Reading Class · He’s the most superstitious man I know. “You’re a reader!” “I’m a...

61Eliza WilmErding ~ rEading Class

Reading Class: Sounding Out Letters and Life with a Roma Clan Leader

Eliza Wilmerding

“I am very good at pool—so good that I win cash and beer.”“C.” I look him in the eye. “You just read that perfectly!” I say. His

lips purse as though holding in a smile. Here he is reading. He doesn’t yet believe it. He was illiterate a year ago in 2003, when I began teaching him. He’s the most superstitious man I know.

“You’re a reader!”“I’m a trying-to-reader,” he says.I call him “C” here. The letter has nothing to do with his name or with

the various aliases I’ve heard him use. “C,” because of all the letters in the alphabet, it best fits his nature and his build. It’s a charming enough letter, round and friendly looking, and it shifts sound depending on its com-pany—the soft C of “cent,” the hard C of “calculate,” the “ch” in “chief ” and “chase.” Sometimes it’s silent as in “indict,” as though it’s hiding out in plain view. It’s hooked, and might just snag you this way or that.

“One more?” he asks. “I can’t tell if I’m really reading or if I kind of know the words. One more.” He prefers reading the sentences I’ve written for him on my yellow pad over those in his workbook. He mocks the book often. I don’t blame him. It was written for children—not grandfathers. Further along in his studies, he’ll read from the workbook such phrases as,

62 rivEr TEETh 11.2 ~ spring 2010

“Will you bite Kate if she pokes you?” and without hesitation answer, “I’ll bite her even if she doesn’t!” and then convulse in silent laughter until he gasps for breath.

I write out a short sentence and hold it up. He takes it from me gen-tly with his bear-paw hand and rests his index finger below the first two words. I watch his brown eyes work through the letters.

“I AM,” he reads and looks up for assurance. “Yes . . .” “A MAN.”“Yup . . .” “WHO.”“Good!”“CAN FFFFIX.”“Yes . . .” The next word begins with “th,” a new sound for him. He’s

used to saying “d” instead of “th.” He wants to say it correctly. He sticks his tongue halfway out between his teeth and blows hard:

“SSSTHHHSSTHD.”“Th,” I say, making a show of blowing lightly.“THH. . . . THHINGS. . . . THINGS.” He smiles. “‘I am a man who can

fix THings.’ Right. Everybody’s problems but my own—then again, every-body’s problems are my problems.”

C is Romani American, a clan leader and judge. He is the Rombaro, or “Big Man,” of his vitsa—a group of allied extended families. He says that his family has been in the United States for a little more than a hundred years and that around three thousand family members, including many dis-tant cousins, now live across the country. He defends their fortune-telling territories, mediates Rom versus Rom (man or a group, whereas Romi means woman or women) domestic and business disputes, joins other leaders to preside over more complex or serious cases, and acts as go-between or spokesperson with non-Romani agencies (including journalists, judges, and policemen). Whenever there’s a problem those in his vitsa can’t solve on their own, he’s the go-to man. He calls himself a “fixer.” He’s called often.

I tutored C on and off for two years from ‘03 through ‘05 in his to-


bacco shop, a few miles down the road from where I lived. If his busy schedule permitted, we met twice a week, sometimes just twice a month, always in Fine Smokes, a shoe-box store no wider than his old Buick, which he parked out front. It was tiny but comfortable. He’d set down a plush, dark-green carpet and had dragged a few wooden chairs in off the streets. He’d boxed off a corner of the room with old sliding-glass doors, making a walk-in humidor. A faded armchair sat between the humidor and the storefront window. Sitting by it studying, we were on both sides of a fishbowl. We watched people passing by, and they watched us. A pedal-powered sewing table stood below the windowsill, the chair to the right and a stool to the left. An armoire stood near the door to a tiny bedroom, and a wastebasket hid in the corner. That was it. No computer. No credit card reader. No register or any other sign of record keeping.

After a few reading lessons, I’d seen enough to realize that Fine Smokes operates less as a smoke shop than a communication center for several cat-egories of callers. Tobacco customers calling the shop’s publicized number sound C’s black wall phone. If the caller seems like a bill collector, C pre-tends to be someone else.

Certain Roma and associates across the country know a second num-ber. Their calls ring his white phone, which he also uses once a week to monitor the Roma chat line. It’s tough to connect. Sometimes he redials for an hour. Once connected, he stays on most of the day. “We have peo-ple all over the United States,” he says. “There’s at least one hundred Roma on this chat line a day. Young people, old people, middle people. They chew conversation. They just chew it, relay information just to be passing time.” They speak in a combination of English and Romanes and use aliases and code words to hide their identities and locations in case police have tapped the line. The dozens of callers on the Roma chat line are “stupid, smart, angry, hurt,” C says. They ask each other for surgeons, spread news of family deaths and funeral services, and they talk business—how and where to “get a deal together.”

C has a cell phone, too. “Even less certain people have the number to my cell,” he says, shaking it—he changes the number often. People he deals with often call his cell. So do those asking for Anthony, his alias when


buying cars (but not for selling them). “This is Anthony,” he’ll say. “What kind of car you got? How old? What you want for it? Where is it? Will it be there if I come by in a couple, two, three hours?”

He invites me for reading lessons on his “slow days.” They aren’t so slow. His sons drop by to talk about cars, deals, to hear or spread news. Sometimes tobacco customers show up, slide the humidor open, and pick out pipe tobacco or a few of the light, dark, fat, short, or skinny cigars (unlabeled), bunched into boxes and old glass jars. “All Cuban seed, but grown in Nicaragua,” C tells them. He accepts cash only. His tow-truck-driver friend also turns up for tobacco—and business instructions (“I may make twenty-five grand tomorrow car dealing in Reno,” C says after the man leaves, and, “His towing license is worth a hundred grand to me.”) And, nearly every day—sometimes throughout the afternoon—Roma from across the country phone to do business, ask for advice, to vouch and ask his vouchsafe, a favor, legal help.

He holds the phone to his ear and hears all kinds of cases. Someone’s daughter has eloped, driving off across the country with a boy from the wrong family. C says he’ll contact her, make sure the boy’s father pays the appropriate bride price—traditionally, he’s said, a girl’s father picks out her future husband and only after that receives a bride price from the boy’s father.

A Rom has beat up his own wife. C will make a call, send someone to make the man feel what it’s like to be beaten.

A boy has shot another for stealing his girl.A roof job has gone belly up. A Rom roofer sits in jail and needs a bail

bondsman.A Rom doesn’t keep his end of a deal, doesn’t split the score. They

need C, the Romani judge who can’t be bought and whose word carries weight. As our lessons proceed, I find that C is obviously good at solving problems and is proud of his work.

Indeed, he can listen to both sides of a story, “pick out the lies,” and list from memory the globi, fines, for various transgressions. (Fines are the usual punishments in Romani law—for example, he required a boy’s fam-ily to pay a $2,500 fine on top of a bride price, after a couple eloped.) He


says that he learned Romani law and tactics for dealing with feuding men, couples, families, and business partners by hanging around his grandfa-ther, uncle, and father—all Rombaro in their time—and listening silently for years to their conversations and judgments. Romani laws remain unwritten (save ethnographers’ research). They are reinforced with every meeting and tribunal.

C’s older brothers fought other boys, raced cars, and roamed the streets. C trailed after his father. By the age of nine, he says, he could repeat what had been uttered during a tribunal the prior day. They soon nicknamed him “Lawyer.” “When I wasn’t around, people asked my father, ‘where’s your lawyer?’” He remembers sitting in on “gypsy meetings” with his fa-ther and then after his father died. “I was sort of there like a witness, to listen to what’s going on. And then we would give our opinions,” he says. “And the things that I said—there was nobody to overrule it because it was all good. It was nice. It was peace. And yet it gave the wrong person a way to get out of it, a way to say sorry and do what’s right with the Romania.” Leadership grew on him. He liked it, and it accumulated for him with every case. In time, other families even turned to him for help. There have been many cases. One in particular, he says, set him apart as the peacekeeper for his extended family and their allies. A man from another family, whom we’ll call Joe, phoned C, angry. He’d paid good money—$12,500—for a bride for his son. A month after the wedding, the bride went back to her parents. According to Roma law, Joe gets half of his money back, but he wanted $10,000. C remembers counseling Joe that a divorced woman is hard to marry off (“she would have to marry a man who would have to marry her past”), and when she does, her father doesn’t get a high price.

“Why should you get more than what the settlement is in the Roma-nia?”

C mimics Joe’s response, “She was crazy, she was nervous, she never told me about her worries, and to top it off, they fought a few times. It was no big deal. It stopped. But for one week straight, she slept on the floor in the living room with a hammer underneath her pillow.”

“Joe,” C recalls asking, “let me ask you a question. If you was to sleep in my house because you had to, with a hammer underneath your pillow, for one week, do you think that’s some kind of tortured life that you had


to live? Maybe you was really worried about me, maybe you got that ham-mer underneath your pillow to defend yourself, maybe you thought your life was in danger. Is that why? Why didn’t she put a doll underneath her pillow, Joe? Why a hammer? She didn’t tell us this, you told us this.

“‘Well, what do you guys suggest?’“‘Take the half before we hear more of the story.’“‘I’ll take it.’”C shook his head. “She was only sixteen,” he tells me. “And if you see

her face, which I did during this conversation, you can tell that she’s not a violent person. I don’t care what anybody tells me. And the words that she selected to explain herself, showed me how warm and delicate she was. The words that her father-in-law used told me where the wrong was and where the right was.” It was one of his defining cases, he says. “By then all the Rom would say, ‘If there’s ever a situation where the truth really needs to come out, if there’s ever a situation where it just can’t be settled, we have to call C.’”

C’s position has brought him power and prestige, but anxiety, too. “People like me feel like they’re dinosaurs, the way the world is changing.” The old ways and the respect for Romani law will die with his generation, he says. “There won’t be no more asking for a daughter’s hand, there won’t be no more matchmakers, there won’t be no more fines.” Without Romani law, C says, their code will fade into assimilation.

The Romani justice system relies on respectable leaders—Rombaro who solve problems through Roma law and who judge fairly—and a body of Roma who adhere to their laws and rulings and fear expulsion from the Ro-mania if they don’t. The system is eroding, says C. He lists leaders “on the take,” whose judgments can be bought. He knows Rom who’ve informed on others. (Romani code forbids informing on one another no matter the anger level or the deal a detective might cut.) And young Rom are “too busy getting rich, too busy with their families, or just being bums,” he says, to pay attention to the system, let alone learn to lead and judge. He says that without its justice system, chaos would disrupt the Romania. Roma could steal from or scam one another without consequence, seduce each other’s


wives, move into and crowd other vitsas’ fortune-telling territories.

The issue becomes personal for C in the winter of 2004. On a snow-less January day, I find him sitting by the fishbowl window, brow furrowed. He’s in no mood to work on reading. His tone sounds angry and deter-mined. He says a Rombaro we’ll call “Sam” had the audacity to open an offica, or a fortune-telling parlor, in C’s territory. “He’s a stool pigeon,” says C, a police informant, and, perhaps of greater magnitude, a dirty judge, whose rulings weaken the force of Roma law. “A rotten son-of-a . . .” C says, slamming the table with his meaty fist. “All he wants to do is have drink and food money. It doesn’t matter what people’s lives are all about.” Sam is a notorious “fly-by-night,” says C; he’s a Rom without territory of his own, who scams, scores, and skips town for a while. Sam will open up a fortune-telling place in another family’s territory, “run it for two, three, five, six months, make some money and flee—F, L, E, E, right?” C asks, as if our reading lesson, briefly, has actually convened—leaving the Rombaro who does preside over the area shouldering the consequences.

Sam’s move is clearly disrespectful and unlawful, C says, meant to show off, demonstrate to other Rom that, with his police “friends,” he can do anything—even to C’s powerful family. “It’s sort of, like, to show people, look . . . they’re the biggest and they’re the strongest, and they can’t do a goddamn thing.”

C also has a relationship with the police, but it’s quite a different one. They’ve kept tabs on him ever since they put away some members of his vitsa. “The only thing that these gypsies did,” says C, shrugging, “was a little fraud. Or let’s say a lot of fraud.” C says his family remains under the watchful eye of the “gang in blue.” But, whatever Sam might hope, C is determined that police surveillance will not stop him from protecting his family’s territory. It was a moment when certain contradictions became clear. C has a code, values held in support of his clan and tradition that punishes a man for impinging on C’s right to a monopoly. In C’s code, the “others” in “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” don’t include me or any other non-Roma. Oddly, they do include Sam, in spite of his dirty reputation.

For C, solving cases that center on people other than himself is far


more agreeable. Each case is an ego boost. People asking for his help signal his skill and authority. Solving their problems makes him smile and wax expansive. Weeks earlier, I’d walked into the store and found him grinning with pride. “I got a couple back together the day before Christmas,” he’d said, pumping his brows. He told the story. Four months earlier, a wom-an from L.A. had made a $100,000 “score” fortune telling. She’d skipped town with the cash and had holed up at her father’s apartment in another city. Her husband had called her and asked for the money. Traditionally, the Romi brings in the money, but her husband is entitled to it. She’d complied, packaged the cash she’d stashed at her father’s, and mailed it off to her husband. The package had arrived. The husband had torn it open, counted the cash, and phoned back. He said $30,000 was missing. She’d said she was sure she’d sent everything, that her father was the only one who’d known where she’d hidden the stash, and that he must have skimmed some off the top. Her husband had then called the father and demanded the money. The father had refused. With that, the husband had left the wife and their baby son. And after a few days, he’d phoned C about a divorce. With his usual judiciousness, C’d sorted through the confusion, handling the case with a few diplomatic calls. He’d spoken sternly to the father—he shouldn’t have swiped the cash. It wasn’t his to take. It must be returned. He’d phoned the husband and spoken sternly to him, too—wasn’t keeping a family together the most important thing? “You can always make mon-ey,” C had counseled. “You have a little boy who needs his whole family.” The man had agreed to reunite before Christmas. Out of spite, her father had then insisted the husband pay a virgin bride’s price of $15,000-$17,000 to remarry her.

C rolls his eyes, telling me the story. “He’ll be lucky to get $5,000.” The father needed time to settle his anger, C tells me. C will let that time pass, then invite him over for a chat. “In person,” C says, “he’ll have a different tone than he will on the phone.” In person, he’ll be more likely to think things through and “avoid embarrassing himself.” It all sounded as wise as it did wild.

The day I realize that C is the Roma gatekeeper to the city, I also witness his street sense. Arriving at midday I find Fine Smokes crowded. C’s son and nephew (a lumbering thirtysomething with a massive belly, crooked


teeth, and eyes set close) hunch over a broken printer. The nephew has dis-covered that C has a reading teacher and can’t stop chortling about it—his powerful uncle has a young, female reading teacher asking if he’s done any homework. “Out,” C bellows. They leave in seconds. C shakes his head. “Idiot.” This nephew is one of the laziest boys in the family, C says. He has little patience with the fellow. C opens his workbook, makes a show of studying it, and looks up.

“People are waiting for me.” He points outside with his chin. “Who? Why?” I ask. A family in a green pick-up circles the block. “To be respectful. They have to check in when they come into town.

We’re very organized here.” A family that lives and works in an area for a long time and is successful there may come to control it—organizing it into economic units, spacing officas, psychic reading and fortune-telling parlors, far apart so they don’t compete. Back in the ‘60s, C’s family had claimed much of this city, including the wealthiest sections. C’s father was the man for anyone new to see before moving in and setting up shop. Af-ter C’s father died, the eldest son sent people to C.

We watch the dark-haired driver double park. He jumps out, waving to his wife and four kids, who watch from the car. C closes his workbook and stands. Romani women, says C, pull in 95 percent of a family’s income through fortune telling. “The pride of the Romi is supporting her fam-ily,” he says. The Rom, however, does the negotiating. This Rom is formal, hesitant. Outside, they speak for several minutes. The man shyly asks C’s permission to set up an offica in town.

Through the window, I watch C shake hands with the man and watch him drive off with his family into the city. Back inside the shop, C says, “He was alright.” He’d conducted his usual interview. “I ask, ‘Who are you? Who’s your father, who’s your mother, who’s your uncles, brothers? Let’s call them up and lemme see what kind of opinion they got about you.’ If they’re family-recommended, I say, ‘Okay.’ But, if they have the reputation of being ‘fly-by-nights’ I tell them to move along.” C seems to care less about the crimes newcomers might commit than about blame that might fall on him afterward. Scams anywhere in C’s family’s territory bring the gendaria, or police, knocking on C’s door.

“So, we tell these fly-by-nights when we catch them, ‘Just gas up.’


“‘Well listen, we’re short and we have to make a stop here.’ “‘Here’s a couple hundred dollars. Take a hike. We know what you’re

all about, we know what you’re gonna do.’” C thinks for a moment and adds, “The gendaria would never say that about us—how we prevent crime!” he chuckles.

He’d known members of this family. The young man was properly re-spectful. His asking had shown that he wishes not to infringe on anyone’s territory, shown that they follow the rules.

We practice the alphabet almost every session. The long and short sounds sink in. C realizes that an E at the end of a word changes a short vowel sound to a long one. We move on to diphthongs.

“O and W says . . .”“‘OW,’ like what the man whined when my son punched him,” he says

laughing, “ohhh, owww.”“OK. How about the word ‘boy’—want to try and spell it?”“B. O. Y.”“Right. The O and Y together sound like ‘OY,’ like TOY.”“OY!” C brightens. “That’s a gypsy word,” he says, “‘Oy!’—like ‘what

did I do to deserve that?’” He giggles. His mood is up. He isn’t distracted. We sail through lessons. On these good days, he absorbs nearly everything.

On many other days, he prefers telling stories. Sometimes he speaks of his youth, of living on New York’s Bowery during the mid-‘60s. He remembers the day—he was about nine at the time—his father stood up to a bigot who’d beaten up C. His father had forbidden C and his older brothers to converse with gadjé (non-gypsies) or to speak Romanes where it might be overheard.

“He didn’t want the gadjé knowing we was Rom, because we’d never be accepted. ‘Keep away from them, keep out of their way, if they talk to you, just go around them and leave.’” C wound up chatting with white neigh-borhood kids anyway.

They hung around Christy and Delancey Street. The white kids’ old man showed up. “I was talking to his children and some of their friends. He didn’t like that. He didn’t want us to play together. On the other side of the street it was all the Puerto Ricans. We never had any trouble with them,


except a few kid fights, which was all right. But Puerto Rican adults never beat up gypsy kids, and the gypsies never beat up the Puerto Rican. They’re kids! They should be hanging around with each other. This guy was kind of like a racialist. He had some kind of accent, was white, maybe Irish.” The man rushed at C and pummeled him.

“At home I says, ‘Dati, we’re getting tired of this. Can’t take it no more. Why do these people do this?’ Bruises formed, but my father wouldn’t let us get even. My brother got mad: ‘Because we’re dirty thieves, no-good gypsies, right Dad?’ My father’s expression changed. He says, ‘All right. Go find him and bring him here.’ So my brothers went and found the guy. He was a lot older than me. He was like thirty-five or forty. My brothers was like seventeen, eighteen. They bring the guy in and my father questions him.

“‘Why did you beat up my son?’“The guy says, ‘You guys not supposed to do this and that; it’s against

the law.’“My father says, ‘You want to talk about the law or do you want to

answer: why did you beat up my son?’“‘You broke the law in the beginning.’“‘So we could all say it just now happened in my house and you broke

that door in.’ And then he says, ‘son.’ And my brother went and shut the door, went outside, and kicked the door back in and broke the door open. And he said, ‘Look what you did to my door. And look what you did to my son.’

“He says, ‘Yeah, I understand what you mean now.’ “‘So how are you going to handle this?’“‘Could I say I’m sorry?’“‘Well, how many times did you hit my son?’“He says, ‘I don’t know—seven, eight times.’ “‘Pulled my son’s ear. Did you spit on him?’“‘Yeah.’“‘Well then I’m going to have my sons do this to you.’ So then my

brothers beat him up and then I spitted on him.’“‘Okay, when you feel a bit better come back and fix the door you

broke in.’ And then that was it. Things changed a little bit.”

Reading Class · He’s the most superstitious man I know. “You’re a reader!” “I’m a...

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Transcript of Reading Class · He’s the most superstitious man I know. “You’re a reader!” “I’m a...