My Heritage

ON a trip to Greece a few years ago my father died and was buried in his native village. Last year I went to see his burial place and the house where he was born. I wanted to know more about my origins.

At Athens I took a coastwise steamer for Gytheion, in the extreme south of Greece. There I got a taxi and a guide to take me to the village of Panitsa. We had to leave the car and walk the last two miles over a rock path to the village. It was beautiful country, and there were more wild flowers in the fields than I had ever seen before. Walking through them, I thought of ancient Greece. In the harbor of Gytheion I had just seen the island of Kranae, where Paris stopped with Helen when they were fleeing to Troy. And a few hours earlier the steamer had passed Cythera, the island of Venus.

But my reverie was interrupted when I saw a group of tall, straight cypresses in an open field ahead of us, the sign of a cemetery. After I had put wild flowers on my father’s grave we started for the village. We crossed more fields to a road, and were soon in a little square closed in with tall white houses. There was not a soul in sight, and yet there was no sense of desertion. Always in hot countries there is the feeling about houses that they are places people are about to come out from, soon. We turned left through a wall gate into the courtyard of a farmhouse. Except that it was white, it was just such a house as you find everywhere in France, with three sides built around a court.

We climbed the steps to the first story and knocked. A woman came to the door, and the guide motioned me in. We entered a large room with a high ceiling, the walls whitewashed, the floors bare stone, the only light coming from a partly closed shutter. There was a table against the wall, two or three chairs, a bureau with photographs, several ikons, a candle-lamp fixed to the wall. In one corner there was a pile of bright-colored blankets, and in another a large, high bed. Here my uncle — who had been a foster father to my own father, and was now an old man — was rising from his siesta, greeting me, putting on his shoes, wiping his eyes. He took my hand, and then — the awful embarrassment of not having a language in common. He looked at me carefully and sadly, and the housekeeper cried, as if some message had come from the dead.

And somehow (for the deserted square had been full of eyes) the word spread, and relatives began coming in. There were perhaps three hundred people in the village, divided among four families, and, for reasons of relationship, a fourth of them came to see me. One of the earliest arrivals was a man who had spent several years in America and spoke English very well, and thereafter the questions were asked and answered through him. The guide was dismissed, the taxi sent back, and I was to stay the night, a week, a month, always. But now something to eat; I must be hungry, I must be tired. So, quickly, an omelet with cheese made of goat’s milk, bread, and coffee. And all the while the men and women who were my cousins were greeting me. The children kissed my hands, and the widow of another uncle held one of my hands for a long while, stroking it, smiling, crying, the affection was so sweet to her.

It was somehow quiet. The interpreter would carry a question and an answer, and the women would smile and comment. The room was full, and more chairs were being brought in, babies were put on the bed, and I felt a kind of peace at being taken into all this talking.

When I had finished eating, someone suggested we go out for a while. The women stayed behind, but about six of the men, my Uncle Thomas leading, came out with me into the small square again and we sat down at two little tables under the mulberry tree. From the cafe the proprietor brought us coffee and candied cherries. We talked, and more people came up to greet me, among them the village priest, tall and full of smiling dignity. He was also a cousin, and he wanted to know what I had been doing, and all about Rome and Florence and Paris, where he had never been. And they all asked if I thought war was coming soon, as they believed.

Then, as the shadows began to grow and the children were coming out of school, we set forth to see the fields my father had owned. My uncle led the procession, taking authority silently. We saw the silver glistening of the olive trees and the ripe wheat, and we drank water from a spring. And on the path back to the village they showed me an open shelter the size of a henhouse, and inside were the skull and bones of a human skeleton. This was one of my ancestors, and for some reason it is considered fit that his remains should be preserved in open sight.

It was dark when we came back to the house. In the large room a great table had been fitted together, and the white tablecloth shone beneath oil lamps and candles. The housekeeper and two or three other women were just bringing in the soup. Before we sat down I looked into the kitchen. It was like a huge cave, anti against the back wall a cauldron was hanging over a fire set in a hollow in the floor. This was the only light in the room. The shadows of the women were thrown against the walls, and here and there a half-grown girl held a baby while the mother helped with the supper. It was like something out of a long-forgotten past.

Looking at the fire and the shadows on the wall, I thought of the stories that must have been told here, of the feuds with which these hills abound — perhaps of a shepherd who stole another shepherd’s wife, which is what they say was the beginning of the Trojan War. It was here men would have come, tired from work or fighting, to sit by the fire and tell their stories while the meat smoked.

I was placed across from my uncle; then there were his two strong sons, and five or six other men. The only woman at the table was the widow of Thomas’s brother, and she represented him. It was the table of a patriarch. There was chicken-and-rice soup, fried chicken, and a dessert of curdled goat’s milk with sugar sprinkled over it. The walls were dark now, with lamps and candles from the table giving the only light. Soon the women cleared away the dishes. We sat and talked awhile over cigarettes; the things we talked about could have kept us all summer. And then it was time for bed.

I was to have my uncle’s room. One of the women was making the bed, using the handwoven blankets — which are the symbol of a family’s wealth — for a mattress, and then the white sheets, with another blanket and a quilt; and when it was all done it was as high as my chest. One by one my cousins said good-night and my uncle last of all. I undressed and got into the clean soft nightgown left for me, and then I noticed that the only window in the room was closed with shutters. There was no glass, but there were spaces for the air. I thought awhile and decided to leave the shutters closed, to see what it would be like to wake in the morning in the dark. I put out the candle, in its bracket on the wall, and fell into the sweetest bed I ever laid my head in, full of the smell of the sun on the grass beneath the olive trees.

I woke in the morning thinking stars had somehow come into the room. The roof was thatched with reeds, and every so often a small opening the size of a hazelnut had been left. Through these openings the light blue sky glistened, and the room was cool and still light.

In this way I came to understand a little of another tradition that belongs to me. And all the time I was wondering — and I shall never know — what survives of ancient Greece in this, in people who have lived under the same sky, with the same language. My life has been in and of America, and I do not belong in that historic, patriarchal world. But I have seen it, and I recognize my heritage.