This story tells you a lot—about Mary. But Russ doesn’t do anything in it, only reacts. His actions, which set it all up, take place offstage. I began to feel that I was searching for a void. Everything people said about Russ was a negation. He was very quiet. The stories about him mostly weren’t: instead they revolved around him, as if the events and characters were in orbit around a dark star at the center.
I went over my notes from talking to the old guys, where I asked them what Russ was like. Not flashy, somebody said. You didn’t see him in no limelight or nothing.
The further we went, the more it felt to me like Russ was one of those people who hide themselves in plain sight. It was like dealing with a magician and being faked out at every turn: the more carefully you think you’re looking, the more you’re following his misdirection. It started to feel like one of his cons. What was I looking for anyway? Namesake. Why? Where was this going?
I think Tony felt it too as we went along. His father had hidden himself from his own family. For decades my dad had been content with that abortive presence, made his peace with it so that he could pursue his own dreams. He had locked the dark void of his father into a closet. And now I was dragging him along to join me in the hunt for this man. He wanted to do it, and he dutifully unearthed memories. “Jesus, I haven’t thought about that for seventy years!” Here and there, he was a boy again, staring up at the towering colossus of the father. But I don’t think he was finding much substance in the childhood vision.
Then I had an idea—which was a relief, really. Go back onto the other tack: Do what I do for a living. Set the personal baggage aside. Don’t look for my grandfather. Look for a historical figure.
4
The Immigrant
RUSS’S FATHER’S NAME was Antonino Sciotto. When I visited his village, high in the mountains of eastern Sicily, and found the very house he was born in, the notion popped into my head that when he first opened his eyes, in the summer of 1876, it would have been onto a sky so blue and so near, so enveloping, it must have felt, as he grew, like his true home. Just as intimate and enveloping would have been the noises of the mountaintop enclave. Carts groaning against cobbles, bells on animal necks clanking musically, the shuffling of wild pigs at night followed in the morning by the brassy clarity of church bells.
The village, remote, pre-plumbing and pre-electric, hemmed by stands of cork, cypress, cedar, and hazelnut trees and far from any major trade route, was in some ways not much different in his time from when it was founded in the ninth century by Arabs, in one of the successive invasions of the island. The narrow, stacked houses stood huddled close to the central street. There was one well. You got water by leading a donkey up and down the steep and twisty paths, coming back with your sloshing jugs and buckets. You kept it for use in clay pots in your house. At night you lit candles or oil lamps.
The name the town eventually received—San Pier Niceto, or Victorious Saint Peter—was apparently a nod to the later Christian reconquering. From the highest spots you can see the metropolis of Messina down below, but from up here the port city seemed as remote as Rome. Even today seafood has no part in the local cuisine, as if the Tyrrhenian Sea glimmering down below was suspected of being an optical trick. The parade of invaders—Carthaginians, Greeks, Normans, Swabians, “Saracens”—had left a population comprising a veritable database of ethnic markers: dark to fair, straight to kinked, lithe to squat.
The boy—who would grow to exemplify the dark and squat end of the spectrum—wasn’t special. Not in his first name—calls of “Antonino” rang out in every stony corner of San Pier Niceto—and as for his last name there were Sciottos scattered throughout northeastern Sicily. When I brought my family to the town, Mario Italiano, its unofficial historian, took us on a passeggiata through the streets and introduced us to residents. Probably half a dozen people we randomly encountered had my great-grandfather’s last name. In the Middle Ages the Sciotto family apparently had some power; there’s a Palazzo Lo Sciotto in the town of Pace del Mela, six miles away, a remnant of feudal grandeur. But there was no power in Antonino Sciotto’s family—the whole town was poor, including his parents. The house where my great-grandfather was born was a bastion-like stone structure with a bricked arch over the door in the manner of the ancient Romans; Mario, my guide, said it dated to the late Middle Ages. It sat on the edge of town, a few steps from a cliff.
Antonino’s parents, Santi and Petronilla, were farmers. Both had spent their whole lives in the village, as had their forebears going back at least into the early 1700s. The boy had no schooling—illiteracy was the norm in nineteenth-century Sicily. He went to work as soon as he was able, probably with olives and grapes, the two main pursuits of the townspeople. There were also shepherds, men and boys who picked their way along perilous tracks wearing leggings and jackets of shaggy goat hide, looking like they were in the process of merging with the animals they were tending. But paying work of any kind was hard to find. The region—the island—was in the midst of a harrowing depression that had begun before he was born.
At age twenty-one, Antonino was compelled to make a sudden change, “compelled” being the operative word. He didn’t want to do it, but after months of what must have been bitter fighting between two of the village’s oldest clans he finally showed up at the municipio with a sixteen-year-old girl named Francesca Spadaro, bringing two of his workmates along to serve as witnesses. The reason for the haste would have been perfectly evident to Placido Bruno, the man who registered the marriage, for in addition to being mayor he was also an obstetrician.
I was fortunate enough to find an assistant in my research into my great-grandfather, in the person of Giuseppe Ruggeri. Joe, as he goes by in English, was born and raised in San Pier Niceto, trained as an economist, spent his career in Canada, and, in his retirement, returns for a portion of each year to the Sicilian village we have in common. After doing some research in the local archives for me, he confirmed the situation between Antonino and Francesca in an email:
The marriage was definitely forced and there must have been quite a lengthy negotiation because the banns were made very late. He was 21 and could marry of his own will, but she was a minor and needed approval from her parents. As long as she was a virgin when he impregnated her and he later married her, the family honor was preserved on both sides.
Since Francesca was seven months pregnant, I wonder whether the mothers of the bride and groom would have carried through with the traditional morning-after ceremony. They were supposed to make the newlyweds’ bed and hang a bloodstained sheet out the window to certify the bride’s virginity. At any rate, two months later, Dr. Bruno would likely have been the one to handle the delivery when Francesca gave birth to a son. They called the boy Santi, following the Sicilian tradition of naming the first male after the man’s father. Two years later they named their daughter Petronilla.
He was a restless young man, this Antonino, with a roving kind of hunger in him—dangerous in a place where lethality was acceptable in protecting family honor. At some point while still a newlywed with a shotgun-marriage bride he was conducting a flirtation with another, even younger, girl in the village—a teenager from another family of ancient local origin. Both her parents had died, and her sister, her only sibling, had married and gone off to live with her husband. Maybe Antonino had preferred this girl from the start, and the inconvenient pregnancy of Francesca had changed things. Or maybe he found her tragically alluring in her orphaned state, a thing to be pitied and cosseted. Then again, she also possessed some tenacity, which could have attracted him. She had been resourceful enough to get the nuns at the convent in the center of town to give her a job working in their kitchen.
But such a relationship could only be doomed: in a small village, he wouldn’t have dared to stir things up. Most of the time, presumably, he worked, or looked for work, and cared for his wife and growing family.
And he listened. In the public squares tucked around the village y
oung men were talking about the outside world. They were talking, with scorn, about something called Italy. Three decades after the unification of the peninsula it was still a largely alien concept in Sicily. People in the village didn’t speak Italian (Sicilian diverges enough from Italian to be considered a separate language, containing borrowings from Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Medieval French, its many dialects making it difficult at the time even for people from different parts of the island to communicate with one another) and didn’t know Italians. And Italians—meaning those from the northern part of the Italian peninsula, who had led the push for nationhood—didn’t know them. An emissary sent southward in 1860, as part of the initial effort to pull together the disparate, foreign-controlled duchies and principalities into one nation, informed his superiors with news-flash horror: “This is not Italy! This is Africa.”
“Africa” was shorthand for alien, barbarian, lawless. Sicily’s location, at the center of the Mediterranean Sea, coupled with its distance from the major powers around the perimeter, meant that its culture had taken shape in a constant crucible of invasion, in which one occupying power held sway for a time even as another was preparing to mount the next assault. Europeans, North Africans, and Near Easterners had been raping and plundering the island’s landscape since long before the time of Christ. A visiting Englishwoman in the 1800s described the conditions she found as being utterly different from the rest of Europe: the cities “are in a state of indecency, almost inferior to that of the ancient tribes of Africa. The prisons and sites of detention are places where beasts can hardly be kept. There are no public fountains, no clocks, conditions not in the least fit for civilized quarters.” Another result of the centuries of abuse by alien empires, for people in villages such as San Pier Niceto, was a complete distrust of authority.
Having endured so many centuries of multifarious oppression, Sicilians were suspicious and inward, beswarmed by superstitions. Their Catholicism was nominal, a surface under which a liturgy of incantations, spells, and rituals thrived—to get you through the day, to bring a healthy baby into the world, to make it rain, above all to ward off the malocchio, the evil eye. Like all other young men and women, Antonino Sciotto would have been taught to trust only family, and to trust family utterly. Reverence for parents and grandparents was on a level that is hard to fathom: for example, he probably addressed his humble, impoverished father as “Excellency.”
Meanwhile, northern Italians—with forebears like Galileo and Leonardo, not to mention Julius Caesar—considered themselves the creators of European civilization, the forgers of the modern world. What fueled men like Giuseppe Garibaldi, the leader of the revolution, was a desire to get back to the greatness that had been lost with the collapse of the Roman Empire. The fight for a united Italy—the Risorgimento, or Resurgence, an endless cycle of alliances, invasions, sieges, annihilations, raids, assassinations, and banishments—consumed most of the nineteenth century. It culminated, on September 20, 1870, with a three-hour cannon assault by an Italian army on the walls of Rome, the capital of the Papal States, the last major piece of the peninsula holding out against the idea of a unified Italy, and the eventual capitulation of the pope. Victory—independence—was announced in 1871, five years before Antonino’s birth. Rome became the capital of the new nation. It had to be the capital, for were they not rebuilding the empire?
Unification turned out to be the last straw. The northern Italians who ran the new government accomplished, within the first two decades of Antonino’s life, what the Carthaginians, Vandals, Goths, and other invaders of Sicily had not: they brought the island to a state of ruin and its people to starvation and despair. Northern leaders couldn’t fathom the opaque structure of Sicilian society. They found it was controlled by two groups—large property owners and the Catholic Church—both of whom seemed to be manipulated by a little-understood organization called “mafia.” The roots of this society went back at least into the previous century and perhaps much further. Even the term was a source of confusion. An Arabic word, mu’afa, which was taken up into Sicilian, meant “a place of refuge.” It seemed to refer to a community formed to protect against outside threats, of which the people of the island had experienced many.
As far as the leaders of the new Italian government were concerned, such layers of cultural obfuscation did nothing but allow corruption and malfeasance to flourish. They had no choice, they felt, but to impose, as one wrote, “our superior intelligence and superior morality” directly on this alien people, so that “we can hope to govern and master them.” Waves of new taxes were levied—at the same time that prices for locally produced goods were plummeting, and also while a virus was decimating the island’s grapevines. Even in better times the diet was dead basic. Today we fetishize Italian cuisine; these people subsisted mostly on bread—the poorest on balurda, a type of cornbread—supplemented by field greens like dandelion. And now they were actually starving. Women went to extreme measures to feed their families, like scraping the outer layer of plaster off the walls of their homes and mixing the powder into their dough to make it go further.
Young Sicilians reacted to the crisis. In villages like San Pier Niceto they went to meetings of a new movement called Fasci Siciliani, Sicilian Workers Leagues, which called for social justice.
Others opted for a different response. Foreign enterprises—railroad companies, mines, governments—had come to see opportunity in the crisis in southern Italy and began actively recruiting workers. Suddenly there were posters in towns all over Sicily advertising high and secure wages for those willing to travel.
Some of the first Italians to leave in numbers headed for, of all places, the state of Louisiana. The upheaval in Sicily coincided with the end of the American Civil War, which freed slaves and left plantation owners desperate for cheap labor. An enterprising group of former slaveowners calling themselves the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association established a regular steamship route between New Orleans and southern Italy. They advertised good working conditions, solid wages, and free passage.
More than 100,000 young Sicilian men went to Louisiana. They worked the sugarcane alongside Black sharecroppers, or took the places that former slaves had abandoned as they sought what they hoped would be a better life. If it wasn’t technically slave labor, it was close, both in terms of it being backbreakingly difficult and in the way they were treated. They became objects of degradation and disdain to white Louisianians and far beyond. The eleven men who were hanged in the largest mass lynching in American history—in New Orleans in 1891—were not Black but Italian. The New York Times defended the extralegal executions, calling the victims “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.”
And yet. Many of those who staked out a life in America found that it was better than what they had left behind. As it happens, we have a reliable observer who was able to compare the situation of peasants in Sicily with Blacks in the American South. Booker T. Washington, the Black educator and adviser to U.S. presidents, traveled through six European countries in 1910 and wrote a kind of antithesis to the travel guides that were popular at the time. He wrote The Man Farthest Down for those, like him, who were freed slaves, and for their children. How did their suffering and abuse under the Jim Crow system compare with living conditions elsewhere?
Washington toured salt mines in Poland and visited London slums. But he found the subject that best fit the title of his book when he got to Sicily. “I have frequently seen men who had done a hard day’s work sit down to a meal which consisted of black bread and a bit of tomato or other raw vegetable. In the more remote regions these peasant people frequently live for days or months, I learned, on almost any sort of green thing they find in the fields, frequently eating it raw, just like the cattle.” Peasants worked like animals for absentee landlords, being forced during harvest time to exist on two hours’ sleep. Bare and bleak landscapes; old men dying in gutters—Washington found signs of “physical and mental deterior
ation” in both the land and its people.
Washington served up his wan summary of comparative hope for Blacks in America: “I have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunity of the agricultural population in Sicily.”
This was what Antonino left, and why he decided to leave, in 1901. Other entities—U.S. states, shipping companies, mines, and factories in Argentina, Venezuela and Australia—had followed the lead of the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association. When men like Antonino ventured down out of their medieval villages to the big city of Messina, a sprawling place on the cusp of the twentieth century, they found walls papered with posters. Recruiting agents—padroni—would stop you on the street and ask if you were ready for adventure. They would sign you up like it was for a stint in the military.
Many of those looking for a way out followed friends or family members. Antonino’s wife’s brother had gone to work in a coal mine near Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He doesn’t seem to have stayed long, but he blazed a trail. Pennsylvania would become the second most popular destination for Sicilian émigrés, behind New York. Antonino was like the majority of those who went there, settling not in the big cities but in smaller towns. These were the locations of the mines and factories most in need of desperate, hardworking foreigners.
Smalltime Page 4
