Oral history collected in Windsor, 1983

In the 1880s, 5 acres of prunes would support a family. In the days before refrigeration, they were a valuable crop. The Russians grew root vegetables in Sebastopol for Fort Ross. All those people in Alaska needed vitamins.

Villa Chanticleer was built by bootleggers. There were cars with false bottoms. Rum runners. Grappa was made north of Santa Rosa. My grandfather worked at night. He didn’t speak much about it. There was machine gun fire every Friday night. The Coast Guard. As kids we’d get red lights and run along the beach so the Coast Guard would come, with lights flashing.

People came out west for gold, and to work on the railroad. Everyone had a garden. And everyone was building something. We worked 18 hours a day in May. The barley crops grew in six weeks. There are 55 minorities in China. They were a landless people. It’s like El Salvador today.

It is strange to be a minority and one’s own country. In 1856 to 1858, the people refused to pay taxes, and all the land was foreclosed. Every country I’ve been in has a minority. If it’s not race, it’s color if it’s not color, it’s skin.

During the Civil War, Santa Rosa and Petaluma raised an army. Thats why there’s the Shiloh cemetery in Windsor—it was made during the Civil War. (There are McClellans buried there—as in the General George McClellan who was pro-Confederacy. Both sides of the equation were represented in Sonoma County—the pro-Union Yankee Petaluma Guard and Emmet Rifles in suppressed a secessionist skirmish in Healdsburg. The Battle of Washoe House, is perhaps, the most comical, if apocryphal Civil War story. The story goes, Petaluma raised a militia and marched north on Confederate Santa Rosa, but the day was hot, and they got no further than the roadhouse, where they drowned their fury in suds.)

My grandmother used to tell me of the General Slocum disaster of the 1860s. New York. It was a school outing. It was a paddlewheeler steamer. My mother couldn’t go because she was from the wrong church. (Lutherans from Little Germany. Few of the women and children survived. After the disaster, the community dissolved). That’s why I’m here. My father was a tailor from Paris. And here we were in Windsor picking prunes to survive.

Anonymous, Oral history collected in Windsor, 1983.

But I didn’t name my informant. He sounds like he could be Chinese, or more likely German. I was probably going to turn it into a poem and never did. I was also doing a lot of Elderhostel teaching in those days, and people would tell me stories so it could’ve come from a workshop. Parentheses are mine, to make some sense of the story. Added 2020