A Well Seasoned Story

Written and researched by Chris Chiller

About a thousand years ago, an ethnic group left northwestern India, moving west. These were people who maintained a tight community, clinging to their language and customs. Using borrowed words related to horses and commerce as clues and historical records, it seems likely that the group spent time in Persia. The group continued to move west into Greece and the Anatolia region of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. 

Around the 1300s, they spread into Europe, all the while maintaining their language and ethnic identity. 

 

Their language seems most closely related to Sanskrit, but the Europeans mistook it for one of the three languages in use in Egypt, referring to these people as Egyptos or Gypsies. They were viewed with suspicion as they were all immigrants who would not assimilate, and they tended to live nomadic lives, trading horses and goods wherever they went. 

 

It appears they quickly adopted observance of  a culture now referred to as “marime.” This culture insists on strict adherence to anti-pollution rules on food preparation as well as casual interactions with the non-Romani residents of the places they went. To enforce marime, they were careful to maintain their language and dress. 

 

While the culture is different from that associated with European Jewry, the reactions of the dominant populations were similar but even more extreme. The Romani were accused of theft, Un-Christian divination, and stealing children for nefarious purposes. The common reaction was to subject them to criminal punishment, including slavery. 

 

That is how Romani came to be among the very earliest Europeans in the New World. The earliest documented mention is the four “egiptos,” the Spanish term for Romani, that sailed on Christopher Columbus’s third voyage in 1498. This was the start of a forced colonist policy that the Major powers used to provide workforce to the plantations and mines of the new world.

 

Romani slaves or indentured servants were sent to Virginia and the Caribbean islands by the British. France sent hundreds of “Bohemians,” the French name, and loaded Louisiana with Romani men just before the Louisiana Purchase. Spain also continued to enslave its egiptos. Such harsh treatment left the Romani even more insular.

 

There were three main streams of Romani immigrants that came to America starting in the mid-19th century.

1. The Romanichals came from Britain in large numbers as immigrants after 1850. They were renowned for their horse trading and mule work, often running the livery stables in many New England towns. 
2. So-called Romanian Gypsies, the Ludar mostly came from northwestern Bosnia between 1880 and 1914. They were animal trainers and circus performers. 
3. The Rom, also known as Vlax, came from Serbia, Russia and Austria-Hungary starting in the 1880’s. They were metal workers, specializing in retinning heavy equipment for commercial bakeries and laundries. 

While some settled in place, many chose to continue their nomadic lifestyle, travelling with horse-drawn “gypsy wagons.” They would set up camp on the outskirts of a community and offer services such as tinkering repairs to metal kitchenware.

 

At roughly the same time as the Romani influx, Spiritualism was expanding throughout the US, especially among the well-off. Interest in the paranormal spread like wildfire after the Fox sisters in upstate New York claimed they could communicate with the dead. Mary Todd Lincoln was reported to have multiple seances to try to communicate with her dead son, Willie.

 

Reports at the time mention the St. Croix Valley was “excited” by the idea of talking to dead loved ones. In Calais, seances were a regular feature but also some answers from the ‘dead’ were demonstrably wrong, raising public suspicion. As belief in the efficacy of communing with the dead waned, many of the curious shifted to clairvoyants and fortune tellers, hoping to glimpse the future for their own benefit.

 

The Romani took advantage of the interest in divination and the women especially began to offer fortune- telling. Romani women would knock on doors in Maine resort towns offering to tell the future, and travelers were seen in places like Old Orchard Beach from about 1890 through the mid 1950s. In all cases, the women were just travelling through and would move to another town as they were encouraged to leave by the law.

 

Fortune telling has a more than checkered past as far as keeping public order. A ‘gypsy’ fortune teller who stays put invites the ire of the disappointed. We lived next door to a woman who gave tarot and other readings in the town of Deadwood, South Dakota back in the ‘90s. Deadwood had recently legalized gambling and casinos were up and down Main Street. People were streaming in hoping to win money while having a good time. Some of them consulted the Madame before gambling to get an early look at their chances. One of them was a true believer in spirit guides, and was disappointed to lose everything after a favorable turn of the cards. As I recall her story, this person sent a letter to the town threatening a lawsuit and bad publicity. 

 

The town settled some amount with them, but immediately passed an ordinance making it illegal to, 

“…advertise or engage in or carry on any business of telling fortunes, carrying on a business advertising or involving a cult or psychics powers, facilities or forces, clairvoyants, spirits, mediumship, seership, prophesy, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, or other craft…”

 

This ordinance stood until 2014 when it was repealed such that some of the locals could organize Haunted Deadwood tours and ghost hunting parties. The story is included to show how fortune telling could disrupt public order, even if gambling is removed. Questions of inheritance or prospects for love can rouse the most mild when rosy predictions do not come true.

 

The Deadwood ordinance mimicked thousands from the previous two centuries which were mostly directed at the Romani. Maine’s iteration was spelled out specifically in Title 17, Section 3758 of the Maine Revised Statutes Annotated. The law empowered county sheriffs to jail:

“all rogues, vagabonds, and idle persons…begging; persons using any subtle craft, jugglery, or unlawful games, or plays, or for the sake of gain pretending to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmistry, to tell destinies or fortunes or to discover lost or stolen goods; common pipers, fiddlers, runaways, drunkards, nightwalkers, rallers, brawlers, and pilferers.”

 

(Anyone who knows what a raller was should send an email. I’m baffled.)

 

The Maine ordinance seems to be mostly designed to give the local sheriff a means to keep the “Gypsies” moving before they stole too much or won too much money from shell games or three card Monte. There may have been suspicions that even more was taking place as the title of the ordinance was, “Lascivious speech or behavior in public places “ (Don’t send me any emails, I’m pretty sure I know what they didn’t want in public.)

 

The Romani continued their nomadic ways until the early 1960s when changing circumstances compelled them to adopt more standard lives with jobs and regular church attendance. They were not forced to move on so much as they encountered truancy laws, trespassing laws, traffic ordinances, and vehicle safety ordinances making their wagons unlawful. It simply became easier to go mainstream. Research shows that there are roughly one million people of Romani descent living in the US as of 2020, but they are not the people of Reality TV. They are not recognizable by their features or dress, but they still converse in their language among themselves. You might live next door to a Romani family and not recognize them as ethnically distinct. If this short look at the Romani has piqued your interest, I recommend the following books:

1. Roma: Modern American Gypsies by Anne H. Sutherland 
2. American Roma: A Modern Investigation of Lived Experiences and Media Portrayals by Melanie R. Covert 

 

This history of nomadic groups, local legal pressure and mutable cultural shifts made a perfect backdrop for the second book from The Admiral Inn. In A Dragon in the Bookcase, Chapter 2 we are introduced to Ocean Sutton: 

 

“June turned back to focus through the bleached-out glare as sparkles seemed to dance around a woman climbing out of the rear door of a sedan. The magic fizzled with the glint of fake coins sewn to the fringe of a batik scarf encircling a tiny frame stuffed into a puffy white coat. June could pick out one operatic, high-pitched voice.

 

“Oh, I feeeeel it! The energy is positively swirling around me.”

 

Thinking of society as a sort of ecosystem, it is not surprising that other groups rose up to occupy the niche vacated by the Romani. My neighbor, when she was in Deadwood, and the fictional Ocean Sutton, for example, became providers of alternative spiritual guidance. In the case of each of them, Hollywood had presented an image of gypsies the two women copied in their dress. Later in Chapter ten an added twist is revealed in a conversation with police 

Detective Daniel Bonnet:

““Ms. June. Do you know what happened here in the summer of ’68?”

 

“I’ve only heard a passing joke about the Great Hippie Invasion. Now you’re saying it was a real thing?” June kept her eyes on the windows across the front of the mansion, straining to see anything amiss.

 

“It was not a joke back then. It is a bit of a fish story, but some accounts say there were over a hundred people squatting around the town.” He parked the car in front of the sprawling gingerbread wrap around porch that led to the grand entrance. With a well-practiced move, he fished his tiny notebook from his inner jacket pocket and flipped it open. “Prior to that, the townsfolk had worked hard to stop the migration of what the locals called ‘gypsies’ through Moorewicks Bay every summer as they came up from the south. According to Buck Hollister, this was something common in the fifties and sixties. While these nomads would offer some skills or repairs, and shall we say, ‘exotic services,’ the townsfolk claimed that they stole anything not tied down.”

 

June turned to look at him. “Wait a minute. I’m still back at ‘exotic services.’”

 

“Not what you are thinking. Like fortune telling and tonics. Stuff like that.” Dan shifted in his seat to face her.

 

“Ok, but they are gypsies, not hippies? Just so I get my discrimination slur right.”

“Yes,” he smirked, “but when the town passed a series of anti-gypsy laws, they thought their vagrancy issue was solved. It seems they instead, created a void, and in 1968, that big group of hippies came into the town and set up camp in the city park.”

 

“Wait, wait, wait.” June squeezed her eyes closed. “Actual anti-gypsy laws? Like, anti-Romani laws? That can’t be legal.”

 

“Not specifically anti-anyone. It is more like no unpermitted booths or anti-fortune telling laws.”

 

June snorted a laugh at the detective. “Anti-fortune telling? You made that up.”

 

“No Ma’am. Many towns still have these laws on the books today.”

 

June squinted at the detective. “And Moorewicks Bay?”

 

“Well, yes.”

 

Her gaze burrowed into the Detective. “You do realize that most of the work I do as an accountant for all those good townsfolk is predictions. Budgets. Projections. I am actually a ‘fortune-teller.’ Oh, and I’m a woman. With long grey hair.” She leaned in and whispered, “And when the moon is full, I like to dance—”

 

“Ms. June.” Detective Dan pushed his back against the driver’s door and rubbed his eyes. “I cannot unsee that.”

 

The plot point was that Ocean came in with the travelers the locals called Hippies and left with an enduring memento of her visit. I’ll not spoil the story for you, but in many ways the mobile youth of the ‘60s did take up where the Romani left off. It was common among the counterculture to explore alternate spiritualities, and fortune telling of a type was accomplished using the I-Ching, a Daoist book with epigrams chosen by randomly flipping coins or throwing sticks. It was part of exploring other paths than the Christian tradition they had been exposed to growing up. 

 

While the allure of eastern religions has somewhat faded, the desire for foreknowledge remains. It has been estimated that Connecticut, where I live, has 30 to 50 psychics, 40 metaphysical centers and several hundred private practitioners. The Romani and the hippies of stereotype are gone, but their echoes remain.