Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

  It was 1919. Because of the war, life was harder and more dangerous in Puglia than it had ever been. The poor were poorer; the rich, richer. And it was more difficult to leave.

  A peasant army had fought the war. "They took our men, and gave them sticks to fight with, and marched them to the machine guns, let the Austrians kill them," my grandmother said.

  On the boat, on the way over, my stepgrandmother knit the man who would become her husband a sweater from finely spun wool she had bought with money he sent her. She knew that it was sometimes cold in this new land, even cold indoors, and very cold where he worked outdoors on the railroad for many months of the year near a lake, far bigger than the one near her small village. She knit this man a sweater to show concern for him, to please him. She did not yet know that she would never please him, that no one could please him now but the tiny daughter she was to attend.

  She crocheted herself a shawl, too, on the voyage over, for she was quick with her needles. The wool was thick, and the work went fast; she had nothing else to do, and was unused to inactivity. The shawl was black, and she was happy at her knitting, though she was crowded below deck with so many others, and permitted on deck for fresh air for just a little while each day. The black shawl was something she would wear around her shoulders to keep herself warm in this strange new place where, at least, she had some relatives.

  She had enough to eat on her journey, and she was grateful for this. He had sent her much more than the 435 lire for her passage (he was a generous man, and this was good, her mother said). So she fed herself well, fed herself food that could be bought for a price, food she did not have to cook herself, more food than she had ever eaten— pasta asciuta alia conserva di pomodoro; pasta asciuta al sugo; minestrone di pasta e ceci. Although others complained about the food, she did not complain. She knew what it was like to have nothing to eat, to fill your belly with dirt and air.

  But generous as the man was, she decided that she would not knit the child a thing, not now, perhaps not ever. For, although she would care for her, the child was his. Not hers. Not theirs. The child was not her blood.

  My grandmother did not begin crocheting tablecloths until my grandfather died. When he was alive, she was inclined neither to finery nor extravagance and through all the years she lived with him, the tables she set were functional and austere.

  Why she began crocheting her tablecloths, I cannot say. Perhaps to pass the time. Perhaps to leave something of herself behind, for there would be no children, no namesake, no one of her blood to tend her grave when she died.

  If her stepdaughter wanted to use these tablecloths, all well and good, though Libera would never sit at the table with her. But if her stepdaughter didn't want to use these tablecloths, that too was all well and good. She would give them to the child who suffered, as she had, in this house filled with rage and sorrow.

  Why my grandmother sat close to the radiator during the winter, I could well understand. Her body had never gotten used to the cold.

  But I think, too, that the radiator became my grandmother's companion. It didn't yell at her, like my parents. Nor mock her. It didn't tell her what to do, what to wear. It didn't condemn her for who she was: a peasant from the South of Italy.

  The radiator didn't betray her. In winter, it was warm; in summer, it radiated the idea of coolness, so that, for a woman used to so little, it might have seemed little enough. The radiator, her needlework, her food, her mornings at church, our few moments together, her only comforts.

  My grandmother took all her meals alone, even on holidays, when she'd bring a loaf of her bread into the dining room, place it directly on the tablecloth, and return to her place at the kitchen table, as if to protest how she was treated, or perhaps because my mother was not her blood, and so she would not break bread with her. (My mother would take the bread off the tablecloth, take it back into the kitchen to slice it, and place it in a bread basket, lined with a napkin.)

  She ate, often, in her chair by the radiator, from the chipped bowl that was companion to my grandfather's. She fed herself with a large metal spoon she had brought from Italy, adjusting her shawl around her shoulders as she ate. It was larger than my mother's soup spoons, and bent and worn. My mother said it was dangerous to eat from such a spoon because who knew what it was made from, and whatever it was made from might react with the food my grandmother ate, and poison her.

  My father said not to worry, my grandmother was too mean to die. My grandmother held the bowl up close to her face, clutched her spoon in her fist (this annoyed my mother), and sucked her food into her mouth, satisfied that she was eating. Sometimes she'd offer me some of her food, but I'd refuse. I liked her bread, her pizza, her zeppole, but not those viscous greenish liquids she preferred for supper.

  Sometimes she'd tease me, try to shove her spoon into my mouth to force me to taste what she was eating. I'd recoil. And she'd laugh. When she laughed (which wasn't often), you could see her gums, and her single pointed tooth in the front of her mouth, and then I thought that she looked like the witch in my book of Grimm's fairy tales, thought that my friends had good reason to fear her.

  By the end of November each year, my grandmother would be wearing her long underwear; two or three dresses (one atop the other); two or three hand-knit sweaters (one atop the other) in fanciful lace patterns out of keeping with her otherwise austere appearance; and her old black shawl. Everything except her long underwear was black, everything was frayed and worn, everything was poorly mended, for she had no patience with the needle.

  Whenever she wandered into the kitchen to cook something warm for herself— a bean soup with whatever greens she could find at the market down the hill, a minestra made with a few winter vegetables, a bread soup with a handful of dried herbs from her cousin's garden, my mother would complain about her appearance. "You look like the wrath of God, dressed like that," my mother would complain, leaving the kitchen to go upstairs to organize an already tidy drawer. "Can't you dress like a civilized person?"

  My grandmother would continue to buy nothing new, nothing American, nothing warm enough for winter, even though wearing more than one dress and all those sweaters and that shawl around her shoulders when she went to Mass or did her shopping on frigid winter mornings marked her as a peasant, disgraced my parents, and embarrassed me. Embarrassed me so much that I betrayed her by laughing with my friends rather than silencing them when they called her the old witch, or the garlic eater, when they held their noses and said "Pew, pew," when they claimed she ate babies for breakfast and people's brains for supper. (She did eat brains, though not people's; but this, I never conceded my friends.)

  My father rarely communicated with my grandmother directly. He resented her intrusion into their lives, thought she was the reason why my mother was depressed, though he often ate her food, for he missed his mother's peasant fare. What could he do? Turn the old woman out of his house, into the street? Her relatives didn't want her all year round; she had nowhere to go; she couldn't afford to support herself. She was his cross to bear.

  "Tell her to buy some new clothes, some warm clothes, goddamn it," he'd yell to my mother within earshot of my grandmother. "Tell her she's a disgrace. Tell her people will think we don't take care of her. Tell her to take a bath. Tell her she stinks."

  My grandmother would manipulate another complicated stitch on the white tablecloth that rested on her lap, and she would ignore his yelling, ignore his words, and defeat him, as always. For this, if for nothing else, I loved her. I cannot count the times she threw her needlework to the ground, stitches slipping off crochet hook, ball of cotton unwinding across the floor, to put her body between his and mine. I cannot count the times she took a blow that was meant for me.

  On rare occasions, my mother came home with a new dress for my grandmother (black, but with a pattern of tiny flowers), or a heavy cardigan (black, of course), or an overcoat (black, again). My grandmother, knowing that it was better to yield than to resist, and knowin
g that yielding was the most potent form of resistance, would take the item, hold it at arm's length, inspect it, take it upstairs, and put it in her bureau drawer or closet, where it stayed, unused, until she died.

  Once only, she wore something new. A black silk scarf I bought her for Christmas with butterflies embroidered in black. It was expensive, but I bought it, because it was the only black scarf in the store.

  When she unwrapped it, she wound it around her neck. "Seta," she said to me. Silk. I knew I had pleased her, and though she was unused to silk, and resented finery, she did wear the scarf, and I was glad.

  There, by the radiator, my grandmother sat, ignored and despised, through the years, in that darkened room, on the straight-backed chair, in a space that was not Italy but that was not America either, crocheting tablecloths, knitting sweaters, making afghans.

  There she sat, this woman at her needlework, through the late 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, into the early 1970s, until 1974. In that year, she became ill, couldn't get out of bed, and was taken to a nursing home run by the state, because my mother said she could afford no other. And there she died.

  The sweaters are gone, and the afghans too. They were collected, thrown into giant plastic bags, and dropped into a Goodwill box after she died, together with all that unused clothing my mother had bought her. The worn underwear, dresses, sweaters, the old black shawl, tattered and motheaten, my mother threw into a garbage bag and put into the trash.

  But the tablecloths I still have. They are now treasured heirlooms, which adorn our family's festive tables. I have many tablecloths to give, presents for my sons and their wives; gifts for my grandchildren, for you can crochet many tablecloths through the years when you have little else to do. And I will pass on, too, stories about the woman who made them.

  My grandmother must have known how little we valued what she made. Yes, we used the tablecloths on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Easter. But we never wore her sweaters, used her afghans. When my grandmother finished an afghan, we would throw it into the bottom of a closet; so garish and ugly were their colors that no one with any self- respect— this is my mother talking— would use them or display them.

  But still, my grandmother kept knitting, kept crocheting. As if to crochet and to knit was what mattered. As if what she made was not important. As if the admiration of others did not matter. When she died, there were twenty or more sweaters, fifteen or more afghans, thirty or more tablecloths with patterns that looked like constellations of stars or gatherings of snowflakes or clutches of flowers or spiderwebs or motifs in Moorish temples, stuffed in bureau drawers all over the house, in boxes under her bed, and in the bottoms of closets.

  Once, I saw my grandmother finish a tablecloth and begin a new one on the same day without stopping to take some refreshment, without holding the completed work up to the light of the window, without stopping to admire what she had accomplished. To crochet and to knit in the absence of anyone's desire but your own. To crochet and to knit because the very act of knitting, of crocheting gives you what others do not, what others cannot give you, what the country you left, what the country you came to does not give you: a sense of worth and some small scrap of human dignity.

  My grandmother's hands, all dry and cracked and sere like the land she fled, making beauty. My grandmother at her needlework, affirming her right to exist in a world that did not want her.

  DARK WHITE

  In the photograph of my grandmother on her Certificate of Naturalization, she is dressed in black, as she always was: her life was one of perpetual mourning even before my grandfather died, for the family she had left in Puglia that she never saw again.

  In the photograph, she is double-chinned, although she was not corpulent. Since arriving in America, though, she was well nourished. And for this, she was grateful, always blessing her food, blessing herself, and saying a prayer of appreciation before eating.

  My grandmother never ate excessively. She considered gluttony unpardonable; and if you committed this very great sin, she believed you would burn in hell. She said that to eat just enough was a very good thing, and this is why she was happy she lived in America. But to eat too much was a very bad thing.

  She condemned those of her relatives and my father's relatives who put too much food on the table, who ate too much, who threw food away when they could have transformed leftovers into another meal— a beautiful pasta, a nourishing soup, a simple frittata. My grandmother believed that eating too much, or throwing food away, meant that you were eating or discarding what could have been eaten by someone who was not eating enough. And when you were fat, according to my grandmother, you were showing those who could not eat enough that you could eat whatever you wanted, waste food even. This was the sin of pride: showing that you were rich enough to eat too much.

  After we visited relatives, whenever my grandmother talked about the people who had eaten too much, she derided them, and walked around in imitation of them, and puffed out her cheeks as theirs were puffed out. She cursed and swore at them. She said that they were no better than the rich people where she came from, who ate too much while the poor ate too little. That they were no better than the Romans, who ate and puked while their undernourished slaves looked on. No better than the popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests who dined lavishly, who, if they were true Christians, should have been giving food to the people. (They took money from the collection boxes, my grandmother said, and used it for themselves. This was why she never donated money during Mass. She told me never to put the money my parents gave me into the collection box at church— better I should use it for myself or give it to the poor.)

  Once my grandmother, when she was very angry about this, told me they should suck the fat out of all the people who ate too much, and fashion it into candles. (You can do this, she told me; you can make candles from fat.) And with these candles, she said, you could light the darkness of the world for a hundred hundred years.

  In the photograph, my grandmother is light-skinned, although her skin burned when she stayed in the sun too long. But by late summer, she was well tanned because of her outdoor work on the farm of her relatives in Long Island. She was dark-haired, though graying at the temples, and her hair was pulled back away from her face, though not austerely, so that one wave dipped over each temple, its lustrous length braided and fashioned into a neat circlet at the nape of the neck. This does not show in the naturalization photograph, and, although her hair was beautiful and long, I could never imagine her wearing it down, for women who wore their hair around their shoulders, she said, were puttane, whores.

  At the corners of my grandmother's mouth in the photograph, there is a smile playing, and it might have been because she was happy that she was becoming a citizen of the United States. But I don't think so. For she was always suspicious and contemptuous of the ways of bureaucrats and government officials, and also of rules and regulations, taxes and fees and stamped documents and official ceremonies. But I think the hint of a smile on her face is one of disdain for the proceedings.

  That her name was Libera suggests she probably came from an anarchist family, like my grandfather. His father's name was Libero, and these names— Libera, Libero— were ones that only Italian anarchists gave their children. Which is how their families might have known one another, through anarchist circles, for many Italian anarchists settled in Hoboken, where my grandparents lived.

  It is during World War II. It has taken a long time— over twenty years— for my grandmother to decide to become a citizen. But now the United States is at war with Italy— Sicily has been invaded— and being Italian in the United States is dangerous.

  When the United States first declares war on Italy, thousands of Italian Americans are arrested; more than two hundred are interned. The news sends shock waves through the country's Little Italys. And here, in Hoboken, police have raided Italian neighborhoods.

  Many of my grandmother's relatives living in the United States are fighting in the war, b
oth in the Pacific and in Europe, demonstrating their loyalty to the United States, their new land. In Italy, they are perhaps even fighting against family and paesani. Still, Italians and even Italian Americans are suspect. So she and my grandfather decide to become citizens.

  Until the United States declared war on Italy, my grandparents had sent nonperishable food, money, and clothing to relatives there.And until Mussolini's abuses became known, they had defended him because he supported the South. After the United States joined the war, they were anguished and torn: they wanted to know the fate of their people— parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins; they didn't want the land of their people destroyed; they feared that relatives in the United States would wind up on battlefields in Italy fighting against paesani; yet they wanted the United States to win the war.

  Renouncing their Italian citizenship was fraught with difficulty. Though they knew they had opportunities here that they hadn't had in Italy, that they lived better here than they ever could have lived there, changing their citizenship meant admitting that they never would go back. And though they were deeply suspicious of governments, this constituted a betrayal of what they valued most highly: loyalty to their families.

  Becoming United States citizens was the single most difficult act of their lives in this country.

  My grandmother is eligible for naturalization because Italians are legally considered Caucasian, and only Caucasians, at this time, can become citizens. (In the 1890s, Italians hadn't been considered white, but by World War II, they were; until 1952, people not considered white were not eligible for naturalization.)

  Naturalization granted my grandmother some of the rights and privileges of native-born Americans, but she was not completely accepted nor absorbed into the mainstream of life in the United States. Still, her naturalization papers remained precious to her always, for she kept them in the locked box that held her visa, her steamship ticket to the United States, her birth certificate, a lock of my grandfather's hair (cut after his death), the set of crystal rosary beads he bought her when they married.