(Host) Looking forward to Thanksgiving has commentator Mary McCallum
remembering one so filled with contrasts that it gave her own holiday
much food for thought.
(McCallum) The Great American Thanksgiving
is a holiday centered around the importance of family and friends, of
sharing our collective good fortune among them, and giving thanks for
what we have. I love that it’s more about tradition and less about
shopping. Yet I recall vividly one Thanksgiving from the past that was
a complete break from tradition.
In the late sixties I was a
student in a small college on eastern Long Island. The tiny campus sat
on a river, and classes were held in the genteel rooms of what had once
been a grand old mansion. I got my first taste of political activism
there when I fell in with a small group who fancied themselves radical
thinkers. We got tear gassed protesting the Vietnam war, shut down
classes during the Kent State shootings and started an edgy literary
magazine.
One fall semester we partnered with a group of
activists that ran a breakfast program for pre-school kids at Head Start
on Long Island’s east end. They were the children of migrant workers
from the American south who followed the crops. That season they were
pickers at the sprawling potato farms.
We students initiated a
huge food drive, and for weeks gathered boxes of cereal, powdered milk,
canned fruit, bags of oatmeal, and bottled juice. Early Thanksgiving
morning we loaded a truck and headed east in the gray November chill to
the Head Start office. We were to meet the two men in charge of the
breakfast program, who happened to be members of the leftist Black
Panther Party. The plan was to do the drop, talk some politics, then
head home to our Thanksgiving dinners.
But the men wisely invited
us middle class white students to follow them out to one of the migrant
farms to meet some of the people our food would be going to. No
problem, we could spare the time, our own holiday meals wouldn’t be
until dusk anyway.
It was 1969. Migrant labor conditions had not
changed much since the 1950s when 40,000 acres of Long Island potatoes
were cultivated and harvested by poor southerners of color. Entering
the long dark wooden barracks lined with single metal beds and heated by
a coal stove at each end was a step back in time. Outside, women
stirred a large pot of stew over an open fire while men stood by, joked
and passed around a bottle. Children played tag in the bleak November
cold, stopping to warm hands at the fire.
A tiny wrinkled woman
told me what it was like to stand at a conveyor belt all day grading
potatoes by size with her arthritic hands. She told me she thought she
was sixty-five, but didn’t know for sure. She coughed a lot.
The
ride back was quiet. The flat agricultural landscape gave way to
subdivisions starkly lit by streetlights as darkness came on. At campus
I got in my car and drove to my parents’ home, where a long
Thanksgiving weekend awaited. The house was warm, the smell of roasting
turkey hung thick in the air, a large table was crowded with familiar
foods that celebrated the bounty of harvest. We raised our wine glasses,
toasted our good fortune and, to my acute discomfort, passed the
potatoes.