The Ethnic Garden in Portuguese-American Writing

The Ethnic Garden in

Portuguese-American WritingReinaldo Silva

Writing about the garden in American litera-ture has a long tradition, but this does not applyto emergent contemporary American literatures,especially the Portuguese-American one. In myexploration of this issue, I will briefly outline thescholarly work on the American garden—rangingfrom contemporary ‘‘ecocriticism’’ (LawrenceBuell), to the pastoral ideal (Leo Marx), and fi-nally, to the georgic mode (William Conlogue)—to understand the essence and importance of thegarden in Portuguese-American writing, especiallyin the fiction of Katherine Vaz (1955–) and FrankGaspar (1946–), and in the poetry of the latter.While I aim at focusing on these Portuguese-American voices, I will also contrast canonical,mainstream representations of the garden to arguethat Edith Wharton (1862–1937), George Wash-ington Cable (1844–1925), and Jack London(1876–1916) viewed the garden as a pleasure,leisure ground. In contrast, in contemporary Por-tuguese-American fiction, the garden is a placewhere one can grow vegetables and flowers; aplace for preserving one’s ethnic identity and an-cestral rural way of life; or a retreat from thealienating conditions imposed by the factory,commercial fishing, the whaling or dairy indus-tries, and intensive farming—activities in whichthe first generations of Portuguese immigrantsexcelled in the three traditional areas of settlementin the United States: New England, California,and Hawaii. While the first two mainstream writ-ers, Wharton and Cable, were fascinated by the

refinement and social status entailed in owning agarden, in The Valley of the Moon (1913), Lon-don’s character Billy Roberts ridicules the Portu-guese agrarian ways and mentality. With thisnovel as a case in point, my goal is to focus on thegarden as emblematic of the gulf between theAmerican mainstream and some of its peripheralminority voices, and how it highlights conflictingresponses toward culture and life. While assessingsome of these notions in Portuguese-Americanwritings, I will also note, in passing, how the gar-den is a forceful presence in Italian-Americanwriting as well.

Since the nation’s inception—that is, withJeffersonian and Jacksonian agrarianism—the gar-den and the machine have been at the heart of theAmerican experience, and these realities have gal-vanized American scholars and writers. Contem-porary ‘‘ecocriticism’’ scholars such as LawrenceBuell (in Writing for an Endangered World: Lit-erature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S.and Beyond) have called our attention to the dan-gers of pollution on the American landscape andits physical environment. However, in his attemptto distinguish between ‘‘green’’ and ‘‘brown’’landscapes—that is, the landscapes of ‘‘exurbiaand industrialization’’ (7)—this framework is notapplicable to Portuguese-American writings. Inthe Californian landscapes and gardens of Kather-ine Vaz’s fiction, and those from Massachusetts inthe fiction and poetry of Frank Gaspar, Buell’s‘‘toxic discourse’’ does not find a congenial home.

Reinaldo Francisco Silva is assistant professor of English at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. His interests include nineteenth-century American literature (realism and naturalism) and contemporary ethnic literatures, with a special focus on Portuguese-American writers. Some recent publications can be found in Frank Norris Studies; The Journal of American Culture; The Mickle Street

Review; Gavea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies; Restoration; The Yeats Eliot Review;Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies; and Ethnic Studies Review.

191The Ethnic Garden in Portuguese-American Writing � Reinaldo Silva

References to the ethnic garden abound in thefiction of Katherine Vaz, especially in Saudade(1994), and in Frank Gaspar’s novel Leaving Pico(1999), as well as his three volumes of poems, TheHolyoke (1988), Mass for the Grace of a HappyDeath (1995), and A Field Guide to the Heavens(1999). The gardens in these writings are not pol-luted with toxic waste or invaded by the ominoussound of civilization as represented in, for exam-ple, the emblematic whistle of the train in Thor-eau’s Walden (1854).

My contention is that in Portuguese-Americanwriting, these matters are nowhere to be seen.Instead, the gardens in Portuguese-Americanliterature bring to the fore aspects that are quin-tessentially marked by immigrant experience.Surrounded by the hustle and bustle of public,mainstream life, the gardens in some of thesewritings reflect aspects inherent in the private,intimate side of the Portuguese ethnic experiencein the United States.1 In addition, these gardensare depicted as oases of tranquility, providing cul-tural and spiritual sustenance. Moreover, they al-low for what Leo Marx views as a ‘‘retreat into theprimitive or rural felicity,’’ and a ‘‘yearning for asimpler, more harmonious style of life, an exist-ence ‘closer to nature’’’ (6). In the context of Por-tuguese-American life in the United States, forthose keen on growing a garden, such an activityallowed for a brief respite from a demandingwork schedule—in the New England textile mills,in California’s competitive dairy industry, or inthe perilous whaling industry in Massachusetts—and a momentary return to a simpler way of life,given that most of these immigrants had beenfarmers or fishermen back in the old country.These are some of the issues that we encounter inthe works of mainstream American writers ofPortuguese descent. In essence, the garden func-tions as the liaison with the old country and as anincentive for recollection of a past that can nolonger be retrieved: the stories and conversationsexchanged with relatives and friends while tillingthe fields, or the competition among women as towhose garden has the most variety.

While planting kale, turnips, tomatoes, pep-pers, onions, corn, and flowers, for example, the

characters in the fictional gardens of Portuguese-American writings experience what William Con-logue defines in Working the Garden: AmericanWriters and the Industrialization of Agriculture asthe georgic mode—that is, the ‘‘earth worker,farmer’’ and the pleasure involved in husbandry(as opposed to the pastoral mode), meaning a ‘‘re-treat into a ‘green world’ to escape the pressuresof complex urban life. In a rural or wildernesslandscape, the character’s interaction with thenatural world restores him, and, ideally, he returnsto the city better able to cope with the stresses ofcivilization’’ (6–8). Writing about the garden, ofcourse, has a long literary tradition in the Westernworld. While Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’sWorks and Days are the anchors of gardening lit-erature, Andrew Marvell’s poetic contributions,too, cannot be ignored. As we will see in the writ-ings of Katherine Vaz and Frank Gaspar, there isreally no need to escape into a rural area or eventhe wilderness, since the setting in Saudade, forexample, is a rural community in California, whileLeaving Pico captures Portuguese-American lifein a fishing community on the tip of Cape Cod.Whatever retreat there actually is, it is instead intothe ancestral culture and the old habits and waysof life, and how these can be safeguarded in a newenvironment. Challenged and often pressured toassimilate a whole new set of values and ways, thevery act of gardening has been a means throughwhich Portuguese Americans have asserted theiridentity and national origin.

Interest in the garden is not a feature that per-tains exclusively to Portuguese-American litera-ture. ‘‘It is truly surprising,’’ William Boelhowerwrites in Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosisin American Literature, ‘‘how frequently the gar-den appears in Italian-American narratives’’ (114).As I have argued elsewhere,2 the garden and theethnic meal are intimately related, and this can beseen during both clambakes in Leaving Pico,where the guests consume vegetables from theirgardens and the seafood from their catch. Such acommunal gathering as this one, or even the Ital-ian feast, as Boelhower has noted, function as ‘‘anact of historical synthesis in which each partici-pant feels integrated into the semiotic space of his

192 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 28, Number 2 � June 2005

ethnic culture’’ (116). When writing about thegarden of plenty, Luisa Del Giudice notes that theItalians, like the Portuguese in London’s The Val-ley of the Moon, do not leave a single inch of landuncultivated. Unnecessary shrubs or trees areeradicated to make way for orchards or vegetablegardens (62). In essence, what Boelhower andGiudice are trying to argue is that food and theethnic garden cannot be separated, since both re-veal much about one’s ethnicity and culture. Eras-ing one’s agrarian background in a new country(the United States) was practically impossible forthe Italians and the Portuguese, especially for thepioneer and first generations.

With these theoretical considerations on thegarden, to what extent does the ethnic gardentouch upon quintessential aspects of immigrantlife in Portuguese-American communities in theUnited States? And how does its representationin the fiction and poetry of Frank Gaspar andKatherine Vaz contrast with the gardens in ca-nonical mainstream fiction offered by Wharton,Cable, and London? The most representative po-em on the ethnic garden in Frank Gaspar’s TheHolyoke (1988), winner of the 1988 Morse PoetryPrize, is ‘‘Potatoes.’’ Unlike his more recent vol-umes of poetry, The Holyoke focuses on certainaspects of the lives of Portuguese Americans inProvincetown, Massachusetts, a predominantlyfishing community. It is an unusual poem becauseit highlights the fondness that the Portugueseevince in growing a vegetable or fruit garden intheir backyards. This is an aspect that character-izes Portuguese immigrant life in the UnitedStates and shows that even in an industrial set-ting—as is, for example, the Ironbound section ofNewark, New Jersey, which I am very familiarwith—the Portuguese still plant vegetable andflower gardens today. In their attempt to holdonto an ancestral way of life, they find in thesegardens a spiritual connection with the old coun-try. What is fascinating about the gardens in TheHolyoke is that they have a little bit of everything.Apart from potatoes and even corn, this one has apatch of kale (to make the famous Portuguese kalesoup) and a ‘‘patch of anise’’ (10). The episode ofGaspar’s mother digging for potatoes comes in the

tradition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country ofthe Pointed Firs (1896), in which the narrator digsa few potatoes to make a chowder. Fortunately,the old New England way of life that Jewett soeloquently wrote about at the turn of the centuryhas not entirely disappeared; it is another way oflife that the Portuguese keep alive.

Compared with the previous volume, Mass forthe Grace of a Happy Death (1994), winner of the1994 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, contains very fewpoems dealing with the Portuguese-American ex-perience in the United States. The setting in partone of this book, ‘‘Chronicle,’’ is Provincetownduring the poet’s youth. The poems in parts twoand three, ‘‘Lamentation’’ and ‘‘Psalm,’’ rangefrom the poet’s days in the navy during Vietnamto his days as an undergraduate and graduate stu-dent in California, and describe life in the GoldenState, the drought, illegal Mexican immigrantsbeing assisted by family members, the youth cul-ture of the 1960s, the border scene, 1970s roadculture, and women and sex.

I will focus on the poem with a flower gardenfrom part one, ‘‘My Aunt Among the Lilies.’’ Atthe poem’s outset, the reader learns that this gar-den has a profusion of flowers:

There were never lilies.Irises grew in a brickedrow along the front of the house,hollyhocks spined up behindour hedge, and morning gloriesbruised the fencewith their bitter mouths. (9)

As in several poems written by Gaspar, ‘‘My AuntAmong the Lilies’’ is also imbued with religiousimagery. The poetic voice depicts his or her auntas a ‘‘dark saint,’’ presumably a Portuguese widowin mourning, who is walking among the flowersof her garden. She is compared to a medievalknight in full armor, a Crusader, ready for battle:

......................................................Whydid she ever walk this way,along the strict bordersof the house, her dresspuckered in the summer heat,her rosary laced at her wrist?For hers was not an earthly


mission—no concern forthe watering can or rakeor spade. (9)

Reminiscent of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Portuguese Jesuits involved in evangeli-zation overseas, this aunt is intent on purging theworld of sin. She spots a cricket whose blacknessand repulsiveness prompt her to see it as an agentof the devil. The poetic voice immediately sees her

.........................................................reachonce into a corner of mossand bring out a cricketperched on the curlof her arthritic hand, watchit with wonder and thendrop it, crush itbeneath the stub of herblack heel. She rosethen on heavy breathand loomed over the yardlike some dark saint cometo harrow this worldof violent conversions. (9)

Instead of offering a depiction of a Portugueseflower garden in a northern New England cli-mate, the poem evolves into religious matters tostress the staunch Catholicism of certain Portu-guese women in Provincetown. In delving intothese issues, Gaspar acknowledges his indebted-ness to English devotional writers such as HenryVaughn, whose work, Silex Scintillans, he quotesat the beginning of the collection.

Practically all of the poems in A Field Guide tothe Heavens, Gaspar’s third volume of poetry andwinner of the 1999 Brittingham Prize in Poetry,are about California, the poet’s home. This vol-ume conjures up the memory of lost ones as itfocuses on the poet’s immediate family, his wifeand son. Alice Clemente has noted that there ‘‘is arose garden instead of kale and potatoes’’ in thebackyard (38). The nights are spent either star-gazing through a telescope or reading books: JohnMilton, The Teaching of Buddha, the ancientGreeks, Dante, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert,Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, and Fernando Pessoa.As the title indicates, ‘‘Seven Roses’’ is a poem

about a rose garden. Its poetic voice notes thatkeeping it is not a very appealing activity:

The rose bushes were here when we boughtthis house, though we have added to them,subtracted from them. Frankly, I don’t likethem much. They demand so much of you.They want to be fertilized and pruned andmulched. Then they get sick, they get rustyand moldy, and things live in them and youmust resort to despicable substances, youhave to wear yellow gloves. All that time outin the heat when you could be bodysurfingor reading a book. (19)

The smell of the ‘‘seven roses in a jar on thekitchen table’’ make the poetic voice feel as if heor she were ‘‘in a fogbank. I was out wanderingthe keeps/of some mind or another far too late’’(19). While the scent conjures up images from thepast, as an artist, however, he wonders which useshe could put them to:

If I were Rumi I could make a parable aboutthe roses, I could dance into a fainting spelland someone on my staff would write downthe poem I uttered, or if I were FrancisPonge I could study the roses in a way that acubist might, just before painting them all upand down a stretched canvas. (19)

This poem invites reflection on poetic beauty andart. As a garden that caters to the soul, in A FieldGuide to the Heavens, Gaspar’s portrayal ofgardens too is further removed from the ethnicexperience he had captured in The Holyoke.While ‘‘Potatoes’’ is a poem about how to copewith poverty, survival, and appeasing a family’shunger through the bounty of an ethnic garden, inA Field Guide to the Heavens, the gardens inviteintellectual and artistic contemplation.

The poem ‘‘When Lilacs’’ reports to life inProvincetown and has strong resonances of WaltWhitman’s ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the DooryardBloom’d.’’ Gaspar’s poem begins with a series ofimages suggesting decay:

The pine fence rotted and collapsed,and then there was nothing between usand the abandoned lot of the fish-packing company, its wild outbuildings,the forges and pumps, the truck barn,


the coopery, the workshops, silentand weedgrown, and the counting-house,ivy-choked and gone to pigeons andferal cats . . . (67)

In this poem, Gaspar highlights the ambiance ofabandonment and decay to capture the death of away of life, fishing, in a Portuguese-Americancommunity. In addition, ‘‘When Lilacs’’ takes usback in time—that is, to the times when the

..............................................lilac tree, stoopedwith blossoms, and my mother stealingamong them like a ragged queen, snippingand gathering, filling milkbottles withthe nodding clusters: she would chokethe house’s sorrows with the lilacsin the kitchen with its pinched windows,on the sills and shelves and sinkboard,on the red round table and the stove’s back,and lilac water in the vases and jars—and in every cluttered room . . . (67)

In this poem, the lilac blossoms function, so tospeak, as an anchor in the poet’s mind, evokingboth a place and past occurrences that can nolonger be retrieved.

Leaving Pico is a novel about Azorean immi-grant life in Provincetown, and how this commu-nity reacts to, or resists, American ways. Thisnovel captures quite well the antagonism betweenthe Portuguese from the Azores, represented byJosie’s family, and the Lisbons—that is, those fromthe Continent, represented by Carmine, who iscourting Josie’s mother, Rosa.

In this novel about Josie’s coming of age, thereare numerous references to the Azorean presenceon the very tip of Cape Cod: the kale and potatogardens, the social clubs and club bands, the fishserved during the two clambakes that take placeduring the course of the novel, the names on thefishing boats (most of which highlight this com-munity’s strong Catholic beliefs—the Coracao deJesus, the Amor de Deus, and so on), the fadomusic played at parties and social gatherings, andthe rituals associated with their Catholic calendarthroughout the year, namely the sodalities, thefestivals with their street processions, the Blessingof the Fleet, and so on.

As Clemente has noted, ‘‘Gaspar structures hisnarrative around two clambakes,’’ and most of thefood consumed during both events comes eitherfrom the sea or the ethnic garden (41). But what isactually grown in these gardens? In the episode inwhich the firemen and neighbors are trying toextinguish the fire in Madeleine Sylvia’s house, thenarrator tells us that ‘‘Maybe everything was overin minutes. I couldn’t tell. But both yards were amess. Our little garden had been trampled, andkale and turnips lay crushed on the wet ground’’(176). With the intent of saving money on food,such a habit also highlights their rural backgroundand way of life in the old country, and how thesecannot be easily erased in their country of adop-tion. In addition to these vegetables, for the lastclambake, which is organized to mourn Josie’sgrandfather, the narrator notes that ‘‘Ernestinahad already left us with a bushel of sweet cornfrom her garden’’ (206). Asked to comment onthese literary representations of the garden in hiswritings, Gaspar has generously shared his insighton this issue. In what concerns the earliest gardenthat Gaspar recalls, he noted that it

was the backyard garden that is somewhatfictionalized in Pico. We grew and usedmint—it was used to freshen dishwashingand for cooking and cleaning. The yard nextdoor—a huge cannery-row-type affair con-nected to the Atlantic Coast Fisheries, thetown’s then biggest cold-storage and fish-processing plant—was rife with wild funcho[fennel], which filled the air with itsodd, sweet smell and was used to makesoup. (E-mail to author)

Gaspar went on to enumerate what his familygrew in their garden:

Our little garden had tomatoes and pota-toes—those I remember most vividly, andwe used the Portuguese names for them,along with couves [kale]. We kept threeducks (like in the novel) for their large,strong eggs. When we lived for a short timewith my erstwhile stepfather in anotherhouse around the corner, he kept a largergarden with mostly kale—lots of curlykale—and corn. Then he went away, and


the garden era sort of came to an end. I thinkprobably by the mid-fifties most of the big,serious and small serious food-gardens weregone. (E-mail to author)

Growing a garden in the Provincetown of his child-hood was a common practice, Gaspar noted, and

[n]one of this was done in any manifest wayto ‘‘preserve’’ tradition. It was simply a partof life, like most of the customs we observed.It was just what you did. No one said, ‘‘nowwe are going to remember some Portuguesethings by doing this.’’ It was part and parcelof what life was. I believe that in the ‘fifties,we saw the old folks who came from theIslands in the 1880s carrying out the ends oftheir lives and the ends of the 19th centuryAzorean way of life they brought with them.(E-mail to author)

Writing about the ethnic garden is not an ex-clusive feature of Frank Gaspar’s poetry and prose.Instead, it is also present in other Portuguese-American writings, as is the case of Saudade(1994), a novel in which Katherine Vaz cap-tures the clash between the old and new worldsin a number of ways. As I have argued in ‘‘Por-tuguese American Literature and Anticlericalism:Katherine Vaz’s Reshaping of the Tradition,’’ thestory in Saudade is centered on Clara, a deaf-mutegirl from the Azorean island Terceira, who inheritsthe property of her immigrant uncle Victor wholived in California. Through scheming, Father TeoEiras convinces Clara’s mother, on her deathbed,to sign the deed of the land over to the church.Eventually, he becomes Clara’s legal guardian, andboth sail away to Lodi, California. Through time,Clara unsuccessfully uses her sex appeal to retrieveher land. As Father Teo Eiras gradually fades outof her life, Clara befriends Doctor Helio Soares. Itis during this episode that they both build what,by American standards, looks like an unusual gar-den. To repay his love, attention, and companion-ship, Clara, we learn, begins to carry

cuttings of rosemary and seeds for black-eyed Susans to his house to start a roof gar-den—a legacy from being born in a smallcountry where people planted their roofs toown more land and as a sign of the melan-

choly trust that one day a siege must come.Helio bought flats of basil, thyme, and pe-tunias for her projects, and they hauled sacksof dirt up the ladder to strew on his house.Greens, yellows, and pastels soon becamevisible on the red roof, and from a distanceClara could see her mark like a quilt she hadtossed outward from her bed. Most after-noons, when Helio returned from hispatients, she was already at work, wavingto invite him to ascend into the garden. Asunflower leaned against the chimney andherbs were drying on old honeycombframes. The sun baked the hose when Clarastretched it up to the roof, and the watercame out warm enough for tea. She filled ajar with water and crumbled in dried mint.Once while drinking her tea, the heat madethem unwind backward, side by side, to takein the light. (206–07)

Before analyzing this passage in further detail, it isworth noting that the farming techniques of theAzoreans referred to in this quote are the objectof ridicule in Jack London’s The Valley of theMoon. To my knowledge, perhaps this is the onlynovel written by a canonical, mainstream Amer-ican writer featuring a garden or farm owned by aPortuguese character. As I have noted elsewhere,3

before London, Mark Twain’s The InnocentsAbroad (which contains an account of Othernessas the Quaker City sails toward the Azores/Por-tugal, Europe, and the Holy Land) focused on theagricultural techniques of the Azoreans on theisland of Fayal (Faial), especially in chapters fiveand six. In the case of London’s novel, BillyRoberts is envious of the wealth that AntonioSilva amassed in a relatively short period of time,even if it involved growing onions at ‘‘his frontdooryard . . . clear to the sidewalk.’’ He is report-ed to clear ‘‘three hundred a year on that patchalone’’ (110). This mentality is also present inVaz’s Saudade in the sense that the novel, apartfrom evincing other interests, aims at capturingthe ways and mentality of Portuguese characterstransplanted to American soil. Apart from thestrangeness in this rooftop garden, the agriculturalmentality under consideration substantiates theancestral habit of maximizing whatever land was


available, regardless of whether these fictionalimmigrants were now living in spacious Califor-nia. In addition, it stresses the vulnerability of theAzoreans who, from an historical point of view,have experienced various sieges during times ofpolitical turmoil. A garden such as this one evi-dently came in handy. This passage also highlightsClara’s method of expressing her creativity giventhat she is an illiterate deaf-mute woman who,through time, learns how to communicate withcolors. It is impossible to read this passage andnot compare it with the garden that Alice Walkerdescribes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens(1983). Despite the obvious ethnic and historicaldifferences, Clara’s happiness and creativity aresimilar to those that Walker describes when re-ferring to black women after Reconstruction,namely her grandmother and mother who refusedto let their spirituality and creativity be stifledwithin. ‘‘Black women,’’ Walker writes, ‘‘whosespirituality was so intense, so deep, so uncon-scious, they were themselves unaware of the rich-ness they held. They stumbled blindly throughtheir lives: creatures so abused and mutilated inbody, so dimmed and confused by pain, that theyconsidered themselves unworthy even of hope’’(584). By way of reply to Virginia Woolf’s com-plaint in A Room of One’s Own, and with onlythe name of Phillis Wheatley to look up to as anemblem of self-expression and creativity, blackwomen like her mother used whatever means toexpress their creativity, and often channeled it in-to making a quilt or building a garden. Walker’smother, we learn,

adorned with flowers whatever shabby housewe were forced to live in. And not just yourtypical straggly country stand of zinnias, ei-ther. She planted ambitious gardens—andstill does—with over fifty different varietiesof plants that bloom profusely from earlyMarch until late November. Before she lefthome for the fields, she watered her flowers,chopped up the grass, and laid out new beds.When she returned from the fields she mightdivide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit, uprootand replant roses, or prune branches fromher taller bushes or trees—until night cameand it was too dark to see. (590–91)

Walker goes on to note the following:

I notice that it is only when my mother isworking in her flowers that she is radiant,almost to the point of being invisible—ex-cept as Creator: hand and eye. She is in-volved in work her soul must have. Orderingthe universe in the image of her personalconception of Beauty. (590–91)

This passage suggests that for most AfricanAmerican women during and after Reconstruc-tion, the garden was the means through whichthey could give life to their creativity despite theiroverall illiteracy and poor job skills. Representa-tions of the garden prior to the Civil War in someof the fiction by George Washington Cable, forexample, differ from Walker’s piece. In the novellaMadame Delphine (1881), Cable depicts the clas-sic New Orleans vieux carre Creole gardens. Thetheoretical formulations of current postcolonialdiscourse as postulated by Homi K. Bhabha, Ed-ward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, forexample, could be easily applied to this piece. Inessence, this story is about racial prejudice and thefear of miscegenation in the United States beforethe Civil War, even though it was published afterthis pivotal episode in American history. It high-lights the plight of Madame Delphine’s daughterOlive, an attractive young Creole woman whotries to marry a white man to secure economicstability, but who is thwarted from doing so be-cause of legal and social prejudice. In this story,the garden gains an importance of its own, giventhat a few central episodes take place there. Inaddition, the gardens highlight the class and racedifferences prevalent in New Orleans—as is thecase with those of Madame Delphine and PereJerome, Creoles, as opposed to those belonging toJean Thompson and Doctor Varrillat, white land-owners and slaveholders. In addition to reflectingthe tastes and flora available to Creoles in NewOrleans, these quasi-tropical gardens replete withjasmine and crape-myrtle arouse not only thesenses, but also one’s sexual drive, as is the casewith Monsieur Vignevielle, who is sexuallyaroused when he sees Olive crossing her gardenwhile he is eavesdropping. This longing for con-tact with the ethnic Other is an issue that


contemporary postcolonial and ethnic studiesscholars such as Robert Young and bell hookshave touched upon when arguing that whites fan-tasize about having sex with darker ethnic mi-norities (Young 19; hooks 21–22).

In contrast, the gardens owned by the whitesuburban residents of New Orleans have a typicalEnglish style. Sprawling lawns and trees exist pro-fusely, and no strong-scented flowers are to beseen in the gardens of Jean Thompson and DoctorVarrillat. These Southern gardens allow them toenjoy, and even flaunt, their status as leisuredslaveholding individuals. Although the gardens ofthe Creoles and whites are depicted as pleasuregrounds, the most striking difference is that theyalso highlight the clash between the social classesand races living in Louisiana prior to the Civil War.

In The Amateur Garden (1914), Cable devotesthe book’s last of six sketches to ‘‘The MidwinterGardens of New Orleans,’’ in which he recyclesissues of class and race raised earlier in MadameDelphine. In contrast, the first five sketches focuson gardening in a northern climate, more specif-ically that of Northampton, Massachusetts. Un-like Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens(1904), which I will focus on later, in The Am-ateur Garden, we are not in the presence of a first-rank piece of writing on gardening. Briefly, thisbook depicts the gardens of Northampton as es-sentially domestic, privately owned gardens witha profusion of lawns, flowers, shrubbery, andtrees. Fruit trees and vegetables are rarely alludedto in these New England cottage gardens. Instead,they too are depicted as pleasure grounds where aparticular host entertains his guests on a warmsummer day or evening while showing off hiswealth. While drawing the reader’s attention tothe local annual garden competitions and prizesawarded to the best gardens, as a whole, this bookis a manual on how one can perfect the art ofgardening, as in the sketch titled ‘‘My Own Acre.’’While The Amateur Garden may be seen as Ca-ble’s attempt to raise money, it is also possible toregard this piece as his own contribution to theemergence of how-to-do manuals in early twen-tieth-century America, especially by authors whowere also writers of fiction.

In the case of ethnic fiction—and in particular,that of Clara, as in most real Portuguese immi-grants—growing a garden in one’s backyard isemblematic of the ethnic experience in America.It allows for spiritual fulfillment—the work thattheir souls must have—and is a means of con-necting with the old country. Momentarily, atleast, these gardeners may daydream about thesimpler way of life they left behind, since alien-ation and drudgery in their workplaces are a dailyreality. In contemporary Portuguese-Americanliterature, the fictional garden as the one repre-sented in Saudade emanates from personal expe-rience, as Katherine Vaz has conveyed:

My first and most vivid sense of a gardenwhen I was growing up in Castro Valley (atown close to San Leandro and Oakland)was that my Azorean grandfather came overto help my father build a chicken coop, andwe kept chickens for many years. For theeggs, I might add; we were much too tender-hearted to kill or eat the chickens. Mygrandfather was notorious for his sense thatany plant was God’s gift and if a personknew how to take a cutting from it withoutinjuring or removing the plant from some-one’s property, then so be it! My father re-calls being embarrassed as a boy when hisfather would stop the car and take a cuttingfrom the roadside—funcho [fennel] was oneof his prize cuttings. (E-mail to author)

As to the vegetables and flowers in her father’sgarden, Vaz stated that

Funcho we had in our yard, as a result of mygrandfather’s pilfering, and also fava beans,though my sister Maria hated them andwould go out to stomp on the seedlings.Couves [kale], of course, were required—wegrew up in the suburbs, but my parents hadpurchased a lot that was narrow but deep sothat they could have a garden. My father didindeed have one of those magical touches—areal green thumb—to the point that he couldjust about throw a bunch of geranium stemsonto the ground and by what seemed like thenext day, there’d be a profusion of brightblooms. I’d have to say that this ability of hishas very much featured in my fiction; I amnot myself blessed with this ability, and


therefore it truly seems like magic to me.(E-mail to author)

In contrast to other immigrants, however, Vaznoted that ‘‘it was not for necessity that my fathergrew so many vegetables and flowers; it was forpure love of gardening’’ (E-mail to author). Shethen went on to reveal where her father’s gardensurfaces in her fiction:

We had a blackberry bush, very untamed,that I used for a scene in Mariana! My fa-ther’s gardening philosophy was very casu-al—the lids of tin cans attached by strings toposts or trees to scare away crows (I usedthis in my story, ‘‘Fado’’), no trim walkwaysor clearly delineated beds, very here-and-there. (E-mail to author)

Whereas for Vaz’s father and grandfather, gar-dening was a pastime and supposedly a markerof identity brought from the Azores, in otherPortuguese-American communities, gardeningprovided food in times of need. Such was thecase in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a small fishingtown where the Portuguese had settled—‘‘Porta-gee Hill,’’ as the streets located on the upper partof this fishing town are often known. In an eye-witness account of life in this fishing community,Arthur K. Rose notes in Portagee Hill and a Peo-ple: A Tribute to the Portuguese People (1991) thatdespite the families’ economic difficulties, theywould often ‘‘get together and go on picnics overto Braces Cove, a barren strip of beach on theBack Shore’’ (2). Instead of buying their provi-sions at the local grocery stores, they ‘‘would packbaskets and even washtubs full of food, mostlyfrom their gardens, and beer and homemadewine’’ (2). While the sea provided them with fishand their gardens with vegetables, these fishermenand their wives were extremely self-reliant. With-out a doubt, these traits had been acquired in theAzores where people, before emigrating, hadfared no better. Although during the Depression,they (like everyone else across the nation) hadfaced hard times, they had arrived in America, soto speak, well-equipped to face such hardships.‘‘Most of the people,’’ Rose notes,

grew their own food in the backyard. Whatone didn’t have, the other did. Corn, pota-toes, kale, carrots; you name it, they grew it.They raised chickens for the eggs as well asfor food, and sometimes families would gettogether and buy a pig. That was an all dayevent in itself; when it came time to get thepig, the families would go to the farm andhave the pig slaughtered. (4)

Rose also points out that harvest time and the ‘‘fallmonths’’ were an ‘‘especially fond time’’ for him.‘‘That’s when [his] family would put up theirfruits and vegetables in preserving jars for thecoming winter’’ (4). Moreover, it ‘‘was a lot ofwork to put the food up in jars, but when it wasall over they felt a sense of pride and they knewthey had enough to eat for the long New Englandwinter that was facing them’’ (5). Possessing thesesurvival skills was a plus in such harsh New Eng-land conditions. But such expertise, so to speak,had already been acquired in similar, if not worse,economic conditions in the old country duringthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The vegetable and flower gardens of the ethnicwriters under review are completely at odds withequivalent representations by canonical writers,especially those by Edith Wharton in Italian Vil-las and Their Gardens. In this book on Italiangardening, Wharton expresses her distaste for theinformal landscape style of eighteenth-centuryEngland. She was mesmerized by a more formalstyle of gardening where—instead of sweepinglawns and trees—statues, flowers, marble, pools,water fountains, cascades, and flower boxes weregrouped together to create visual harmony. Withsuch breathtaking Italian vistas imprinted on herretinas, it was inevitable that she would try totransplant them in her familiar American land-scape: The Mount, her house in Lenox, Massa-chusetts. There, she tried to emulate what sheconsidered the perfect combination of architec-ture and landscape gardening that she had wit-nessed and described in her sketch ‘‘FlorentineVillas’’ in this very same book.

Instead of the refinement, leisure, social status,and debate on Otherness as reflected in the gar-dens discussed by Wharton, Cable, and London,


the ethnic garden in Portuguese-American writinginstead mirrors the idiosyncrasies of this partic-ular ethnic background. Ranging from the Cath-olic fervor to the ancestral rural origins of mostPortuguese Americans, in the fiction and poetryof Vaz and Gaspar, the theme of the garden in away allows for an ethnic rewriting of the fables inwhich the busy ant or bee is constantly providingfor the long and harsh winters. Understandably,the pleasure grounds of Wharton and Cable arenowhere to be seen in Portuguese-American lit-erature, since the so-called pioneer generations inthese writings—that is, the first- and second-gen-eration fictional immigrants—are portrayed asobsessed with creating the conditions for a betterlife in a new country even if they, like the ants andbees, have to toil night and day.

Notes

1. On this issue, see Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography, Hungerof Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Fueled by RichardHoggart’s discussion of the scholarship boy in The Uses of Literacy,Rodriguez states that he, like the scholarship boy, has spent most ofhis life moving ‘‘between environments, his home and the classroom,which are at cultural extremes, opposed’’ (46).

2. Reinaldo Francisco Silva, ‘‘Food and Artistic Performance inPortuguese American Writing.’’ Presented at the panel on The BookCooks! Multiethnic Recipes for American Literature, the 117th MLAAnnual Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, December 27–30,2001.

3. See Reinaldo Francisco Silva, ‘‘Mark Twain and the ‘Slow,Poor, Shiftless, Sleepy, and Lazy’ Azoreans in The InnocentsAbroad,’’ The Journal of American Culture 26.1 (2003): 17–23.

Works Cited

Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis inAmerican Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Cul-ture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA:Harvard UP, 2001.

Cable, George W. The Amateur Garden. New York: Scribner’s, 1914.

———. Madame Delphine. Gretna, LA: Firebird Press, 2001.

Clemente, Alice R. ‘‘Of Love and Remembrance: The Poetry andProse of Frank X. Gaspar.’’ Gavea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal ofPortuguese-American Letters and Studies 21 (2000): 25-43.

Conlogue, William. Working the Garden: American Writers andthe Industrialization of Agriculture. Chapel Hill: U of NorthCarolina P, 2001.

Gaspar, Frank X. The Holyoke. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.

———. Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death. Tallahassee, FL:Anhinga Press, 1995.

———. A Field Guide to the Heavens. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,1999.

———. Leaving Pico. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1999.

———. E-mail to the author. 4 May 2002.

Giudice, Luisa Del. ‘‘The ‘Archvilla’: An Italian Canadian Architec-tural Archetype.’’ Studies in Italian American Folklore. Ed. LuisaDel Giudice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1993: 53-105.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: SouthEnd Press, 1992.

London, Jack. The Valley of the Moon. Ed. David Rejl. Los Angeles:Reprint of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1988.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the PastoralIdeal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of RichardRodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Rose, Arthur K. Portagee Hill and a People: A Tribute to thePortuguese People. Gloucester, MA: Sea Shore Literary, 1991.

Silva, Reinaldo Francisco. ‘‘Portuguese American Literature andAnticlericalism: Katherine Vaz’s Reshaping of the Tradition.’’Gavea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-AmericanLetters and Studies 22–23 (2001–2002): 46-63.

———. ‘‘Mark Twain and the ‘Slow, Poor, Shiftless, Sleepy, and Lazy’Azoreans in The Innocents Abroad.’’ The Journal of AmericanCulture 26.1 (2003): 17-23.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. New York:Library of America, 1984.

Vaz, Katherine. Saudade. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.

———. E-mail to the author. 5 May 2002.

Walker, Alice. ‘‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.’’ Ways of Read-ing: An Anthology for Writers. Ed. David Bartholomae andAnthony Petrosky. 2nd ed. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1990: 583-94.

Wharton, Edith. Italian Villas and Their Gardens. 1904. New York:Da Capo Press, 1977.

Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Cultureand Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.


Documents

The Ethnic Garden in Portuguese-American Writing