Plain Jane: I Survived by Crying, Praying, and Working

By Jane Coma

All my life, I have loved to draw. When I was in grammar school, my teacher used to pin up my artwork all over the classroom.
One of my favorite things to draw was flower. As far back as I can remember, I used to draw this emblem. I feel it is my logo. I drew it on paper, drew it in the sand and mud as a child.
In one of my jobs, I was responsible for clearing some glass. I used to draw this flower with glass cleaning foam on the vending machines, and people didnt want me to wipe it off. It seemed to make them happy, and It makes me happy too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466913752

Jane Coma

Jane Coma was born on March 17, 1962, in Shum, a small old village in the country of Macedonia (formally Republic of Yugoslavia) as one of six children. After a childhood of hardship of working the fields, chopping firewood, and being under the reins of her very opinionated father, she tried to escape his wrath by marrying at sixteen into a family who would ultimately see her as their servant and not their daughter-in-law. She would eventually give them four beautiful grandchildren, one girl and three boys. Nine long years of slavery to her husband’s parents and grandparents had passed when she was given the opportunity to come to America for freedom and opportunity, none of which came to light until she escaped from the beatings and infidelity of her controlling and abusive husband. The responsibilities of a single mother took over her life and led to what it is today.

Book preview

1

I am neither rich nor famous. I haven’t invented or perfected anything; in fact, I am bound by heritage, upbringing and habit to live by ancient traditions. I have no special talents or gifts: I am an ordinary woman. I’ve lived a simple life: no make-up, no dating, no bars or nightclubs, no drinking or smoking, only one sexual partner, never even a parking ticket. Mine has been a life of hard work, caring for others and prayer. I am telling my story not because it is racy or glamorous, or because I am any more important than anybody else, but because I am a survivor, and any glimmer of hope or insight, you may gain from it will be a mark in my favor in heaven.

My children and I have become Americans, thank God. Our extended family is Albanian, part of the largest ethnic minority in Macedonia, a result of a political redrawing of the borders after the defeat of Turkey by the Balkan states in 1912. After World War II and the rise of Communism, many Albanians were stuck in Macedonia with no way out. I can remember Macedonian police patrolling our streets, happily arresting Albanians for saying anything and doing nothing. We heard horror stories of Albanians being tortured at the hands of the Macedonian government, and we were afraid of them. Macedonian men would walk around with the Macedonian flag stuck in their jacket pockets, a symbol of their support for Communism.

The Macedonians had all the good jobs and left little for the Albanians. Many Albanian men went to other countries to work. The Macedonian government also controlled all the commerce. If my father needed something done, say, a land surveyor or medical care for us, he would have to bribe certain Macedonian friends with gifts of produce, chickens or roosters from our farm, or even money. If you bribed them, they would treat you like a friend, and if you didn’t, someone you loved might die.

Routinely purchasing falsified documents became a way of life a way of surviving during a time when resources were extremely limited for Albanians. This is one of the reasons we came to the United States illicitly.

My father knew how to network, and people from our village would come to him to connect with government doctors and officials.

The Macedonians also controlled all health care, and they were insensitive to Albanian cultural mores. Because of this indifference, we often treated our illnesses, injuries and other concerns ourselves, without the assistance of doctors. Albanian women would never subject themselves to the attention of male obstetricians. Most of us gave birth at home with the assistance of midwives. Prenatal care did not exist for Albanian women. I simply carried my first three babies, gave birth alone in my bedroom and went on with my business.

With mandatory military service both, my brothers and my husband eventually did their duty. I also had some mandatory combat training.

Things are better now, and there is a great real estate boom taking place. Beautiful new condominium complexes and businesses are popping up everywhere. Albanians are free to travel anywhere.

Macedonia will always be our touchstone, no matter how far away we live. Our family has been here for generations and there has been a mass exodus of Albanians from Macedonia in search of work. However, as far away and isolated from here as they become many Albanians ask that their final resting place be Macedonia.

I have told my children I want to be buried here in New Jersey, where I raised my children, learned to speak English, learned to drive and to collect a paycheck and to own real estate. New Jersey is the state where I discovered and seized my independence. My wish is for a New Jersey burial so my children and grandchildren can bring me flowers.

Yes, I return to Macedonia for a few weeks every summer, and I am always happy to be there, to see home and family, but by the third week, I become homesick for America and always ready to kiss the ground on arriving at the Newark Liberty International Airport.

Albanian was my first language. However, due to the political situation when I was a child meant many of us like the American Indians learning English had Macedonian, the official language forced down our throats.

For public use, the language uses the Cyrillic alphabet and we learned both languages.

Moreover, after a terrific struggle I eventually mastered Macedonian. I can remember one time, after selling eggs in the farmer’s market; I went to a stall and tried to buy bread. Everybody there spoke Macedonian, and my Macedonian language skills were not good. I gave the woman the money, and she said, If you don’t learn to speak properly, you’ll die hungry. I left without the bread.

To this day, I read and speak Macedonian perfectly, as do my siblings and my oldest son. When my children were little, if my husband and I wanted to speak in front of them without their understanding, we would speak Macedonian. It reminded me of the way my father and grandfather would speak Turkish when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying.

As an adult, I found learning English to be a monumental challenge and I am still learning.

Being an American has brought me much hope and happiness. Had I never come here, I might not have survived, let alone had the opportunity to share my story. People who have helped me to solve my largest problems, adjust to American life and gain my independence have suggested that my story would be of interest to American readers. My purpose in writing all of this is to demonstrate that even an uneducated foreign woman like me can work hard, overcome adversity, raise strong, beautiful children and create a good life for herself.

2

Thus, I begin:

Born on March 17, 1962 on my family’s farm in Shum I am the third of six surviving children. Shum is a small mountain village on the outskirts of the city of Struga in Macedonia.

My father, Demir and my grandfather, Sunai built our house from local stone with their own hands. They hauled the stones in batches from the riverbed, and my grandfather chipped them with a hammer into the shapes and sizes he needed. My grandfather built the stonewall which surrounded our house. Most Albanian houses have a stonewall.

My dad used to say, Dad, you have golden hands. My grandfather, a truly gifted Mason earned his living laying stone as well as farming.

Finishing the house represented more to the family than completing an arduous task. Finishing the house meant continuity and stability.

In the first eleven years of their marriage, my parents had lost six babies, including a pair of stillborn twins. My mom used to say delivering a dead baby was more painful than giving live birth. Thanks be to God, I never tested her mantra.

I’ve had four pregnancies, which have resulted in four healthy kids. My families repeated losses happened in the old house at the top of the village.

My parents and grandparents became convinced the house had a curse. Long after my family left the old house, the old people talked of a presence. Something unexplainable going on there.

We knew the people who bought the house. They rebuilt on the property and had six girls.

Some people said since the family produced no sons to inherit the land that the curse did exist.

While we were all practicing Muslims, my people maintained a firm belief in the supernatural. There was one story of an old childless widowed woman, in her fifties, named Selvia. She had no one to support her. She used to babysit all of the village babies under the trees, rocking the cradles three or four at a time. In exchange for this service, the women would bring her food, like pita or burek (Albanian pizza). She loved everybody’s children. When she passed away, the neighbors were on their way back from the burial, and throughout the village, people swore they saw the cradles rocking by themselves. The villages credited Selvia with spilling pitchers of water and throwing dirt on people’s steps, just to let them know she was still with them. This went on for a long time, until the entire village turned toward Mecca and prayed that God would direct her to heaven to be with her husband.

Widows without children faced special hardships. Women needed men to support them. Often parents, in-laws, brothers or their own children. My grandmother, sitting by the wood burning stove at night, used to tell us the crazy story that led to one local woman becoming a living ghost story.

There were two brothers, Vezir and Tair, who lived in Shum before my birth. Vezir married and sired a son and a daughter. Tair remained single. Vezir stayed close to home with his wife and children, and while Tair ostensibly lived with them, his brother and sister-in-law basically turned him out to find work where he could for the summer. Tair brought home the money he made and shared it with the family. When winter came, the married couple sat warming themselves by the fire, and as the story goes, Vezir told Tair, You go out and find work. So Tair drifted around the village and surrounding area, taking whatever menial labor people would offer him in the dead of winter. He split firewood and mucked out manure from the barns. Tair worked for his keep and precious little actual cash.

One day, Tair passed out on the job, possibly because he was malnourished. He sunk into such a deep coma that the people he had been working for thought he was dead. Various people whom he had served came around to help with the burial. When they laid him out to wash the body and wrap it in white linen, he suddenly began to stir. When he revived, instead of rejoicing, the people thought that he was some kind of undead monster, caught between two worlds. They thought he could not die because he’d never married or had children.

Well, Tair, now feared by the community, continued to labor like this, subsisting on whatever food his various employers saw fit to provide. He continued giving whatever money he earned to his greedy brother. Eventually he did die for good, worked to death as a slave to his brother.

Soon, Vezir grew sick and died, leaving his wife Nadia alone with their two children to raise.

Their ill treatment of Tair tainted their kismet, ‘their luck.’ Both children died in their teens. For the rest of her life Nadia lived alone without any means to support herself.

Nadia’s brother, Mefail, built a cottage for her near him, but there was little else he could do to help his sister. He had his own family to provide for. People in the village felt sorry for her and brought her food, even though their own provisions may have been short.

When I was a child, we all thought Nadia had a monster living in her house. I don’t know whether she had a great sense of humor or wanted to scare us out of bitterness. Often when we hung around her windows begging to see her monster, she’d go inside, put on an old gas mask left over from the war, and appear suddenly in the window wearing this hideous thing. We’d all run screaming down the hill. For years, we all thought it was a real monster, and only later in life did we realize what it was.

When Nadia passed away, the village pooled their resources to provide her with a proper Muslim funeral. Her house on the hill is still there, and when I return home and see it, I smile at the memory of that fake monster and all of us fleeing in terror.

3

Luck or ‘kismet’ is very important to my people. When bad things happen, like my parents’ loss of six children, one right after the other, people sought supernatural explanations. They trusted in God, but simultaneously believed in malevolent forces.

To get free of the cursed house, my father and grandfather had a talk with my great-grandfather. They agreed that the family should buy a piece of land and build a new house. A new house would have plenty of ‘kismet.’ They talked to a family member who was interested in selling three acres of land, and they bought the place. The family was eager to be free of the curse and so hopeful my parents could have some children who would survive. So intense was this mindset that they moved in before the house was finished. There must be something to the story, because my mother went on to give birth to six more children, all strong, healthy and vital.

My grandfather told us he was so worried the seller would change his mind that he went out and did masonry work in the January deep-freeze in order to pay off the land as soon as possible. He said he carried a hammer and a few hand tools for his trade. However, he often found himself clearing away snow away before he could get to work building walls. The job site he worked on was a three-day walk from home. At that time, my family had no transportation. It was never easy on the sexagenarian. Unfortunately, he could not borrow any of the farm animals. Each had its duty and was unavailable for off the farm chores.

The new, luckier house was made of local stone, in a mix of natural colors, gray, white, a little yellow. With all the houses in the village constructed of brick fires were of little concern.

We didn’t have firefighters or fire trucks. The sight and sound of my first fire engine in America amazed and surprised me. In Macedonia, there was no need for fire or flood insurance.

Albanian constructed houses were practically impregnable. No flimsy materials like wood and Sheet-rock, which constituted most American homes. If American homes were made of stone, people would be much safer.

The house sat on three acres of hilly land, with orchards, a vineyard, corn and barley fields. A river passed through it to a nearby lake.

Plumbing gradually ran directly into the house. Initially cold water and then we had the luxury of hot water.

My mother often reminded us that when they were at the old house, the river itself was the only local water source in Shum. Everyone use river water for cooking, washing, and watering animals. It was good, clean sparkling mountain river water. Fresh, but far from convenient.

It was a long walk to lug back bucketfuls over and over. Often, in addition to the water buckets the village women carried loaded wash-baskets on their heads. My grandfather opened the well on our property, and people would wait in line for water. A much better quality of water than they could get dipping from the river. Shum has long been renowned for the quality of its water.

4

When they moved in my parents’ bedroom was the only finished room. There was space for three cows on the ground floor, and four rooms above, all whitewashed. A cousin of my dad’s using chestnut logs that he provided from our trees made the doors and windows.

Heavy green drapes closed for nighttime privacy and always left open during the day to bring in the sunshine.

At the end of the hallway between the rooms was a bathroom, which was actually a latrine. A hole in the ground with a commode above.

We used to have to warm pots of water on the wood-burning stove for baths. When I was a child, they brought in cold-water plumbing, a modern toilet, sink and tub. In the 1970s, my dad brought home a hot water heater, and we had the luxury of hot showers instead of bucket-by-bucket baths. This was during the time of Communism in Macedonia, and although we had electricity nothing really worked right, and the power supply was always unreliable.

In the main part of the house, one room was for my great-grandparents, which we used as a living room during the day; one room for my grandparents; and one room for the rest of us, which contained two metal beds with mattresses stuffed with cornhusks and always lumpy. My mom and dad slept in one bed, and all of us children in the other. We kept our clothes in low baskets, which my grandfather wove himself; they slid under the beds. We didn’t have closets or drawers, and we didn’t have many toys to clutter up the rooms. When we played, it was with things we found outside in nature, although my mother did teach us how to make dolls from sticks and rags.

My brother Jemal, eight years my senior, was the first child to survive infancy, and so three generations of adults looked after him like a little prince. He was always the first to get the good stuff, like his own bicycle, long before the rest of us. After they expanded the house, Jemal was the first to get his own bed.

My younger brother Omar and I were both bedwetters. In the morning, we would argue, It’s not me, it’s you! and our mother would just quietly put on fresh blankets for us.

Omar had thick, light hair, green eyes and freckles like me. We all have lots of freckles. Just two years apart, he and I were intensely devoted to each other, and he was my conscience and my advisor until he died young. He was tall and handsome. As a child, Omar was so sweet, always did what he was told, and loved to make everybody laugh with his jokes. Omar went to school in Prishtina, and later served his mandatory stint in the army. When he died, he left his beautiful wife Sabina, four gorgeous daughters, a handsome son and ten grandchildren.

Also in that bed were two sisters, Alima, who is three years older and Azra, who is four years younger than me. Alima had beautiful long golden hair and blue eyes, while Azra’s hair and eyes were dark brown.

When you share a bed, you learn all kinds of intimate things about your siblings. Ever since our parents took away her binky (the name for her pacifier) when she was a toddler (before I was born), Alima had developed the habit of sucking on the bed sheets all night. We all made fun of her for it. Alima was a good sister, protective of the rest of us, and she didn’t deserve the ribbing.

People always thought I was older because I was taller. Alima became our mother’s right hand, always helping with the babies, cleaning and cooking and she learned to crochet beautifully. I didn’t get good at housework until Alima got married and moved away, because then I had to take over her responsibilities. She lives in Germany with her husband Muhammed. They have two sons and a daughter, and among them, they have given her five grandchildren.

Azra was a quiet little girl who resembled our mom. She had an innocent smile that everybody loved, which she never lost as an adult. Like all of us, she had a freckled face. Our father, however, used to say she resembled an aunt he didn’t like. He called her Sexho like his aunt. Like our mother, Azra has always been a people-pleaser, deliberate and attentive. She would eventually marry our next-door neighbor. We grew up playing with him and his siblings. Our aunt Hurma was married to his uncle. Azra and her husband are still together and have three handsome sons and a daughter like a princess, who has given them two grandsons. They live in Switzerland, and built a summer vacation house back home, which they visit every year.

Our youngest brother Ismail, named after our great-grandfather, slept in the same handmade wooden cradle we had all used. My mother always said he was the best accident that ever happened to her.

Ismail and I have the same green eyes and freckles. I can remember holding his baby bottle for him, and later, seeing him walk around the house with it. His birth was the first I was old enough to remember.

The morning after he was born, according to age-old tradition, we wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in the middle of the sofra, the long, low table that accommodated the entire family seated on the floor. The adults gently rolled him back and forth until he began to cry. A newborn baby’s cries were a way for him or her to ask God for good luck in their life.

The family then discussed and chose his name. It was important to honor the family without offending the neighbors by copying someone else’s name. Finally, everyone threw money around him to help start him on the path to prosperity. Ismail would follow us around when he was little, and soon learned to do chores, mostly caring for the animals.

Ismail eventually went to college in Pristina, Kosovo, but then Milosevic’s regime fell apart and he got out of there while the getting was good. Hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled the country for Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Australia or the United States. Ismail returned home ahead of a wave of death and destruction that fortunately never came to our door. He picked up new duties on the farm, taking over the responsibility for renting out our tractor to neighboring farms. I was already in the United States when Ismail got married. He has his own business