Title: Seagulls
Hate Parsnips
Author:
Virginia Tanzer
Date:
1989
Publisher:
EPM Publications
ISBN:
0-939009-23-4
Length:
196 pages
Illustrations:
drawings and map by the author
Quote:
“At the 1964 New York World’s Fair…less than half the people
questioned were able to identify Delaware as a state.”
Delaware
is, as Tanzer explains early in Seagulls
Hate Parsnips,
the second smallest of the United States. “Nine miles across at its
narrowest, and hardly a hundred miles long,” Delaware has at times
been populated by more than ten times as many chickens as humans. In
fact, Sussex County, the southernmost and largest county in Delaware,
was the home of 200,000,000 chickens and 110,000 humans at the time
of writing. One of those humans would later become our President.
Tanzer
wrote from Sussex County, and her purpose in this book is to
celebrate the place and time of which she wrote. “Maryland’s
Eastern Shore is awfully nice, but not as nice as Sussex.” New to
the place, she liked everything she found, even the local accent:
“Lots of people in the County are Volunteer Farmen, who shore do a
good job fighting fars.”
Of
course, she recognized that many of us would be content to read about
Sussex County, Delaware, rather than live there. “FLAT IS
BEAUTIFUL! If you yearn for mountains and hills and things like that,
try Colorado,” and, “No matter how long you live here, or how
involved you get in community life, you will never be considered a
Sussex Countian. To qualify as that, your grandfather should have
been born here. And even if he was, and your father was, but you, by
some quirk of fate, were born in Pennsylvania, you will still be
considered an outsider.”
Actually,
several of Tanzer’s “hints” to people considering a move to
Sussex County are applicable to many of North America’s rural
communities. It’s not that the residents of places where “Almost
every native…is related to a large proportion of other [natives]”
don’t like the
eighty-somethings who moved in as children and have been active
citizens ever since, who are still deemed noteworthy as what a
legendary Vermont town called “dearly loved strangers among us.”
It’s partly that they’ve not travelled much, themselves, and find
other people’s memories of travel interesting.
Tanzer
was a “dearly loved stranger” in Sussex County. Although her book
follows a claim that the place has “the nicest weather in America”
with, five pages later, a report on a particularly dramatic storm at
sea, people seem to have encouraged her to write about how Rehoboth
Beach got its name, why people pick up and move entire houses, and so
on.
She
notes that, before large-scale immigration from India began, Delaware
recognized its own five racial categories: White, Black, Red,
“Oriental…and Moor.” In other parts of the United States “Moor”
was sometimes used to express a more favorable perception of North
Africans than of sub-Saharan Africans, even as the misguided
“courtesy” of misidentifying any African-American the speaker
happened to like as a presumed descendant of North Africans.
Delaware’s Moors were another close-knit community that could be
described as “triracial isolates,” genetically comparable to
Tennessee’s Melungeons, North Carolina’s Lumbees, etc. In the
early twentieth century the government of Delaware burdened itself
with the obligation of providing separate schools so that neither
“Moor” nor Nanticoke children would have to sit beside Black or
White children. Tanzer documents that the Moors isolated themselves
by choice, and discusses four distinct theories of how some distant
connection with Morocco may actually have existed.
If
I find her reports on the Moors particularly interesting, it’s
because they were one detail of Delaware’s natural history that
is not equally
applicable to Maryland. Tanzer writes at length about Delaware’s
flowers, gardens, birds, farms, and summer tourists, without
mentioning any real difference between any of these things and their
Maryland counterparts.
She
does, however, describe an attempt to follow a friend’s recipe in
which she produced a cake that even the seagulls wouldn’t eat. That
would have been quite an achievement. I have never seen anyone cook a
food item seagulls wouldn’t eat in Maryland.
Speaking
of food, you wouldn’t expect two states as small and as close
together as Delaware and Maryland to have evolved different
“foodways,” but I notice something about Seagulls
Hate Parsnips.
I don’t believe a book about Maryland could be written without some
discussion of crabs. Although Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Seventh-Day
Adventists, and vegetarians are well tolerated in Maryland, real
Marylanders eat crabs.
They don’t even park the crabs on clean sand to get the crabs’
bodies to empty out immediately before they eat the things. They can
hardly overlook the reality that blue crabs are scavengers, designed
to eat anything and particularly attracted to raw sewage. How people
who know this can swallow something that looks like a giant beetle,
at best, I have never understood.
Tanzer,
writing about Delaware, is able to evade the question of eating
crabs. Or is she? She had written another book, Call
It Delmarvalous,
about the “linguistic peculiarities and culinary specialties”
of the DelMarVa peninsula. Presumably that would be where she admits
or denies any personal experience with the culinary
specialty of Maryland. I’m not sure I want to know.
Anyway, Seagulls
Hate Parsnips is
an interesting and enjoyable read. It is particularly recommended to
anyone who has trouble remembering the names of the original thirteen
states because two of them are hard to find on a small map. After
reading this book you will remember that that blurry line down the
edge of Maryland is a separate, special, historic place.
Seagulls
Hate Parsnips is
written for adults and contains jokes and references children won’t
understand. It is, however, more family-friendly than the average
daily newspaper. Sophisticated kids who want to learn about things
that interest Real Grownups more than teenagers, e.g. property taxes,
might like this book.
According
to Spokeo, Tanzer is still living in Delaware at the age of 101,
having been born in 1913. It is, er um, 2015 now, so this information
could be wrong. If you buy either Seagulls
Hate Parsnips or
Call
It Delmarvalous from
either address in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, by
sending $5 per book + $5 per package (i.e. if you order both
together you send $15), I’ll try to send $1 per book to Virginia
Tanzer or a charity of her choice.
Posted
on September
23, 2015 Categories
A
Fair Trade Book Tags
Delaware,
topophilia
and The
. When Norris was writing these mostly short essays, she and
husband David Dwyer didn’t realize that Dwyer had cancer or that Norris would,
as a widow, become a Benedictine nun (although her religious affiliation was
not Catholic but Presbyterian).
, and a record of traditional Gregorian chants was selling as well as
rock and rap. In Dakota the nuns and
monks are mentioned, but there’s more attention to phenology (in the shorter
essays) and local social issues (in the longer essays reprinted from
traditional magazines). 
’s or
’. This is an author who could write about nuns in a way
that made sane people think, for minutes on end, about being nuns. She writes
that way about living in flat, sun-parched or blizzard-swept, sub-desert
country, too. You wouldn’t really want
to live there but you’re convinced that she really does.
here, you'd send a U.S. postal order for $25 or Paypal payment of $26 to the address at the very bottom of the screen, and I'd send Norris or her charity $4. 
Author: Susan Trott
