose ancestors are Russian Jews - says that she sees this as the quintessential American experience.  Interesting.  America is still, in many places, a 'frontier territory' in the sense that people unfamiliar with one another heretofore are meeting, living and working together, and often, fighting with each other.  Even if they are not fighting, there is so much to learn about each other, and the learning doesn't always come easy.

For me, the fact that I look so scandinavian (like my father) is in a way unfortunate because I think my appearance immeditately introduces a note of skepticism when I talk about our moorish heritage, but I can't help the way I look, it doesn't change what I am like, etcetera.  Anyway, I really have no 'verbal' way to pass along this experience, if it is some kind of cultural heritage after all - well, I feel deeply that it is - and anyway, apparently it is not something the family ever 'talked' about anyway.  It's passed on as an experience - you live it.

butterfly people

  This bracelet represents the four directions (on the left) and the butterfly.  I like the white color because it represents the Will of Heaven in Chinese lore, black represents wisdom, yellow abundance and red life.  I chose this bracelet, because when I was going through all my ancestry blues, I finally realized that people came to the Americas from many different directions, from all 'four directions,' and they morphed into something new: the American peoples.  Some people resist this process, but eventually someone in their family will marry someone outside their ethnicity of origin and eventually all those streams merge into the stream of the Original People, just like mine did.  My father came from Europe and fell in love with the indigenous people of the Delaware River area and married someone from that heritage, and they produced me. I feel an appreciation for all the streams of my lineage - they are all represented here - and I just wanted to share this image with you.

delaware more ties

I've been reading Weslager's "Delaware's Forgotten Folk, The Story of the Moors and Nanticokes," the book that everyone said would help to put it all together for me.  Well, I have to say it has.  One of the things that helped was understanding the mess created by the school problem in early twentieth century mixed-blood communities in Delaware, problems that affected attitudes and divisions among people during my mother's and her peers' lifetimes.  Also, of special interest to me was the notion that the so-called 'Moors,' the people my grandfather identified with, were one of the remnants of the Lenape (Delaware) native peoples, probably the ones living furthest south in that time of major movement of refugee people.  My husband's people were also probably part-Lenape, and so that confirms something he and I have felt for a long time.

I've decided I don't feel comfortable calling myself part-native-american or part-african-american, more comfortable calling myself part-white or simply 'white' (with reservations, no pun intended).  However, I do feel comfortable acknowledging that my family had a 'moor' lineage.  My chinese daoist teacher, Jeffrey Yuen, talks a lot about our inherited constitutional factors, which relate both to our genes and to our past lives, and he refers to getting in touch with our lineage.  That message has been very timely for me, since that seems to be exactly what is happening in my life. 

Outside knowledge or information is somewhat helpful, but the main stream of the lineage comes from within myself, from my own memories of my family, my early environment in Philadelphia and south Jersey, my own experiences.  Also, there is quite a bit of dream material that relates to our lineage, which of course I did not recognize until recently. 

I've also really come to understand that my father, a sailor, was not exactly an 'immigrant' to this country.  As a seaman, he traveled all around the world, and of all the possible places he chose the Delaware River area because he really just loved the indigenous people there.  He chose my mother because he loved her and because she was one of those people he already loved.  I think it came as a bit of a shock to him, a Dane by birth, that - possibly because of me - my mother was trying to distance herself from her people.  Oh, the ironies of life!  But - well, I don't know if you can understand this, but - it's been something of a healing for me to realize all of this. 

There was something missing inside me, or some rift within me, that this knowledge has healed.  It almost feels strange to share this in such a public forum, but I do so in the knowledge that sharing this may help someone else. 

Somehow all of this has been buidling to some kind of completion - or so it has felt to me - just recently, so imagine my surprise when I went to the mitsawokett site (the official delaware moor site) yesterday and found that they have posted my family's pictures.  I felt I might not have consclusive enough proof that my great-grandmother was the same Mary Carney born in Delaware somewhere between 1832 and 1835.  But I knew that she and her son, my grandfather, saw themselves as 'moors,' and that her mother's name was Louisa.  Likely that her father's name was John, as well, since that is what she named her first son who was born out of wedlock. 

It does help to be able to put a name to my experience and to understand the kinds of conflicts that drove my mother in a color-conscious society such as Philadelphia's was in her day. But even more than that, it establishes a warm feeling inside me about myself and my mother's family, and my father's love for her.  Out of that love I came.

sephardic tolerance

i've been writing so much about my mother and her family and very little about my father.  well, until recently, i thought i knew all there was to know about my father's family.  but now there's been yet another major familial wake-up call.  my father's family were 'danish jews.'  I put scare-marks around those words, because technically they were lutherans, however, not really.

let me try to explain.  my father told me, when i was quite young, that 'my family are the ones they call the portugese.'  as for most americans, that meant nothing to me.  at age 8, i replied to him, 'you mean you like people from portugal?'  we just looked at each other for a few minutes, aware that we were not really communicating.  but can you imagine that i remember this moment?  i think partly because i'd never seen my dad so agitated.  we had been in a roomful of men who were shouting and laughing and carrying on, and my dad suddenly took me outside and said, 'karen, there's something i really want you to understand about me.  i know you're a little young, but i want you to know that my people are the ones they call the portugese.'

okay, fast forward 50 years, and i'm reading on-line at jewishgenweb that the Danish Jews were called 'the Portugese.' 

Various other memories surface: 'our family wore yellow stars even though we didn't 'have' to' during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.  My father pointing to a picture of the Rothschilds' mansion in Denmark, saying 'they are one of our best families in Denmark.'  My mother insisted on naming me Katherine, and when my Dad pronounced it 'katrin' she changed it to Karen, assuming that it is a Danish name so it would be more suitable, etc.  He told me 'Karen is not one of our names.  Anna and Lilian, names like that are ours.'  There was all of this 'ours' and 'theirs' - not in any kind of passionate way, just quietly, matter-of-fact. 

His account of 'going to (the Lutheran) church' was that 'we' only went for things like 'the naming ceremony about a week after the baby is born,' weddings, funerals and at around age 14, 'when the boy becomes a man, we have a ceremony and the boy is given the scripture.'  He told me, 'they call it confirmation, but really it's just coming of age.'  'The scripture' was the Psalms only.  After that ceremony, my father went to sea, and began the career that would last for the rest of his life. 

Well, well.  Some of my American Jewish friends are very excited about this story, others tell me that he wasn't in any way, shape or form a Jew.  He had chosen to be 'nothing' because he wasn't really a Christian either.  But he always made it clear to me that he wasn't 'against' the Christian faith.  And, when you think about it, after all, Jesus was a Jew, so perhaps that helped at least a little when Jewish family took up a modified form of being Christian.  This kind of 'adopted' Christianity has been going on among the Sephardim since the 1300's at least. 

Apparently, from what I can glean, King Christian IV invited Sephardic Jews from Germany and the Netherlands to come to Denmark to help him modernize the country, especially in the shift to a money-based economy.  I guess it was probably fish-based before that (lol). Anyway, all of that was okay.  They also allowed a smaller number of Ashkenazi Jews to enter, especially in the area of Copenhagen.  The Sephardic population was found scattered throughout the rural districts, such as Ribe Amt where my father's families are from.  Well, in the early 1800's, social pressure was placed on these Sephardic families to convert to Lutheranism in the interest of a more uniform society (sounds like the wishes of Castilian Spain, but without the blood-purity cant.)  Most Danish Jews converted at that time.  The rest moved to either Copenhagen, or to Aalborg where there was a synogogue in Jutland. 

Well!  I have finally come across an article that talks about the high level of tolerance exhibited by the Sephardic Jews, their willingness to blend with their surrounding cultures through intermarriage, adoption of religious tenets, etc, in contra-distinction to Ashkenazi Jews who favored separation and a more highly defined identity. Not only that, but I recognize my dear father in these few pages.  He taught me always to respect the religions of others, because whatever I might think of the religion, it was very very important to the people who believed in it.  That was one of the most important, personal, private, highly-charged things my father ever said to me on one of our wonderful walks together.

Anyway, here's the link to the article on The Special Character of Sephardi Tolerance.

casbah

we lived
in a secret world,
a world apart,
of sand and sun,
rain and marshes,
silences,
and all the varied weather
of the heart.

we didn't know
the modern world
was oozing toward us
to absorb us,
make us all its slaves
and fill our natural silences
with its noise,
and turmoil,
stealing even
the poor places
where we once lived.

since then it's been
a compromise
between the gritty world
and whatever
fna or casbah
we create,
within our home,
our alcove or our yard,
or just within ourselves.