Many Americans don’t realize it, but the United States is home to some 1 million Gypsies, spread throughout the nation. It is believed that Columbus arrived in the States with Romani slaves in 1498, and that Oliver Cromwell shipped Romanichals (often known as English Gypsies, or English Travelers) to the US to be slaves on Southern plantations in the 17th century. The Romanichal also immigrated to America from the UK in the middle of the 1800’s, coinciding with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire.
Large families of Romanichal took up residence in West Virginia, particularly in Martinsburg. They attempt to lead quasi-American lives while clinging fiercely to Gypsy traditions and superstitions, and resisting assimilation. While they originally made their way professionally as horse-traders, they were forced to adapt to the rapid decline in the horse trade after the first World War. Today, the men of Romanichal families usually work in the paving business: laying asphalt, making driveways, etc. The women do not work at all: they are required to stay home and raise the family.
I got interested in the Romanichal due to the reality TV show: “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” (on TLC/ Discovery +, the same network that features atrocities like “1000 Pound Sisters,” an uncomfortably prurient look at the horrors of morbid obesity.) By today’s American standards, Gypsy traditions involving women are nearly as hair-raising as that of the Taliban. The entire culture is male-dominated, with Gypsy matriarchs (older mothers) largely policing and enforcing their ancient rules, taboos and superstitions on the younger generation (mostly the girls), to prevent them from getting “gorgerfied” (“gorger” being the pejorative term that Gypsies reserve for American non-Gypsies.) The girls usually drop out of school around 6th grade in order to learn to feverishly scrub out the insides of their (usually mobile) homes daily. By the age of 14 they are officially on the market, looking to get married by the age of 16 to another Gypsy (frequently a relative, like a second cousin.) Keeping their bloodline “pure” is of utmost importance for the Romanichal; incest, in various forms, has been inevitable, if not explicitly desirable. The girls are required to be virgins at their weddings — the elders prefer that a girl’s first kiss is after the priest says, “You may now kiss the bride.”
Oftentimes, young Gypsies in love will run away with each other when they are as young as 14. ( A Gypsy girl who is 18 and unmarried is usually regarded as being defective in some way.) They are given no sex education whatsoever; mothers usually tell their Gypsy daughters that the husband will show them ‘whatever they need to know,’ on their wedding nights. “Homeschooled” gypsy girls are often illiterate, and frequently end up as single mothers when their gypsy husbands leave them in the house to stay out all night with the boys, or take up with gorger women on the side.
While Americans may regard Gypsies with some trepidation - they have, for centuries, been labeled as scam artists by most of the cultures they have camped on the fringes of — Gypsies regard Americans as more or less utterly contaminated. Gypsy men, for whom there are no strict traditional laws preventing the sowing of wild oats throughout their lives, use Gorger women casually for sex — they are considered too “dirty” to marry.
“Gorger girls are for fooling around with. Romani girls is for wifin’,” explained one Romani lad. Many of the girls marry boys they’ve only met once or twice at family gatherings— arranged marriages are still quite common in the Romanichal community.
What captivated me about the show is the fact that I am obsessed with tribes of people who announce their cultures and differentiate themselves through fashion — like Hasidic Jews, for example, Sister Wives of the Mormon faith, or the Nation of Islam. Both Romanichal men and the women’s dress styles are traditionally so gaudy and oversexed, they end up looking like characters from the cast of “Jersey Shore.”
The women, since they only do housework and take care of the children, are expected to keep their appearances enticing for their husbands. Romanichal Gypsies prize “bling” (at least according to the somewhat suspect producers of this TV show); sparkly and shiny attire harkens back to the Gypsy tradition of wearing your wealth on your body, and is also a sign of rebellion against cultures like the Nazis who persecuted Gypsies, as if to say, “Nanny nanny nanny goat, fuckers, we’re still alive and more fabulous than ever.”
The men use a tremendous slurry of wet-looking products to spike their hair several inches all over their heads, like blowfish, and wear a lot of gold chains; a common look for grooms is to wear the vest of the tuxedo with no shirt underneath (it’s a chance for them to show off their tattoos, one of which usually reads “Gypsy Prince.”)
Romanichal women look like they were raised in the Mothership of Forever 21: Long, ironed hair, usually dyed black. Incredibly tight jeans, with white rhinestone-studded belts. Crop-tops are de rigeur with any female over the age of 6. Breast implants are very common. They all want a suntan, and usually go in regularly to be professionally sprayed various shades of burnt sienna. They wear giant rhinestone hoop-earrings with heart-shaped pendants made of pavé diamonds, bracelets stacked to the elbow on one arm, and maintain absurdly long, rhinestone-encrusted fingernails. They favor large gold handbags from masstige lines like MK by Michael Kors. The overall effect is a jarring daytime casual look somewhere between Promiscuous Disney Princess and a Las Vegas rodeo-escort. Several Romanichal women in the series articulated that their primary role model for fashion is Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” before Richard Gere gives her the makeover. Even the children dress this way. One Gypsy matriarch, Nettie Stanley, commented “I wanna see a newborn in a corset,” when she and her cousins were considering starting a children’s clothing line.
“The first time I saw them, they looked like prostitutes. Slutty and skanky,” said designer Sondra Celli, who is the premiere custom dressmaker for formal Gypsy events. Ms. Celli is a regular player in the wedding show; Gypsies from all over the world call her (at the last possible minute, like they do) to have her create her signature, gigantic wedding-dress spectacles — Scarlett O’ Hara dresses with tight bodices encrusted with thousands of Swarovski crystals, and skirts clocking in at around eight feet wide, stuffed with petticoats and fortified with hoops, weighing up to and over 100 pounds, which requires a network of gauze bandages to be taped over the hips of the bride, lest the weight of the garment chews through her skin.
“What every Gypsy bride wants is a dress that is bigger and bolder than all the others,” says the show’s narrator, who calmly reports on the group’s action as if it was a National Geographic special about previously unseen fish. The show makes great hay over showing these crippled brides, who can barely walk in the gowns, awkwardly trying to squish themselves into the back seats of taxis and limousines, and sometimes bursting into tears, because they can’t.
What really captivates the viewer about Romanichal culture, however, is the constant fistfights among the women. Gossip is a constant part of Gypsy culture, and any minor infraction against Gypsy tradition or statement which could be regarded as disrespectful is taken to screaming extremes. The men commonly rip their shirts off before a scuffle, even if they’re the groom. For me, the pinnacle of “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” was when Nettie, Gypsy matriarch and mother of nine, ran across the lawn to dive-attack her own cousin in front of the entire family, knocked her to the driveway and started repeatedly bashing her cousin’s head against the ground. There was a glorious moment of slow motion where Nettie was sitting on her bloodied cousin squeezing handfulls of her hair, and grimacing toward the camera with her face contorted into a wild-eyed Kabuki war-mask with all of her teeth exposed. For a woman like me who has never actually been in a fight, it looked like Nettie was enjoying a kind of perverse, ecstatic bloodlust — losing her mind in a fit of transcendent violence, and emerging victorious, seemed to confer a visceral sense of delicious power to her, which looked significantly more liberating than the permission to kiss a boy at the age of 15. Female brawling looks like the perfect antidote to all of the strange anti-female repressions of gypsy culture; all the rage of life is concentrated into one bloody orgasmic release, almost like childbirth.
Nettie gave her cousin a few kicks in the side before finally being pried away. It made me think I was missing out on something, being so generally reasonable.
Then, days later, the lifelong friendship between Nettie and her cousin resumed, as if nothing had transpired, and Nettie had not attacked the cousin with all the screeching frenzy of a killer baboon. Family is everything to the Romanichal, no matter how much they spit curses and scream that their loved ones are whores, no matter how many weddings are disrupted by fistfights and ruined by personal vendettas, no matter how many stepsons are stabbed to death at the YMCA (as Nettie’s was). There is no talk of dysfunction, or psychotherapy. They have no use for your Oprah, your Dr. Phil, your anti-depressants. Theirs is simply the Gypsy way of life, and it will be jealously protected as long as they roam the earth.
HOLLER AT ME for your book-coaching, script-doctoring and proofreading needs. I’ll make you look good. CintraW@gmail.com
Artwork: “The Cobra Bride,” oil on canvas by Cintra Wilson, 2019
THE LUXURY OF TELEVISION / KIDNAPPED BY GYPSIES