Sunday, November 18, 2007
Opinion

My mongrel nation

Every year, Thanksgiving reminds me of the worst of my many public humiliations.

By Stephanie Ramage

Every year, Thanksgiving reminds me of the worst of my many public humiliations.

On a stage facing about 150 of my peers, I felt with cold certainty the telltale popping of the zipper that secured my bodysuit as my braless chest was exposed.

Fortunately, I was 7 years old and my chest looked no different from that of Brian, the other kid portraying a Native American in the second-grade Thanksgiving play. He wasn’t even wearing a shirt, just jeans and one of the paper-and-felt headbands we’d made in Mrs. Sealey’s class the previous day. My big line, with a suitably big gesture, was “We bring corn!” It was my widespread arms that were the undoing of my tres chic striped bodysuit. It was 1973—a bodysuit with a hoop-pull on the zipper was all the rage. The mob in the pit went wild, the destruction of fashion a joy to behold. Face aflame, I stomped off the stage and Mrs. Sealey, herself a gorgeous descendant of the Cherokees, wiped my tears and patiently replaced the zipper with a dozen safety pins, adorning me in a way that presaged the first American appearance of the Sex Pistols by five years.

I returned to the stage and we sang “My Country ’tis of Thee,” and it is that song’s line “land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride” that I find myself humming this time of year. I used to wonder, “What the hell is ‘pilgrim’s pride?’” But now I know.

Over the years, I have been extremely fortunate to count a large number of immigrants among my friends. My ancestors came to the American colonies in the early 1600s, well before the United States even existed. But growing up in the household of a World War II veteran, my admiration of much more recent immigrants was inevitable. My father loved them. The German engineers who were our neighbors in a trailer park in Monticello were quickly befriended. Over a Miller beer, my father, who worked with them at Georgia Pacific, would ask them questions about their relatives who lived on the east side of the Berlin Wall. I remember one of them, a big guy named Frans, crying about someone he loved who was trapped in East Germany.

A Lebanese retailer (and converted Mormon) was welcomed into our home once we wrangled a house (it was during the housing shortage) and my Dad grilled him incessantly about OPEC. After we moved again, my new friend Wendy’s Turkish mother was invited in and asked about Ankara. Cubans were especially beloved—Dad would chat them up about how much he hated Castro.

But he loved them all, because, as he said, “Foreigners love this country more than we even know how to love it.” He would explain how it takes a great deal of courage to leave everything and everyone you know, to come to a strange country where no one speaks your language, where you don’t know how the government or social customs work, to find a better life for yourself and your children. “That’s what being an American means,” he’d say. “Hitler said we were a mongrel nation, but that’s where we get our courage and willingness to work.”

It’s hard for me to imagine having the courage to make such a frightening and lonely pilgrimage. But almost four centuries ago, some courageous ancestor of mine, like so many others, made it.

Among the many things for which I am thankful, I’m especially grateful for immigrants: those who came here willingly, those who came in chains, and those, like my son’s father’s family, who came seeking asylum from tyrants (in their case, the Ayatollah Khomeini). I am grateful for, and very proud of, that double strand of bravery and industriousness in our country’s DNA that defines its very identity. I am thankful to my very core for my beautiful, mongrel nation—and, too, for Mrs. Sealey’s ancestors, who were here before any of us. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.