Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  "What is it?" I breathed reverently when I unwrapped this prize at home after church.

  "I'm not sure what it is," my mother said, "but I think it's a little old for you."

  It was a pale blue silk embroidered envelope for hosiery, padded with light satin, beribboned and elegant. I didn't have any hosiery, being eight. This pale blue satin object had no real purpose; it would have been just as easy to safeguard one's pantyhose by wrapping them in a slip. But the object was as beautiful as it was frivolous. I rightly intuited that if Mennonite culture had an opposite, this thing was it. We didn't even know what to call it. This blue thing was peripheral to everything that we stood for. The pale embroidered envelope suggested the very essence of young ladyhood, and I imagined a time when I would wear white gloves and take tea and straighten the seams of my stockings. (Because Mennonites lived away from the world, I had no idea that young ladies had long abandoned the trappings of femininity portrayed in the books that came my way.)

  I loved this satin object with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind. My mother thought that we should put it away until I got older, but I begged so hard to keep it that she finally relented. Inside it I kept a single cotton handkerchief clustered with tiny lilac florets. One of my aunts had sent me this floral kerchief, perhaps assuming that children of my generation still carried starched hankies in their pinafores. And for my birthday that year Lola gave me a bottle of talc that smelled like lavender. Her Mennonite parents, who were more liberal than mine, allowed such things as gifts in her family. I dusted the hankie with the secret powder every Monday evening in a hazy beauty rite. I wasn't sure what elegant ladies did with floral hankies, so I'd unbraid my hair, brush it slowly and elegantly, and then touch the perfumed hankie lightly to my brow. "Why, thank you!" I'd whisper in the mirror. "I feel so faint!" Then I tucked the hankie back into the pale blue satin thing, where it would fragrantly remain until the following Monday evening.

  Ever since, the smell of lavender had reminded me of the beautiful embroidered blue thing into which I once folded all the inchoate desires of childhood. That lavender hankie was my silent pledge to learn the ways of the world, to sigh and dance the cotillion and wear lace underthings. Beneath the mysterious satin flap there was just enough room to tuck everything I longed for but couldn't name.

  Now a swell of bamboo rustled in the spring breeze, and as I shook my bells, I drew my sweater across my shoulders. My eyes misted over a little as I considered these people, percussing and swaying and singing. Without my husband I had somehow drifted back to this point of origin, as if my turbulent marriage had been a long journey on dark waters that had propelled me away from everything known and safe. I suddenly had the feeling you get when, after a long sea swim, you touch bottom and draw a breath of relief: you made it, land ho, sharks from this point on extremely unlikely. The oldsters were singing and smiling and shivering in the breeze that had picked up, heavy now with the scent of lavender. Harmony rose like prayer in the cool of the late afternoon, and the music was gentle as a hand on the small of the back, nudging me forward-the sound of my heritage, my future.

  APPENDIX

  A Mennonite History Primer

  If you're like most folks, you may still have some pressing questions about the Mennonites. I get these questions all the time. At the outset of this book you were probably thinking, Whaaa-? Mennonites? Don't they drive around in horse-drawn buggies and wear doilies on their heads? Or maybe, if you're a straight guy: Hey, yeah, don't Mennonite chicks dress up as semisexy French maids, in black dresses with aprons? What are they wearing under all those layers, anyway? Or, if you're a subscriber to interior decor magazines, Aren't Mennonites the folks who make collectible quilts, many of which are now unaffordable on eBay?

  These are reasonable questions, and no Mennonite writer worth her salt would leave them unanswered. So the answers to these questions are, in order:

  • Sometimes, depending on your congregational filiation.

  • Keep your pervy pecker in your pants, mister. Mennonite gals do not put out, no matter how alluring we are in our bonnets and aprons.

  • Granny panties. White as a flag, but with no surrender.

  • I know of one that sold for $15,500-quilt, not panty. Though I'm pretty sure that the same guy who'd ask question number four would also be prepared to bid on a pair of Mennonite panties on eBay. Perhaps an enterprising entrepreneur should try selling Mennonite panties on eBay, perhaps even set up an e-store, for instance, MyMennonitePanty.com. Hell, I'll volunteer to get this chap started. I'll donate a pair of my own panties for free. Provided that I get to choose the panties.

  Clearly the dominant American culture confuses us Mennonites with the Amish, who in fact began as an insurgent faction rebelling from the Mennonites. America's conflation is reasonable, since the Mennonites and the Amish have historically overlapped in many lifestyle choices.

  But the Amish cut away from the Mennonites in 1693 because the rest of us were too liberal. That's rich, no? A liberal Mennonite is an oxymoron if ever there was one. So many Mennonite beliefs and practices are conservative that folks are perplexed by what they see as a curious dichotomy. On the one hand, the Mennonites resist change with their narrow doxy and their old-fashioned commitment to family values. On the other hand, those same Mennonites have actually identified with some leftist attitudes over the course of their near-five-hundred-year history. Because they are pro-peace, they are antiwar. Because they are nonviolent, they oppose the death penalty. Because they are anticonsumer, they promote a simple lifestyle that advocates for the environment. It's a curious collision of opposite forces that even today results in split political filiations among American Mennonite churches. Some are Republican; others lean Democrat.

  While it seems laughable at first to think that the Amish broke up with the Mennonites because we were too liberal, it actually does makes theological sense. It nevertheless still tickles my funnybone to think that the Amish had a problem with the big bad carousing Mennonite lifestyle. "We'll have none of your worldly schnitzel, thank you! Come along, Esther! From now on we'll attend sing-alongs with our own kind!" Mennonite youth gatherings, no matter how enthusiastic, would never dream of spinning the bottle. If you think Mennonites do anything at a sing-along except sing, you are sadly mistaken! Mennonites don't party. We don't cut a rug. We make the rug, braiding it festively out of old rags, like the ancient rugs you sometimes see in museums dedicated to the life and times of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  Thus I'm not really sure what the Amish rebel Jacob Amman found to object to in our humble little religion. We Mennonites were pretty damn holy in the early years. For instance, we were the folks who got burned at the stake, like witches, but without the exciting element of sexual mystery. With witches, there was a trial that involved a strip search for a witch's tit, a devil's mark where Satan would come and suckle. In actual practice, the witch's tit was often any old mole or freckle, but the idea was that, due to the witch's consensual but unnatural suckling activities, she was one cold mama, and therefore you could shove a needle into the witch's tit and she would not flinch. This is where we get that expression cold as a witch's tit.

  Not that Mennonites would say cold as a witch's tit. We don't hold with witches. Mind you, we haven't ruled them out. If Satan, or séances, or witches, or witches' tits, come up in casual conversation, as they inevitably must, a Mennonite might nod and murmur darkly, "There are powers and principalities!" This affirmation, a bromide descended peripatetically from Romans 8:38, I have always understood to mean something like this: "As an obedient Mennonite, I do believe in an external evil entity, and also in a literal hell, and damnation, and eternal punishment, and so on, but overall I prefer not to say the word Satan, because, all things considered, I do not want to sound like a nutter." After this Mennonite remarks that there are powers and principalities, she will almost certainly redirect the conversation back into more wholesome nonsatanic channels. "There are powers and
principalities" is the Mennonite version of "It is what it is"-a polite way to simultaneously show that you are listening, but to indicate that you'd really rather change the subject.

  An alert reader might ask the follow-up question: "But what is the Mennonite position on tits?" Good question! This reader has really been paying attention! In fact Mennonites neither say nor have tits. Hence in the seventeenth century at the trials of heretics there was no Mennonite strip search. No tit probing. At the Anabaptist trials, it went more like this:

  BURGHER OR MAGISTRATE. Aganetha Janzen, do you hereby confess that you refuse infant baptism?

  AGANETHA JANZEN. I do.

  BURGHER OR MAGISTRATE. Then I hereby sentence you to death by burning. And if you sing God's praises, I'll have to shove this iron stake through your tongue.

  AGANETHA JANZEN. Okay.

  I can't speak for the witches, but the Anabaptists were so eager to die for their faith that they made it a point to refuse the optional little bag of gunpowder that was offered as a civil courtesy to most martyrs. You'd strap the bag to your upper shin, see, so that the dying would be over and done with lickety-split. When the flames flared as high as the knee, kaboom. But the Mennonite martyrs waved away the gunpowder. They wanted the long drawn-out pain, on the theory that Jesus Christ's protracted suffering on the cross served as a shining example for us all.

  Before all of the Mennonites in Western Europe could meet their Maker in this rather spectacular fashion, Russia's Catherine the Great saved the day in 1789 by inviting them to settle her weakest border spot, the land that would one day become Ukraine. They came; they saw; they planted. In 1817 they buckled down to business under the leadership of my favorite czarist dictator, Johann Cornies. I have personally visited this man's 25,000-acre holdings and his Ukrainian estate, Jushanlee. Although the man has been dead for 160 years, his passion for micromanagement lives on. Johann Cornies insisted on implementing a wide variety of agricultural innovations and on passing laws chillingly specific. For example, he legislated paint color-not just of public buildings like schools and churches, but of people's houses. Some call him a pioneer and a visionary. Okay, maybe that's just me. Such innovations! It was attractive paint, and durable! Merino sheep, animal husbandry, silkworms for one and all! And he was also the guy who introduced potatoes to the Russian clime.

  Johann Cornies ruled the Mennonite Kolonien with an iron fist in a sweaty glove. From 1830 to 1848 ole Johann became more hands-on in his governing style, passing laws that progressively became more obsessed with lifestyle, sanitation, and ritual. He set up "model villages" for problem neighbors, such as the Russians and the Jews. He liked his Judenplan-the model Jewish schtetl-so much that he transferred the idea to the Mennonite villages, which soon became rigid utopias of sameness and hygiene. Cornies busily started making decrees about what the villagers should and shouldn't eat. Finally he even started enforcing daily menus, threatening to flog the noncompliant. For Monday, boiled potato dumplings! Tuesday, leftover dumplings! Wednesday, fat-back and fried dumplings! And so on. Woe to you if you're in the mood for a taco.

  Johann Cornies's nickname was "Tree Devil," because, in a powerful vision for a new and improved Ukraine, he ruthlessly bullied the Mennonites into planting fruit trees at the rear of their property lines. They also had to plant a fruit tree in front of every house, in every village, by every road, thirty feet from every front door.

  Naturally, some of the Mennonite villagers started bitching about the long arm of the Johann Cornies administration. The rebels came up with a surefire way to demonstrate their opinion of laws regarding trees. Here's what they elected to do by way of social protest, and you'll surely agree that this eloquent gesture presents Mennonite protest at its finest. They decided to plant the trees upside down. Since there weren't a lot of trees on the Ukrainian steppes at that time, these farmers could, if questioned by the Johann Cornies mafia, pretend that they just hadn't known any better. "Dude," they'd shrug, pointing at the apricot tree with its roots in the air, "we planted that sucker exactly like you told us. Thirty feet from the front door. Measure it."

  I see this eloquent nineteenth-century gesture of subversion as brave, savvy, and intensely effective. It brings to mind similar gestures of defiance, as when, on American Idol, a rejected vocalist in her Princess Leia costume flips a turgid bird at Simon Cowell and shouts, "Your mother!"

  So to sum up: Mennonites. Not the Amish.

  For the entire Mennonite occupation of Ukraine, Mennonites thought of themselves as having been divinely called to lead the local Russians and Jews out of the darkness and into the light. It was as if the Mennonites thought the indigenous population was a lot of special-needs folks who just couldn't get there on their own. For hundreds of years Mennonites had a teensy ego problem. Well, who wouldn't? Let's face it, their hygiene was superb; their ovens, well-ventilated; their soup, full of savory prunes. They had a lot to be proud of. Did they live in mud huts like the Russian peasants? No, ma'am. Did they marry outside the extended family? By no means. Did they contribute the idea of the Judenplan for the ideal Jewish village? Sure! Whatever your village-planning problem, the Mennonites could solve it, particularly if your problem involved being Jewish, Russian, or Nogai! The Mennonite cheese stands alone. The Mennonites enjoyed three centuries of high-handed superiority. Is not a bit of self-congratulation pardonable, given the really good flavor of Mennonite sausage?

  It's not that the Mennonites made a big push to convert the Russian peasants and the Jews; in fact, theologically speaking, Mennonites have kept pretty much to themselves throughout their four-hundred-year history. They haven't been evangelical in the sense of those freshly shaven young men in short-sleeved shirts who, clutching their corduroy-covered Bibles, ring your doorbell and ask earnestly if you've thought about hell at all. Mennonite superiority wasn't about what we believed. It was about what we did. It turned on demonstrable things like work habits and hygiene. It wasn't our fault that the entire native population was shiftless, unmotivated, and blighted by poor economic judgment, but we could fix that shit!

  Allow me to illustrate my point. I was reading a riveting text titled Heritage Remembered: A Pictorial Survey of Mennonites in Prussia and Russia. After eighty pages of old-time photos of Mennonite farmers, preachers, and mill owners, the book suddenly offered a drawing of a Russian wagon. This Charlie Brown wagon looked like the sad fort my brothers built in the backyard when they were eight and five, using the crappy wooden crate that the Nachtigalls' refrigerator had come in. Under the drawing, the Mennonite author Gerhard Lohrenz had written laconically, "Russian wagon, compare to Mennonite wagon on page 249." I have to say that I was a little surprised by the braggadocio of this caption. The Reverend Gerhard Lohrenz's tone was implying that the Mennonite wagon was the Porsche Boxster to the rusted Russian Pinto.

  The Reverend Gerhard Lohrenz must have cherried out his own wagon, back in the day when he washed it in his driveway. But at the time that Heritage Remembered was published, the Reverend Gerhard Lohrenz was seventy-six years old, mature enough to live and let live on the whole wagon issue. Dude, I thought. Mennonites aren't supposed to boast about their wagons. They're supposed to live simple and humble lives, earnestly thanking God that they've moved beyond horseback.

  But whatever. I obediently turned to page 249, where I was met not with one, not with two, but with three Mennonite wagons, all of which clearly kicked the ass of the lesser Russian wagon. Here are the captions. The first read, "A Mennonite covered wagon, unfamiliar among the Russians." (Hey, Russians! You WISH you had a wagon like this!) The second caption read, "Mennonite droschka. Every Mennonite farmer had one. Among Russians the droschka was unknown except when a well-to-do Russian citizen bought one from Mennonites." (Too bad that your richest Russian is like the poorest Mennonite!) Finally, the third caption cleared its throat with pride and said, "A Mennonite box-wagon. It too was unknown to the Russians but very much desired by them. The better-off Russian farmers bought such
wagons as soon as they could." (Say uncle, you sorry-ass-wagon losers!)

  The reason I bring all this up is that in a shocking historical reversal, the very Mennonites who were once the cool kids on the block became not fifty years later the überdorks of the universe, just in time for my childhood. History reminds us that there are highs and lows on any ethnic journey. With a nod to the prophet Isaiah, "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low." Thus the wheel of fortune turned, and it was the Mennonites' time in the doghouse. Gone were the days of triumphant Judenplans. Gone the czarist kickbacks, gone the Beisitzer estates, gone the serfs who served your family loyally for three generations. Hello long skirts, tight braids, and Borscht in your thermos. While the Beatles were arriving and the rest of the nation was singing "Here Comes the Sun," I couldn't help noticing that the Mennonites, led by Connie Isaac, were singing alleluia.

  This is the real dope on Mennonites, the good stuff that you won't find in the academic works by Mennonite scholars. Because I respect your time, I have organized this material under a list of helpful subheadings. Mennonites have a high threshold for boredom. As mentioned before, we can sit still for hours and hours on end in church, and on a wooden pew, with a flat ass, in a scratchy dress; it's a skill we learn from birth. But I am aware that not everybody has the Mennonite Sitzfleisch. Hence I offer an abridged version, a Cliff's Notes for the busy and the brief.