I didn't know that while they lived in the fields, they were fed acquasale, a soup of hot water, salt, a little bread, and a tiny bit of olive oil. They were supposed to show their overseers that they were grateful for this food. While they lived in the fields, they were permitted to forage for wild plants and weeds. The overseers, on horseback, were amused by the spectacle of men and women crawling along the ground searching for wild onion, a shoot of ruca, to stuff into their mouths, amused by the spectacle of men and women fighting over a blade of dandelion.
I didn't know that farmworkers who ate every day were considered wealthy. I didn't know that there were frequent famines in Puglia. I didn't know that the landowners, latifondisti, used droughts to force workers into debt so they'd have to accept lower wages. I didn't know that workers paid 60 percent interest on loans, so their wages were taken to pay their debts, and they were forced to work only for an insufficient amount of food.
I knew that children started working at eight. But I didn't know they worked for half-wages. Didn't know how brutally they were treated. That they were beaten. Forced to run through the "blood line"— a line of overseers who lashed their backs with belts. Didn't know that if a boy shirked his labor, the overseer would tie a string to his penis and tie the other end to the stalk of wheat he'd missed, to shame him.
I didn't know that workers lived in what were called rabbit hutches, housing built by landowners. And that most lived underground, where there was no light, no air. That five to ten people lived in a room sixteen feet by sixteen feet. The average rent was one fourth of the worker's annual salary in a good year; workers paid a year's rent in advance. I didn't know that farm workers had no furniture, no changes of clothing, that they slept on the floor and ate on the floor, that each family owned one communal bowl.
I didn't know that taxes were levied on what the poor bought, that taxes could amount to a family's income for a year. (Landowners avoided paying taxes by buying wholesale in large quantities.)
I didn't know that parents with young children left them behind when they went to the fields. Older children cared for younger children. But no food was left for the children, because there was no food. I didn't know that parents had to hope someone would be merciful to their children and give them something to eat.
I didn't know that Puglia had the highest death rate and the shortest life expectancy of all the provinces in Italy. That there were virtually no doctors, no medicines, no medical equipment. (In Bari, only 180 people out of 120,000 had ever seen a doctor.)
I didn't know that a landowner had the right to have sex with— to rape— any peasant woman in his employ when she became engaged.This right was written into law. Ius primae noctis.
This right was written into law. Ius primae noctis. I didn't know that "good" laborers— submissive, obedient, respectful workers, who bowed when they encountered people of authority— were rewarded with a bonus at payday: one finger's worth of grease to rub into their shoes. Without the grease, shoes hardened, cracked, split, and were useless. Without shoes, you couldn't work. To buy new shoes, you had to go into debt. The cost to landowners of keeping their workers under control: one finger's worth of grease.
I didn't know that the land my people came from was colonized by Rome, France, Spain, by Garibaldi's army, by armies from the North.
I didn't know that the people of the South, my people, were considered by those people of the North (and are still so considered) to be primitive, barbarian, animalistic, racially inferior, ignorant, backward, superstitious, degraded, incapable of being civilized, lazy.
That they were so regarded from the period of Spanish rule and that these beliefs justified the colonization of the South and the refusal of the North to fully integrate the South into the country after unification. A common saying, still used today: 'Italy ends at Rome.
. . . All the rest is Africa."
I didn't know that over 17,000 acres of land in Puglia had been held in common by the poor since before Roman times. That, after unification, this land was confiscated, sold to the rich. I didn't know that the poor tried to reclaim the land that had been seized from them, and that when they did, they were driven off, or were executed by armed gangs of thugs hired by landlords. Because they were poor, they could not afford lawyers, so they had no legal way to challenge the confiscation of land that had been their property for centuries.
I didn't know that my people were no longer allowed to enter this land, except to work it for the profit of the landowners (land confiscators). Wheat and grapes were planted on this confiscated land. The poor could no longer feed themselves, for they could no longer farm the land that was once theirs, could no longer forage on the land, could no longer graze their animals on the land, could not fish in the streams on the land, could not hunt small game on the land.
Instead, they were forced to farm the land that was once theirs for the landowners (land confiscators). The landowners knew that the poor could no longer raise their own food, and so knew they could be forced to work for very low wages; the workers had no choice but to accept whatever wages were offered them. (What they lost when they lost their land: their means of subsistence, their independence, their self-sufficiency.) They stopped being peasants and became day laborers. Entered a life that resembled indentured servitude, only worse, for there was no freedom to look forward to at the end of a number of years.
I didn't know that the diet of farmworkers consisted, mostly, of bread. Not pasta, not beans, not meat, not vegetables, not fruit. Just bread. And poor bread, made from flour that had been adulterated with clay, sand, chalk, that was infested with mites and contaminated with mite shit. Water was often not available; when it was, it had to be purchased; it cost more than wine. Many workers drank wine, not water, so many died from heatstroke. (This was no problem for the landowners; workers could be replaced more easily than farm animals.)
I didn't know that many people in Puglia died of thirst. The Romans, during the empire, brought water to Rome: eleven aqueducts served the city. But well into the twentieth century, no water was brought to the people of Puglia.
I didn't know that farmworkers were overseen by guards armed with whips and rifles. Didn't know that landowners hired gangs of outlaws, misfits, and thugs to terrorize farmworkers into submission. That these gangs assassinated leaders, threatened workers' families, stole their possessions, set fire to their homes. I didn't know that landowners collaborated with fascists to force the farmworkers into submission. Didn't know that the first third of the twentieth century (after my grandfather left Puglia, but while my mother's stepmother still lived there) was a reign of terror. I didn't know that armed gangs of thugs were granted immunity from the law for past crimes and future offenses in return for enforcing curfews, ensuring that farmworkers didn't vote, assassinating political candidates sympathetic to the workers, ransacking the homes of union organizers, ambushing groups of laborers and killing them.
I also didn't know that, throughout history, the people of the South mounted well-organized insurrections against the injustice of colonial rule. These movements were written into Italian history as criminal. During the uprisings against the inequities of Garibaldi's rule, ten thousand people died in the South in violent confrontations and executions; twenty thousand were imprisoned or exiled.
I didn't know that farmworkers launched a powerful revolutionary movement. Didn't know that women were among the most militant of strikers. That they were in the front ranks when crowds of strikers stormed public buildings. That they lay down with their babies in front of cavalry.
I didn't know that the epicenter of the labor movement was near where my people came from. Didn't know that the names of members of my family— Libera, Libero— were common only among anarchists, socialists, and union organizers. I didn't know that among the emigrants from Puglia were political exiles trying to escape reprisals. (I wonder whether my staunchly pro-union maternal grandfather, who joined the labor movement in the United States, belon
ged to the movement in Puglia.)
I didn't know that Puglia was called the land of chronic massacres. Government troops routinely fired into crowds of unarmed strikers. (Striking at harvest time was the only power farmworkers had, since landowners wouldn't bargain with them: they believed the workers had no right to make any demands. In 1907, about the time my grandfather emigrated, there were forty-five strikes, involving 109,000 workers.) This is what the workers wanted: union recognition; wage increases; contracts; shelters for sleeping in the fields; transportation to and from fields; payment for time lost for bad weather; better food; rest periods; broad-bean cultivation in winter to provide employment during this slack time; a holiday on May 1; the right to walk beside their employers during the Sunday passeggiata.
(Antonio Gramsci, on the South: "It was disciplined with two series of measures. The first was merciless police repression directed against every mass movement and involving the periodic slaughter of peasants." The filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini called this genocide. Booker T. Washington, when he visited the South of Italy, remarked that peasants and farm workers there lived in conditions worse than slavery.)
I didn't know that the emigration of Southern Italians— some twenty-five million people from Italy emigrated between 1876 and 1976— was a form of rebellion against these harsh conditions and against the refusal of successive governments to build a more equitable society.
Without a history, there can be no present. Without a past, there can be no future.
I learn all this about my people not from the schools I attended, not from my grandparents, not from my parents, but from books written by Italian American and other historians. About the most painful truths of their lives, of my family's history, my grandparents were silent. Of my grandparents' lives in Italy, my parents only said, "It was hard for them."
Hard for them.
I take out my grandfather's wedding pictures, look at his face, his hands, his body, his eyes. Look for signs of what he's lived through. Look at my grandmothers' eyes for signs of what they've lived through.
And it is there in the eyes, the pain, the sorrow, the despair, the rage. But what is there, too, in the way my grandparents hold their bodies, is a dignity and a pride beyond imagination.
Without a history, there can be no present. Without a past, there can be no future.
I didn't know any of these things about my people. Nor did my mother, my father. But perhaps we knew them in our bodies. Perhaps my mother relived the life of her ancestors in the way she treated food. Perhaps my father's rage began there. Perhaps this is why I hoard food, treat it as if it's sacred, bless it, revere it, let it nourish me, let it excite me, calm me, placate me, spend as much time with it as I can. Perhaps I do this because my people could not.
As I learn all these things, I have many violent dreams. In them, I am the avatar of my ancestors. I fight, and defeat, all those who have disrespected my people, all those who have taken their land, who have forced them into submission, who have overworked them, starved them.
I ride on horseback, through the wheat fields of Puglia. I scale walls, flit across rooftops, drop down the sides of buildings, crawl into windows. I rout landowners from their beds, impale them on my lance. I find their stores of food. And I take everything that I find to feed my people.
PUGLIA DIARY
For my sixtieth birthday, Ernie takes me to the South of Italy, where my grandparents left early in the twentieth century, during the time of the great migration. We'll visit Rodi Garganico, my stepgrand-mother's village (I don't know my mother's birth mother's village); Positano, my paternal grandmother's; Scafati, my paternal grandfather's. On this trip, we're not visiting Vieste, my maternal grandfather's.
I've never been to this part of Italy before, though I've been to many other places in Italy. Why wait this long to come? Lack of interest, yes, for many years. Though I was proud of my Italian American heritage, I felt little connection to my Southern Italian past. I buried my grandparents' stories deep in the crevices of memory. Shards of what I'd heard from them, I'd stumble upon now and again. But I went about my daily life, my American life, without thinking much about my ancestors.
When my father became ill, and I feared he would soon die, I wanted to learn whatever I could about what he remembered so that I could make a record. So my family's story would not vanish. I'd spent years writing about other people's lives, famous writers' lives. Why not about those of my family?
On our flight to Bari, I see the sweep of the Gargano peninsula. It is shaped like the bunion on my grandmother's toe. This is the second time I fly over land where my grandfather, my mother's father, labored— the first, when I fly over the train tracks he laid in Maine. Both times, tears. The same rush of feelings. The irony of my life: that I can afford to fly over the places where he labored.
Now I can see the fields where my grandfather worked the land. See him as a child, bent over, harvesting wheat.
We are staying in a converted masseria. It is exquisite. White stone. Moorish architecture. Wild poppies and wild daisies everywhere. An orange grove. A lemon grove. We lounge on a porch with arched windows and doors. Listen to birdsong. Watch a mother cat groom her kittens. Sip wine made from grapes grown nearby. Eat prosciutto and cheese panini. There are olive trees that are over a thousand years old here. They look like pieces of sculpture. It would take five, maybe six people holding hands to encompass one.
In my grandfather's time, a masseria like this one was inhabited by landowners, overseers— those who persecuted my people. Yet I am staying here as a guest.
At dinner, we sit in a vaulted stone room. Crisp white tablecloths, napkins. Waiters in black uniforms. Tables bedecked with flowers. Along the back wall, a collection of pottery from a nearby village.
Our menu:
First, an amuse-bouche of an asparagus frittata. The asparagus are thinner than pencils. The frittata is cut into circles; they are served with a little bit of parsley, and with a glass of white wine from the masseria.
A pasta in the shape of a large teardrop, dressed with a sauce of cauliflower, bread crumbs, a touch of onion, a touch of anchovy. Cicatelli con cavolfiore e mollica fritta. (The pasta chef is a woman; she recreates traditional pastas from a recipe book found in the masseria. These are pastas I do not know; these are pastas my family never tasted.)
Lamb brochettes with almond sauce and wild onions. Spidino del massaro con salsa di mandorle. The onions are the ones my grandmother talked about; the ones the workers foraged for, and were permitted to eat with their bread, if they were lucky.
A salad of shredded radicchio and sun-dried tomatoes.
Dessert: Crepes with ricotta cheese. It is spring, and the ricotta is sweet.
We eat too much.
All night, strange dreams. In one, there was a child I had to care for. But there was nothing I could do for this child; there was no way for me to care for this child. Another is the old not-being-able-to-find-my-way-home dream. In this version, I have to walk home, and, as usual, don't know which road I should take.
In our bedroom (from which you can see a sliver of the Adriatic), a painting of the shacks that peasants inhabited. Creamy white stone. Square. Little doors. No windows. I can't look at it.
Tomorrow we leave to find Rodi Garganico, my stepgrand-mother's village.
On the outskirts of Rodi, ugly cell-block apartments. In the center of the village, derelict, ancient buildings. The decoration over a church door— a seashell— the same as the one on my mother's gilt mirror ("I don't know why, I just had to have it," she said when she bought it.)
Tiny alleyways, so narrow you have to flatten yourself against a building to let someone pass by. The people, sullen; wary of strangers. I understand dialect, Italian; but Ernie speaks Italian better than I do, so, though he's reluctant to approach anyone to ask them about my grandmother, he's the one who will ask. A maze of alleyways, of stairways, leading towards the sea. You could get lost here if you didn't know your way. H
eavy wooden door. Balconies overhanging the alleyways, protecting them from the hot sun. A village that seems uninhabited. Almost no windows. Small, grated holes in the walls to let in the air. A woman scrubbing her steps. Sounds coming from a kitchen— pots and pans clanging; women arguing; they sound like my mother and grandmother.
The sea, cut off from the village, now, by the railroad. Was there a railroad when my grandmother lived here?
Outside the village, a strip of sand beach on the other side of the railroad tracks. A sole bather. Did my stepgrandmother ever swim in these waters? The smell of garbage burning in the air.
Rodi, at a distance, from the beach: Red-tiled roofs. White houses. A village tumbling down to the sea.
All the hotels in Rodi, except one, are closed until the season begins. This one has been ravaged, it seems, by holidaymakers. Flower boxes full of dead flowers. A rusty merry-go-round. The walls of our bedroom, inscribed with visitors' initials. Peeling paint. Garbage burning below the window of our room.
I dreamed we'd find a sweet little hotel in a perfumed orange grove (for that's how this one was advertised). There would be a little balcony where I could sit and look at Rodi. In my fantasy, I would have an immediate sense of connection to this place. And . . . And what?
For the village in the distance, though it is the village my grandmother came from, is not my grandmother's village. That one vanished from the earth the day my grandmother left. The village she inhabited survived only in her imagination. And in mine.
This village is not the one I came to see. But I did not know this until I came here. And though I try to think my way back through the years, to imagine what it was like when she lived here, I cannot.
I don't know what I thought I was going to find in Rodi Garganico. Someone who looked like my grandmother walking down an alleyway? Someone we'd stop and ask about my grandmother? Someone who knew her family? Relatives of hers who lived in Rodi still? People who knew whether my grandfather and stepgrandmother knew each other before he came to the United States? Whether he had ever passed through this village? Whether they were anarchists?
Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family Page 13
