By Dorsey Price Salerno
With an introduction by her daughter, Allison Salerno
May 13, 2020
My mother, Dorsey Salerno, or Mami as I call her, is 89 years old and began writing this piece a few years ago as she reflected on her childhood as the daughter of a Southern American man and a South American woman.
Her own mother, born of a Maryland man of Welsh descent who built railroads in Argentina and an Argentine woman of Spanish descent, left Argentina for Maryland and the cruel racial caste system that permeated life there and throughout the American South under Jim Crow.
Instead of passing on her own cultural traditions from Argentina, my beloved grandmother, a “shadow wife” as my Mami puts it, passed into the white professional class in Baltimore. Like many white couples at the time, she and her husband hired African American women to help raise their children and cook the family meals.
About a year ago, I shared my Mami's reflection with a dear friend who had immigrated to Georgia from Argentina with her husband, a white Midwesterner. The writing hit her hard. She told me how isolating it can be to be an immigrant, how she misses the sound of Spanish, and what a profound loss it is to be dislocated.
In the week leading up to Mother's Day, my Mami and I went back and forth over emails, texts and phone calls, two writers shaping each other's written words. How lucky I am to have her words. They let me know and love my mother and grandmother more fully.
— Allison Salerno
My mother was the perfect Latin American wife. She was attuned to her husband's wishes, anticipating his needs. She lived in the shadow of her husband's success and taught his children to give him respect. She came from Argentina in 1907 when she was 9 years-old. If only she had told me more.
When I was little, she made me understand I was special, a lovely mixture of Spanish and Welsh. She told me that my brothers and I were fortunate to have more than a single heritage. She said I was pretty because I had a mixture of backgrounds.
In watching her, I knew she was right. Her father, who had grown up on the edge of Appalachia, gave her delicate freckled skin and green eyes, speckled with yellow. Like her Argentinian mother, my own mother moved with grace and her hair was so black that it shone with blue. Her ankles and wrists were slender, like those of a hundred Latina women I have gazed at in recent years.
Early on, she taught me a lullaby in Spanish, which I loved singing with her - una muñeca tengo y estoy feliz! She asked our maid, Bessie, to make Spanish rice for my brothers and me. My mother's eyes lit up when she found guava jelly in Harrington's Grocery Store in our town of Ruxton, Maryland. She would put it on our breakfast toast and we learned to love it. I think it must have reminded her of her own mamacita and her long ago days in Argentina. She said we should speak Spanish at the dinner table. But Father said, “No, we're in America and we will only speak English.” My brother says that was the only mistake Father ever made. We never learned Spanish.
I now own the picture of her family that hung on the wall of her bedroom in Ruxton when I was young. Her smiling mother, Maria Ignacia Ramos (she said Ramos meant “Branch of the True Church”) is holding her on her lap, while an older sister and brother stand next to her, pressing their heads against her shoulder. The family posed for this picture in their first home in San Martin, a village outside Buenos Aires. Her father, who came there from Cumberland, Maryland, “where the South begins,” stands tall and mustachioed, ready to protect his young family. He had sailed to Argentina in 1880 to build railroads for the British, following the tradition of his own father, who had mapped out train lines to bring coal from the mines in western Maryland. In the faded photograph, an Italian gardener in a gondolier's hat and a young maid flank the central figures. I can just make out the cage of the once brilliant birds Mother told me always sang in that garden.
Another photograph that now hangs in my bedroom was taken on a sunny Fourth of July a year later, in 1908. Fifteen aunts, uncles and cousins are gathered in the garden of an uncle in western Maryland. Each child holds a small American flag on a stick, because all the Argentinians have become American citizens. The little girls wear sailor dresses, and I can find my mother, even though she is only 10 years old. She always leans her head to the side and smiles shyly in a photograph.
When I was 5, 6, and 7, Mother drove me once a week to visit Tía, her aunt who was brought by Jonathan Robbins, her father, to Maryland a year after her own arrival. Mother explained it would have been wrong to leave this 41-year-old maiden aunt alone in Argentina. By then, Tía Petrona was 50 years old. She lived alone, and, from lack of use, she stopped speaking Spanish and never learned English. I played with my dolls on the floor of her apartment in downtown Baltimore and watched Mother and Tía sip yerba maté. I heard my mother laugh and speak in her secret language, Spanish. Tía understood but didn’t answer.
When I was in the fourth grade, Mother and Father sent me to the Bryn Mawr School for Girls, and my mother no longer talked about Argentina. Now, like many white Southern women in those years, she asked Bessie to cook Southern fried chicken instead of Spanish rice for the family. Bessie also made us spoon bread with maple syrup and butter, and Mother no longer called it mantequilla. Like so many parents in the South then, Father still felt that our family should speak only English. As he said, we were all Americans now. My mother's only special request to Father was to have her sisters and brother visit for the whole day on Christmas. She still spoke in Spanish to her sisters on the telephone every day, to keep her secrets from me. I used to imagine that if I knew Spanish, I could unlock all the secrets of the world.
By the time I was a teenager, my brothers and I were full-fledged children of a Southern investment banker and his wife, Fannie Robbins Price, who now signed her documents Frances R. Price. The daughter of Maria Ignacia Ramos now wore Fair Isle sweaters and enjoyed an occasional gin and tonic with a twist of lime at her cocktail parties. Our family had become assimilated. We grew up as a white family when only white families could go to the fine restaurants and the country clubs and where the water fountains on the ferry boat we’d take to visit my father's family on the eastern shore of Maryland said “colored only” and “whites only.” It seems so odd and sad to me now that we lived in a time and a place where the law divided people and allowed no room for other cultures.
All of that took place many years ago. I am, in my turn, a woman in my 90th year, with four grown children and nine grandchildren. One of my granddaughters has hair so black that in the sunlight it dances with blue. Sometimes, she and my children and grandchildren ask about their Latin American grandmother and great grandmother. They want to know all the details I can remember.
My mother's corner cupboard sits in my living room, and displays four blue and white English demitasse cups. In the shadows behind them stands a curious object. It is a yerba maté cup, a container for drinking tea. Four inches high, it is made from the thin, brown shell of a gourd. Three slender silver bands, ornately chased, hold the gourd. As those silver bands descend, they take the form of tiny goat's legs, ending in delicate goat hooves. Inside the yerba maté cup stands an elaborate silver straw.
Last year, a guest spotted my yerba maté cup and, pressing her fingers around it, put the silver straw to her lips.
"Your mother came from a very close family," she said. "This cup was passed from member to member as they sat in a circle. They sipped from this silver straw in turn, to show their family bond."
I yearn to know about my Argentine family. Who were those aunts and uncles, so close that they ceremonially sipped their tea from one straw? What did they talk about that was so important to them? If only I knew more … if only Mother had shared her secrets with me.
Dorsey Price Sales was born in Ruxton, Maryland in her family's home. She holds a Master degree in French from NYU and taught French and Latin for ten years. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Johns Hopkins Magazine and the Classical Review. Her novel, the Bacchus Claim, can be purchased on Amazon.
