manner, and almond eyes. Her clothes are detailed with ruffles and gold lamé, and, at the age of sixty-seven, when she walks into a room, people still turn their heads.
Fig. 3. Nadine in front of her home, 1977
Angela Helen (Angel), the second youngest daughter, also started her adulthood as a Felician novitiate, but she left the convent after a year. She married the boy next door, a Dutch-Polish American, and together they had six children. Angel is located solidly in the working class. Her husband, a tool-and-die maker, worked forty years in the auto industry before he retired at the age of fifty-eight with a comfortable pension. Angel worked on and off as a secretary so that they could save up a down payment for a house, convert the basement into a family room, and buy a new car. She and her husband like to gamble in Las Vegas and take three-week group tours of Europe. For over forty years they have lived in the same house in a well-maintained, white working-class neighborhood of ranch homes built in the late 1950s.
Fig. 4. Angel in front of her home, 1967
Fig. 5. Mary, Angel, and Gene at their home, 1952
Mary Marcelia (Mari), the youngest daughter, straddles the decades of the happy housewife of the 1950s and the return-to-college feminist of the 1970s. Like many white working-class women in her generation, she married a few years out of high school. She put her Irish-American husband through college and professional school and raised their four children. By her midthirties she was divorced and back in school. She earned a degree in fashion merchandizing, but never had an opportunity to develop this career. She worked instead as a nursing assistant. In midlife, she changed her name from Mary to Mari, moved to San Francisco, married a Filipino, and moved again to Manhattan where she lived for more than fifteen years with her husband before retiring to Phoenix.
These are the Grasinski Girls. Some will object, I assume, or at least wonder about the use of the term “girl” to describe the lives of women. Let me say first that the sisters themselves do not object to the term. I use “girl” because it captures their laughing personas, their gaiety and lightness, and, in many ways, the frivolity that comes from a combination of privilege (race and relative class privilege) and disadvantage (the “silly” gender). I also like to use the term because doing so subverts the power of the dominant group by co-opting a term that subordinates women. But this is not why the Grasinski Girls like the term. As “strictly a female female,” they all simply “enjoy being a girl.”30
PART I
Migrations and Generations
Fig. 6. The Grasinski Girls’ family tree
INTRODUCTION
St. Stan’s Cemetery
I WENT HOME to visit the family graves at St. Stanislaus Cemetery in Hilliards, Michigan. It was the time of the year when, more than a century earlier, the Grasinski Girls’ grandfather first stepped off the train, the time of year when the hush of dense summer green muffles the afternoon crickets and the smell of clover expands in the heat of the day. St. Stan’s connects me to the country—not the old country, but the farm fields of Hilliards.
In the cemetery, I record the names of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Hilliards: Fifelski, Jan, 1841–1916, and Maryanna, 1848–1924; Zulawski, Pawel, 1855–1939, and Krystyna, 1859–1922; Grusczynski, Joseph, 1848–1937, and Anna, 1858–1939; Fifelski, Ladislau J., 1870–1955, and Frances V., 1883–1962. I locate my bloodlines etched in stone—Fifelski, Zulawski, Grusczynski—and find my beginning in the cemetery, my connection to immigrant farmers and thick-waisted women who married young and had lots of children.
On a blustery March day in 1884, when he was fourteen years old, Ladislaus Fifelski, the grandfather of the Grasinski Girls, departed from the port of Danzig (now Gdańsk) with his parents Johann (Jan) and Maryanna.1 They immigrated to Chicago to join his uncle, who had sent the family transoceanic tickets (costing fourteen dollars for adults and seven dollars for children). His uncle, who worked for the railroad, helped his parents get jobs: his father worked on the turnstiles and his mother cleaned Pullman cars.2
The Fifelskis came from the Prussian-controlled sector of Poland.3 Poles from this sector began arriving in the 1850s, and the wave continued (roughly 450,000 in total) until the 1890s.4 They built the first Polish communities in America, often located near German settlements, as was the case with the Polish communities that later became home to the Grasinski Girls—Hilliards and Grand Rapids, Michigan.5 As a Prussian Pole, Ladislaus had a border culture composed of German and Polish strains, and generations later there is some confusion as to whether or not he was (or we are) Polish, given his “German” roots. His father’s German name (Johann) was Polonized (Jan) on his gravestone. Ladislaus spoke German and Polish, and was literate in German at the time of his arrival. He learned English at night school in Chicago, where he also learned to read and write Polish.6
Fig. 7. Gravestone in St. Stanislaus Cemetery, Hilliards, Michigan. Photo by Andrew Erdmans
Eight years after they arrived, the Fifelski family left Chicago. They traveled by train in the heat of July to the fields of southwestern Michigan and became farmers.7 They settled in Hilliards, an unincorporated village in Hopkins township, situated halfway between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, the two largest cities in southwestern Michigan. I once asked Valentine Fifelski why his grandfather’s family moved from Chicago to Michigan. He said it was because they had upset stomachs: “In Poland all they were living on were potatoes. And see, when they came here they were eating all this meat and it upset their stomach, so they decided to move to the country.8 They had been living in Chicago when they got a letter from a friend from the old country, and this man wrote them and tells them there is a farm for sale here.” This man was Michał Burchardt, a Kaszub (a member of a regional ethnic group in Poland) who had emigrated in 1868 from the Tuchola region north of Poznań.9 Burchardt spoke Polish, German, and English. His language skills as well as his knowledge of the area allowed him to be a cultural intermediary and real estate broker for the Polish immigrants. Walter, Ladislaus’s youngest son, said the Fifelskis came to Hilliards “mainly on account of this old Mike Burchardt. Understand, my dad learned how to speak some English, but his parents never did, and even my grandpa Zulawski never spoke English. [Burchardt] was the guy to fall back on, to look out for these immigrants.” The Fifelskis, he continued, “knew him from the old country.” They also “knew the Icieks and they knew the Klostkas,” other immigrant farmers in Hilliards who came from Poland. So Ladislaus became a farmer in Michigan because of his networks in Poland.
Ladislaus was an immigrant, but the Grasinski Girls’ grandmother, Frances Valeria Zulawski, was a native-born ethnic American.10 Born in Chicago in 1883, she was the oldest daughter of immigrants Pawel Zulawski and Krystyna Chylewska, who also came from the Prussian partition.11 Pawel is remembered as a landowner rather than a peasant, even though he emigrated because his family lost their land.12 More than one hundred fifty years and five generations later, Pawel’s grandson Walter makes sure his
