Striking a bargain

Forty years ago yesterday, I started a garden in Africa.

I’d been living in a Gambian village for about seven months. The Peace Corps asks you to stay the course for at least six, no matter how miserable you are, because that’s how long it takes to even begin to adjust. I hadn’t gotten very far. Anxiety had me by the throat. I was always on the edge of tears. I had to constantly fight the urge to flee to the city and take the next flight home.

I felt like I should have adjusted months earlier

But I couldn’t go home. If I did, I would have failed. I would end up right back where I started, a place I didn’t like. I couldn’t leave my village, but neither could I stay. 

Something had to give, so I made a bargain with myself. I’d already figured out why the women didn’t listen to my health lessons: I’d been telling them to improve their diet with vegetables, the very thing they didn’t have. Although I’d never grown so much as a carrot, I decided that I would organize a garden. If the women participated, I would stay. If not, I’d admit failure and go home. 

The women said they liked the idea, but I couldn’t tell if they meant it—they often said “yes” to be polite. We formed a club and they paid dues to buy seeds, but when the appointed day came, only my counterpart—an older woman named Ya Mari—joined me. We dug one vegetable bed and began another, embarrassed for having started a club that only we wanted to join.

We’d almost finished our third bed when I heard a little boy calling my name. I looked up. He’d run ahead of his mother, who was striding toward us with a cluster of women trailing behind. Smiling and waving and swinging their buckets, they looked like they were on their way to a festival. 

If they hadn’t shown up, I would have understood; they already had way too much work. But with my emotional well-being at stake, but I would have honored my bargain with myself and started packing for the sad trip home. Instead I returned to my hut, tired but happy. I glanced at the calendar, surprised to see that the date was inked in red. I looked closer and laughed. It was Thanksgiving. I’d been too busy to be homesick, and the holiday had passed me by.

A little boy helps his mother water her vegetable beds

The elephant at the table

My mother wanted to buy me a new faucet when my old one broke, but she wanted it to be just like hers—the kind with the built-in sprayer. I preferred a rustic Italian design with a separate sprayer. She kept pointing out all the advantages of her model, not because she was trying to boss me around, but because in that moment, she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that even though fifty percent of our genes were identical, our taste in small kitchen appliances was not.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I’ve been thinking about why there’s so much pressure for sameness in families—a pressure that ratchets up during the holidays. This is what I’ve come up with so far. If you have more thoughts, I’d love to hear them. 

Family members share genes, memories, and experiences, which feed into a shared identity. Our families are extensions of ourselves. We’re like little tribes; if there’s a disaster, we’ll band together. The more alike we are, or so the thinking goes, the better we’ll cooperate, increasing our chances of survival. In peaceful times, our unity gives us a sense of belonging and ease. 

Thanksgiving morning at my aunt’s house in Memphis, Tennessee, 1962. I’m the one wearing glasses.

So what happens when the family sits down for a holiday feast, and there’s not one black sheep at the table, but several? When the liberals and conservatives are more or less equally divided? Maybe the two sides have promised not to talk about politics, and maybe they’ll succeed. If so, politics often becomes the elephant in the room, precisely because it’s so important. It determines whether you have health care, what kind of schools your kids go to, where the next nuclear bomb will drop. Each side of the family is anxious to correct the other’s idiotic and perilous worldview. When discussion does break out, it turns into a shouting match. 

Shouting matches estrange us. We may still see each other socially, but we probably won’t be very close. I became estranged from a cousin—and by extension from his family—after a hostile email exchange about Hillary Clinton’s rumored child pornography ring. It’s sad; one of my sweetest memories from childhood is of Thanksgiving in Memphis at my aunt’s house.

If politics comes up in the family, I say let it come up at Thanksgiving instead of by email. We can read each other’s faces across the table. There are other people around to moderate. We’re more likely to apologize if we’ve upset someone. We could even get to know each other by listening to those we disagree with until we understand their point of view. We usually don’t do this, I think, because we’re afraid they’ll mistake our understanding for agreement.  

What if they do? It’s still a win. Most of us think the same old thoughts day in and day out, especially when it comes to politics. Thanksgiving is a time when people gather around the table. Who among them can teach you something new about the way of the world?