The Grasinski Girls - Mary Patrice Erdmans Polish and Polish-American Studies Series

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that one of the trustees and his “compatriot with the jawdislocated cognomen” were given a deferred sentence.18 His compatriot’s name was Joseph Waynski. The real jaw-dislocating cognomen, however, was that of Józef Grusczynski, who Americanized his first name to Joseph and whose son Americanized the surname to Grasinski to avoid just such derogatory statements.

      Frederick Barth argues that ethnicity is important because it stratifies and structures intergroup relations, and that what is most salient is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”19 This is evident in chapter 1, where I show that when the children of these Polish immigrants moved into the city after World War I, ethnicity (coupled with religion) sorted the groups into neighborhoods and occupations. Polish Catholics were ranked below the Dutch Calvinists who were aligned with the Protestant Yankee leaders. At that time, and in that place, ethnic identity was embedded in relations of power and domination.

      In chapter 2, I show that ethnic identity was less salient in the generation of the Grasinski Girls, most of whom acquired non-Polish surnames in marriage and moved into middle- and working-class non-Polish suburban neighborhoods. For them, whiteness, rather than Polishness, was the border between groups and the basis for ranking and sorting. And yet, Polishness continued into the third and fourth generation as a culture, a set of routines and values shared with family members. The Polishness of the Grasinski Girls is not articulated in class, politics, and social status, but instead is found in the dimples of a smile that reminds them of Aunt Antonia. What is important about this shared history is not the “cultural stuff” the ethnicity (as family) encloses, but the act of enclosing, of bring together, of connecting. In the private sphere, ethnicity helps the Grasinski Girls do the gendered kinship work that keeps the family together; it locates them in a concrete place and connects them to the textured faces of people they love; and it keeps present the memory of the matriarchs and patriarchs of Hilliards.20

      1

      The Mothers of the Grasinski Girls

      We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions.

      Friedrich Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch

      Frances of Hilliards

      In her wedding picture, Frances Zulawski Fifelski, the grandmother of the Grasinski Girls, looks young and apprehensive. She was a short, slight woman, only ninety pounds and less than five feet tall. The yards of cloth that make up her wedding gown add a plumpness that foreshadows her matronly thickness. Her small frame is dominated by a giant corsage that covers half her chest and a limp bouquet in her right hand (the pictures were taken on the third day of their wedding). Both Frances and her husband Ladislaus Fifelski look past the camera lens. No smiles—that was the style back then. Her left arm rests tentatively on his shoulder. She was fifteen when they married in 1898. He was almost twice her age. Her father had arranged the marriage, and she agreed to it. No stories of passion are passed down through the generations. Frances and Ladislaus were introduced, they married, and they had their picture taken. Within a year a child was born, and Ladislaus kissed her for the first time, or so the story is told. In the wedding picture, he sits stiffly in a high-back chair. His brow is unlined, his face clean-shaven, the black suit just a little too short in the sleeves, his collar starch-white.

      Ladislaus’s family arrived in Hilliards about the time the church trustees were getting arrested for selling beer at the church fair. Frances didn’t get there for another six years, and when she came it was to marry Ladislaus. The oldest child of Krystyna and Pawel, Frances was sickly and weak from having contracted diphtheria as a child. After finishing eight years of schooling in Chicago, at the age of thirteen she entered the Felician convent in Chicago. Like her granddaughter Angel, she lasted about a year in the convent. (I am struck by how fortuitous my existence is as a descendant from this line—my great-grandmother and my mother both made attempts to lead celibate lives.) Her children write that the convent was “harsh”; the Mother Superior “felt that self-denial and poverty” were a necessary part of the training, and “Frances did not think much of this life.”1 Leaving behind this emotionally hostile atmosphere of self-abnegation, she returned to Chicago, lived with her aunts, and worked as a seamstress until her marriage was arranged. Nadine, her granddaughter, in an autobiography written while she herself was a novice in the Felician Order, wonders “how strange it was to be taken from the convent, where she spent a year, and marry a man she never saw before in her life.” And in this situation, she praises her grandmother for being someone “determined to make her marriage successful.”

      The choices for a girl like Frances at that time were constrained by her class position. Once she left the convent, she had no education or resources to pursue an independent career. Frances’s decision to leave the convent was almost by default a decision to get married in order to establish her own household. Despite the fact that her father arranged the marriage, the marriage actually afforded her some independence, even if it did mean establishing a dependent relationship with her husband.2 In that new relationship of dependency, however, the matrifocal nature of Polish-American families gave her more power to determine her life in its frills if not its essentials—to decide how to arrange the furniture, what to grow in the garden, which curtains to buy. She became the matriarch of a household while living in a patriarchal family and society. In Frances’s case, she also gained an edge in the marriage because of her nativity as an American, and because her bloodline connected her to landowners in Poland.3 Despite the fact that it was arranged, the arrangement afforded her some power vis-à-vis her husband and her family.

      Frances and Ladislaus were married on May 30, 1898, in St. Stanislaus Church in Hilliards.4 In addition to the church, Hilliards had six other buildings: a general store (which is still in operation) that also held the post office (in operation there between 1869 and 1953), a bar, a community hall, a pickle factory, a creamery, and a cheese packaging factory. Poles settled in this region in a four-by-four-mile area that straddled the townships of Dorr and Hopkins, located along 138th Avenue.5 Most of the farms in the two townships were owned by Americans of northern European descent (mostly English and German with a few Irish, Scottish, and Dutch); however, a defined Polish corridor appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, and by 1913 it was densely populated (see map 1).

      Only four Polish families are identified on the plat maps of 1873, but by 1895 there were forty-six Polish farmsteads occupying almost 3,500 total acres, and by 1935 Polish immigrants and their children owned more than 8,000 acres on 104 farmsteads.6 Between 1895 and 1935 the number of farmsteads grew more quickly than the number of Polish surnames in the area, signifying that in-migration had slowed down.7 By the twentieth century, growth in the community came from within, through the retention of the second generation.

      A few years after they were married, Ladislaus and Frances took over his father’s 120-acre farm.8 Polish farms in that region survived through a combination of subsistence farming, market-oriented farming (grains, milk, and cucumbers for pickling sold locally), and intermittent work in industries (the creameries, breweries, and canneries in the rural towns, and factories in Flint, Lansing, and Grand Rapids). Every farm had a large garden, the women’s domain, that provided fruits and vegetables for the family. They stored potatoes and carrots, canned apples, rhubarb, pears, and strawberries, and slaughtered pigs, chickens, and cows. They also made lard, head cheese,9 and sausage from the pork scrap.

      They called themselves dairy farmers because cows provided their most regular source of income, but they had a diversified agricultural economy that was labor intensive.10 Their main cash crop was wheat, but they also grew a variety of other grains, in particular timothy hay, clover, and oats both for feed and the market. The other source of income was the pickle patch, which netted the Fifelskis some two hundred dollars annually by the 1920s, to be spent on school clothes in the fall. Pickling was a practice that Poles brought to Michigan, and growing cucumbers for market continued until the 1940s.11 The farms

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