Donna Dufresne
I have had a life-long obsession with the Romani people (Roma), commonly known as “Gypsies”. It may have started in my childhood, when my mother told me stories about how the Gypsies would come into town every summer when she was a child and set up camp down by the Charles River. There was also the circus, which would arrive on the train and then parade through the town before setting up their lavish tents and cages. I would get confused between the two, wondering if the circus people were also Gypsies, especially since my Uncle Barney supposedly ran away with the circus when he was twelve or thirteen years old. He was a blonde and blue-eyed rough and tumble boy, and my mother had also told me that the Gypsies used to steal blonde and blue-eyed children. This image stuck with me, especially when my mother threatened to sell me to the Gypsies whenever I did something wrong. Thank God I wasn’t blonde and blue-eyed like all my mother’s people. As a matter of fact, I may have been too dark and swarthy even for the Romani when I was a child. I would turn like a raisin in the summer, if allowed out in the sun, so I didn’t worry too much about the Gypsies coming to steal me. I worried more about what my mother would do to me if I made a mistake. I don’t know if it was ever true that the Gypsies stole children, or if it was just one of the many rumors and racist preconceptions about the Romani, who have never been welcomed anywhere in the world. At any rate there were never any Gypsies setting up camp in the town where I grew up. I guess they were all down at Salisbury Beach, hustling on the boardwalk.
I sometimes wonder if there are Gypsies in my family tree. After all, there was a certain restlessness in my mother’s father, especially when she was a child. They moved just about every nine months, as Grampa was an itinerant engineer who would re-tool factories to make them run more efficiently. My Yankee grandmother, who wanted nothing more than her very own home with a garden gate, used to stomp her foot during moments of frustration and say, “George, when are you ever going to settle down!” But he preferred the roving life. He was what my mother called “The Black Irish” with his black hair which had turned pure white by the time he was thirty. By the time I knew him, he looked like all my grandmother’s people, green-eyed and snowy white. But there may have been some travelers back there in Ireland. If nothing else, they were the sort of people who didn’t mind packing up and moving to America. Sometimes, when I think of my grandfather, who died when I was three, I see him in a Gypsy Vandoor, caravanning through heaven, happy as a clam to keep on moving.
I inherited those itchy feet and the need to keep on moving – if not physically, at least in spirit. I cannot bear the stagnation of the soul. But I learned long ago that I need the stability of a solid home to anchor me so that I can freefall through the universe. I love my nest. It is this solid matter that allows me to spread my wings. However, there was a short time when I was a Gypsy vagabond. When I was twenty-five, I got divorced, quit my job and sold my possessions. I bought a backpack and hiked the Appalachian Trail by myself. It was my vision quest. But one-hundred miles short of my destination, Mt. Katahdin, my father left my mother for a country western floosy who worked in a diner, my brother, amid trying to heal from a brain tumor, left his wife, and I had to cut things short. After picking up the pieces, which seemed to be my job in the family, I spent the rest of the summer hiking the John Muir Trail in California, camped on the beach at Big Sur, and spent a month or so in San Francisco. But by the end of October, New England beckoned me home. I missed the color and the solid ground of a home and a room of my own. Untethered, I made my way back to New Haven, where old shoes no longer fit, and old friends did not understand the new me. It was time to move on, which is what landed me in Northeast Connecticut. When you realize that you are an outsider, you pack up in the dark of night and flee. You become adept at burning bridges and cutting ties. You don’t look back.
This pattern, thankfully, only happens around those Saturn returns or when Mars is in retrograde and climbs up Uranus – meaning your anus. It is a rare thing. But when the wind is just right, you lift your nose to the scent of spring someplace else, and if you are not paying enough attention to read the signs, a tornado clobbers you over the head and moves you to the next location. You wake up thinking “How the hell did I get here?”, but you know it’s the right thing. Even if you must suffer through the maelstrom, you know the dust will eventually settle and you’ll begin a new life, where for a certain period of time you are home and they have not discovered that you are an outsider. An other.
This outsider theme is a loose thread in my family. Grampa Johnston had that need to keep moving, and there was a certain kind of non-conformity in my uncles, and especially my mother. Then there was my father’s side of the family, an odd mix of stolid Yankees and the French Canadians who came down to work in the mills in Lawrence. Talk about outsiders. Poor Grampa Dufresne would never be accepted by his father-in-law (Grampy Dunham), who was a hard tac soul and extremely racist. It was bad enough that Grampa Dufresne was a Catholic, and secondly, French, but his mother was a “goddamned Indian”, dark as coffee, tall and big-boned. It was rumored that she was black. In fact, I discovered after having my DNA checked that an African did enter my genetic pool sometime in the early 19th century. It’s quite possible that my ancestor made his or her way to Canada and married into the Micmac tribe. Or at least tried to pass off as Native American because it was somehow more noble and protective. Whatever the story, it was about survival. People who are outsiders can spend a lifetime trying to pass themselves off as something they are not.
This reminds me that I was born on the outside. I have walked that tightrope of not belonging for as long as I can remember. Born into a working class, rural family, it was clear from the beginning that I was different. Tongues would wag, and heads would shake in wonderment as to where I came from. To this day, my 93-year-old dad shakes his head when I share a piece of writing and recites the mantra I’ve heard my whole life: “How the hell did an old farmer like me get a daughter like you…”, which I know is meant as a compliment about my intelligence, my talent, or whatever positive attribute he is trying to convey, but in fact only reminds me that I don’t belong.
The other dynamic which enforced my sense of being an outsider was that I lived in a rather posh neighborhood, next to a prep school. We were poor people compared to the neighbors of my early childhood. My parents were care-takers for wealthy estates early in their marriage, and we lived in the hired hand rental on the farm where my father was sent to work when he was eight-years-old during the Depression. My people have strong Massachusetts accents – that Yankee Seabrook dialect lacking in R’s. But I wandered in and out of my neighbors’ houses where the furnishings and the speech were more refined (except for the Polish lady across the street). I began to separate myself from my family, adopting the English accent of Edith Whittier, whose husband owned the farm and the land that cradled our little house. Later, I noticed that the wealthier people who cradled me from a distance seemed to have a much bigger sense of the world. Life was incredulously small in my family, and there wasn’t much hope if you were a girl, that you would ever be anything other than a housewife and a mother.
Inside that family, where I didn’t quite belong, I danced my way through the soft edge of confinement, testing the seams, looking for a way out. I yearned to join that class of people whose daughters weren’t held back and who went to college and became writers, singers and actors. I did things that those prep school kids did -like cross-country skiing. I sang my way into the hearts of the middle class, hoping they would rescue me. But in the end, I was not one of them. I was still an outsider. I could get only just so close, and then I would find myself somehow discarded like an old suitcase put out in the trash. No matter how refined my manners, no matter how refined my speech, how articulate, how intelligent – it did not matter. I do not share the same lens of entitlement as them. I go through life like a beggar, my hands held out for alms for the right to exist. Definitely not something my middle and owning class friends experience.
So, it’s no wonder that every once in a blue moon, I’ve packed my bags and disappeared into the dead of night, looking for my tribe – my real people. For a while, I gleaned onto my so-called Native American heritage. I dived into the Seven Arrows book and every other pseudo Indian spiritual pathway until I realized that most of the writers where in fact white middle class people who somehow had the same idea as I – that we should return to the “noble savage” ideal, even if it meant that we were robbing their culture. The backdrop of my “quest” was that old TV ad for the clean water act in the seventies – where the Native American chief is paddling a canoe down a river which is riddled with litter and pollution. The scene ends with a closeup of his beautiful chiseled face, the face of my father and my grandfather, with a solitary tear running down his cheek. I would think to myself, “These are my people – not those stupid white people who pollute!”
When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I regarded it as my vision quest. Indeed, I did hear my spirit name in the ethers while I traipsed across some mountain top near a crystalline and leech filled pond. I tried to change the word to French, because the real name was a tad bit too new-age – even for me. But in the end, the real thing stuck because it does in fact describe the essence and the elements of my being – water and air, mostly. My old friends didn’t much like the name I’d started using after I returned from my quest. They were more interested in smoking pot and drinking, and that didn’t fit me, so I waited for a sign, and then disappeared into the night.
Although I continued to identify with and search for my Native American “people”, I soon realized that I wasn’t going to be welcomed into that fold either. After all, I look hopelessly white, even though I was never quite white enough for my mother. This was made evident to me when an angry young man showed up at a sweat lodge my husband and I had built, when we organized a sweat gathering. He ranted and raved for what seemed like hours about how we were stealing from his culture and had no business appropriating his sacred ceremonies. He demanded we tear down the sweat lodge, then got into his car and drove off to sell tobacco and other Indian contraband on the so-called “Res”. The trouble is, what did he really know about the sweat lodge ceremony from the Sioux Nation, when he was a Pequot, for God sakes. Furthermore, I probably have more “Indian” blood than he, if, according to my family, my grandmother was really a Mic Mac princess and not half black. But he did have a point. My Micmac people wouldn’t have used a sweat lodge either. I forget his name – it was Beaver something. We chose to call him “Beaver Breath” amongst ourselves, thereafter.
Back to the Gypsies. When we first bought our land in Pomfret, there was a campground around the corner. Every summer, the “Gypsies” showed up in a huge caravan and camped out in their very fancy and expensive rigs. One day in the tiny little Abington Post office, I noticed a very dark-skinned couple buying stamps. I was sure I recognized their language as “Roma”. I guess that in my mind I had become an expert because I had recently immersed myself in a series of books about the Romani people, written, of course by white people who had run away with the Gypsies and then made a gazillion bucks writing about their experiences, enthralling other white people like me, who were outsiders. After they left, I asked Toni, the Post Office lady, if they were Gypsies. She clicked her tongue in disgust, and said, “Yep – and you better check your wallet.” She went on to explain that they showed up every summer at Boupree’s Campground. I went home and fished out my tape recorder, determined to sit by their campfire and interview them about their underground, outsider lives. My husband grabbed onto my feet the way that did when we were driving too close to the edge of those cliffs on Cape Breton, and I, like an errant dog, had my head and half my torso hanging out the window to breathe in the salt air. Perhaps it was just as well not to barge into the camp of strangers. After all, I was outside their box, and who knows if I’d have been able to bust through that wall. Still, I wonder if I missed an opportunity. I could have written a book about Gypsy nights around the campfire which would be read by white people like me. But I guess I wasn’t ready. Who knows where the Gypsies have gone. You just don’t see or hear of them anymore.
However, I swear that I bought my truck from Gypsies. I had read that the Gypsies in New England whose niche market was once horse training and trading used to travel the race track circuit. New England and the Northeast in the warm months, and Florida in the winter. I was trying to research the status of the Roma in New England, and learned that a number had settled in Worcester, and were running used car enterprises. Now that’s an outsider city. All of the Vietnamese nail salon workers in Northeast Connecticut live in Worcester, which has a huge community of immigrants. What’s odd to me, is that immigrants and outsiders such as the Romani, somehow thrive on an underground network. They gravitate toward their hidden communities like iron filings dancing with a magnet. You know you are truly an outsider when you can’t even find your magnet.
We were in desperate need of a new used truck when the breaks totally went on the Silverado. Somehow, we found a website for used cars and answered an ad for a Dodge Ram in Worcester. It wasn’t that old but had an excellent price. We drove up to check it out. The garage was tucked away in a dubious neighborhood shackled by overpasses for three different highways. The first thing I noticed, was not the shiny blue double cab truck, but the strikingly dark and handsome young men working in the shop. The truck had a cracked radiator and a cracked windshield. The radiator went during the test drive. No worries, they offered to replace both the windshield and the radiator and came down to $6,000 for the truck after repairs. Arrangements were made for the “transaction”. We transferred money, so I could write a check and pick up the truck while Michael was away. This is where the whole thing got a little shady. There wasn’t a title to the truck. The father of the shop owner would deliver the truck, but he had to go to Norwich to pick up the title. First, he would meet me at the mall in Killingly, and I would give him the check. Then he would drive to Norwich with a couple of other cars on his tow truck and get the title. Obviously, he was a horse trader. He would call me when he was back in Killingly, and I could pick up the truck, the keys, and the title. Michael would have had a fit, and never would have gone for it. But I, being an outsider, go with my hunches and intuition, and therefore agreed to the transaction. After all, I was convinced that these guys were the hidden Roma, and if they knew I was one of their tribe, they wouldn’t do me wrong.
I waited several hours, sweating out the conventional thoughts suggesting that I may have been duped. But then, just as it was getting dark, the Gypsy dad called me. He wanted to meet at MacDonald’s. So, I got a ride from my neighbor, and waited – and waited. Either he had skipped town, or operated on Romani time, which is akin to Latin time, Indian time, and my own poor sense of time – unlike my German husband, who always knows what time it is. The Gypsy dad, aloof as he was during our earlier meeting, got his cheeseburger, and sat down at the table where the transaction apparently was going to take place when he saw fit. I made nervous small talk, telling way too much about myself. He told me nothing. But when I mentioned that I was a singer/songwriter and that I had a band called Gypsy Romantique and wrote “Gypsy Jazz” music, he suddenly perked up. The façade crumbled, and he smiled for the first time. He was oddly interested in my music, which was surprising – because God only knows nobody else ever seems interested. Gypsy dad pulled the title out of his jacket pocket, and the keys to the truck. We parted as though we were best friends, him saying “If the truck gives you any trouble, make sure you call us, and we’ll fix it. Let us know if you ever need another car.”
And that was that. I drove my luxurious, humongous Dodge Ram home. It’s lasted at least ten years and is still going – although the rust is taking a toll. I think the truck could have been a lemon. It obviously was involved in an accident. But it was blessed by Gypsies, and I like to think they blessed me because they recognized me as a fellow outsider.