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INTRODUCTION

Newcomers

A few days before Thanksgiving, I took the subway from Manhattan to the New York City borough of Queens. It was one of those November mornings that signal Thanksgiving is near—a cloudless sky, temperatures bracing enough to warrant diving into the coat closet to locate a scarf and gloves, and the sight of fallen leaves swirling in a neighborhood garden as I walked to the subway station. When my train exited the tunnel under the East River and clattered aboveground into Queens, I could see the sun sparkling on the water down below. A couple of miles south of the bridge I had just crossed, the East River empties into New York Harbor. It mingles there with the Hudson River, which flows into the harbor from its parallel route along the west side of Manhattan.

When the one hundred and two English settlers now known as the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower in the autumn of 1620, they intended to land not far from this very spot. The ship’s master, Christopher Jones, was steering for the mouth of “Hudson’s River.” The Hudson, as the river would come to be called, formed the northernmost border of the Colony of Virginia, where the English Crown had given the Pilgrims permission to settle. But the turbulent seas and fierce winds of the Atlantic pushed the Mayflower off course. The ship overshot its destination, ending up off the tip of Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts. It was November. Winter was coming. The Mayflower had been in transit for two months, and provisions were running dangerously low.

Master Jones informed the Pilgrim leaders that his ship could go no farther and told them to choose a spot to land. The Pilgrims selected a location with a deep harbor, an abundant source of fresh water, and a hill on which they could build a defensible fort. They named their new home Plymouth, after the English port city from which they had embarked on their journey to the New World. It became the first permanent European settlement in New England.

My destination in Queens that autumn morning was a public high school for recent immigrants. Newcomers High School was founded in 1995 for the purpose of providing new arrivals with intensive instruction in the English language and an introduction to American culture, along with the standard high school curriculum. Once they are proficient in English, the students have the option of transferring to a mainstream city high school. Newcomers is housed in an imposing four-story brick edifice in Long Island City. The building first opened its doors in 1905, when an earlier wave of immigrants arrived in New York City with children who needed to be educated.

Queens is one of the most ethnically diverse communities in America. It is home to 2.7 million New Yorkers, almost half of whom—47.7 percent, to be precise—were born in a foreign country, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. More than half of Queens residents speak a language other than English at home. The ethnic composition of students at Newcomers High reflects that diversity. On the day I visited, the school’s eight hundred fifty students came from sixty-plus countries and spoke more than forty languages. If the Tower of Babel had a contemporary earthly home, it would be located in the corridors of Newcomers High.

For Newcomers’ students, the coming holiday would be their first or second Thanksgiving. I was visiting the school at the invitation of two teachers who were teaching the history of the holiday even though it wasn’t part of the state-mandated curriculum. A hundred years earlier, at the turn of the twentieth century, when immigrants were flooding into this country from many distant lands, school textbooks routinely included the history of Thanksgiving. Teaching newly arrived students about the history and traditions of the holiday was seen as a way to Americanize them, a way to help them establish ties to their new country. These days, while the basic history of Thanksgiving is still taught in elementary schools, it has mostly disappeared from high school curriculums. The teachers who invited me to speak to their classes in Queens were taking a cue from the past. They saw an opportunity to educate their foreign-born students about the early history of their new country as well as a way to help them understand a uniquely American holiday that is enjoyed by virtually every citizen.

I agreed to lead the class discussions because I wanted to hear what students had to say about the favorite holiday of their new country. What did these young people know about the origins of Thanksgiving? Were their families going to celebrate it? What did this uniquely American festival tell them—positive and negative—about the history, values, and culture of the United States?

Several years later, that day at Newcomers High is still vivid in my mind. As the school bell announced the start of my first class, eleventh-grade American history, I felt a little stab of nervousness. Sixteen-year-olds can be annoyingly taciturn. Would the kids slouching at the desks in front of me have anything to say about a holiday that many of them had never even celebrated? How would I encourage them to talk to me, especially those for whom English still didn’t come easily? My sister Holly, a high school teacher, had advised me to avoid asking yes-no questions. Frame your questions in a manner that encourages the kids to speak expansively, she suggested. As it turned out, getting the students to speak up was not a problem. Anything but. The problem was keeping them from talking all at once. They had lots to say and were eager to talk. As our classroom conversation took shape, it did not take me long to realize that this group of teenagers, born in the four corners of the world, had much to teach a native-born visitor about the essential meaning of Thanksgiving.

These young newcomers had a very personal understanding of the earliest story at the heart of the American experience. For them, the Pilgrim story was their story, and the Pilgrim fathers and mothers were historical reflections of themselves. Some identified with the group of Pilgrims known as Separatists, the religious dissenters who were seeking an opportunity to practice their faith freely. Others felt a kinship with the Strangers, the skilled workers and indentured servants who took passage on the Mayflower in the hope of building better lives for themselves and their families in the New World.

The teenagers understood the hurdles that the English settlers had to overcome before they celebrated the First Thanksgiving. More important, they understood why it was worth the risks. A boy from Bangladesh expressed it eloquently, if with imperfect grammar: “My story and their story was very much alike,” he said. “Both groups suffered in their mother country . . . and arrived in the United States with a new hope in [their] heart, a new dream in [their] eyes.”

For the students at Newcomers High, the Pilgrims’ story mirrored their own experiences, and they exuberantly claimed the Thanksgiving holiday as their own. The Pilgrims “were looking for something they didn’t have in England,” explained a girl from Colombia. “When you come here it is the same. You have to face difficulties.” An Ecuadorian girl sitting near her agreed: “When the Pilgrims came here, they felt alone and didn’t have friends. Me either.”

Other students shared similar personal tales: “My dad came here to have a better life,” offered a girl from Ivory Coast. Her father had worked as a houseboy in his home country. Now he had a good job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Or a boy from China: “My mother finished elementary school. Then there wasn’t any money for middle school. . . . She wanted to come here to make a better life for her children.” Another Bangladeshi boy referred to the Declaration of Independence: His family came here for the purpose of “pursuiting the happiness.”

Like the Separatists—the Calvinist reformers who had rejected the Church of England—some of the students at Newcomers High came to the United States seeking freedom of worship. One boy told me he was from Tibet, a country that has not existed formally since China annexed it in 1950. He explained that his Buddhist family couldn’t practice the religion of the Dalai Lama in China. A Christian student, born in the predominantly Muslim country of Indonesia, described how she was persecuted by Muslims in her neighborhood and feared for her safety. Another Christian, this one a Copt from Egypt, said she was afraid of being kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. “We wanted to close all the bad pages of memory . . . and start a new page,” she told me in describing her family’s decision to move to the United States.

The students were so eager to talk that it was sometimes hard to keep up. The words flew across the room. Our conversation ranged far beyond the Pilgrims and the history of the First Thanksgiving. The students knew that a hallmark of the holiday was feasting, and soon the discussion segued to the poverty they observed in America, the land of plenty. They offered views on American generosity, on football, on the European settlers’ displacement of the Native American peoples, on Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, and of course, on Thanksgiving dinner.

The kids were all familiar with Thanksgiving’s food traditions and many said they planned to celebrate at home with the traditional meal. It would be the first time that some of them would taste turkey, a meat not widely available in many of their native countries. There would be nontraditional foods on the menu too, as their families initiated their own Thanksgiving food traditions by incorporating favorite home-country dishes into the classic American meal. A Polish girl mentioned pierogies. A Chinese boy said his family would eat rice. When I asked whether it really matters what you eat on Thanksgiving, I got a bunch of you-gotta-be-kidding looks. “Yes! It’s tradition!” one student shouted out. “Remember the history of the country,” another student admonished. When it came to attitudes about Thanksgiving, the familiar metaphor of America as a melting pot certainly held true for this spirited group of teenagers.

The basic story of the First Thanksgiving is well known to every American: Pilgrims and Indians. Turkey and cranberries. Giving thanks. But few Americans know much more about the holiday’s multifaceted history. Nor do we often stop to consider the role that Thanksgiving has played in many aspects of American life in the four centuries since the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people feasted together for three days in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts.

It was late summer or early autumn in 1621 when the Pilgrims who had survived their first winter in the New World sat down with their Wampanoag neighbors to share food and fellowship. The friendly coexistence between the English settlers and the Native Americans would last only a few decades longer. But that original Thanksgiving pointed the way to the diverse, multicultural people we have become.

In telling the history of Thanksgiving, I have taken my cue from the young immigrants I interviewed at Newcomers High School. Like my conversation with those enthusiastic newcomers, this book ranges widely, venturing into the realms of religion, hospitality, economics, philanthropy, culture, and politics, as well as food. It is not arranged chronologically. Rather, it weaves and bobs among the centuries to recount little-known stories about Thanksgiving that I hope will shed light on the meaning of America’s favorite holiday and how it reflects and reinforces values most Americans share.

Thanksgiving is at the heart of the American experience. It is intertwined with seminal moments in our history—the arrival of the early European settlers, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the westward expansion, the influx of immigrants. In all these events, religious faith played a part. The first act of the first Continental Congress was to declare a national day of giving thanks to God. The first presidential proclamation was George Washington’s call for a day of thanksgiving. In 1863, when the nation was torn asunder by war, Lincoln established the Thanksgiving holiday as a permanent fixture on the American calendar. Congress codified Thanksgiving Day into law in 1941, just days after the United States’ entry into World War II.

In 1937, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison famously wrote that the Pilgrims are the “spiritual ancestors of all Americans whatever their stock, race or creed.”¹ Today we live in more fractious times, often tending to focus more on what divides us than on what unites us. In my visit to Newcomers High School in Queens, I set out to discover whether Morison’s sentiment holds true today in the minds of some of America’s newest and youngest arrivals. Their answer was a resounding yes. So, too, say most Americans—at least on Thanksgiving Day.