pat willard

Pot Luck
America is not anything if it consists of each of us.
It is something only if it consists of all of us.
Woodrow Wilson, January 29, 1916.

The newest people in my town when I was growing up was a Vietnamese family who settled after the war into the old parish house behind St. John’s rectory. They were the latest arrivals in Manayunk, a section of Philadelphia that was originally settled by Lenne Lappi Indians who with surprising hospitality and grace made room for William Penn when he claimed their settlement as payment for a royal debt. In quick succession, then, there came Englishmen and Scots who tried to farm the low marshlands and strung nets across the swiftly flowing river to gather shad; then Germans looking for religious freedom and Irish conscripted to dig a canal; freed slaves from the north and runaway slaves from the south; Polish textile workers who labored in the mills and factories that sprung up quickly along the canal; and finally Italians–bakers, stone masons, and tailors among them. All came to find a way to make a life on this narrow split of land along the rock-strewn shores of the Schuylkill River.
Among the first of their countrymen in Philadelphia, the Vietnamese became a community project. People left bags of clothes, odd pieces of furniture, on the parish house porch like offerings–objects the grandfather, parents, several widowed aunts, and seven or eight children of varying age and size did not know how to use, let alone call by name. Most of the people who made these donations did so because, unconsciously or not, as much as they considered themselves to be devout Americans, continued to cling to an identity moored in another homeland. They could recall–either through their own experience or in hand-me-down reminiscences–what it was like to come from another country and begin from scratch all over again. No matter how many years had passed since they or their ancestors had traveled across seas to find this place, folks here understood what the large Vietnamese family, displaced by the ill-fated war and the fall of Saigon, had left behind, and they sought to give them whatever they could to once more make a home.
Yet, what they could not give–at least in those early years–was what the family truly desired most. And that was their own food, most especially lemon grass, dried fishes, coconuts, mung beans, tuong sauce. These were nowhere to be found, especially not close by. Mrs. Cavioni was the first to notice this for she remembered, as a young bride brought by her soldier husband from Italy after the Second World War, her own bewildering, futile search through store after store for the right spices and flour she required to make a proper meal. Even nearly thirty years later, the only place she found what she called the “good” rice–the short-grain, almost nutty-tasting, Abborio she used for rissoto and her grandmother’s pudding–was in the supermarket aisle marked “ethnic,” nestled besides cans of Chinese noodles and Spanish beans. She watched the grandfather unwrap the bread and lunch meat he received each day from the senior citizen center and understood the low moan that reflexively seeped from his pursed lips. Week after week the Vietnamese women and the father, with the children huddled behind them, all peered with perplexity, frustration, and longing at the aluminum cans, the sacks of vegetables and boxes of cereal brought to them by Mrs. Cavioni and the other women in the parish.
“I can taste their hunger,” she said at the next meeting of the St. John’s Women Clubs. It was her firm belief that this was why, despite all the best efforts of the parish and the town, the family seemed so unhappy, not thriving at all. Forget the new clothes, the warm house thousands of miles away from danger. Forget the new jobs for the adults, the aunt who had been a university professor now helping the nuns with the small children in the after-school program, and the father trained as a doctor working as an aide in a nursing home while he took English courses at the community college downtown with his wife who spoke French with her sisters as they sat in the evening on the cold wooden floor of their new home. What they needed, Mrs. Cavioni told the members of the women’s club, was a good meal of their own and then, she nodded her head emphatically, then they would be happy.
And that was how the pot luck dinner came about. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, it seemed to be time for two nations to once more sit down at a meal that would be composed of a little from each country, blending together what they each brought to the table to achieve a jubilation that was entirely distinct and separate–a new way of being. My mom and Mrs. Cavioni’s daughter (who at the insistence of her mother volunteered to go to make sure everything went well) offered to drive the aunts and the wife to the Oriental markets in Center City. In those days, the indifferently lit collection of stores in the narrow streets which edged the expressway on the outskirts of the main shopping district were the only ones in Philadelphia where the women thought they would find the ingredients on the Vietnamese’s grocery list. My mom and Mrs. Cavioni’s daughter followed behind the women as they went into one store after another and from stall to stall. They watched them touch and sniff the exotic goods, their fingers tickling the hard frilly edges of roots and dried mushrooms, their eyes narrowing to choose among the array of fish heaped in barrels filled with ice chips shaded under swaybacked awnings.
“What is this?” My mom asked, holding up something as hard as a baseball with a mottled green skin. Through a series of pantomimes, elegant and brisk, the wife explained how the thick hull is peeled to expose the dense ripe pulp inside; how the black-purple seeds are scooped from the middle of the ocher-colored meat before the flesh is sliced into thin, boat-shaped slivers and finally eaten.
“Very good,” the wife declared in her crisp new English, then laughed at the opportunity to savor the simple fruit once more.
By noon, the Vietnamese had found enough of what they needed for the dishes they would contribute to the evening’s meal, and extras beside for their family. Everyone walked back to our family’s station wagon laden with plastic bags. With the food loaded in the back, the car became fragrant with a sharp briny scent. All the way home, the Vietnamese women adamantly chattered while my mom and Mrs. Cavioni’s daughter exchanged glances in the front seat. The women were laughing, interrupting one another, and a fiery blush even erupted across the wife’s delicate face as she debated something with one of her sisters. My mom told me later that, while trailing behind the women through the Chinatown markets, she had not at all been looking forward to the dishes they would prepare later but that, as she drove up the hill to the parish house and listened to the women, her hunger grew until it became distinct, growing even fierce.
At the parish house, the women would not allow them to come inside, would not even let them help unload their purchases. The children streamed around their mothers, pulling and clutching at the bags to see what they had bought.
“Later, later,” one of the aunts exclaimed, pushing the two women gently from the open door so she could shut it. The latch clicked closed, a lock was drawn, and my mom and Mrs. Cavioni’s daughter stood on the porch looking at their watches and counting the hours until the dinner would begin.
It was, as pot luck dinners often are, a hodge-podge of a gathering. Not only were there people of the parish who had helped to bring the family to town, but there were those who, in the course of daily life, had met the Vietnamese and wished to celebrate with them. Almost one hundred people sat down that night, arranged around long tables set up under the basketball hoop and before the small stage in the parish hall. What the aunts and wives had succeeded in making was augmented by dishes brought by the other guests. Along side the women’s clear broth with shavings of ginger floating under white scallion blossoms were plates crowded with cabbage leaves stuffed with anise-flavored pork, chicken fried to a crisp tawniness, and thin slices of roast beef swimming in a silky gravy. Small transparent spring rolls and minced fried fish balls seasoned with coriander leaves were joined by plumb little knots of freshly made tortellini, heaps of sharp coleslaw, and dense beds of mashed potatoes; steamed coconut milk and slices of that strange green fruit were happily united with assorted cakes and pies. The dinner went well into the evening, continuing long after the food was gone and ending only when the beer in the frosty kegs was drained. The adults lounged back in their chairs, sharing jokes, stories, bits of news. The children ran under and around the tables, shouting with excitement at the late hour and the luxury of being turned loose, nearly forgotten. In the corner of the hall, a group of women–including my mom–watched as two of the Vietnamese aunt’s produced elaborate fans and performed an intricate dance that made them seem like stalks of tall grass, swaying, curving, bending together under a steady river breeze. The audience clapped, the aunts laughed. No one seemed in a hurry to leave the warmth of the parish hall and venture out into the cold November night.

It was a good night–but not a rare one, not here in America. For what that meal accomplished, what it represented, has been in evidence throughout our country’s history. Our nation is formed from many different–even dissonant–strands, and it is at such regular feasts that these strand have been plaited, where foreigners have evolve into countrymen, where strangers have settled into neighbors.
Democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, builds a lonely home. It not only “make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him: it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
What a barren forecast the young Frenchman claimed for us, and yet what he perceived is true for what from the beginning has separated our society from any other has been the necessity for every citizen to create their own life, each an Adam or Eve, with no one but ourselves to explicitly rely upon. Even those who have made the journey precisely to become so unfettered from one’s own history and the accident of birth–from low-born parents, wayward uncles, scandalous grandmothers–have been surprised at how steep the cost of such freedom would be: to be so entirely disengaged, even marooned, from anyone else in such a bountiful, yet boundry-less, land.
Our national character is rich, indeed, with the currency of a restless spirit, but what this has mostly purchased is a lonesome heritage that is barely acknowledged, too frequently denied. While we hold dear the vision of the solitary settler, the stalwart explorer, the taciturn pilgrim, united by nothing so much as the divine right to be left alone, we almost never examine why it is we run–often at a drop of a hat–to congregate about a table. In most cases, it’s not even what is on the table that matters, so much as the company sitting about it.
“Few nations in the world are as devoted as Americans to group eating,” Walter Kipling, an administrator of the Federal Writers’ Project, noted in a forward to America Eats, the great trove of stories, fables, traditions, and lore about American food that the Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, was preparing to publish just before the WPA was dismantled. After the corn was husked, the apples peeled, the hogs slaughtered; when a house needed building, a barn raised, a town hall constructed; with a birth, coming-of-age, marriage, or death to mark; or merely to warm a long winter, a hard working day, the empty plains: For these reasons and many more, Americans piled a table with all manner of foods, not just to celebrate an occasion but to feel a sense of belonging to a community outside ourselves.
The writers employed by the Federal Writers’ Project found such congregations to be typical of not only small town life but of urban neighborhoods, too, especially as the Depression darkened the lives of the people and war rumbled overseas. Through such precarious days, community dinners were a way for people to brace civic and family ties. In a country so bent on individual rights, these assemblies nourished the sort of connection to one another that is necessary to get through hard times all in one piece.
It may seem now that such days are long gone. Modern times have certainly curtailed the need to make pleasurable work out of husking corn and building barns. Yet, when our neighbor was struggling to raise a fence last summer friends and strangers rolled up their sleeves, did some work, then sat down side by side to a barbeque dinner that couldn’t be beat. And then, in those terrible days after September 11, we did it again. We not only fed the rescue workers in improvised banquet halls, we gathered our families and friends, neighbors and acquaintances, to soothe our fear and grief. Whether the events we are marking are tragic, glorious, or mundane, we are still joining together at the table for the same reasons: as a way to pool our strength for what lies ahead.
When I think back across the years to that pot luck dinner, what I appreciate most was the guileless pleasure that everyone took in welcoming the Vietnamese family into our midst. In its way, the dinner granted them a more permanent citizenship than any official paper ever could. From that night forward, the family was more securely woven into the town’s daily life. All of them ventured out more, gradually taking their place at school and neighborhood meetings. Their voices raised with others at Sunday masses, and they more readily stopped to chat whenever they ran into their new friends. Within a year, the aunt received an offer to teach at a nearby college; the father began to practice at the health clinic, and his wife opened an elegant dress shop on Main Street. The children melted into the pee-wee baseball teams and theatrical shows organized by the neighborhood settlement house. Even the grandfather was seen trudging on his own along the old canal path to sit among the men fishing off the rocks below Flat Rock Dam.
And, in the neighborhood, we went about our daily separate lives. Yet, time for all of us was marked by such events as the annual Fourth of July picnic, Mrs. Cavioni’s funeral, and the fire station’s yearly barbeque outside the VFW Post where we greeted each other with a special fervor, relishing the chance to sit together among ourselves.
Come one, come all, and fill your plates, the announcements read across America. And here we find ourselves again, assembling together in this land full of feasts.