Okay, so this goes all the way back to when. I had yet to reach my fifth birthday when this Thanksgiving incident occurred. We still lived next to our cousins, not yet at the farm which is a few miles away from them, still in a barrack left behind by the government when the Japanese Internment Camps were shut down. Many Indian families on the reservation lived in these barracks, none of which had insulation of any kind, just boards nailed together and a sloping roof. Like I mentioned before, we were poor. We had an abundance of pride but…yeah…still poor.
Anyway, Thanksgiving time rolled around and we had no food for a Thanksgiving dinner, so Mama was planning on cooking the usual carb loaded meal of fried potatoes and tortillas. We, the kids, dreamed of a big juicy turkey, stuffing spilling out of it, sweet potatoes, and all the other traditional Thanksgiving goodies that play a big part in making Thanksgiving memorable. But when you don’t have money, what can you do but eat what you have. We knew better not to openly complain about having to go without because if we did, a severe lecture on gratitude would certainly come and in that lecture we’d again be hearing about starving people in Africa, starving people in other foreign lands, and even some living right here on the reservation. Yeah, like us. Truthfully, though, we weren’t exactly starving. We just didn’t need to diet to stay skinny. Would another fatherly lecture shame us? Heck no. Our young bellies craved a turkey feast.
Let me interject something here. The siblings in my family can be separated into two groups. There are two sets of twins in the family but at this particular time, the youngest set of twins had yet to be born. I am positioned right between the two sets of twins. We are the younger group. Five brothers and sisters make up the older group. Eight years separates the older bunch from the younger. The older brothers were in high school. I don’t remember where the eldest brother and sister were but I do know they were out of high school and out of the house by then. The remaining sister was in seventh or eight grade. The high school brothers were like the greasers in S.E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders–Levis, white t-shirts, pomade in their dark hair kind of stuff. A typical look for the lower income families at this time. Levis were cheap and long-lasting. They had yet to become fashionable but would the brothers be seen in anything else? Like slacks? Fat chance! Not even for church. These were two tough teenage boys, fighters. One of them was a hothead, and way too proud for his own good. Proud but not in the conceited way.
Anyway, the Sunday of Thanksgiving week, we went to church and being a four-year-old with a big mouth, I blabbed to the missionaries that we had no food for Thanksgiving and I might have implied that we were in fact starving. Yeah, okay, I admit it, I said that. I tended to be dramatic and just blurted stuff out when I probably wasn’t supposed to, but recall, I was just four. And I didn’t think I was exaggerating because my sister, one of the twins who is a year older, backed me up. Well, the missionaries took it upon themselves to speak secretly to the congregation about our plight and low and behold, on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Eve, the church’s Women’s Missionary Society and the pastor appeared at our door with a large care box filled with all kinds of Thanksgiving donations: a turkey, a sack of Russet potatoes, a large can of pumpkin for a pie, and other goodies. The brother, the prideful hothead, could barely wait for the visitors to leave so he could unleash his wrath on my sister and me for “humiliating the family.” Mama told him to be quiet but he continued his angry tirade, throwing his hands up in the air as he stalked around the house, yelling that we had so utterly humiliated him and the entire family. He swore to the Almighty that he was not going to eat a single bite of that food because, well, we might as well be on welfare. Remember, at this time, being on welfare was a total embarrassment, a stigma. He swore he’d rather go to the canal, catch a fish, and cook it for his Thanksgiving meal. He would not eat “charity” food. Mama just nodded and swept her hand toward the door, and said, “Go ahead, go catch yourself a fish for tomorrow. Jesus ate fish so no shame in that.” I remember him stomping out the door, mumbling stuff as he departed, and Mama saying we needed to pray for him and that temper of his. We never did. What the heck, we were hungry and there was no need for a high school boy to be yelling at us kids. Well, maybe from his perspective there was.
His anger bounced off of us. We were shamelessly ecstatic with the “charity” food. We couldn’t eat pride but we sure as heck could eat turkey, and Mama was going to roast it in the morning. We couldn’t wait. My brother returned empty handed and still in a foul mood. He continued to shoot daggers at me and my sister so we stayed close to Mama.
On Thanksgiving Day, Mama cooked. Delicious smells permeated the house and happiness came with it. The table set, the food placed on the table, we all sat down to eat. Dad offered up a lengthy prayer of thanks and once that was done, the feasting began. The “humiliated” brother took a seat at the table. He had no choice. No one disobeyed Dad. Eventually, hunger knocked him off his high horse and he took to stuffing his mouth like the rest of us. My other brother, who was a year older than the hothead, sarcastically said to him, “Seems like charity food is pretty good now, huh?”
He was told to shut up but didn’t and, like always, an argument between the two boys ensued. It was short lived. Dad ordered them to both shut up. He said that they needed to be thankful for what we did have and to God who had blessed us with a caring church family. I think they should have been thankful that they had a big mouth little sister. After all, humiliation or not, we had one glorious Thanksgiving dinner thanks to me. Even though I was only four, I remember this long ago Thanksgiving very clearly. It’s a great memory, a hilarious one to me.
***Until next time, whenever that may be, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
