Root Down, Rise Up
As I wrote last time, the end of 2020 left me feeling exhausted and heartsick, as it did so many of us. It was hard to get the love and nourishment we needed from this world in order to exist, let alone blossom, in it. Rather than continue to fight against elements that remain stubbornly beyond my control, I have decided instead to embrace this winter of my life. That is, rather than grow upwards and outwards, I’m choosing instead to root down and deep, drawing resources from the soil of my very self. With that in mind, I want to start this year by thinking deeply about a concept that is frequently invoked in social justice spaces: the idea of the ancestors. As Justin Michael Williams tells us in his masterful Stay Woke, thanks to our ancestors, “Our lives have been paid for.” What might it mean to acknowledge that we are here thanks to them? What might it look like to do right by that debt? What might it feel like to be rooted in this world through them?
Whenever community organizers invoke the ancestors, I feel pretty awkward. As I’ve hinted at in various posts, my family life is complicated, so complicated, in fact, that I’ve rarely felt like the philosophy of the ancestors applied to me at all. But, as we start a new year, I choose to accept the invitation to think more capaciously about ancestors. This post then is a reflection on my various roots. I want to ground myself more firmly in the here and now, asking: where do I come from? how far back does my story go? where do I get my political and moral investments from? In the words of Justin Michael Williams above, who paid for my life and how will I honor that debt moving forward? This story will begin with my mother’s family in late nineteenth-century colonial India before taking us to early twentieth-century Chicago and Omaha, where my dad’s Irish and Italian family, respectively, alighted in this country. Though it may seem odd, their blended perspectives wound up giving me a unique worldview, the political and intellectual contours of which I’ll spend the rest of 2021 exploring.
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A strong legacy of bucking trends and supporting liberal, downright progressive, causes emerges from what I’ve been told about my mother’s side of the family. It starts with my great grandfather, Baij Naath Prasad. Born in 1895 in Meerut, my great grandfather came from a very wealthy north Indian family who had amassed money and property over generations as local traders in the region. His father had also served as treasurer to a local nawab, or king, which secured the son’s inheritance. As a result, my great grandfather was highly educated. He read, wrote, and spoke three languages – Hindi, English, and Farsi. After briefly working for the British colonial administration in Meerut for two years, he became an Ayurvedic doctor and that’s when a major turning point in the Mittal line appears to have taken place.
As a local doctor, Baij Naath Prasad established a free clinic for the poor who couldn’t afford medical care. He treated them and distributed herbal medicines for free. My great grandfather was also involved in the movement against the caste system, especially the rampant discrimination against the lowest orders that has long plagued India. He sought to set an example among his peers by employing those from the so-called Untouchable caste as well as Muslims as his personal valets. Though today these efforts resemble noblesse oblige, it was a truly radical move in those days. While in his employ, he offered to send them to school, paying for their books, tuition, food, and lodging. All six men took him up on the offer.
His sister, Shakuntala, followed a similar path though, being a woman, it was through connections to men in her life that she got her start in activism. My great aunt was married at age ten. Her husband, Bhagvad Dutt, was fourteen years old. At the time, he was away at boarding school where he learned from the Upanishads, a sacred Hindu text, that husbands and wives are equal to one another. Taking the lesson to heart, he decided that Shakuntala should continue her studies, that she, too, needed, indeed deserved, an education. Because she was already married and women’s education was not yet the cause it would become, Bhagvad taught her what he was learning in school. Among the entire extended family, he was also the first to adopt Gandhi’s philosophy on the importance of both women’s education as well as the anti-colonial independence movement, writ large. Naturally, my great aunt, whom I only had the privilege of meeting once, became an ardent believer, as well. Together, they went to anti-colonial protests throughout the 1930s and 1940s and they brought along their young nephew, Prem Prakash, my grandfather.
My great-grandmother died in 1923 while giving birth to my grandfather, something for which his father never quite forgave him. He was raised by his stepmother, Ramkali, known affectionately as Maaji. My mother remembers Maaji, her grandmother, with great fondness. As the only son of a rich family, Prem Prakash was afforded the luxury of being a bit dilatory in his studies. Nevertheless, he went to college because that’s what rich young men did in those days. Around then, his father announced that it was high time for him to find a wife. Perhaps influenced by his aunt Shakuntala, my grandfather made clear that he wished to marry an educated woman. Well, easier said than done in the 1940s. It is to Shakuntala’s credit that she managed to find a beautiful young woman with the necessary credentials, as few women received any formal education at that time.
Enter Raj Doulari which, when translated, literally means “beloved of the kingdom,” and she was. Born in 1926, her father and grandfather had been lawyers and property-owners. They were, if possible, even wealthier than her soon-to-be husband’s family. She was the eldest of seven sisters. Her father wanted his girls to be educated but there were no girls’ schools in Meerut at the time. In lieu of sending them to school, he was able to hire a private tutor to support them in their studies. In this manner, Raj Doulari earned a double bachelors in Sanskrit and English by the age of twenty. The year was 1946 and few women in India would have been fortunate enough to have such access to education.
My grandmother’s ability to pursue an education was one felicitous outcome of her father’s devotion to the Quit India movement. In general, the Garg family was supportive of independence. For instance, they engaged in the boycott against British goods by refusing to wear foreign clothes. Indeed, the anti-colonial movement and the birth of an independent India run in the background of my grandparents’ story. Raj Doulari Garg and Prem Prakash Mittal were married on December 26, 1946, just one year before independence. As newlyweds, my grandparents marched side by side against British colonization in the Quit India movement. My mother was born in April 1948 and, because of the timing, my grandmother always referred to her as an “Independence Baby.” All through my grandmother’s pregnancy and into the first few months of my young mother’s life, the violence of partition spread throughout Meerut. Luckily, they remained safe throughout the great unrest.
I can’t help but smile when I hear stories about my grandmother, who went from Raj Doulari to Rajeshwari, or “goddess of the kingdom,” upon marriage, declared so by her new father-in-law. She was famously whip-smart, generous, and tough as nails. It was because of her needling that my grandfather, a man with little interest in school, eventually pursued a law degree at one of the top universities in India. By 1952, he was a defense lawyer, arguing on behalf of mostly poor and marginalized clients in Muzaffarnagar, a town they had moved to a year prior. In her defense, Rajeshwari was no less demanding of herself. At the age of 27, with two children under the age of five, she began to study for her masters, focusing on Sanskrit. And if she was studying, so would they. She would wake them up at four in the morning, give them a cold bath, and make them study until school started at 7am. In some ways, it was simply an intimate manifestation of her lifelong devotion to education.
My grandmother remained a fervent advocate of children’s education, and young girls’ education, in particular, her whole life. After a long career as a teacher in one of only three girls schools in Muzaffarnagar, she became a school principal for a girls’ school (7th-12th grades) for the next decade or so. Even after she retired in her fifties, she “encouraged” the so-called peons who were fortunate – or unfortunate – enough to find themselves in her presence to pursue an education, as well. We know of at least six young men she hectored into going to school, and financially supported throughout their studies. By the time she was in her sixties, she began whittling down her possessions and poured the rest of what money she had left into building a temple in Muzaffarnagar. It serves as a local community center still – offering medical services to poor women and children in the area as well as afterschool enrichment programming to children, some of which my grandmother offered herself. But now we’re skipping ahead.
My mother described herself as a sickly child who fell ill every two months or so as a result of an early childhood bout with jaundice from which she never entirely recovered. Otherwise, hers was a rather happy childhood. She spent the summers reading English detective novels by the likes of Agatha Christie. Her parents were loving, supportive, and seemed to behave as real partners in marriage. Theirs was one of the few middle-class households where both parents worked outside the home. And because my grandmother worked, she wanted to ensure that her daughter received sufficient mental stimulation in her absence. Consequently, she sent her to school starting at age three and education defined my mother’s early life, too. She attended a girls school in Muzaffarnagar. Because of the early start and her brilliance (she skipped two grades), she graduated high school at the tender age of twelve. At this point, she began college.
From ages thirteen to sixteen, she lived at home and attended classes at the college in town. Due to her young age, she had long experienced social isolation and jealousy from her peers. While this didn’t necessarily make for a happy experience, it didn’t stop her from earning her dual BA in Math and English. And her parents figured that, since my grandmother had managed to earn a master’s degree, my mother should also continue in her footsteps. In other words, marriage at age 16 was not on the table – yet another singular feature of the Mittal household. The decision to continue my mother’s schooling went against the local mores of the neighborhood. You’re wasting money on a daughter, they said, save it for your son. But these arguments did not move my grandparents, and my mother continued her studies.
Because her father had instilled in her a love of reading, my mother decided to pursue an MA in English. Once again, she attended seminars at Agra University while living at home. And when she finished at age 18, her parents were once again confronted with the question of whether it was time for her to marry or if she still had time to, well, live a little. Perhaps influenced by Shakuntala once more, her mother and father chose the latter option. Though she was granted acceptance to a M.Sc. program at the premier school for mathematics in India, IIT, she was unable to go; there were limits to what even progressive Indian families could allow their daughters to do in the 1960s. To attend IIT, she would be required to live on a campus 400 miles away from home in Kanpur. Though this is more or less precisely what her younger brother did, she settled for living at home, taking occasional seminars, and continuing her studies in English rather than Math. She completed her PhD by age 24, and I sometimes wonder what beautiful things could have been in store for her. But tragedy struck, and things would never be the same.
My grandfather died quite suddenly of a heart attack on March 6, 1972. It’s no exaggeration to say that the family was devastated. Even my grandmother, that veritable force of nature, found herself laid low by the untimely death of her husband. They say her beautiful dark hair turned white overnight. In addition to the emotional ruination, his passing also led to sudden financial uncertainty in the family. My grandfather had invested nearly all their money in a small orchard. And, besides his aunt Shakuntala, no one on his side offered to help them. Similarly, no one on my grandmother’s side offered support, whether moral or material. From this moment onward, my grandmother continued to work out of financial necessity, as opposed to personal fulfillment as before.
To alleviate her financial burden, and at the insistence of my grandmother, my uncle took a scholarship to study abroad. My aunt, just fifteen years old, remained at home. As for my mother, she had hoped to get a teaching job to help support the household, but the town gossip was hard to bear. Not only did folks whisper about the “needy” Mittals, but they wondered about the pretty daughter who was on the verge of becoming an old maid (she was just 25 years old). One day, her father’s friend showed up at their doorstep with an unexpected marriage proposal. My grandmother and mother, still reeling from the death of my grandfather, accepted the offer. As it turned out, he was a man who looked better on paper than he was in real life.
My mother arrived in the United States in 1975 with only this strange new husband by her side. Suffice it to say, it was not a happy marriage but it was long. After 11 years, my mother summoned the courage to do what few immigrant women ever could – she pursued a divorce and raised me on her own as a single mother. Absent any financial help from my father, without any moral support from the Indian expat community, and with her own family half a world away, she was entirely alone on this continent. And yet, she found a way through. Though she started as a teller at a bank, over time she built an impressive career, working her way up to Branch Manager with the honorific of Vice President by the time she retired 37 years later. And she managed to teach after all, perhaps not in a traditional classroom, but in her staff meeting rooms day in and day out.
I can honestly say that my mother made it because she is brilliant, hard-working, persistent, determined, and brave. My sister and I both got our feminist fighting spirit from her, even though “feminist” would scarcely be a word she uses to describe herself. Most importantly, in spite of everything, and much to my lifelong amazement, she remains an endless font of joy. I suspect that it was this natural ebullience that nourished her in hard times, though it sounds like we had our fair share of good times, too, back when it just the two of us those first few years of my life. And though she had decided to remain unmarried and singularly devoted to raising her daughter, she met the man I would come to call dad and everything changed yet again.
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As I describe my relationship to my dad’s side of the family, we move from biological ancestry to the notion of what they call fictive kinship. But there’s nothing fictional about it. Because my dad chose to raise me as his daughter, his story becomes mine. And what a story it is…
Like my mother’s family, and really all of us, their lives were shaped by forces greater than themselves. His mother’s family were descendants of Irish immigrants from Cork County who, we imagine, settled in Chicago sometime in the nineteenth century. Given the timing, our best guess is that they were fleeing the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849), which killed off one million Irish from starvation and illness and sent another million packing as migrants and refugees. Once in the United States, they seemed to have assimilated quickly. According to family lore, for instance, my dad’s great-great-grandfather served as a Union soldier in the Civil War. His was not a happy ending as, at the end of the war, he and his company were ambushed by Southern rebels in Missouri who either didn’t know or didn’t care that the war was over. His children fared better, though we know little about them.
At some point, my dad’s great grandparents must have managed to establish a factory that produced boilers. We know this because my dad’s grandfather and great-uncle inherited it, most likely from their own father. This is how the Houlihans amassed their wealth in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago. From what I’m told, they had a veritable lock on the industry in the blizzard-ridden Midwest. Their massive wealth had them rubbing shoulders with politicians, gangsters, and other important people of all stripes. As a result of their power, wealth, and prestige, my grandmother, Virginia Houlihan, received an upbringing befitting a wealthy young lady. When I hear about her life, I conjure up images of a childhood of frocks and lacey dresses, servants and horse-riding, a childhood bookended by baptism and cotillion. She went to Northwestern University but never graduated. Instead, she left to become a singer and dancer and, in her twenties, she met and married a man named Wiley Shoaf. Sadly, he died just 13 months later, in 1946. The story goes that, once Wiley died, she could never sing again. She did however remain in Chicago, which is how she eventually met her next husband, my grandfather, Carmen Dominic Barton.
The Bartoni family came from Carpinone, a town in central Italy that lies about 100 kilometers from Naples. No one really knows how we went from Bartoni to Barton but we imagine that it had something to do with wanting to assimilate. In the 1890s, my great grandparents, seeking to escape poverty, migrated from Italy to America via Canada separately, most likely with their own parents. They eventually settled in Omaha where a growing Italian community was sprouting up. Indeed, it’s likely that they helped build the neighborhood known today as Little Italy in northern Omaha. My great-grandfather Giovanni was a ditch-digger when he met and married Josephine. They went on to have twelve children, though they buried three. It is said that my great-grandparents didn’t get along well very well. It must have been hard feeding so many mouths on the paltry income of a ditch-digger. Perhaps it was an unhappy household, which is why the daughters sought to leave the home the only way they could – through marriage. All of my great aunts married at age 16 or 17. But the young men had more options.
My grandfather, Dominic, born in 1905, was the youngest of four sons. He dropped out of school after the 8thgrade. At some point in the early 1920s, he and two of his brothers moved to Chicago. And though he had long taken on odd jobs in Omaha, whether selling newspapers or moving slabs of meat in slaughterhouses, he found his real passion when he arrived in Chicago, through the unions. He worked as a mailer for the local newspaper, The Chicago American. As a mailer, he was responsible for taking the printed newspaper hot off the press, adding inserts, sorting them, tying them in bundles, and loading them into trucks to be distributed. He became a union member while working at The American.
My dad says that his father was proud to serve in an elected capacity as shop steward, the go-between for labor and management. Indeed, he was a lifelong union man. For him, unions meant that someone with no generational wealth could nevertheless find a measure of job security; that someone with an eighth-grade education could even make a middle class living. In other words, union membership was the key to his version of the American Dream, so much so that when The American was eventually purchased by the non-union Chicago Sun Times, he decided to up and leave, moving the whole family to California. But that would come years later.
My grandparents met later in life at the Elk’s Club. They married in 1949 and my dad was born a year later. He describes his childhood and upbringing as pleasant and pretty typical of your standard 1950s American nuclear household, dotted by occasional visits to aunts and uncles on the Barton side. The family lived in a European immigrant neighborhood in the Ravenswood district of Chicago before leaving for California when my dad was in fourth grade. They took the train to San Francisco and moved around some before landing in Pasadena, in Los Angeles. My dad attended Muir High School and, though he wasn’t much into school, per se, he discovered he was an extraordinary drummer and musician. Because of his remarkable talent, he won the coveted John Philip Souza Award at Muir High. And this talent would carry him far.
Like my mother, my dad experienced the early death of his father in summer 1967, when my dad was just seventeen years old. By then, lung cancer had spread to my grandfather’s brain, causing him to act peculiar at times. He had been in and out of the hospital for at least a year by that point, and when home, had spent a good amount of time lying in pain on the sofa. I know his death was devastating for my aunt, who was only twelve years old at the time. I can only imagine it was similarly painful for my grandma and my dad. Around this time, my dad decided not to attend college but to spend the next decade or so traveling the US as a drummer with various bands.
Even during high school, he had played in local bars, joining the local musicians union in order to do so. When he graduated in 1968, he auditioned for a touring lounge act and spent the next three or so years playing along the Lake Tahoe-Vegas circuit. Following a long stint with that first show band, he began to tour the US with other groups, working the nightclub scene. At one point, he joined a band called Sugar and Spice, the only band I’ll remember the name of easily because the photo of the pink tuxedoed band members has been indelibly burned into my brain, as is the image of my dad sporting an afro and a mustache. In all, he played professionally for about thirteen years and still relishes the memories. Why? Well, as he points out, he got to spend his twenties seeing the country, giving vent to his artistic side along with other creatives, all while making good money. What more could you want, he asks wistfully.
He left life as a drummer in 1982 in order to move back to his then-wife’s home state, Oklahoma. When the marriage ended a few months later, my dad found himself returning back to southern California with two children in tow. He found a unit in a condo complex in Duarte. As it turns out, so did my mom and I. When I was three years old, I broke the garage door and wouldn’t you know it, the nice man who lived down the street came to fix it. That’s when he was still John to me. A year later, I’d be calling him dad.
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What have I learned from these various ancestors and their breath-taking stories? At the broadest level, it’s hard to ignore the pattern of the rise and fall of the families’ various fortunes through the generations. The way that a sudden turn of luck, whether good or bad, can irrevocably alter a life. But I’ve also learned that every day we unintentionally live out our family’s patterns, and that this too is our inheritance. For instance, I now see clearly that I come from a long line of brave, unyielding women on my mother’s side. That, through them, I am connected to a legacy of fighting for progressive causes and doing my part to contribute to a more just world, especially in the field of education. This sense of self, as a moral being with a responsibility to others in this world, was reinforced by my dad, though it’s hard to say where exactly he got this sensibility.
I undertook this piece as an act of shoring myself up after a trying year, to remind myself that I am connected to something profound and beautiful. It has been a reminder that I am not alone in this universe, and that so many have paid for the life that I now live. While in the past, I have felt it necessary to shield up to go out into the world, this post is instead an attempt at rooting down into the very thing I most fear these days. And I can do so because I am heir to a legacy of joy, willfulness, and moral clarity. I’m ready to honor that inheritance as I begin to rise up once more.