by Jane Borden
“What did you say was ‘pretty’? Oh, that—the one thing that’s not from the Salvation Army? The thing between the stack of graphic novels and the skateboard? Not the oversized plastic light-up candle that my roommate pulled in off the street after Christmas, and not the glitter snow globe I made out of an empty salsa jar, but the thing that is in fact ‘pretty’? Thanks. My mother gave it to me.”
But I can’t make this argument to her, because it would actually hurt my case. If Mom saw where I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she would not only keep my loot in the basement, but throw me in there too.
I know people in New York whose parents stay with them when they visit. When my parents are in town, they get a hotel room and I go to them. They don’t see my home—ever. It’s a silent understanding, a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. They want to believe I’m not living like a college student. And I want them to believe there isn’t a woman in the apartment next to mine whose name is Pussy Five. Sorry to drop the p-bomb, but that’s her name. And it’s not my place to go changing people’s names like some latter-day Adam in the Garden of Eden. I didn’t even change Amanda the cat’s name when I rescued her from Staten Island and Amanda is a pretty lame name for a cat—maybe not as lame as the p-bomb plus a prime number, but you see my point.
It’s impossible to have my parents over. What if we ran into p-bomb-5 outside the building? “Mom and Dad, this is …[long awkward pause]. [Long awkward pause], these are my parents.”
My lovely mother, wearing her cashmere cape and Steel Magnolias coif, would take in the hot-pink hair and combat boots, and respond—in all sincerity—“Well, hay-eee! How wonderful to meet you.” My father, in his Brooks Brothers tie and tweed hat, would bow slightly and add, “We’re the Bordens.” Then the three of them would shake hands and explode because that’s what happens when matter meets antimatter.
It’s not a risk I can take. And the chances of meeting her are high; she hangs around the stoop selling marijuana cupcakes to supplement the living she makes publishing an indie zine. And even if my parents did reach my apartment without an encounter, p-bomb-5 might knock on my door to find out if the cops had come by yet to investigate the 9-1-1 call I’d made the other night regarding that gunshot down the block.
Hmm. Sounds like her name would be the least of my parents’ worries.
Still, even though there is far more crime in my Brooklyn neighborhood than in Greensboro, even though crack deals transpire on my corner and my parents live next to lawyers, even though I have in fact been robbed before, my grandmother’s diamond and sapphire ring would be safer in my apartment than in my childhood home, because New Yorkers do not fall prey to that silly thing called trust. I have two deadbolts on my door and bars on my window; my father doesn’t lock his car because it’s “an insult to the neighborhood.”
It’s not the neighbors he should be worried about! Even if you moved deep into the country, miles from civilization—even if you ran background checks on each in your community—you could still get In Cold Blooded. Not me: I sleep soundly inside my cage. It’s not so bad in the daytime, either; I don’t even see the bars anymore. Many Southerners believe that under constant suspicion is no way to live, but I find comfort in the peace of mind it engenders. It’s like living in a cell. And prisoners don’t get shivved in their cells.
Violent burglaries are rare in my parents’ neighborhood, as is breaking and entering in general, but the area still suffers a high incidence of theft due to the kind of robbery that happens in broad daylight through unlocked doors. Every fall and spring, like clockwork, while homeowners tend gardens or walk dogs, their sideboards are unburdened by the gypsies.
Now—wait—whoa—I don’t mean gypsies as in Gypsies, as in the Romany people, who’ve been persecuted for centuries. I’m talking about a group of petty thieves who are referred to as gypsies. Possibly they are indeed of Romany descent, are the dreaded example that makes discrimination against their race so hard to overcome. Or maybe, because they’re foreign and they steal, Southerners just call them gypsies.
But trust me, if my liberal mother thought her words could be construed as bigoted, she’d be appalled. And you can be sure she doesn’t know because she called them gypsies to their faces. Or at least she intended to. Once, before a long vacation, she hid my grandmother’s silver service in the basement and left this note on the door: “To the gypsies: Our silver has already been stolen.” In retrospect, actually, there is no way they read that note because had they, we definitely would have been robbed.
Look, I’m not trying to make excuses. I don’t mean to justify the use of slurs. I’m reluctant to associate this band of thieves with the Romanies not least because it inclines my bleeding heart to just give them our silver as some small reparation. But the bottom line is, I don’t know who they are, and furthermore neither does it matter: This story is not concerned with them but with the way they are perceived.
The gypsies are really good at what they do. They’d have to be to dupe their targets year after year, using the same techniques and on the same appointed dates. You’d think we’d see it coming, but Southerners cherish their genteel trust the way girls keep stuffed animals beyond grade school.
Here’s how they work. The thieves never enter a locked door, presumably because of legal ramifications. From a distance they watch a homeowner’s movements, waiting for him or her to be indisposed: in the attic, in the basement, in the shower. Then, swiftly, a woman and a man—they almost always work in coed tandem—walk nonchalantly through the front door. The woman plays decoy while the man locates a makeshift sack. If at any point she is discovered, she will become distressed, crying either about a lost dog—“Have you seen it?”—or that she feels faint—“Could I have a glass of water?”
Meanwhile, her partner fills his sack. Whatever jewelry can be found quickly is snatched. But he’s on a tight time schedule and does not bother himself with what is hidden, especially not when the real prize is always in plain sight.
Almost every house in Irving Park, where I grew up, has a silver service; no society Southern home is complete without one. There are seven deadly sins, seven seals of the Apocalypse, seven veils in Salome’s dance, and seven pieces in a proper silver service: coffeepot; teapot; an urn; three bowls for cream, sugar, and waste; and the tray.
This is what the gypsies want. The focus of their organized crime, their business, is singular. Or at least it is in my parents’ neighborhood. Perhaps after leaving Greensboro, they hit Tennessee for gold-plated statues of Elvis.
The escape is tactical. If the loot is conspicuous or the way not clear, they will assess expedients in the landscape. A monogrammed L.L. Bean tote bag filled with sterling might be stashed in a neatly hedged English boxwood or a prodigiously flowering azalea. Later under the cover of night, another in the gang will retrieve the booty, which the grieving previous owners never knew was still under their noses. Typically though, the intruder, brazen as he clearly is, will walk directly out of the front door, carrying a suitcase, and head down Country Club Road or up Sunset Drive, like a bad Santa, until the getaway car concludes its residential-block orbit. This is when poor Gene Willoughby exclaimed, while turning into his driveway, “Huh! That man has the same luggage I do!”
Oh, Southerners are so trusting … until suddenly they are not. For it was only moments later that Gene Willoughby got wise and sounded the alarm. A network of cordless phones spread the warning call through the neighborhood.
“The gypsies are back; they got the Willoughbys.”
“No! The silver?”
“Yes, the silver.”
From there, information is disseminated to all family members. “Lock the door, all the time, even when we’re home.” Apparently the end of the directions includes, “then forget I said this and feel safe again, at which point stop locking the door for another six months, on the dot, until someone else gets robbed and we have this conversation again.”
Even after the word
is out, the gypsies are able to hit a few more houses before leaving town. It’s as if they know who will talk to whom, who is friends with whom; as if they watch us, know who plays bridge together and who chaperones which Girl Scout troops.
Or maybe they’re simply reckless—to wit, they were once caught. It was in the early ’80s, and my friend Andrew’s father, Locke Clifford, a prominent criminal defense lawyer, was assigned to represent one of the accused as part of his pro bono work. I called him up recently to jog my memory.
“So you want to know about the flying saucers, right?” he asked.
“The what?” I responded, wondering exactly how foreign Greensboro thought these people were.
“You want to know about the jeepsies!” he clarified in an accent that instantly made me homesick.
“Oh, yes sir,” I said. “I do.”
“It starts with the flying saucers.”
Here’s what happened. Someone among the recently robbed actually caught a glimpse of the getaway car and called in the description, which went out on an APB. Within a couple of hours, the police pulled over two vans. Unable to fit all of the suspects in the patrol car—and one supposes, unwilling to wait for backup—the cops decided to follow the vans to the station. At an intersection along the way, however, the two vans split in opposite directions at top speeds, forcing the patrol car to choose one and lose the other. Then, the passengers in the pursued vehicle, in an effort either to dump the contraband or discombobulate the fuzz, started throwing silver from the windows and doors. Shiny, glimmering trays and bowls Frisbeed through the air.
“The cops said it looked like something out of Star Wars,” Mr. Clifford recalled.
Eight suspects were caught and set to be tried in federal court, as they were accused of similar crimes in towns all over the South. Each received a different court-appointed lawyer. In the middle of jury selection, however, a twist:
“Down the aisle walks this young lawyer,” Mr. Clifford told me. “Black hair, dark skin, who’d been sent down from up north by the king of the Gypsies.”
“Hold on,” I interjected. “Did they use the phrase king of the Gypsies?”
“Well now, I don’t remember; it’s possible we assumed that. The implication was that this person was the boss. I asked, ‘Are you gonna represent all eight?’ The answer was yes.
“They were all sitting in the front row in the courtroom, with their arms crossed. And then they all started yakking away in a different language, and slowly the accused started leaning forward and then nodding. A few minutes later, the lawyer turned around and said, ‘All right, Judge, we are ready to proceed and they’ve all changed their pleas to guilty.’
“Each got about three years’ prison time. I was stunned. I’d never seen anything like it.”
For a city like Greensboro, this was high drama. The story fueled the Harris Teeter produce-aisle gossip circuit for weeks. People couldn’t believe they’d actually been caught and sentenced!
As a teenager, I desperately wanted to run into one. I wanted to stare into the face of a gypsy and see who stared back. I wasn’t afraid because I knew they weren’t violent. I just wanted to meet one and, I don’t know, get his autograph? Although they meant us harm, we were strangely attracted to them. Like the way teenage girls are obsessed with vampires. Except, actually, vampires can’t come inside unless you invite them. So I guess, the best comparison my childhood mind could make is that gypsies were kind of like zombies—dangerous, sure, but all you had to do to stop them was lock the door.
My aunt Jane encountered one, or thinks she did, years ago while tending to her roses in Raleigh. When she stepped into the garage for a trowel, she heard the front door open upstairs, and then footsteps directly above her. She walked to the staircase and called my uncle’s name but he did not answer. Now I will hand her the microphone: “So I grabbed a coat hanger and straightened it out. And I screamed up the stairs ‘I’m coming to get you! I know you’re a gypsy and I’m coming to get you—you better run!’ But by the time I got upstairs whoever it was was gone.”
I half expect her, at the end, to pull out a flashlight, place it under her chin, turn it on, and say, “Sometimes at night, I can still hear them rifling through my underwear drawer.”
Like I said, high drama. I recently asked my mom what she remembered about the arrest from the early ’80s, and like any good bit of gossip, the details had been warbled during their journey through the telephone: “The king of the Gypsies himself strolled into the courtroom—dressed beautifully, in a very elegant suit—and said he’d come from New York to get them off.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“They said he was very glamorous. He’s probably dining at Jean Georges in Manhattan tonight.”
For the next few days, she left me intermittent voice mails saying, “Jane, you better not write about the gypsies! They’ll come get you! The king lives in New York, Jane. He’s gonna get you!” Then, I’d hear her howling with laughter before the phone hit the receiver. For you to get the joke, though, you’ll need more context. Really, she was making fun of her own mother, Nana.
When Mom grew up in the late ’40s and early ’50s in Danville, Virginia, a small town near the North Carolina border, an itinerant community came through every spring in caravans, out of which they sold tonics and told fortunes. They were known to locals as Gypsies. It’s safe to assume these nomads were in fact Romanies, whose presence in that area at that time—and in that way—has been well documented.
In Danville, they squatted on a couple of acres at the end of Broad Street, which belonged to Mr. Dibrell, who owned the Dibrell Brothers Tobacco Company; he didn’t mind. From what my mother can remember, the women wore multiple bracelets, head kerchiefs, long flowing skirts, and jangly earrings. “No one had pierced ears back then,” she says. “If you had pierced ears, you were a gypsy.” If this is true, then the Piercing Pagoda at the mall stole its imagery from the wrong culture.
Eventually, whether or not they were guilty, the nomads developed a reputation for stealing—another occurrence common to the time. The police began to monitor their actions. Mr. Dibrell ran them off his land. And Nana, in an effort to deter my mother from playing with their kids, told her that Gypsies steal children and turn them into other Gypsies. In case you’re skimming, I’ll repeat that: My grandmother told my six-year-old mother to stay away from the Gypsies because they would “steal” her.
Baby theft was a common accusation against the Gypsies—as the slander went, kidnapping was a recruiting tactic—but I don’t say that to cut Nana slack. She wasn’t above using scare tactics to exert influence. When she asked me, at the age of six, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, “a cheerleader.” For whatever reason, she found this reply unsatisfactory, so she responded, “No, no honey: Cheerleaders get diseases.”
This terrified me. I remember watching football games with my dad and thinking, Oh, those poor girls; I hope they don’t die, and also, Why would anyone choose that profession?
Similarly was my six-year-old mother terrified of the Gypsies. She has a vivid memory of encountering one woman in particular, who was walking with her barefoot child toward Main Street. My mother stopped in her tracks, turned white, flipped on her heels, and fled in abject terror for home. And who can blame her? I would’ve done the same thing at that age if I’d been approached by a man in a van offering candy—which is essentially how my grandmother had framed the situation.
“You ran from her?” I asked.
“Yes! It’s horrible,” she replied. “Nana told me they’d take me! What could I do?” Then she laughed over the absurdity of it all and said, “Oh well.”
I’ll tell you this much, though. She’s never pierced her ears.
the one on which the green Herend leaf dish was received and instantly retrieved, my mother insisted that my sisters and I “go through those boxes in the basement and divvy it all up.”
I was confused. Was I being forced to sh
are my future loot? I mean I guess it’s only fair. Otherwise it would be like when parents turn a dead child’s bedroom into a mausoleum—at least let my sisters play with my toys.
But I was wrong. These were different boxes entirely. They were the mother lode of all buried Southern treasure TBE at a point TBD, and I hadn’t known they existed. I knew, of course, that both of my grandmothers had died, but because I was living in New York, I hadn’t witnessed the distribution of their valuables. The boxes to which my mother referred held my sisters’ and my allocations, the paltry consolation prizes you receive when you trade one box in the ground for another.
We descended the dusty catacomb stairs with a card table and chairs and took inventory: gold-rimmed crystal goblets, silver liqueur glasses, a set of Wedgwood, white and gold Nippon, green-rimmed china, a pink-and-white breakfast set, several different collections of demitasse.
We didn’t recognize most of the items. In one case, there was a clear explanation. The date on the Richmond Times Dispatch wrapped around a set of C. H. Field Haviland Limoges china read Tuesday, December 10, 1957. Nana must have packed the plates before they moved from Broad Street to Hawthorne Drive in 1958. But she never unpacked them, not even when she moved again to Greensboro after my grandfather died. For the last fifty years, that china has lived in three basements—and counting—without being used.
In one sense, that makes it more valuable. The Haviland was one of the few complete sets in the inventory. At the same time, however, it carries no memories; its teacups are empty. Use is not a dirty word. Another of her sets, for example, is missing salad plates. Therefore, even if I don’t remember ever eating off them, I can at least close my eyes and imagine her dropping one on the kitchen floor.
For this reason, I became more interested in the newspaper around the Haviland than in the plates themselves. I tried to conjure her wrapping them—right around the time that 6 CANADIAN SHIPS CATCH 636 WHALES, as reported by the New York Times, Sunday, October 20, 1957; “Virtually every part of the whale has a commercial use.” While she sacramentally mummified those saucers, ALBERT CAMUS WINS NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE, Sputnik “beep-beeped triumphantly in outer space,” and, my favorite, BRITAIN PRESSES U.S. ON AGREEMENT TO DUMP OIL WASTE ONLY FAR AT SEA.
