How My Family Became White Americans

Tshaj mentions the immigrant waves of peddlers, their children who become grocers, the regular process of assimilation…  

And I smile,

seeing the images my mind has created:

My Great Grandfather (the local confectioner’s immigrant clerk),

selling candy to the white children in the neighborhood.

It’s around the time of the Great War

and the country of his birth, far across the beautiful sea,

is emerging from their Turkish overlords (a type of Arab Spring).

But حجار is now Haggar, free and struggling in America,

requires his children to translate the important phrases,                  to

the teachers, the police officers,

the journalists and businessmen (I still wonder if he worried then, if he didn’t assimilate they’d be rid of him).

So soon the children forgot the language of the ancient Semitic civilizations,

dawn the new imperialism,

spoken in their classes.

Barely out of school when they enlist,

for the next great generational conflict.              Bound on a destroyer

through the turquoise sea his Father fled across to freedom.

Grandpa Ed was called “Blackie” then, like the oil stolen from his Father’s people, his hair a rare rich thing in a land of blond haired children.

Yet he says the tarnish of their nicknames was a bond,

these innocent boys learned to cherish.

Never questioning the flag, or their leaders, or the order. And when the war was won,

they were honored for their service…

and my once impoverished dark haired grandparents open up their own business.

And of course, it’s what all people need (as immigrants can’t fail to recognize),

a grocery store,

the cornerstone,

 around which a Sioux Falls neighborhood develops.

                  Where 50 years after my Arab Great-Grandfather’s death,

                                                                                                            I can still go to buy my candy.  

And because they welcomed him, I consider how fortunate my life has been  

while the news shows another “distant tragedy of migration”.

The shorelines of a once beautiful sea, spotted with drowned faces, …so familiar.

And my heart hurts,               because my life     here,                         

 shows that sea,     is not what divides us.