To celebrate the start of Italian American Heritage Month, I thought I’d share this excerpt from my manuscript, The Dreams that Break Your Heart, which captures how my parents came to arrive in America, how difficult such a change could be for everyone involved, and also how different the experience could be for each individual.
It’s good to remember our ancestors and where we come from. For Italian Americans, this month is a special month to do so, as it’s not only autumn, when we honor the dead, but also a time when we pause to remember what our community has endured and overcome and to celebrate our culture.
If you’re interested in writing stories like these about your family and ancestors, be sure to let me know, and I’ll add you to the waitlist for my next creative workshop, “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors.” You can learn more about the workshop, the first of which just wrapped up a couple weeks ago, by clicking this link—bellafigurapodcast.com/workshops.
I plan to host another in late January/early February 2024. Being added to the waitlist means you’ll be among the first to know when registration opens. The first workshop sold out rather quickly!
Happy Italian American Heritage Month, amici. xoxo
Chi nun risica nun roseca.
He who doesn’t risk, doesn’t gain.
- Napolitano proverb
At the factory where my mother works, the boss walks up and asks, “Was your mother okay when you left the house this morning?”
My mother pauses in her work as the chestnuts she’s there to jar stream past her.
“She was fine,” she says.
The boss walks away, and she tries to go back to her work. Her fingers fumble over the chestnuts; a few bad ones slip past her. She pictures Addolorata as she was when she left the house and tries to locate something she might have overlooked, something that could have gone wrong in the meantime. Then the boss returns, asks again.
“She was fine,” my mother repeats. “What happened?”
“There’s two men outside asking for you,” he says. “They say they need to take you home. Your mother’s sick.”
My mother shoots away from the line, throws off her apron, washes the dust, dirt and shards of nutshell from her hands and hurries through the door. The bright, white light of day forces her head down. There is my father; beside him, my grandfather. They both lean against my father’s car. The sunlight flashes off the hood. My father blinks to shield out the glare.
As my mother draws closer to them, smiles spread across their faces, and she realizes, lowering her tensed shoulders, breathing again, that it was all a ruse to get her out of work. It’s a familiar trick, used by boys throughout the province of Avellino to free their girlfriends early from the factories for an afternoon date. The boss circled around it several times before letting her out because it was a ruse he had to go along with, God forbid this time it was the truth.
They did bring news to my mother, however. Nearly a decade ago, my grandmother’s brothers had begun the process of securing immigration papers for her and her family, and the papers had finally come through: They would all be going to America.
My father’s family plans to spend only a few years there, save some money and return to Italy with a nice cushion of funds with which to live out the rest of their lives together. They will depart in groups. The first group to leave will be my father, his sister, Irena, and my grandmother, Anna.
“So,” my grandfather starts, “you two are to be married first.”
My parents had been dating for several years, and they were in love, but it was also important to my grandparents that my father be wed before they left; the risk of him as a single man falling for an American girl was too high.
“Fine,” says my mother.
And with this their fates are sealed. The wedding will be one month later.
* * *
My parents are married in Santo Stefano’s Church in Baiano where, shortly after they eloped in Rome to great scandal, my father’s brother, Mario, and the woman who would become my aunt, Stefanina, were also officially married. But theirs was an empty church, with most of the pews vacant, attended only by Stefanina’s people. Without the warmth of bodies to absorb the sound, the cheap rubber soles of the men’s shoes squeaked obnoxiously, reverberating through the space. Each cough forced heads to turn and the priest to pause. My grandmother Anna forbade anyone in her family to attend. After the wedding, she went to my aunt Lillina’s house, my mother’s sister, carrying a glass vial in the pocket of her dress, a potion that was supposed to ruin love and turn a man’s heart cold. She urged Lillina to drip some into whatever drink she served her son when he came for visits. But Lillina refused to be my grandmother’s ally. As a wedding gift Stefanina received an envelope slid beneath the door of her parents’ home where, after being banished from my father’s family, she and Mario had gone to live. It was a mourning envelope—stationery stamped with a large black circle, used to announce someone’s death. Stefanina opened the letter and read the message my grandmother wanted to relay: You’re a whore and a slut, my grandmother wrote, and you can tell your new husband that his mother is dead to him.
My parents, on the other hand, receive a lavish wedding by the standards of the day, given to them by my father’s family. It’s November 1967. My mother wears a gown sent to her from America by her uncle Tony. He had promised it to her after a recent visit when, after hearing of Anna’s behavior toward Stefanina, he told her that if she did not want to marry my father she could come back to America with him and find a husband there. My mother declined, telling uncle Tony not to worry, she had not done what Stefanina had. My father’s parents would treat her differently, she said.
White silk cinches my mother’s slim waist, and then swings to the floor in a bell. A sheet of lace embroidered with white flowers cascades from her waist down the front of the gown. She wears white silk gloves. Pearls as big as marbles dot her earlobes. Her dark hair is swept up in a twist. When she arrives at the church ten minutes late, she looks classic, perfect as the porcelain-bride figurine set atop the cake. She had waited at home for her father, who never showed. At the last moment, Carmine decided he’d been disrespected because my mother hadn’t sent a fancy car to pick him up special, so he opted to spend the day in the piazza instead.
My mother steps out of a rented Chevy Impala, four miles long and wide as a house, and stands at the foot of the church steps. A little hat is pinned to the top of her hair and veils fall down her back. The sun shines behind her. She pauses, then draws one of the veils over her face. In the background, the buildings of her hometown surround her; they are crumbling as they have been crumbling all her life, with the stucco cracked off in great sheaths so the stones the structures were assembled with centuries ago are revealed. Stray dogs sniff past the crowd. Someone rumbles by on a moped. Clean-shaven men in fedoras, women with faint moustaches, dressed in handmade skirts and blouses, and children in play clothes with dirt on their cheeks and soccer balls held beneath their arms surround her. The tall wooden doors of the church fan open, and when the inside of the church is revealed, the women make the sign of the cross. My mother steps through the doors, filled with the innocent hope only an eighteen-year-old can muster. Since Carmine did not show, my uncle Mario walks her down the aisle, as my grandparents eventually came to not so much forgive, but turn their cheek to my uncle’s betrayal.
Addolorata borrows a pair of decent shoes for the big day, shoes that look like nothing more than clean slippers, and her dress like nothing more than a clean house dress. In the photos, she stands a few inches away from my mother, or behind her, like she is already a memory, like she is already thousands of miles away from her youngest daughter. My aunt Irena wears a shimmering black dress, her hair tied back in pigtails. My grandmother Anna wears two-inch chunky heels, a gold necklace circles her throat, and her hair is parlor-fixed in loose waves. My father is dressed in a tuxedo with silk lapels and a black bowtie; a little strip of white handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket.
They are married, and before they leave the church, my father bends and takes my mother’s hand as both of them laugh. He leans over and kisses it in an exaggeration of chivalry. They drive through their hometowns in the Impala, the oversized American automobile barely squeezing within the little streets, taking turns slowly so as not to scrape the buildings. My mother’s gown brushes along the dirty street as they step out to greet people assembled along the roads of the village, as is custom, who hold trays of rice and candy and flowers. Children, their cheeks sweaty from play, their shoes specked with mud, take turns holding the bride’s train aloft. The villagers toss the flowers and rice at my parents’ feet and wish them auguri.
There is no honeymoon. Ten days later, the groom embarks from Naples on the Cristoforo Colombo and sails to America for what, they all believed, would be a few years stay.
Chi cagna paese cagna furtuna.
He who changes towns, changes his luck.
– Napolitano proverb
When my father, grandmother and Irena arrive in America, after a two-week voyage on the seas that made them all miserable and sick, the Summer of Love has just ended. Men and women are practicing free love and dropping acid. It is also the summer of race riots. In Newark, New Jersey, twenty miles from Ozone Park, Queens, New York, where my family will settle, riots raged for five days, leaving dozens dead and injured. The Vietnam War slogs on, and the month before my family arrives, thousands march to the Pentagon and offer armed soldiers flowers.
My family understands none of this. They arrive in Ozone Park and stay with my great-uncle Giuseppe, my grandmother’s brother, in a neighborhood dominated by Italians, and what happens outside its confines is irrelevant to them. They cannot speak a word of English, but it doesn’t matter, because all along the avenues of Ozone Park the main language spoken is Italian. Shop owners speak Italian, restaurant owners speak Italian, bank tellers, bus drivers, flower sellers, the butchers, the bakers, the landlords. An ambitious John Gotti has recently moved into the neighborhood, and he and his crew gather regularly at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, located on 101st Avenue. They drive Buicks and Impalas, wear suits and grease their hair. My family is far removed from this. There are men who have power whom you do not cross wherever you live; these were these men, they are told, so my family walks about the streets, minding its own business, beneath trestles and past stairwells leading down to tunnels that shake the ground as trains thunder below. There are no animals in the streets save for men, but the streets are filthy in their own right, littered with the garbage of men and the gray soot of automobiles and factory chimneys. There is no farmland, and no piazza, but there are churches on every corner where the priests understand your sins in Italian, if you’re inclined to confess them. Outside of the neighborhood, there are women who wear skirts to their thighs and let their hair down in the daylight, and they do what they want to do, these women, and this is enough to unnerve any mother who had tried to raise a good Italian son, and made sure he married an obedient Italian woman. It certainly unnerves my grandmother. For my father, and many other young Southern Italian men who arrive, freed from the constraints of their small villages, it is the best thing America has to offer.
It’s winter when my father arrives. He has never really known winter like this, where the wind bites against your cheeks. Snow is something altogether new; it falls and falls until you have to shovel it out of the way or you cannot leave your home. The neighborhood is asleep in those winter months. People rush from door to door, not speaking to one another, heads bowed in deference to the cold. He thinks that if this is what America is—cold, hurried, isolated—Americans can keep it.
The first job my father takes is at John F. Kennedy Airport, washing dishes. During this same time, Gotti is outside on the airport’s tarmac, hijacking $30,000 worth of merchandise from the United Airlines cargo area, and then again, months later, a haul of $500,000 worth of cigarettes. My father is impacted by none of this. The irony of his coming to America to better his life, only for him to go from constructing buildings to scrubbing airport dishes is not lost on him. My father does not want to be in America, but he saves enough money to rent a place of their own in Ozone Park, and they prepare it for the arrival of the rest of the family. He came to America because his parents had told him he would. He wants to go back, and the sooner the better. In the meantime, he’ll make good use of America’s loose moral standards and have himself a good time.
America offers so many unforeseen things. Beyond the work and the money, it offers its freedom. In Italy, if a man looked at a girl too long he’d have that girl’s brothers looking for him in no time. My father and many of his friends, other twenty-somethings from the towns near Avellino, are young in New York. In their little villages you are a man at 22; in New York, you are still a young man at 22, and this freedom is like a buffet of food you know is not top quality, but there it is, laid out for the offering, and so you consume too much of it.
For my mother, leaving her hometown is as easy as tearing a sheet from a notebook and crumpling it between her hands, tossing it over her shoulder as she walks away. Her sole grief is that she will leave her mother behind, unsure when they will see one another again. She lowers what few articles of clothing she owns into the black trunk my grandmother packed with the bed sheets, tablecloths and nightgowns she’d been buying since the day my mother was born, a little at a time, in preparation for her wedding day, as is custom. Aside from this, the only other thing my mother takes to America is a black-and-white photograph of her brother Antonio. She leaves behind her own collection of photographs—the ones taken at la fontana vecchia on those sunny afternoons when they danced to 45’s, snapshots of her teenage years, which, although she is merely 19, have already vanished.
My grandmother Addolorata weeps with the energy of a train derailing when my mother says goodbye. With her son Antonio dead, and Lillina already moved to Germany, this is the third grown child Addolorata loses. At least now her daughter might have a chance at a better life, and my grandmother tries to cull some comfort from this. With her home officially empty of the spark of youth, the chatter and energy of children and their visiting friends, my grandmother begins her slow decline.
For my mother, America is love at first sight. The minute they leave JFK airport, for she had flown to America with a ticket given to her by that great benefactor, uncle Tony, arriving with my grandfather and Stefanina, (with Mario traveling later by ship to bring the last of their belongings) she looks up at the tall buildings, tries to absorb the breadth of the streets, the expanse, the vastness of it all, and says to herself, I am home. This is it, she knows. She loves America instantly.
Upon entering the two-bedroom apartment my father has rented—where my grandparents will sleep in the enclosed porch, Irena in a small off-shoot of a room, my parents in one bedroom and Stefanina and Mario in another, my mother’s eyes grow wide. She walks through that apartment as if it is a palace. In the living room, she spreads her arms out to her sides and turns around and touches nothing; the kitchen has space for a table and chairs and still if you cook in it, no one will get in your way. She opens the refrigerator door and closes it; she touches the stove, the range top, then she opens the oven door. No more icebox! No more single boilerplate! It’s what America had promised to be. As if this alone were not enough, there is an indoor bathroom, with a tub she can sit in and a shower nozzle she can stand under. No more outhouse! No more filling up a basin with water in the middle of the kitchen to bathe! She is in love, but she is not supposed to be, and my father’s mother takes note of her joy with wary eyes: Too much pleasure in America will ruin her plan. This is not to be a new home for her children, but a stopover on their way back home. She thought their macaroni dinners and nights around the fireplace, as they’d always done, would simply be transposed into new surroundings. She hadn’t anticipated the surroundings could be stronger than her influence.
The night my mother arrives relatives come to visit—my grandmother’s siblings, their children, old friends from the neighborhoods back home. My father sits beside my mother at the table, cracking jokes for the guests. They drink espresso and break walnuts and cashews, and the men smoke until there are hills of shells upon the table and ashtrays to be emptied. It is the happiest night of my mother’s life thus far. If she had innately believed she was worthy of a good life, well, here it is. She is in America, sitting in a modern kitchen, with her husband at her side. And life is not only not in black and white, it is, as in the American movies she used to watch as a child, bursting with the dreamy, brilliant hues of Technicolor.
* * *
I imagine my grandmother Anna with her arms outstretched, trying to hold her family together like a woman trying to hold the ocean in her embrace. The wives are the problem. They might break off like rivers, going their own way, and the great fear is that they will pull her sons with them, taking them further into American life, ruining the plan to return to Italy, splitting her nuclear family. Wives are expendable; if they have to, her boys can find new ones. But her sons are not replaceable. She has already buried four children; she will not lose the living ones to America.
At night my grandmother lies in bed and thinks about it. She calculates like a man calculating his accounts. The freedom has caught her by surprise; not exactly the freedom, per se, but how much the children seem to enjoy it, how much it is like a drug, and they are eager to be wasted on it. She can maintain control of her sons, as long as the grip of their wives does not grow stronger than hers. If the wives will just follow her lead, do what she says, live their lives according to her plan, then there will be no trouble.
If my father does want to take his wife out of the house, to the movies or for an ice cream, say, my grandmother will send Irena along with them. Oh come on son, take your little sister with you, she never gets to do anything, and how will my father be able to say no to his mother and his little sister? Before they walk out of the apartment she reminds Irena to walk between my parents, to wedge her body between them. When the boys sleep at home beside their wives, well, she can’t control that, but she tries her best. She stands with her ear to their bedroom doors. She hopes to glean a bit of information on what the wives might be plotting—are they trying to plan for the future with their husbands? Are they discussing money matters? Their lives? It drives her crazy not to know.
One night my mother caught her. My grandmother had been standing, ear to the door, outside Mario and Stefanina’s room, when my mother stepped into the hall to walk to the bathroom. My grandmother played it off, stood upright as if she, too, were merely on her way to the bathroom. You go first, she said to my mother magnanimously, but she knew my mother knew. That one is clever; she gives her the most trouble. She has a sharp tongue and she is proud. She will be the harder of the two to control.
So this is the way to do it. She begins to sleep better at night, knowing she has a plan. Undermine the women, hold aloft the men. Whatever her sons want she will give them. Whatever keeps them from getting too close to their wives—mistresses, lack of privacy, lack of loyalty—she’ll encourage and allow. In America, the streets are not just paved with gold, but with the blood of mothers who fight to keep their children close.
If you’re interested in writing stories like these about your family and ancestors, reply to this email or write me at dolores@bellafigurapodcast.com, and I’ll add you to the waitlist for my winter creative workshop, “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors.” You can learn more by clicking this link—bellafigurapodcast.com/workshops.