Sappho's Bar and Grill

by Bonnie J. Morris

  While Letty carved and others helped serve, they all attacked this question, plates soon full—eating, drinking, interrupting, and laughing, then serious again. “You, my dear, would wear the scarlet letter,” Janey poked her partner, Amy, with a fork.

  “And I’d be hanged for bearing a mixed-race baby,” Letty sighed. “I know about those old laws.”

  “Me, I’d be one of those indentured servant chicks,” Emily announced through a mouthful of Brussels sprouts. “I’d leave behind a bad-girl personal history of having been a London brothel slut. I’d show up on a pier in Virginia, all demure in a frilly apron with a knife under my petticoat for any knave who tried to violate me during that long nauseous Atlantic crossing. I’d clean till I drop, faint, at the feet of my rich planter dude employer, then make him fall in love with me and marry me and will me his estate. Then we’d raise horses and I’d skip off to kiss the stable girl on weeknights, saving her the best cuts from the ham we’d had at supper.”

  “Jesus,” from Moira. “No need to ask which of us took that class with Dr. Stern.”

  “You’d tire of being kept,” said Trale. “You’d run away and join the Revolutionary War. I might pass as a man and play the music in those army camps. Be Deborah Sampson, but more of a yogi.”

  Hannah, already glutted on mashed potatoes and cornbread, was enjoying this, but had a question of her own. She accepted another glass of Isabel’s mulled wine before she spoke. “Have you ever thought,” she began, “about what it might have been like to leave England, or Northern Europe, or Spain during that whole long epoch of exploration and Crusading and piracy, in order to start a lesbian colony? A lesbian country, our own? I mean, as the Pilgrims and Puritans experimented with a community of their own. An escape from persecution, into autonomy.”

  “Well, forget that fantasy,” Jeri put in. “The Pilgrims came in and settled their big, sanctimonious butts atop Shoni’s people. There’s no starting a utopian village anywhere on planet Earth without displacing whoever’s already there.”

  “One group’s refuge is another’s land lost,” said Shoni.

  “Look at Israel and Palestine,” someone else added.

  “And no way to unite women across, you know, race and class and Protestant and Catholic, and language. Everyone distrusted and hated the next village, and women turned one another in to the Church or the law, happily letting someone else be tried as a witch. And it takes skills and training to run a colony, which women didn’t get except as queens ruling from long distance. But there have been many attempts to create a utopian motherland in fiction, at least,” Carol offered. “Look over there at Isabel’s bar bookshelf. Herland was written in 1915! Then there’s Mists of Avalon, Daughters of a Coral Dawn, The Wanderground.”

  “If you want a lesbian autonomous community, what about that Oregon women’s land collective? There’s also that old directory of lesbian land communities over there on the bookshelf.”

  “I lived in one,” Carol sighed. “And it was no utopia! My God, the arguments we had. I was nearly expelled for using the wrong kind of toothpaste. Then, after I had my son, I was out. The processing . . .”

  “What about Michigan? The Michigan festival? Or any other women’s music festival, you know? Those were lesbian mini-villages, for sure—all through the 1970s,’80s,’90s. There was processing and conflict at festivals, sure, but they were successful over time. Like annually reappearing cities of women. Lesbian colonies.”

  “And now mostly they’re gone,” Dog hissed. “Disappearing. Like that Lost Colony.”

  “Like Brigadoon. Which appeared once every hundred years . . .”

  “Look,” Isabel interrupted suddenly. “Do play along here, for one minute—I believe that Hannah was imagining what a first lesbian Thanksgiving might have been like. Weren’t you?”

  “Well. Uh,” Hannah sighed. “I, I picture a raggedy mothership of unwashed Amazons, landing not at Plymouth Rock but at P-town.”

  “Ha,” from Trale.

  “The question is who would be doing the cooking and serving at that original lesbian holiday, too. This is where feminist politics gets bogged down, you know. I mean, who cleans up? Who carves? Who sits where at the table? Who leads what kind of grace, and in what language?”

  “We all share the work here at Sappho’s, at our holiday meals,” Moira pointed out. “No one person does all the labor. Well, of course Isabel does the drinks. But—”

  “A recipe collection that shall never see print,” Isabel smiled, pouring them all one more round. “Professional secrets.”

  “There’s a caste system even in lesbian culture,” said Carol. “Carpenters on top, child care workers below.”

  “That sounds about right—not to mention sexy,” laughed Letty, as she reached for another helping of yams.

  “I know that in a past life I might have been a servant, not a scholar,” Hannah mused. “I wouldn’t necessarily be the same kind of person I am now. I might have stripped the corn kernels, shelled the beans, plucked hen feathers, cleared away the corncobs at that first Thanksgiving, or at a later lesbian version.”

  “Good. Take these out to the compost heap now, my dear,” Isabel directed, handing Hannah a platter of denuded corncobs. “Let’s make some table space for the pies.”

  “PIES!” screamed everyone, forsaking any utopia but that of whipped cream heaped on pumpkin and pecan.

  Hannah balanced the platter of corncobs, some trailing delicate fringes of corn silk, as she edged toward the back door of the bar. She could hear rain still pelting the roof, here where the eaves sloped thinly, and the lights were flickering again although that wasn’t too much of an issue for the gathering now that most of the food had been cooked and served. With one foot she nudged open the back door, looking for the three garbage bins (one marked “COMPOST”) that Isabel kept in the alley.

  Rain smacked her in the face. The door banged shut. And in front of her was not the familiar, dumpster-lined alley, but a pier deck slick with salt crust, upon which women huddled, aprons pulled tight to their faces.

  “Be you from the workhouse?”

  It was a hoarse whisper. Hannah fell to the deck with a thump. The young woman next to her lowered the apron from her face slightly, just enough so that Hannah could see a tired eye surrounded by what could only be the lingering pockmarks of smallpox. “Don’t ye puke, I’m over and through it,” she added, pointing to her scars. “They sent me over to be indentured since no man will marry me now in London town. And you?”

  “I’m at Thanksgiving dinner,” was all Hannah could come up with.

  “Bound over to serve the parson’s house then. Well, you’ll be fed, but mind ye his wandering hands!” The deck creaked suddenly with heavy feet. “The men come!”

  “You? What can you bring a master?” asked a sneering agent. A child no more than ten obediently rose and then recited: “Card wool, mix dye, work a lye for soap. Wind thread, spin and knit, brew, make preserves, raise lambs, milk cows, churn, skim cream, set hens, stitch quilt patches, fix a lady’s hair, mend gloves.”

  The woman next to Hannah, newly recovered from smallpox, extended her hands. “Look not upon me as a planter’s wife but as an able chamber maid,” she offered to a man who had stepped forward, hat pulled low.

  “I look for a servant to do washing for my family of nine,” he growled. “Wash and starch and iron and never mind thy two scarred hands.”

  Frantic, Hannah slipped back to the end of the long line of aproned women and tried to orient herself. White women on a wet pier boasting their household skills. This must be Thanksgiving week, after the time of the Pilgrims’ first feast in 1621, but still colonial America. Sending over indentured female servants had not yet given way to sales of slaves. This pier wasn’t yet an auction block. But what a sad-faced lot of women, children, teenagers with stretch marks of lost child-bearing, some women clearly dressed in prison garb marking them from Newgate back in England. There were any number of reasons fo
r women to accept the unknown horrors of indenture if it paid passage across the ocean, putting them at good distance from the horrors they had come to know well. This was the book that Hannah taught each fall!

  She always shivered when she came to that chapter assignment on indentured women:

  Completely subject to the will of their masters or mistresses, they could neither leave nor marry until their time of service was up, and were severely punished if they tried to do so. Whippings were common, and brandings were inflicted for a second offense. Their terms were extended as punishment if they did marry, or if they bore an illegitimate child, even though this was often the master’s son. Therefore they often resorted to child murder, even though the law required execution for this crime. No wonder that a servant woman in Virginia in 1623 wrote, “I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth daily flow from mine eyes.” *

  Hannah knew what it meant to live in this era—not from personal experience but from hour after hour of poring over history’s pages. Indentured servants were too often the most desperate women, released from crowded London jails and workhouses. Some had been prostitutes or were unmarried girls caught self-aborting, others shamed by rape at the hands of an upper-class master whose inherited status meant his victims could never see justice. In Scotland, local ballads passed these stories down as mournful melodies, depicting the plight of serving girls charged with infanticide. These and others headed to the New World colonies to redeem their souls through seven years of work. Their numbers grew with women banished by their families or former employers as well as those unable to pay fines for petty crimes, or unwelcome in poorhouses due to their sins. England’s new “poor laws” could not sustain them with enough to eat, for while women did twice the work of men, they were allocated one-half the support. The disabled, anyone marked with difference, well, they didn’t even rate charity, and instead were given caps and kicked into the streets to beg for coins, marked with the forever-lasting slur handy-cap. Maybe in the Massachusetts Colony, each could reinvent herself, but here they would encounter new oppressions in the religious laws bringing new and harsher punishments for such sins as running on a Sunday, gossip, and idleness. The stocks and dunking stool awaited them. And there was always, always the lurking possibility of being accused of witchcraft.

  “Can ye wield a broom?” A man was prodding Hannah with his cane. She reacted instantly to the unwelcome sense of physical invasion, jumping up to standing posture and looking him in the eye. “I can ride one,” she retorted.

  He slapped her across the face. “We shan’t suffer a witch!”

  Several women then gathered protectively around Hannah, who touched her stinging cheek in astonishment. No man has ever hit me. One older woman reached up, pretending to straighten Hannah’s dress collar, but as she did so tucked Hannah’s star of David necklace out of sight under a fold of shawl. This woman leaned in and through rotting teeth whispered, “Jewess, hide thy worship. They have not yet built a temple here. Keep a hock of ham curing on thy rafter to quit inquiry, like thy sisters before ye who fled moor to moor.”

  So that’s it.

  Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and not allowed back until 1656.

  The Ladino-speaking Jews from Spain had already fled north, along with the Arab Moors, after Queen Isabella expelled them all. They were called Moorish, for “dark.” The Jews who stayed in Spain, the Marranos who hid their faith, kept pork curing in the corner of a front porch to assure passing Inquisitors the home-dwellers were neither Jewish nor Muslim . . . though that pork never entered the house. Some took that custom in fleeing to England.

  Hannah had landed in the 1630s, just before slavery was an official trade by law in these colonies, a time when conversion to Christianity could release an African woman from bondage. But what would the Puritans do to a Jewish servant? Where, in any nation, could she hide?

  “Enough!” The angry man took Hannah’s hands and felt them, probing for calluses and needle-prick scars. “Soft handed and sharp tongued, are ye? A spinster who canst spin? Nor a farmer’s daughter useful in a field? What are you worthy for that brought you to this land?”

  Then Hannah found her voice. “I am a teacher, sir, and not for marrying,” she roared. “A scholar for a household, and thankful I can read.”

  “That is well.” A stern, heavy-browed man tapped Hannah on her skull with dirty fingers. “I have now at my Thanksgiving table a Wampanoag squaw who refuses the catechism.” He thrust a ten-pound Bible into Hannah’s chest. “Come, governess, and give our savage the Word of God.”

  The pier tilted. The voices of the other women shrank to desperate murmurs. Then, in a blur of transition, it was late afternoon in a low-ceilinged cottage dense with the smell of boiled corn. Under Hannah’s thick long skirts, a wooden bench supported her trembling legs. The table before her was heaped with plates of corn and potatoes, deftly set down by a handsome Algonquin serving girl swathed in ill-fitting colonial dress. She looked sideways at Hannah as she bent down with a wooden tray, taking in the measure of her face.

  And Hannah almost felt as if she’d been slapped anew, but in a very different way. The immediate recognition was unmistakable, the familiar eye-blink of a moment passing between two lesbians who recognize one another in passing and in that glance wonder, Will we become lovers? and regretfully conclude, No. Can’t. But it could have happened. And it would have been terrific. All of this passed between them in a whisper-narrow instant. But then the young woman slowly raised one finger and ran it over the bridge of her nose.

  My face. She’s never seen a Jew before but she knows I’m not a Puritan. Not English. I look more like her than I look like them. We both look more like Shoni.

  Does she know I see the dyke in her?

  “Good,” nodded a figure at the head of the table who appeared every inch the family patriarch in all senses of the word. He pointed at Hannah with a half-chewed ear of corn. “Let our governess now go with the squaw to teach our catechism. Remember, these savages are as children, and moreover the men and women seem to mix their places designated by our Creator. We find these women trying to govern and lead, and their men disdaining hard agriculture as womanly, and other deviances. We find the men praising elder women as the wisest of council authorities when we know from our gospel the warning what man is clean that was of woman born? So instill in her our scriptures, and both of you remember well the penalty for runaways—for disobedience to both earthly and heavenly Master.” He leaned across the table and rapped on Hannah’s knuckles, just once, his large and ragged thumbnail scratching her cold skin. Soon enough, Hannah knew, English law would inscribe the “rule of thumb” allowing a husband to beat his wife, or any woman in his household, with a cane or a whip as long as it was no thicker than a man’s thumb. By this man’s hand, that could mean a stick far rounder than a walking cane. Hannah saw the man’s silent wife glance up at her just once, fearful-eyed.

  The family’s Thanksgiving meal continued, but Hannah and the young servant were directed into a side room filled with barrels, riding boots, and blankets. A leather-bound book lay open to a page on table manners for colonial children:

  Never sit down at the table till asked, and after the blessing.

  Speak not.

  When any speak to thee, stand up.

  Look not earnestly at any other.

  Hannah had no idea what to do. This, to be sure, was not the lesbian-colony Thanksgiving she and her friends had been dreaming up at Sappho’s over warm triangles of pie. This was a test of Puritan decorum, with an added fillip of missionary labor, the erasure of Algonquin women’s leadership and stature. She noticed a thinly latched door, beckoning her to flee with her new companion. But that young woman slowly raised a portion of her shirt to show, on one shoulder, the lingering marks of a brutal whipping and, on the other shoulder, a brand. She had twice escaped, only to be caught, returned, and punished with deliberate scarring.

  Abruptly Hannah
recalled a few words Shoni had taught her in the sweat lodge.

  “Wuneekeesuq,” she greeted the young woman, who looked startled to be addressed in her own language. “Wuneekeesuq,” she responded.

  Hannah gestured slowly, first to herself and then to her tough-looking companion. “Niizh manitoag xkwa. Niizh manitoag xkwa?” I am a two-spirit woman. Are you?

  “Niizh manitoag. Naxkohoman,” the woman whispered back. I am a two-spirit who goes between the men’s and women’s camps, and a singer of songs of my tribe. She pointed to herself, finally smiling. “I am Weetamoo.”

  “Hannah. I am Hannah.” Hannah pulled out her Jewish necklace, circled her face with her hand, and emphatically pushed aside the Bible she’d been carrying. “Nkateman.” Leave! I had to leave there. That’s the only reason women like me are here. But I have to leave here, too. I have to try. Let’s go.

  “Nkateman,” nodded Weetamoo, but touching her branded flesh. How would they escape without more punishment?

  Then Weetamoo pointed to something that certainly did not belong there, in the 1630s, and that Hannah would never have been glad to see in her own time. It was a weapon, poking out from behind a sack of corn flour; but not a Pilgrim musket. It was Officer Angie’s gun, the one Isabel did not allow into the bar at Thanksgiving or on any other day, but which their policewoman friend back at Sappho’s was obligated to carry close at all times. Weetamoo seized it now and held it out to Hannah. A separate scatter of bullets fell from her hand, rolling around on the wood-planked floor. And Weetamoo sighed, and brushed the clinging flour from her hands as if wiping away an element far dirtier and more sinister.

  This was a symbol of all the trouble that would enter this land, plaguing it for centuries: gun violence, first turned against the indigenous peoples, then infecting every community. Forever. Could they stop all of that, somehow? If the two of them—Algonquin and ignorant invader—destroyed this gun, buried its bullets, and bonded with each other, could they reverse the course of history?