Daily Dose

From The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, by E. F. Granell, translated by David Coulter

IF THE

"If the Greeks invented destiny, that doesn't explain why it is still merciless towards the gypsies."

From Chapter 12 The Unknown Hunter

"Me sem Djuhli." Part One of an Interview with Carol Miller, Author of "Lola's Luck."

One of my favorite recent books, (and my favorite excuse for interrupting my reading of Villette,) is Lola's Luck: My Life Among the California Gypsies, by Carol Miller. I was lucky enough to get an introduction to the author. Herewith, a brief interview:

Brad Craft: Carol, first let me thank you for your book. It is an amazing story, a very personal memoir of your life with the Machvaia Roma, and a beautifully written look into a fascinating world the non-academic reader would otherwise never see. So to start, why the Machvaia Roma? I mean as opposed to Inuits or Fijians or whatever?

Carol Miller: Why the Machvaia? Well, why Gypsies in the first place. Probably the two articles in The New Yorker by Joseph Mitchell, a fantastic writer, stimulated my curiosity. Then, years later, as a volunteer teaching adults to read, I was assigned a young Gypsy couple as my clients, and my curiosity really took off. At that time, we lived in Oregon and I found the Portland public library had a number of books written by men with little, or no, direct experience and who had imagined their Gypsy stories. Apparently, very little was known about Gypsies, other than their criminal activities that got in the news. I considered Gypsies a mystery to be solved.

As I mention in Lola's Luck, Gypsies were only a short distance away when, as a graduate student, I wanted to study a society that wouldn't take me far away from my not-yet-grown children. Also, the head of my graduate committee, available at UW, was someone who had already studied Gypsies. Professor Edward Harper. There were other reasons, but that is probably enough to mention.

I explain, I think, why I chose Machvaia over the Kalderasha in my book.

BC: You do, very well. Just quickly, before I forget, would you explain the significance of the coins that line the covers of your book and head each section?

CM: In the book, (page 102,) I explain that Katy persuaded me to spend my birthday money on a half dollar gold piece. That same gold piece decorates the book's cover and separates the inside sections.

BC: Your book is a remarkable one, and not at all what I expected frankly. It is a much more personal story that your academic credentials led me to believe the book would be. Was this your intention when you started writing it?

CM: I began writing about Lola when she died in 1975. Then I included all my field notes about her; I was considering a memorial or tribute of some kind. It took me maybe fifteen years of being with the Machvaia, living with them, living among them, to finally understand the society and where Lola was, what she was, in the group. Without that information, you don't really know a person.

In writing about Lola, I began to write about myself -- how else to explain a different culture? Somewhere along the way, I began to long to share the people, the Machvaia, and what they were really are like, not what an Outsider imagined they were like, with the world. So I wrote, rewrote, for decades, in the expectation that when I had learned to write something truly compelling, a publisher would come along.

I didn't initially have the writing skills to succeed, of course. You might say I wrote Lola's Luck for thirty years.

BC: Can you explain what a “djuhli” is and is that a term that is still used in reference to you among the Machvaia Roma?

CM: A djuhli is a female Outsider; it is considerably more friendly than gadji, the Kalderasha term. Djuhli is a what Machvaia used as reference term for me. They seldom used it as a term of address. Those I was close to called me Carol.

When asked, at public events, who I was, I would say, "Me (sounds like may) sem Djuhli."

BC: At the heart of your story is an exceptional relationship with a remarkable older woman, Lola. So many questions come to mind. First and foremost, at what point did you realize you were becoming something other than an anthropologist and a subject?

CM: When did I realize I was becoming something other than an anthropologist with Gypsies as my subject? Before I even started I knew studying them wouldn't be easy. They have built-in structural defenses against anyone knowing their society or becoming intimate with them. A few years earlier, everyone who brought me to a public event -- and that was what I was trying to study, celebrations, weddings, baptisms, slavi, pomani -- would have been outcaste. So Bibi told me in 2000.

Early on, I decided the Machvaia would be my life work. I was required to finance my own fieldwork -- possible in the 60s, 70s, 80s -- with part time employment.

BC: Lola is a very real, physical presence in your book; conjured up for the reader in her own voice, in her dancing, her delightfully outrageous clothes. How much of Lola comes from your original notes?

CM: All of the material about Lola is from field notes or the memories I had in 1975, when she died. I am not an imaginative writer.

Read the rest of this interview, and my favorite quote from Lola, below:

"Me sem Djuhli." Part Two of an Interview with Carol Miller, Author of "Lola's Luck."

And here is the rest of my conversation with Carol Miller, author of Lola's Luck: My Life Among the California Gypsies, new from GemmaMedia.

Brad Craft: Your respect and affection for Lola is tempered, in the book, by your frustration in getting her story from her, though you eventually do. How did you do it?

Carol Miller: Only when I understood the culture did I understand what Lola said, what she did, and why.  She considered herself very American and that is why she adopted me.  Had we lived in Los Angeles, she might have been shunned in the 60s. 
   
Lola was really a woman of great personal conviction, born before her time.
   
Initially, I found her adorable, but impossible.  Impossible melted away over time.

BC: Your relationship with Lola, and with her family, seems to me all but unique in my reading of the literature on Gypsies. That unique access also proved to have unique difficulties for you personally. What was the response to your research academically? Have you been criticized for “going native?”

CM: Going native is no longer bad news.  Anthropologists have married the natives and gotten fantastic material.  Cultural anthropologists are dedicated to finding out how the group under study thinks, feels, and believes.  That is its value.

BC: Sounds a very good thing to me. Does your friendship with Lola, and all that it added to your life, still define you professionally? Are you still “the Gypsy expert?”

CM: Soon, there will be no one Machvaia who remembers Lola, except through my book.  The people don't write much down, and after a few generations, the Dead Ones are forgotten.
   
I am not very professional, having no university affiliation.  At the moment, I consider myself a writer.

BC: Your portrait of all the Roma women you met and came to know in Lola’s world is specially poignant in the book, as you tell your personal story as well; as a young single parent, as a woman for a time of no fixed address, even, hilariously, as an apprentice fortuneteller. Did you set out to study the role of Machvaia Roma women specifically? Did you come to them with a particular agenda in mind -- and here I’m thinking particularly of the issues of ritual purity and the like?

CM: Most societies like the Roma divide contact into male or female by kind, and I was assigned to the female group.  Conversations proceed best between those of like sex and age-group, which is one of the reasons Lola couldn't answer my direct (really insulting) questions.  But I didn't know.     
 
My interest was in ritual and belief -- that is the subject of Church of Cheese, my next book.

BC: One of the most interesting turns of event in your book is that these women, in a sense, rescue you, provide you with safe haven, friendship, even a place to live at one point. The book seems to me to be, at least in part, a tribute to your friends. Do those you still see see the book as such? How important are these friendships to you still?

CM: They provided a place to live whenever I ran out of money, at least they did for a time.  All of Lola's children are dead, except for Boyd and Pretty Bobby.  As both are in California, I only talk to them by phone -- Boyd, every two weeks, Pretty Bobby every other day.  I see one of Lola's nieces and a grandson when I visit, once or twice a year, the SF Bay area.  Both are runaways and we are very close.

BC: The central relationships in your book are intimately detailed, including your relationship with what would seem from the book to have been the great love of your life. Could you have told this story without those intimate details? (As a reader, by the way, I’m enormously grateful that you didn’t.)

CM: My writing teacher was Ann Lamott and she never tells a story except with the most intimate details.

BC: There is no photograph in your book of Stevo, or of Stevo with his “Djuhli.” I understand your discretion, but I’m curious, do you have such a photograph?

CM: I have great studio photographs of Stevo and Stevo with his Djuhli.  I couldn't get a release for them.  The Machvaia I knew advised me to leave him alone because he is with another woman.

BC: There is a touching discomfort in many of your personal encounters with custom and protocol. Experience presumably lessened the likelihood of sitting on benches that turn out to be alters, but did you ever completely lose that outsider’s awkwardness? Also, there is no more touching scene in the book, for me, than when you review the contents of your wardrobe, noting the occasion of each “gypsy” dress, etc. Do you still have these clothes? Do you still have occasion to wear them?

CM: I no longer go to public events.  Well, I did go to Fatima's one-year pomana a few years back and may, again, if someone I love dies.  No, I don't feel awkward at all.  I feel I have earned respect and the right to be there, whether most of those present are aware of who I am or not.  

Clothes styles changed over the many years I have known the people.  Currently, sumptuous ball gowns are the mode.  I don't have any ball gowns.  My granddaughter who is into the stylish and lives in Manhattan posed for some designer ads and got some good buys on Zelda pants/full skirts, which I combine with various tops.  The Zelda is more recent than the clothes mentioned in the book.

BC: Despite the losses and the disappointments you describe with such candidness in your book, you seem to be quite happy to have lived the story you tell. Is this perspective something you attribute to the Roma, or something you brought with you into their world? And, finally, your relationship with these people was such a consuming one, have you been able to maintain it since? How have you managed to incorporate your experience into your other, more traditionally American life?

CM: I am happy to have lived the story I tell.  It was my life.  I chose it. 
   
Anyhow, who would want to read about a person to whom nothing ever happened? 
    
I never had to incorporate Gypsies into my more traditional American life because I never, after my divorce, had to worry about having a traditional American life.

BC: Thanks again, Carol, for talking with me and for writing such a wonderful book.

Daily Dose

From Lola's Luck: My Life Among the California Gypsies, by Carol Miller

THE GOOD LIFE

"Lola's ideas about living and dying were clearly defined and tersely stated. She said that all you have in this life is 'to get dressed up, live comfortable and have a good time. You should do that and quit.'"

A Break from Bronte

Having got Miss Lucy Snowe to Villette, and no further, I've paused to take up another book. Such is the way of things when one works in a bookstore. I have learned to allow for this. It explains the state of my nightstand and why, when reaching each morning to turn off my alarm-clock and retrieve my glasses, my hand must snake between stacks -- some already dusty with neglect. Distractions, from any book, however good, are among the chief benefits of my present employment.

Today's distraction was the kind of book I will never be able to resist. The pull-quote writ large across the back is as follows:

"Bette Davis. That's who I'm like. Did You notice? Everybody says so."

Yes, I am that queen. Mention Bette Davis and I am all attention. But there has been much written about Miss Davis that is worth no more time than it takes to turn the book over and read the title.

But this book had me as soon as I did. Lola's Luck: My Life Among the California Gypsies, by Carol Miller, from the new GemmaMedia. Nothing to do with Miss Davis, you see, but I have other spots that are soft. From the day I read George Borrow's The Romany Rye, I have been hooked by any reference to the Roma. Jan Yoors' The Heroic Present: Life Among the Gypsies, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca and others, have all put their spell on me before. I took Miller's new book with me to lunch, read the first forty pages, and will now, I think, have to read the rest before I so much as acknowledge Miss Lucy Snowe's presence in the nightstand stack again.

Carol Miller, I read, is an anthropologist, living here in Seattle. She worked with the Machvaia Roma of California. She knew these people, studied them for years. She became a friend to the woman, quoted and pictured above who, as you see, looked nothing like Bette Davis, but I begin to suspect, had every right to claim that she was like her, none the less. Carol Miller, it would seem, is my kind o' anthropologist. I can not wait to read on. Charlotte Bronte will have to wait quietly until called for. I am off tonight with the Gypsies.