What Good Old Days?

by Jean Roberta

This post is partly about synchronicity: events or items that appear close together, apparently at random, but which form patterns.

Yesterday, a venerable local restaurant, The Diplomat, put on an American Thanksgiving Day feast of butternut squash soup, roast turkey, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and pumpkin pie. This was a new thing for the restaurant, which has been a downtown landmark for many years in the prairie town of Regina, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and capital of the province of Saskatchewan.

Of course, Canadians don’t get a day off for American Thanksgiving. We had ours on a Monday in October.

My spouse Mirtha and I made reservations and went to the Diplomat, a dimly-lit space decorated with oil portraits of diplomats on the walls. Since my American parents passed away in 2009, Mirtha and I have both missed my mother’s American Thanksgiving family suppers, which sometimes alternated with American thanksgiving in the home of some other expatriate faculty members at the local university. My family moved north in the 1960s, as part of a mini-exodus of intellectuals during the Vietnam War era. In the fifty years since then, nearly all the academics of my parents’ generation that I knew in my youth have passed away. (One notable exception, my father’s old colleague in the Economics Department, celebrated a book launch and his 100th birthday on the same day as the feast at the Diplomat.)

So Mirtha (who is Chilean-born) and I went to the restaurant for a “family” style turkey supper. I felt nostalgic for the Thanksgivings of my childhood in Idaho. Mirtha felt nostalgic for my mother’s Thanksgiving suppers, which she attended as a guest for twenty years.

We both know that the first Thanksgiving in the U.S. was a celebration (giving thanks to a Protestant God) for a victory of white settlers over the “Indians.” It had been a slaughter.

It troubles my conscience that this has become such a characteristic American holiday. I prefer to think of Thanksgiving the way Mirtha seems to, as a simple occasion for good food and (if possible) good company.

We would have liked the companionship of some close friends or relatives, but neither of us missed my father’s rants about how much better everything was in the U.S. in the good old days before troublemakers began demanding social and legal equality for all human adults. At family get-togethers, he usually held forth on a subject dear to the heart of every American conservative: the supposed compatibility of “democracy” with extreme disparities of income, of experience, and of status. According to this logic, “democracy” requires recognition of the inherent inequality of different groups of people, and the necessity of allowing the fittest to survive at the expense of the rest.

I’ve never actually heard a conservative claim that slavery was a democratic institution, but I’ve heard it implied. And I’ve been told that the drastic racial segregation formerly enforced by “Jim Crow” laws was necessary at the time, and would help keep the peace now.

This week, I got the latest issue of BBC History magazine, to which I subscribe. It includes two short articles under the title “Why are America’s white supremacists on the march again?” A woman historian, Manisha Sinha, briefly summed up the history of American racism since the U.S. Civil War, which resulted in the end of slavery. By upper-class southern standards, the uncompensated loss of slaves was an enormous loss of property, from which that class never completely recovered. Ms. Sinha discusses that loss as a kind of founding event, and she mentions the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to an interracial democracy.

Dr. Michael Cullinane begins his article this way: “White supremacy tarnishes every era of United States history. Even at the outset of the government’s founding [in 1776], white privilege prevailed.” I found it refreshing to read about a familiar topic from a non-American perspective.

While reading, I couldn’t help imagining the voice of my late grandmother (dad’s mother), who had southern roots. “But those people belong with their own kind,” she would say. “It’s only natural.” She also liked to reminisce about the “good old days,” when “everybody had servants.”

Last week, when teaching a story in the “Southern Gothic” tradition to my first-year English classes, I thought about how upper-class southern nostalgia for the “gracious living” of the antebellum past has spread throughout American mainstream culture. It literally makes me nauseous.

Even while gruesome little cell-phone videos show white men in uniform killing unarmed black civilians in front of their loved ones, and this evidence is shown regularly on the news (even here in Canada), the mainstream mantra seems to be “there’s fault on both sides.” I’m sure this would be my father’s argument.

Any moral code that isn’t based on a general recognition of human rights seems to me to be no better than anarchy. Yet morally-righteous defenders of extreme oppression seem to abound everywhere, including in Canada. The only difference between nations is in which underdog is being abused.

And I haven’t even brought up violence against women. In the region where I live, this especially affects indigenous women.

Mirtha sometimes tells me she wants to get off this planet. Sometimes I want to go with her. But since we’re not really willing to die yet, we distract ourselves with the comforts of our own little life together.

Even though I sign petitions and even send letters of protest to various levels of government about the latest outrage, I know there is really nothing we can do about racism, or sexism, or classism. All these abominations seem to be getting worse rather than fading away, as the optimists of the past said they would.

In the meanwhile, there’s always good food and drink for those of us who can afford them.

The Guest List

by Jean Roberta



As the late comedian Joan Rivers used to ask, “Can we talk?”

Period dramas set in an ancestral pile in England in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century (Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey) fascinate American and Canadian viewers because none of us have “servants” (even if there is a cleaning lady who comes in once a week), and of course, none of us have ever been ”servants.” We like to believe we live in a classless society in which the concept of knowing one’s “place” (rank) is limited to the military and to BDSM scenarios.

Parallel dramas about life “below stairs” and in the drawing room are considered quaint because nowadays, we are all “middle class,” and no is ever banished from “society.”

This is a collective delusion.

When entering a new school, neighbourhood or social group (e.g. a queer community), we all want to “fit in,” to be accepted by the rest of the group, even if we can’t be the unofficial leader because that spot is already taken. Nineteenth-century realist literature about the bourgeoisie, or “people in society,” often shows the humiliation of a woman who tries to host a party at which no one shows up, or who is not invited to the social event of the season, because there has been “talk” about her, whether it is accurate or not. In Daisy Miller by Henry James, circa 1880, young Daisy is simply a flirtatious young American, but European society turns its back on her.

I’ll never forget a costume party of the early 1980s, hosted by a popular prof in the English Department where I was a graduate student, to which I was not invited. All the guests were supposed to attend as literary characters. When the other grad students told me what they were planning to wear, I thought at first that this event was being put on by the department as a whole. Then I learned that “Chuck” (known by his first name, even to students) was putting on this soiree in his home. I found excuses to speak to Chuck in the halls, thinking my invitation would be forthcoming, but it never came.

I complained to my mother, who told me Chuck had probably just forgotten to invite me, and that I could go to the ball like Cinderella transformed into a princess, and everything would be fine. The more I considered the situation, the more I doubted whether I could just show up as a well-disguised stranger, and be welcomed in. What if Chuck had a reason for not inviting me? I couldn’t imagine what it might be, but he didn’t owe me an explanation. (Note that I was the divorced mother of a mulatto child, but I was not “out” as a lesbian yet.)

After racking my brains, I realized that I couldn’t crash a party to which I hadn’t been invited, so I stayed home. Later, I had to hear endless accounts of who went as which character, and how much fun it all was. Everyone around me seemed to assume I simply wasn’t a party-goer.

When I “came out” by going to the gay bar alone soon after this event, I was picked up by a younger dyke who had dropped out of high school, and who warned me about the “fancy educated women” in the community, who presumably liked to show off. I soon found that reality was more complicated, at least from my viewpoint.

There were “public” social events, such as the monthly women’s dances and lesbian potlucks, which any woman could attend--including those who weren’t sure about their sexual orientation-- and then there were private parties which were discussed at length at the dances and potlucks by those who had been there.

As a graduate student, I was a “fancy educated woman” to the working-class lesbians who identified as “dykes” or “women” (butch or femme) and classified everyone else accordingly. Because I was a femme to them, they could forgive me for my education as long as I never used “long words” and as long as I planned to become the wife and housekeeper to a butch, even though most of the butches I knew had trouble finding work and could hardly support themselves, let alone me and my daughter. Their chivalry could be charming, but in the long run, I was alarmed by their drinking, their violent culture, their limited vocabulary, their notions of how children should be raised (or placed in foster homes), and their vision of our future together.

White, university-educated lesbian-feminists were prevalent at the potlucks (not in the bar), and they were polite to me when we met, but after a few years, I realized that I was never going to be invited to their parties. Of course, they never explained why, so I was left to guess. I was often told at a potluck on Sunday that “the whole lesbian community” had gone to So-and-So’s party the night before, but no one had invited me.

When I began dating Mirtha, now my spouse, in summer 1989, she was a newly-hatched lesbian who thought I was well-established in the community because I belonged to various groups, including the elected board that ran the bar. When she noticed that no one invited us to private social events, she blamed racism. (She originally came to Canada from Chile, and can pass for an “Indian” from here, aside from her accent.) She thought I was being left out because I was with her. I thought it was the reverse: who knows how popular she might have been if she hadn’t tied herself to me before playing the field? I told her she was free to test the waters as a single woman, but she shuddered at the thought. What she had seen at public events, and heard from me, apparently convinced her that a monogamous relationship with me was her best option.

There have been times when we've hardly noticed our general exclusion from every private social group, especially when all our three children were living with us, and their fathers popped into their lives occasionally. There were school events, then there was a period when a tribe of teenagers filled our basement for days at a time because every kid who knew our kids and couldn’t stand life at home preferred to hang out at our house, called the Mothers’ Nest.

Now that our youngest is 36 years old, our pets are our only live-in dependents. In general, we enjoy our life together, and we sometimes run into people we know, who are willing to chat with us one-on-one (or one-on-two). We still seem to be left off every guest list, but by now, we’re used to it.
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