White Bread Sandwiches & Other Memories of Childhood

Although I became a New Yorker at the age of four, there were so many thing—big and small things—ever reminding me I did not truly belong.

On cold, wet mornings in January, with the sun barely peeking out of the sky, my sisters and I would set out for school.  We would dress in our pleated blue skirts, freshly laundered and ironed on a Saturday morning, topped with a yellow shirt and white bobby socks.  We must have made for quite a sight on those dusty Brooklyn streets:  Four young Black girls trudging through the snow single file wrapped to the gills in coats, scarves and gloves, with two startlingly white silk ribbons tied in a bow peeking out from beneath our winter caps.

For me, the sense of difference never really materialized until lunch time.  Down to the cafeteria I would race to take my seat among the smell of institutional Pine Sol and sweaty, chattering fifth graders.  I would place my lunch box on the table as I uttered a short but heartfelt prayer:  “Please God, please!”  Or “Dear God, I beg you!” Or “This time, God.  Surely this time!”  My prayers were not in gratitude for the food, as one might expect.  And certainly, they were not in memory of the less fortunate—as my mother would have suggested.  All of the pleading and supplication came down to this:  May there be a white bread sandwich lying in my lunch box nestled between my thermos of milk and a bag of chips.  Just like all the other kids.

I would hold my breath and wait and watch as my friends threw open their own lunchboxes.  Out came the smelly tuna, the soggy bologna and mayo, the thirst-worthy peanut butter and jelly, and even the dreaded bread and cheese sandwich, which often meant the end of the month was near and food was getting tight.  I would have traded my own lunch for any of those—even the bread and cheese.

But as hard as I prayed, the result was always the same.  Inside my little Wonder Woman lunch box was not the sandwich I pined for but an assorted motley crew of plastic bowls and aluminum foil-wrapped concoctions:  red rice and beans, fish in a thick tomato sauce, spinach, okra, chicken gizzards, turkey necks, oxtail and pigs feet.  It was the kind of food I savored at home but eschewed in public.  It was home food, not school food.

I found it impossible to convince my immigrant mother I needed white bread sandwiches for lunch.  I tried.  After enduring the casual but devastating taunts of my schoolmates, I would race home from school determined to make my mother understand the importance of sandwiches.  But the aroma of my mother’s cooking would nearly stop me in my tracks: boiled green plantains with a mashed red bean paste, yellow rice mixed with vegetables, dumplings, meatballs, conch in a rich stew.  My stomach would growl in traitorous anticipation even as I tried to stand my ground.

“Maman,” I would begin haltingly.  “Tomorrow, may I please have a sandwich for lunch?”

My mother came from a long line of Haitian women who toiled before coal-fired stoves to prepare hearty meals for their families.  She met my request with a strange mixture of surprise, disgust and hurt.  “Un sandwich?” she’d grunt as she ladled hot soup into a bowl and set it on the table.  “That is not food.  It will slip through your teeth before you can even feel it.”  She would hrrumph a few times before continuing, “This is food,” she said as she set a mile-high plate of chicken gizzards next to the soup.  “This will feed you and strengthen you and make you smart.  Sandwiches are for motherless children.  Do you really want to run around looking like a motherless American child?”

And that was the end of that.

It was impossible to convince my mother of the primacy of sandwiches.  How could I when they were as foreign to her as my ribbon-wearing-rice-and-bean-touting self was to my classmates?  We did not even have a name for sandwich in our own language.  We simply used the English word with a funny French accent.

Sandwiches have a certain mystique for the immigrant child that may be hard for others to grasp.  Very simply, it signals belonging.  I am not the only one who believes this.  The white bread sandwich experience seems to resonate with kids across the immigrant spectrum.  Consider two scenes from the 2002 comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  In the first, a geeky young Toula Portokalos—with her thick, black glasses and pigtails—sits alone in a lunch room full of chattering, laughing, white-bread-sandwich-eating classmates.  As Toula slowly pulls out her own meal, one of the perfect blonde Mean Girls pounces:

“What's that?” asks Mean Girl.

 “Moussaka,” Toula hesitantly replies.

“Moose kaka?” Mean Girl sneers, sending her cohorts into gales of laughter.

Fast forward two decades, and a now thirty-something Toula stands at the brink of spinsterhood (at least by Greek standards!)  She is living out the dreary life of a waitress in her parents’ restaurant, and she longs for change.  Toula decides she will go back to school.  After the obligatory ugly duckling turns into beautiful swan scene, in which she throws off her glasses in favor of contacts and fashionably curls her dark tresses, Toula finds herself back in a school cafeteria. 

Once again, the Beautiful People are seated together at a lunch table, laughing and chatting and eating their sandwiches.  But this time, Toula rejects social isolation just as surely as she rejects moussaka for lunch.  She sits with the Beautiful People and whips out her own white bread sandwich while chatting and laughing with the best of them. 

And so at last, Toula is accepted.  She is one of them.  By the grace of the sandwich, Toula belongs.

Interestingly, for all of its status as cultural icon, sandwiches are themselves mere immigrants to the American experience.  They are said to have been invented in the Eighteenth Century by the high-born John Montagu, The Fourth Earl of Sandwich.  A profligate gambler, the Earl faced a daunting dilemma: Should he extricate himself from the gaming table just so he could get a bite to eat?  In a fit of inspiration, the Earl decided to remain where he was and have his meal delivered to him instead.  To avoid sullying his cards—and who doesn't hate dirty cards?—he placed the meat in between several layers of bread. Voila! The sandwich was born.  

In modern times, we may well have labeled the Earl an addict and prescribed an intervention or the nearest Gambler's Anonymous meeting, but the Eighteenth Century apparently was more forgiving.  By 1762, when the word first appears in print, the sandwich had become such the rage among the English upper class that the Oxford Companion to Food noted “one was able to observe numerous important contemporaries supping off cold meat ‘or a Sandwich’.”

The sandwich made its way across the Atlantic with a wave of European migration.  Like immigrants the world over, it was forever changed by the experience.  Once the exclusive preserve of the upper class, the sandwich quickly became manna for the masses.  Italian dockworkers in Pittsburg piled overwhelming amounts of meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and onions onto an Italian roll topped with a dash of oregano-vinegar dressing and called it a Hoagie.  Down and out New Orleaners created the Po’ Boy out of the unlikely pairing of French bread with fried oysters, shrimp, fish, soft-shelled crabs, crawfish, roast beef and gravy, roast pork, meatballs, and smoked sausage.  The comic strip “Blondie” inspired the invention of the Dagwood—once described as “a mountainous pile of dissimilar leftovers precariously arranged between two slices of bread”—that in turn spawned a chain of Dagwood sandwich shops in Florida.  From its quintessentially English roots, the sandwich became truly American.

It is a transformation most immigrant children long to make.  Happily, like the sandwich, most of us eventually are able to wedge the dissimilar aspects of ourselves into a hybrid concoction that is uniquely American.  At least, that is what happened to me. I grew up and learned to navigate the mores of two different, and at times competing, cultures.  I learned how to eat sandwiches in the outer world and elaborate Haitian meals at home.  The memories of my once frustrated obsession with white bread sandwiches faded into obscurity.

Until, that is, my new life unexpectedly collided with the old.

It is fair to say that probably the last place I expected to see a reflection of my struggle with identity, belonging and sandwiches was in the pages of a legal text.  In the intervening years since my obsession with sandwiches, I had become a commercial lawyer and eventually an academic.  It was a safe world far removed from the disquietude of childhood.  But then, all of a sudden there it was.  In the guise of legal analysis, a judge was being asked to answer a question that had bedeviled me for years: Is it possible to become a sandwich? 

As a child, I very much wanted what the sandwich so casually embodied: to blend in, to belong, to become so commonplace as to be unremarkable.  I wanted to be a sandwich. 

Luckily for the judge, he was not asked to determine whether human beings could become sandwiches.  At least on the surface, the judge faced a relatively straightforward legal question:  Did a landlord violate his own lease when he rented out space to a burrito-maker given his agreement to refrain from renting to other sandwich shops?  But circling around the edges of the legal question were the more poignant ones of transformation and acceptance.  Could a burrito become a sandwich?  Could “The Other” become part of the whole?  Could the periphery join the center?  Is it possible for something so foreign to become so quintessentially American? 

The experts weighed in decrying the very idea.  The blogosphere derided the case as one more example of the legal system run amok.  After all, even a child could tell you a burrito is not a sandwich.  One celebrated New England chef testified the notion was absurd.  “A sandwich is of European roots,” he said, while “a burrito . . . is specific to Mexico.”  Finally, the judge dismissed the lawsuit with the pithy reasoning that “common sense” will tell you a burrito is not a sandwich.

Ahhhh.  Common sense. 

It turns out I could not be a sandwich after all.

The summer of my fifth grade year, my mother went into the hospital for some tests, and just like that she was gone.  One moment, she was standing in front of our stove stirring a big pot of bouillon as she dropped crab legs, yams and hot peppers into the bubbling stew.  The next, I was bouncing in my seat demanding a once-forbidden Pepsi while my mother's spiritless corpse awaited burial. 

When fall came, it brought with it many changes.  My sisters and I now trudged to school dressed head to toe in black—black pleated skirts, black silk blouses, black socks and black ribbons in our hair.  I now carried a Bionic Woman lunchbox, having switched allegiance from the hopelessly outdated (in my eyes) Wonder Woman.  

Nestled within my lunchbox was a white bread and cheese sandwich.