Was Jennie Happy?

How little we really know.

The portrait of a lovely young woman on a shelf near my bedroom is of Jennie, my grandmother. I knew a bit about her life, but it had never occurred to me to ask myself whether she was happy; I had not wondered what was going on in her mind.

I’m sure she was glad her mother and sister were with her when she left her comfortable middle-class European home to follow her husband to a tropical island in the midst of the Pacific. At the time Ponape, in the Carolines, was a German colony. I still marvel at the courage it must have taken to adjust to a completely different world. Her husband would have been away most of the day building bridges and roads.

But in the beginning, he did spend half a day repairing and tuning the piano that they found in the governor’s house where they first lived. Yet, one can’t help but wonder how she coped with the new foodstuffs and with the climate. Staples like sugar would have been imported. Did they have coffee for their afternoon coffee break? I find it hard to understand how she and her mother could have accepted the fact with such equanimity that giant cockroaches would fly around at night and be splattered on the wall or that geckos might drop down from the ceiling into the soup. How many of us now would do so?

Jennie may have spoken a bit of English or French in addition to German. Although in 1900, when she and her mother joined her brother in New Jersey or New York, to which he had immigrated several years earlier, her mother refused to learn this new language, but managed quite well at the market since so many of the vendors were Jewish immigrants.

In Ponape, Jennie surely left most of the conversation with the natives to her husband, who probably used what was known as pidgeon English. In writing up a few memories of his time working on the island, he had explained it as a sort of “spoiled” English dialect used in a most amusing way to picture things. For instance, a native to whom he showed a locomotive in Hong Kong, called it steamer bush, and a goat became a dog with long horns. The head was a coconut, and the hair on it grass.  As revealed in a letter my grandfather wrote to his three- or four-year old son, my father, in the United States, the attitude of the Germans in their colonies was typical of the European white man, whether in the Pacific or in Africa, or for that matter in America.

The white man always seems to have considered himself superior. “If they get all too lazy, I scold them, or sometimes I have to give one of them a good licking. Then you should see them work! They are all afraid of me because they know that I always have a revolver in my pocket, and if one of them should try to stick a knife into me, he knows that I would shoot him dead. All of the black people do not like the whites because these always make them work.”

And what must it have been like to give birth to a child in such “primitive” surroundings? Was she in one of the other European houses? Was there at least a midwife present? Perhaps, she was assisted by one of the other European women. It was, hopefully, a relatively easy birth even if it was her first-born. Given the conditions surrounding childbirth at the turn of the century, it is a miracle that both the mother and the child survived. Would his mother have nursed him? Would this baby have had a native wet-nurse? Perhaps not, given the European concept of the natives. Would he have been given coconut milk? I rather think he would have been fed bananas as well.  Were there any other children around? None appear in any of the photos of the European settlers that have survived.

We can only imagine. We can only imagine what her return in 1900 to what her mother thought of as civilization was like. The voyage by sea to Australia. Then a steamship to San Francisco or Sacramento. How many days was that? In 1869, the golden spike that celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad had been driven in. But it still took three days by rail to cross the American continent. The three women probably traveled first class, perhaps with Pullman accommodations.

All fascinating questions to which the answers can only be suppositions.