my gypsy man

On the first date with the man who later became my husband, he told me he was “Gypsy.” Since we met when as a requirement for a grade he had to let me, a writing tutor, read over a paper he wrote in his native Italian, I had assumed he was Italian. The only associations I had with the word gypsy at the time were probably things like Johnny Depp’s character in Chocolat and the children who tried to steal my dad’s wallet in Florence. Despite the latter, I wasn’t any less interested in him.

Later when we had been dating for a little while, I went to the Harold B. Lee Library to find out what I could about Gypsies, which this handsome guy with a nice smile who was wearing a collared white shirt, tie, and vest the first time I met him had told me was actually a derogatory word commonly used to refer to an ethnic group of people called Roma (or Rroma, or Romani people). What I really wanted was something like “Romanes 101”—learning a third language seemed like a great extracurricular activity. But Romanes is not a written language, and the best I could find were some linguistic studies and a dictionary that used words from the hundreds of dialects spoken all over the world.

From my Gypsy man, the internet, and the stack of books I flipped through sitting at a big wooden table that afternoon, I began to understand something about a people and culture to which I had been completely ignorant. What most fascinated me was that these nationless people have adapted wherever they go, but have resiliently preserved a distinct way of life and ancient language. The gypsy concept is so popularized, in, well, some kind of modern American consciousness, as mysterious, romantic, and fun—it’s not a negative stereotype, necessarily—but it doesn’t seem to anticipate that we might encounter breathing people who have anything to do with bright carnival posters of mustached violin players and hoop-earringed (yes, I’m allowed to invent words) palm readers. On the other hand, Europeans know about Roma as a literal and disadvantaged minority. The families living on the fringes of society in places I’ve been, like Italy, and the characters that have romanced us in movies seem to represent two completely different identities: Gypsies and Roma.

I’ve now been married to my Gypsy man for two and a half years and we have a gorgeous baby Gypsy girl. I come from Mormon pioneer stock: I was born in Salt Lake City and grew up in Southern California. I don’t know how many women like me get a chance to know, and I mean really know, something about Gypsies. I find myself constantly explaining, and sometimes I find people who are really interested. There is so much to know that people just don’t know that I could write a book about it. In fact, my Gypsy man has so many interesting stories about his life that people often tell me I should write a book about it. But a book? Seriously, a book? I’ve always liked to write, but writing seriously (in something other than my journal) gives me the jitters so much that I usually have to consume almost a whole carton of ice cream or almost a whole batch of my own best recipe for chocolate chip cookies every time I sit down with my laptop, trying to convince myself to do it (as I did over the last three days, and which might explain why I was doing a better job keeping in shape post-partum than I did during six years of college when at any given time I had an average of at least five papers to write). So I am starting small, with a blog that I am not telling anyone about, and I am thinking about it as a sort of hobby—a life-after-graduation-as-an-English-major project.

You might be wondering why I continue to use the word Gypsy when I explained that it’s derogatory. Actually it’s not easy for me to use it. It’s become almost like swearing to me: I cringe a little inside when I hear it or say it. However, I am making the decision to use it because my audience (which I am pretending I don’t have so that I don’t get stage-fright) probably has the same associations with the word that I did—as opposed to zilch associations with the word Roma (or mistaken associations having to do with either the Coliseum or tomatoes)—AND because I want to re-educate you on everything you think you know about Gypsies and help you understand their living every day reality. I want to sort of make an experiment of whether it’s possible to unify those two separate identities I talked about, until Gypsy is no longer a hiss and a byword from the European perspective and until Roma becomes appropriately more evocative and meaningful for Americans. Plus, doesn’t it make my life sound more fun and romantic when I talk about my Gypsy man?