The last class before Thanksgiving vacation, though, was one of her absolute favorites, listed on her women’s history syllabus as “The Fun Food Lecture.” Half of her students had already left early, skipping Tuesday classes for better airfares and train fares home, the first-year students exploding with homesickness and new knowledge, ready to confront their anxious, tuition-paying parents over the turkey: Mom! Dad! I’ve become a feminist. My women’s history professor says . . . Hannah had begged them, “Don’t make me the bad guy! Don’t ruin the dinner with your big provocative announcement of how radical you are now. Let everyone eat. Let your families enjoy having you home for a day before you let them have it with your new college persona. If you’re serious about identifying with feminism, bear in mind how hard the women in your family probably worked to get that Thanksgiving dinner together while you were comfortably reading your Jewelle Gomez vampire novel on the train homeward.” But in spite of her advice, every year a few of her favorite new students stood up just before dinner was served and, gripping a great-grandmother’s lace-knit tablecloth, declared “I won’t eat your filthy turkey any more, Mother—I’m a vegan now.” Or: “I’ve joined the Socialist Workers.” “I’m transitioning: Call me Eddie, not Edna.” “Mom and Dad, I’m leaving the Church to become a Buddhist nun.” “This is my new boyfriend and, yes, he’s a Muslim. We’re engaged! Did I mention I’m pregnant?”
Today, the students who had not yet departed for airports and family drama filed into the lecture hall, lighthearted at having made it this far through the semesters, beaming as they awaited the “fun” lecture that came before Thanksgiving. Hannah stood at the chalkboard, smiling back at them. “I know that many of you,” she began, “are itching to get home to your families, and for most of you that means a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and the ritual foods you long for with nostalgia. Okay, you’ve just had ten weeks of women’s history. Let me ask: What’s gendered about this holiday meal?”
They all burst out laughing. “OMG, it’s the most gendered holiday ever,” nodded Molly. “It’s total hunting and gathering, in a way. I mean, let’s face it! The women do all the vegetables and cooking and mashing and serving, and the men just carve the meat.”
“Or tend the bar and watch football,” a male student added. “My dad sometimes grills kebabs, though; we’re Lebanese.”
“The men use what look like weapons—carving tools—or they do food prep that’s outside, like Ali said,” Janice contributed. “The grill is outside, the barbecue pit is outside, the men play touch football outside. The women are inside using more harvest-y type tools.”
“You’re all over eighteen,” Hannah pointed out. “In just a few years you’ll be setting up your own households. How many of you feel ready to carry on the traditional Thanksgiving meal yourselves with the families you’ll create? Janice? Molly? Keisha? Any of you feel ready to prepare and serve a full Thanksgiving dinner to your guests?”
Gasps of horror greeted her inquiry. “Hell, no,” Molly shook her pink-dyed head. “I can about boil water. I don’t know any of those recipes.”
“We eat dorm food,” Ali reminded Hannah. “I mean, some guys live off-campus or in the frats, but most of us pay up to use the dining hall during our four years here. We don’t get many chances to learn basic food prep unless we take summer jobs in restaurants. My mom is always trying to show me how to select a ripe avocado or a melon. It’s a mystery to me.”
“And, like, that info just isn’t passed down from mother to daughter as much anymore, if that’s what you’re looking for,” said Janice, who was always eager to provide the “right” answer in class. “Maybe our mothers took home ec in high school, but we didn’t have to. We all took computer programming. We grew up zapping snacks in a microwave or eating fast food on weekends.”
“Yeah, it’s not like I ever saw a cow, growing up in Brooklyn,” Keisha explained. “I had no idea where butter came from. They sent me to Fresh Air Fund camp and I had to collect eggs, and sometimes they were not only warm but covered in chicken poo! It freaked me out. But in Africa, lots of girls still live traditionally, agriculturally and all.”
“Any one of you grow up on an actual working farm?” Hannah asked. Not a single arm was raised. She turned to the board.
“Okay, let’s start with all the skills we have lost. In pre-industrial Europe, in colonial America, any girl who wasn’t born into an elite family had to learn the basics for running her own household one day by age ten. She could be married off or sent into servitude at ten, eleven. How did her typical day start?” Her hand moved rapidly up and down as they made the enormous list.
In the dark. She’d rise before dark to the crowing of roosters—no clock, no watch, no alarm bell. Before starting breakfast she’d have to get firewood, walk with its weight and break it or chop it herself. Get a fire going, then fetch the water, and if there’s no well on her land that’s another long walk to the river, the town well, the spring, or the creek. That’s when stranger danger begins. The strange man in those woods.
“What’s in breakfast?” Hannah asked, and they called out “Eggs. You have to collect eggs.” “Butter. You have to be able to milk a cow and churn butter, and make cheese . . . and make bread. Women knew how to grow wheat and rye and flax and corn, how to make flour, bake bread in an oven.” Hannah interrupted, “Yes, good, but we all come from different traditions, here. What are the breads of your foremothers?”
Now they were hungry and longing for the taste of home, of heritage, of ethnic pride and comfort food and love. Everyone yelled at once. Challah. Chapati. Kolache. Biscuits and cornbread. Panini. Irish soda bread. Bean paste bun. Fry bread. Tortilla. Crepe. Lavash. Beignets. Pita. Shoofly pie. Babka.
“Can any of you make those foods? Will those traditions continue with you?”
Silence. Heads hung. “I know how to make brownies,” boasted Francesca, and after a moment she conceded, “But my grandmother’s homemade pasta; that tradition will probably end with her. I mean, I buy my noodles at the corner store!”
“This exercise isn’t meant to make you feel guilty; and I know how you feel,” Hannah assured them. “My own grandmother grew up with a live carp swimming around in her bathtub every Friday to make gefilte fish. I certainly haven’t carried on that skill, although I inherited a love of gefilte fish if somebody else makes it.”
“Ewwwwwww,” from the non-Jewish students.
They returned to the Skills of Our Foremothers list on the board. Young farm girls, preparing for marriage, once knew every aspect of cooking, growing and preparing food, making clothing, tending animals, predicting weather, protecting and pruning orchards, vegetable gardens, herbal medicine gardens. The lists filled the first chalkboard and spilled over onto the spare rolling chalkboard behind the lecture hall stage. Planting rice. Plowing. Winnowing. Haymaking. Chopping cotton. Preserving jelly. Boiling. Frying. Rendering fat. Roasting, Deglazing. Churning. Poaching. Koshering. Baking. Simmering. Weaving. Spinning. Carding wool. Sewing. Knitting. Quilting, Embroidering. Knitting. Dyeing. Making candles, soap, baskets, pottery, cradles, tablecloths, lace . . .
“I can’t do any of these things,” Hannah confessed. “I am a different kind of woman. Nor did I marry, or have children. In the past, I’d be a ‘spinster’, but that’s based on the idea I could spin. I do make a mean mashed turnip dish, though. Now scoot!”
They headed out of the classroom, talking agitatedly, pausing to wish her a happy Thanksgiving. “God,” Hannah overheard two students say, “I’m going to get my great-aunt’s recipes right now! I’m going to learn how to make brisket if it kills me! I’m going to take a class in quilting; and make jam . . .”
I didn’t learn any of those things. I teach a history of domestic life I never lived myself. What do I know how to do, anyway, except teach? Will the material legacy of women’s culture die with me?
The wet weekend came at the end of Thanksgiving vacation. Hannah felt the storm even before she heard rain
with her ears, waking to a drenching, rocking rain on that last Saturday in November, just after she’d gone home to her mother’s for the holiday (beets, potatoes and carrots, oy vay!) and then returned to catch up on lost work time. Her first thought was gratitude: At last, a wet day for staying at home to get things done. A return to immersion in women’s history. But then she remembered the annual Thanksgiving gathering at Sappho’s was later that afternoon. She’d have to make use of the morning, cooking—and hopefully the storm wouldn’t deter too many guests from driving in to the bar for their beloved holiday event.
Peeling turnips for the buttered mashed dish she was supposed to bring over for Isabel’s feast, Hannah looked affectionately at her snug apartment. Rain and history might shake her rafters, but her books and papers kept her anchored in her chosen life’s work. As her hands scraped and chopped, she could sense the multitudes, the eons of women before her who had engaged in this simple work of feeding others—mothers, daughters, servants, apprentices. Her eye fell on the book left open on her rocking chair: Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. Then, just as she turned back to her wooden cutting board, for an instant she saw an unfamiliar rough sleeve extending down her wrist—not the pilled cotton of her Berkshire Conference of Women’s History sweatshirt but a scullery maid’s leg-of-mutton sleeve. Scared, she backed away from the stove, and her apron fluttered, an apron she did not own, had never worn. The apron strings tied to someone else’s life.
Abruptly she was herself again, in her women’s basketball sweatpants, Ugg boots and her beet-stained feminist history conference pullover. The turnips began to simmer in the pot. And adrenaline simmered in her bloodstream. She paced. The apartment was shaking from storm winds now. And Hannah was shaking, again, from the past reaching out to her with its crone-like fingers. Touching her.
The phone rang and the lights went out at the exact same time. Hannah stumbled over a turnip that had somehow rolled underfoot, banged her ankle hard against the counter edge, and grabbed for the phone in the sudden darkness, for one second expecting the voice to be a sad servant-girl from colonial America. But it was only Isabel. “Hi! Are you still planning to join us tonight?”
“Of course I am. I’m making the fucking turnips right now,” Hannah growled, relieved and bruised, rubbing her ankle. “Are you getting slammed by this rain? I just lost the power here, except for some reason the telephone works.” The lights flickered back on.
“It’s fine over here. There are about six women already at the bar, cooking,” Isabel responded, sounding amused. “If we lose power at the bar, we’ll use Jo’s camp stoves to reheat the dishes—she brought four of them. I’m just checking in with everyone so we know how much to make. Trale’s bringing goulash, no matter what. Looks like a number of women may have their driveways flooded by afternoon. But we have at least twenty coming, plus we’re counting on you.” Isabel paused. “And your turnips!” She laughed and hung up.
Hannah sat down, staring at her hands.
We’re counting on you. Well, she was a beloved member of her own community, that much was certain. And it was Thanksgiving, a week of renewed gratitude for what they shared at Sappho’s. But, glancing again at her textbooks on colonial women’s history, Hannah wondered what in fact she herself could be counted on to do in her own time.
At four o’clock the rain was still pounding, loudly, and the leak in the window frame in Hannah’s bedroom was dropping pings of tree-root-smelling water into the mop bucket positioned below. But the rest of her apartment was redolent of buttered and seasoned turnips, and Hannah decided to forgo body oil altogether as she towelled from a shower. Why disturb the Thanksgiving smell of food, nature, and warm womanhood? She pulled on nice wool pants, good boots, and a dark red cowl-neck sweater and walked carefully to her car, balancing umbrella, covered dish, keys. The entire neighborhood smelled like food, a medley of competing ovens, microwaves, wood stoves, and uncorked wines.
Yes, the roads were flooded in places, where broken branches and piled-up sopping leaves had blocked curbside drains. But other cars were out, negotiating delicately, with drivers in holiday moods of you-go-first kindness and solicitude. At the last stoplight before Sappho’s Bar and Grill, five cars scrambled around two small harvest pumpkins that had blown off a closed produce stand and were now merrily rolling around the four-way traffic intersection. Hannah glanced at the dish strapped child-like into the passenger seat, but her own vegetables remained passive. She panicked briefly when she spotted a police cruiser in her rear-view mirror, blinking at her, then realized it was Officer Angie, also on her way to the bar for the holiday event.
Sappho’s was festive in the best fashion. Sprays of perfect autumn leaves, their edges outlined in gold paint, decorated the walls, ceiling beams, bar posts and chair backs. The pool table was temporarily covered with a sheet of plywood and a golden-dyed cloth, and rows of dishes gleamed richly from ceramic and wooden bowls. One long table with extra folding chairs along each side was set with silverware and gourds, vases of flowers, and a very large punch bowl steaming with some sort of mulled cider. A stack of dried corn tied to a pouch of tobacco honored the indigenous Native Americans, starkly reminding those feasting of the vanished indigenous communities whose ways had sustained the lives of white colonists.
Hannah left her wet rain jacket in the hallway and entered smiling, leaving her mashed turnips on the pool table. Behind her, Officer Angie was peeling off a leather overcoat and, as Isabel’s rules required, she entered without her weapon. “It’s locked in the car,” she assured Isabel, who welcomed her.
“You made it!” several voices called to the new arrivals. Other women, too, were scraping wet boots at the door and proffering hot food baskets. It might have been any Thanksgiving gathering scenario, thought Hannah, except for the absence of male guests and the very friendly kissing exchanged between women. In point of fact, Dog and Yvette’s mouths had yet to separate. “Would you two stop making out and help me with this frickin-ass bird?” was Letty’s rather un-Pilgrim like command, and other couples popped apart as well to finish setting the table and basting.
Trale, having finished tuning the bar’s damp piano, began a quiet medley of “Simple Gifts” and “Amazing Grace” until Carol ordered her to offer “something more dykey,” and then Moira shouted “I’m on it” and turned on the sound system, which Isabel had cued up with sexy food-themed blues tunes from the 1930s and’40s. Soon they were all standing arm in arm around the table.
“I guess this is where we ought to say grace,” Yvette ventured, and Letty, hovering over both the basted bird and the sculpted tofu platter with an elegant serrated knife in each gnarled hand, sighed loudly, and paused in the middle of carving.
“What are you thankful for?”
Isabel had carefully poured a measure of amber-colored cider or mulled wine into everyone’s cup before posing this question. Beautifully dressed, wrapped in a velvet cape, she smiled at her guests from her place at the head of the table. In response, faces beamed back at her—or went blank, according to personality.
“I’ll start,” Dog offered. “I am thankful I am not forced to observe this holiday with my homophobic mother and drunk father, and that I have a family here who built a space of love.”
“Amen,” from Yvette.
Tongues loosened. “I’m thankful that I found y’all when I was . . . was pretty close to suicide,” shared Emily. “I’m close to that B.A. because of all of you—and Dr. Stern, of course,” she toasted her professor.
Hannah glowed with pleasure. “I’m thankful for you too. For all of the brave students who dare to take a women’s history class.”
“For those who came before us,” added Trale. “Dykes of every decade, every class.”
“I’m thankful for the motherline of feminism.”
“Enough to eat, this year, for so many of us.”
“My family who support me.”
“My partner, sitting here besi
de me, in spite of my bad temper and my snoring.”
“For all people who fight racism.”
“My baby girl!”
“My guru.”
“My new electric wheelchair.”
“My cats, my AA group, my Taiko drumming class.”
“Yes, but . . .” Shoni spoke with difficulty. “I want to ask this question. Who would you be if you had lived in colonial America at that first Thanksgiving we learn about in school? I would be the ‘savage,’ invited but the Other, we all know.” She touched the tower of corn in front of her.
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