During my childhood, my mother had invoked a proverb that she often repeated, which seemed to me to be a kind of curse. She used to say, “When one door closes, another door closes.” Hearing this had always made me angry, resentful that my mother stuck to a needlessly bleak view. Why couldn’t she occasionally buy into the American notion that if you were optimistic enough, every time a door closed at least a window would open? Why couldn’t she believe that sometimes you could somehow make your own luck? I was at a point in my life, both professional and personal, where I was in charge and would have to make my own luck. I was starting a new phase of my life and was determined to learn everything I could about who I was, what was truly important to me, and how I could make it happen. Acknowledging this, I suddenly realized how deeply I had internalized my mother’s belief that good fortune was always tempered by some kind of misfortune and misfortune was the only thing one could count on. I had ingested this bleakly pragmatic philosophy and it had become a part of my outlook on life. That had to change. I wanted to understand how and why I had so internalized this point of view. Sometimes, in order to look forward, you have to look back.
Chapter Three
MY MOTHER’S family emigrated from the Mani region of southern Greece to Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1907, when she was six years old. Her family came from a very rugged, rural part of the country, known for its olive groves and the strong work ethic of the local people. They worked in the groves and lived in small stone houses that had one or two simple rooms. There was no possibility of moving up the economic ladder there, of gaining any sort of meaningful toehold and improving one’s socioeconomic standing. What these people had was a voracious appetite for hard work and a set of ethics and values that centered on a rigid code of honor that kept them insulated from the world at large while firmly cementing their familial bonds. Those who chose to emigrate to America came because it offered them a place where their hard work would be rewarded, where they would be able to improve their circumstances in life. And Lowell offered them a place where they could, at the same time, maintain their Greek values.
The town of Lowell had been a mecca for Greek émigrés since the 1880s, and by the time my brother and I and all of our cousins were born, it had become known as “the Acropolis of America.” Greeks came to Lowell because it was a factory town with plenty of available jobs. Early arriving Greeks had established a very active and visible cultural bulkhead, which provided an added incentive for the newer Greek émigrés who were streaming into America via Ellis Island to settle in Lowell. In this small New England city, these émigrés would find the kind of community support they needed to begin the process of assimilation. By 1930, there were forty thousand Greeks in Lowell, mostly living around a part of town known, simply, as “the Acre.” The Acre, and the rest of Lowell, and the other towns surrounding it, were just like many other small cities across the United States that had flourished in the years following the industrial revolution, but which were ultimately hit hard by the Great Depression that came after the stock market crash in 1929.
Alexandra Christos, or Alec, as my mother was called, was the youngest of seven: two brothers and five sisters. In Greek families, the sons would take on the responsibility of keeping a watchful and protective eye over their siblings, particularly their sisters, to ensure that the family’s honor was upheld at all times. While Alec’s brothers worked the family’s one fruit pushcart and her older sisters worked in the local cotton mills all day, she went to school. All of the adults around her worked sixteen-hour days and contributed their earnings to the family savings, which allowed them to build their family business from a single fruit cart to a general store, which led to a drugstore, and which culminated, finally, in the acquisition and management of tenement buildings in and around the Acre. In just a few years, the Christos family became well established and prosperous in the Greek community of Lowell. The amount of energy, conviction, stamina, and above all the hunger for success it took to achieve this kind of success so quickly were enormous.
But the story of the Christos family’s early days in the United States was not a cliché of immigrants overcoming hardship nor was it a stereotypical rags-to-riches tale. On the contrary, the Greek émigrés were people of great appetite, not just for work and the betterment of their families; they also had great appetite for culture, and the arts, and good food and drink, and they were always happy to celebrate, whether it was a wedding, a christening, or any other holiday or family event. They had a joie de vivre—that spirit of kefti—that was perfectly suited to taking full advantage of the opportunities America offered. They would make their dreams come true without sacrificing their ability to enjoy life, and one another.
My mother, because she was the youngest in her family, was able to attend school instead of going right to work. She was the only girl in her household to ever attend school, and she was one of a small handful of Greek girls to graduate with a high school diploma. She was a self-taught pianist and had a knack for drawing and painting. She was even awarded a scholarship to attend art school, but, given the times, this was impossible. As the daughter of a good Greek family, she was expected to marry well and make housekeeping and raising her own family her number-one priority. Women could and did work outside the home, but Greek women and girls were not encouraged to have a social life outside their small community. Their social interactions were limited to those that centered on family and friends: going to church, being involved in community organizations, socializing with other Greek children.
Greek women and girls were encouraged to be active in the community as long as they did not do so at the expense of their familial responsibilities. My mother was blessed with an inordinate amount of kefti, which made her a family favorite. She was playful and bold: she would sing, play practical jokes on people, and she was a great mimic. She was, within the context of her family, what we might call a party girl, and she would dance and celebrate whenever the opportunity arose. But she was always mindful to keep her actions in check so that they would never embarrass her family’s honor. In short, she was comfortable with her family’s set of ethics, and she was respectful of the Christos family belief in honor. In the early roaring twenties, for example, my mother wore trousers and smoked—but never in the presence of her brothers or father. She knew the latest dances—the Lindy and the Charleston—and she had her hair cut in a flapper bob, just like the movie star Louise Brooks. But she never acted out in defiant ways, never questioned that she must follow her older brother’s lead in all things. Her small rebellions, if that’s what they were, always took place in such a way as to never challenge her Greek family ethic. She was, in turn, doted on by her adoring older siblings and her parents, who surrounded her with love and a sense of abundance. (She once told me that she remembered how her father would stock their cellar with giant wheels of feta cheese, barrels of olives, and casks of wine so that the family was always prepared for an impromptu celebration.)
It wasn’t until she was out of high school that she set foot in the cotton mills of Lowell, and then it was only because she wanted to feel what it was like to earn something by virtue of her own hard work. She only lasted in the mill for a few short months; she lost the hearing in one of her ears due to the deafening roar of the cotton processing machines.
Though my mother was an aspiring musician and artist, she had to be careful about becoming too proficient in these creative endeavors in one very important—and very Greek—way. It was perfectly all right for a girl of her time to work alongside her brothers and her father, and study hard and achieve success in school. But women and girls were not encouraged to pursue these activities at the expense of their primary responsibility, which was to tend to the home and family. The fear was that any movement away from the Greek home, participation in “American activities,” was to be carefully monitored. This meant my mother was not permitted to have a social life that did not revolve around the family. She was not permitted to interact with Americ
ans, especially American men, and she was allowed to spend time with Greek men only under the watchful eye of her brother Fred, and even then, only at family gatherings. In this way, her life in Lowell was tied to the life her family left behind in Mani—it was marginalized in many ways. She lived, quite by choice, in the Greek style that her family re-created here. It was all about family pride and honor. Always.
I remember my mother telling my brother and me one story in particular that always struck me hard but that I didn’t understand for a long time. The ending, in particular, was upsetting to me. It went like this:
“There was a beautiful young woman who lived with her family and worked in the olive grove,” my mother would always begin. “One summer, this beautiful girl fell in love with the overseer’s son. In a moment of passion, she slept with her lover. When her family found out, her parents sent for her brother to come home from America. When he arrived, he went straight to the house and got a rifle. Then he went into the olive groves in search of his sister. When he found her, she was high in the branches of a tree, picking olives. He called out her name and when she saw him she immediately yelled, ‘We’re going to get married,’ but without a moment’s hesitation he pulled the gun from behind his back and shot her dead.”
At this point in the story, my mother would clap her hands three times—once for each crack of that rifle. Then she’d end the story by saying:
“And then she dropped like a fig to the ground.”
When I was roughly the age of the girl in the story—probably fifteen or sixteen—I realized that this was a parable about the Greek familial honor that pervaded my mother’s upbringing, and that by behaving in a way that disgraced her family, this girl had left her brother—her own brother—with no option but to kill her and so erase the dishonor she had brought upon the family name. I also learned that this was no fairy tale at all—this had actually happened to a girl back in my mother’s village in Greece.
My father, Constantine Stelianos Dukakis, was born sometime around 1899, into a family of Anatolian Greeks who lived in Adramit, Turkey. His father had emigrated there and become a successful merchant. My grandfather was originally from the island of Mytilene, which was known in ancient times as the island of Lesbos—a place dominated by, revered for, and even feared because of its feminine energy. By the time my father was born, his father had become relatively wealthy and owned the “best” house in town. My father spent his childhood enjoying the benefits of this wealth—the finest education available, horseback riding, and sailing boats in the Aegean Sea. One of the elements that contributed to his family’s success was their ability to master the art of living as “outsiders”—in fact, they had thrived on it, much as my own family did later in Lowell. My father wore the public mask known as the “Anatolian smile,” which appears to the viewer as a face that exudes trust and openness, when in fact it is quite the opposite. It is a face that hides all bitterness and suffering, a face that maintains hope in the face of defeat. A face of contradiction. It is a device of protection, of survival. In some ways, it is not dissimilar to the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. It’s a face of neutrality, of apparent acquiescence. It allowed this minority group of Greeks to thrive in a hostile world…until the Ottoman Empire began to crumble at the turn of the twentieth century when the Young Turks rose to power and started their reign of terror against the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Jews who had been at the center of commerce and culture in the region for nearly five hundred years.
My father came to America in 1914, when he was fifteen years old. By then young men were being conscripted into the Turkish army, and my grandfather had already allowed his two eldest sons to leave Turkey (though they did not fulfill his wishes and go back to the Greek mainland: one went to America, the other to Russia) in order to avoid conscription. The genocide launched by the Young Turks was brutal. In the middle of the night, my grandfather got word that he and his family would be slaughtered if they did not flee immediately, so the next morning, he, my grandmother, my father, and my father’s sister, my aunt Marina, grabbed the few jewels and coins they could hide on their bodies and made their way to the sea, where boats from Mytilene were to arrive to take Greeks to safety. For some reason the rescue boats were delayed, and by the time my father was put on board, he was deathly ill with a life-threatening virus. While crossing the Adriatic Sea, he was given last rites. It was always considered a miracle that he survived the journey from Turkey to America.
My grandfather, whose home back in Adramit, Turkey, was now the home of the newly installed mayor, never recovered from having to abandon the business he had so carefully built. After building a successful life in Turkey, he arrived in this country with no money, no status, and no work. In 1918, he and his eldest son, Arthur, died, victims of the great influenza epidemic that swept the globe following the First World War.
When they got to Lowell, my father and his brothers were forced to take any kind of work they could find, so my father took a job in a munitions factory. That lasted only six months, however, as my father watched men lose limbs, eyes, and their lives whenever there was an explosion in the factory—which happened often. My father had always had a deep love for education and had already mastered three languages and wrote essays on politics, social issues, and the classic arts. He felt that he would only succeed in America if he were educated. Thanks to the generosity of his brother George, he was able to finish high school in Lowell. From there he went on to Boston University, and he continued to study there off and on for the next decade as he pursued a law degree. To make ends meet, he ran a printing business, first with a partner, who, I learned later, had embezzled profits from the business and run off with them. I recall my father beginning his business again, solo, when I was a young child, after we had moved into the house once owned by my grandparents. Over the years, whenever he could pull the tuition money together, he would go back to school. It was only years after his death that I discovered he had actually continued to pursue his law degree, and eventually, in 1937, at the age of thirty-seven, he was chosen by his fellow law school classmates to be the class day orator for their commencement ceremony. This was a high honor—but my father never mentioned it. It was only after he had died that I finally understood how determined he had been when he first came here—how tenacious he remained in the face of obstacles, and how hard it was for him to get that degree.
My father, or Costa, as he was known at home and around the neighborhood, was a true believer in the democratic process. There were liberties and opportunities available to him here that he never would have had access to in Turkey or if his family had gone back to Greece. These liberties included access to free education and free libraries; the ability to speak out in public; and the ability to organize and create unions that would protect workers and laborers. He loved everything about the democratic political system, especially the right to voice one’s dissent publicly—something that Anatolian Greeks certainly could not do in Turkey. And he loved it that he, indeed everyone, was entitled to this kind of voice, this kind of visibility, this kind of expression, regardless of whether you were born here or not.
His life, like that of so many others, especially the immigrants who were just finding their footing here, was derailed by the train wreck that was the Great Depression. By the time my father had finished his law degree, the country was nearly a decade into the Depression, and the bonds that had been forged by hard work and the desire for the same success that had formed among various ethnic groups were now in tatters. The willingness to lend a hand to someone of another ethnic group, to help them succeed, was gone. For my father, a Greek, passing the bar exam in the late 1930s proved impossible, but I never fully understood why. My mother insisted that it had to do with the Irish, who held so much political power then and so held power over the courts and the legal system. I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that it had to do with his ethnicity, though this is something my father would never acknowledge in public
or private. (That Anatolian smile stayed in place until the end of his life.)
Years later, at my mother’s wake, an old friend of hers told me that my father was not the first man my mother was involved with. Apparently she had been seeing a young Greek-American doctor who was well regarded in and around the Acre, but this man betrayed my mother in the worst way—by behaving dishonorably and disrespectfully toward her. It seems that while he was seeing my mother, he was also having an affair with a non-Greek woman—an American. When my mother found out, she had no choice but to stop seeing him.
My father had heard about this vibrant young woman named Alexandra Christos and had seen a snapshot of her. He used to come “hang around the soda fountain,” as my mother would say, at the Christos family store, which my mother was now managing. Though he visited frequently, in the hope of striking up a relationship with her, my mother proceeded very cautiously. She’d already been burned once and was guarding her heart.
In those days, my father was the living embodiment of what successful assimilation looked like. He was not only a college graduate and a young man pursuing a law degree, he was also a proud and active leader of the local Greek community. He founded the Lowell Plato Society, the goal of which was to promote the higher aspects of Greek culture among the newly arrived. For my father, this meant actively cultivating and living by the highest standards of Greek society as he saw them, which included being very well educated, being socially conscious, being politically active—and being a good family man.
Ask Me Again Tomorrow Page 5