So he left everyone and everything, made the journey, first down the hill to Messina, and the port. I presume he waved tearfully; I presume Francesca saw him off, along with their two little ones, filled with whatever cauldron of emotions, waving to the figure of him up on the high deck. He had grown somewhat in the four years since they had married; he was thicker now, and sporting the brawny mustache that southern Italian men of his generation favored: “Moustache Petes” they would call them in America.
He would be back, of course. This was—for him, for most of the millions who formed this tide of which he was a part—migrant work, a source of cash. He had every intention to return to the world that mattered to him.
Eighteen days later came the arrival at Ellis Island, and the line of southern Italians—the ship had made calls at Naples, Messina, and Palermo—wending down the plank and into a great hall. The paper you were clutching as you waited your turn told the immigration officer what he needed to know. Then an agent from the coal company thrust a packet into your hands: your food for the journey. There was the brief, frightening or healing magic of beholding the New York City skyline, then the roaring train ride across Pennsylvania.
Walston was the name of the town, a community just north of Punxsutawney and eighty miles from Pittsburgh. It was named after Walston H. Brown, president of the Rochester & Pittsburgh Coal & Iron Company. Mr. Brown himself was back in New York; he worked in Manhattan, and lived with his wife—an energetic advocate of the women’s suffrage movement—north of the city, in Dobbs Ferry. Their mansion, with its views across the Hudson River, was about as far removed from Walston, Pennsylvania, as could be.
The new life asserted itself. There were the rows of miners’ houses: six families to a house, or an equivalent number of single men, partitions between rooms so thin that everyone could hear every single thing that everyone else said and did. Jobs were doled out: miner, coke-puller, coke-worker, scraper, hauler. Charging the coke ovens was the hottest work; people likened it to being in hell. As coal baked, the ovens gave off a cloud of blue smoke, which later turned yellow. Everyone in town could not only see it but taste it: “disagreeable” was the word that one local reporter found to describe it. The ovens stretched out like railroad cars, a train of beehive structures that went on for more than a mile and lit up the night sky. When the works first opened, an observer declared that “driving along the road at night, in full view of this serpentine-like line, the spectacle is simply grand.”
The railroad tracks ran right up to the ovens so cars could be loaded. Sometimes hoboes emerged from the empty cars, heated up their cooking pots on the ovens, made friends with the workers for the short duration of their stay, then headed out. From them the cluster of foreign workers got news of exotic places: Omaha, Sacramento, Denver, Jersey City. America, whatever that was, out there somewhere.
A coal-industry journal said the workers in Walston were of “all known nationalities except Turks and Indians.” You were living in a company town, and you tried to surround yourself with paesani, for security and for comfort. Life was primitive: eat, work, sleep. But you were paid well compared to what you’d left. No: better than that. A coke-puller got $2 per oven, and could make $5 a day. That wasn’t good—it was breathtaking. When you had time, there were shops to go to, and you had money to buy things. On Sundays there was beer. When you clanked tankards with Irishmen and Poles—Sláinte! Na zdrowie!—you were celebrating freedom, the giddy falling-away of cultural mores. In that absence there was suddenly a wee bit of room to contemplate something that essentially hadn’t existed before: yourself, as an individual.
Antonino settled in. He made a decision—far crazier than the one to come here, which had really been a matter of necessity. This was something else: a lunge, a shout from a mountaintop into an echoing valley, the bellowing call of an ego demanding to be fed. It was a tradition-defying act of selfishness. He must have been shaking inside as he dictated the letter to a Sicilian coworker who could write. The message was simple: Come. It’s good here. Or good enough. Better, anyway.
The letter made its measured way across the ocean. Somehow, it wound through the Byzantine postal system at Messina. It got loaded onto an animal’s back for the steep climb up into the cypress-scented hills. But it wasn’t his wife, Francesca, who opened it. It was addressed to Annamaria Previte, the orphan girl.
5
The Cheat
I ASSUME ANNAMARIA’S was a somewhat different journey from San Pier Niceto to the port at Messina. The transport would have been the same as when Antonino went, mule having been the standard means well into the 1950s. But I’m imagining that my great-grandmother made the trip alone, rounding the steep bends and trundling down toward the cobalt, salt-scented coast with some mixture of anxiety, panic, and excitement at the mad step she was taking. She had no family, after all. She must have had a confidante, for just as Antonino needed someone else to write his letters she needed someone to decipher them, but otherwise it was only the two of them in this scheme. Her ticket was paid for, by Antonino. He had sent her money for the voyage: $10. And he knew the drill at customs, so he must have instructed her on what to say to the American officials. She dutifully listed him as her contact in the United States, referred to him as her “cousin,” and gave his address, 244 Findley Street, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, as her destination and new home. This was a carefully orchestrated coup, on his part a clear act of betrayal, on hers a lunge at a future.
A year later their first child was born. They called her Anna. They hadn’t married and never would—not surprising, considering that he already had a wife and they were both Catholic. But they began presenting themselves as husband and wife shortly after her arrival, and my family always assumed they were.
The next part of this sustained act of subterfuge came a few years later, when they left town. The coal mine had lifted both of them from poverty, but it was ruinous work. In Antonino’s first full year on the job, 2,232 miners died from mining accidents in the United States, which was only a fraction of the true toll. For untold thousands, work in the mines led to the black-lung cough; the sufferer filled handkerchiefs with what one writer dubbed “inky expectoration,” then weakened rapidly until “in the course of a few years, he sinks under the disease.”
The little family traveled sixty miles south to Johnstown. Where Punxsutawney had been all about coal, Johnstown was a steel town. And it was growing furiously. Two decades before they arrived, a visitor described it as “new, rough, and busy, with the rush of huge mills and factories and the throb of perpetually passing trains.” Just then it was having another growth spurt.
The town had come into being a century before as a hardscrabble coal and iron center, with mostly German and Welsh immigrants working small mines and foundries tucked into its wooded gullies.* A man named Daniel Morrell gave it trajectory when he arrived from Philadelphia to run the Cambria Iron Company in the 1850s. He was one of the first people in the world to take advantage of a new, dramatically more efficient, process for turning iron into steel, and by the end of the Civil War he had turned Johnstown into the steel-producing capital of the United States. Morrell was a benevolent dictator, who abhorred unions but believed in taking care of his workers as a father would his children. He gave the city its first hospital and library, and ran the town government, the department store, and the local bank. Despite Morrell’s anti-union policy there seems to have been little outward expression of grievance from workers, who under him had a better standard of living than they had ever known.
In the 1870s, while Antonino Sciotto was taking his first steps in the cobbled lanes of San Pier Niceto, a new generation of industrialists in Pittsburgh, seventy miles to the west, made a run at Morrell’s empire. Morrell dismissed the upstarts—who included Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick—as mere financiers rather than real steel men, but within a short time they made Johnstown subordinate to Pittsburgh. They also ushered in a newly confrontational re
lationship between factory owners and workers. And, almost as if they had wanted to fashion a symbol of their relationship to lowly workers, the Pittsburgh titans conceived of a fairy-tale recreation area for themselves and their families in the hills above Johnstown. They formed a social club, erected a seventy-two-foot-high dam near the town of South Fork, and diverted water to create a gravity-defying mountaintop lake. Each member of the club built a palatial “cottage” around the lake, where their families could spend summers away from the heat of the city. Visitors described it as like something out of a dream, with women twirling parasols while servants worked oars and sails, fancifully sailing boats on top of a mountain.
As this paradise was nearing completion the people of Johnstown became alarmed: the South Fork Dam stood just east of the city, and 450 feet above it. Everybody feared the spring floods, which roared with biblical ferocity down the steep slopes. Morrell sent his chief engineer to inspect the dam; he reported “serious elements of danger.” The lords of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club ignored complaints. In 1889 the dam burst, the water cascaded into the valley, and 2,209 people in Johnstown were killed, most within ten minutes.
The Johnstown Flood was the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history to that time. It focused national attention on the concept of disaster relief (Clara Barton spent five months in the city, with a team of fifty Red Cross doctors and nurses). And the flood washed away the idea of an industrial overlord as a benevolent father figure. Newspapers across the country delivered a unanimous verdict on its cause: “The Club Is Guilty” … “An Engineering Crime.” Rebuilding took years. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel moved into town in the aftermath. The mills expanded and modernized, and the town grew, but so did the class divide and the mistrust.
The steel mills became the focus of everything. Johnstown was roaring like a beast—as were the other little cities encircling it: Altoona and Youngstown, Morgantown and Wheeling. As Antonino and Annamaria arrived the mills downtown were clanging and booming and grinding out their girders and sheets. There was hope here, and not just in income but quality of life: the mills were easier on the body than the mines were.
In making his decision to move, however, Antonino apparently hadn’t factored in discrimination. To the town’s original German and Welsh inhabitants, the newcomers who had been flooding in for the past several years were all “Huns” or “Hunkies,” whether they came from Hungary, Poland, or Italy. The caste system in early twentieth-century America put Italians’ status roughly on par with that of Blacks. At around the time of the family’s move, a native-born white man earned $14 a week, while the average Black man earned $10 per week. For southern Italian immigrants in the United States, the figure was closer to $9. Decent jobs in the mill weren’t generally open to Italians.
But maybe the couple zeroed in on Johnstown precisely for this reason. There was a strike on at the Bethlehem Steel plant around the time they arrived. Striking workers complained that the company had brought “a couple of car loads of Negroes and Italians into the plant.” Antonino was apparently one of these scabs. He worked in the mill’s car shop, painting railroad cars. Eventually, though, the strike ended, and he wound up back in a coal mine.
So no, the move did not bring about a better work life. Instead, the significance of relocating to Johnstown turned out to be in the evolution of identities. From now on their names would appear differently on official documents. In Johnstown, Antonino Sciotto and Annamaria Previte became Tony and Mary Shorto.† The change wasn’t just due to vague notions of Americanness, of making pronunciation easier, and of fitting in. It was also a way to distance themselves from the past, from the village in the hills of eastern Sicily, and Antonino’s wife.
Soon Annamaria—Mary—was pregnant again and Antonino—Tony—was making the first of several trips back to San Pier Niceto. His mother was still alive: I’m told by family members that he traveled back in part to see her. And since his original plan to seek work in America had been to help support his wife and their children, he would have to see Francesca on his return trips. Did he stay with her when he visited, as man and wife? Was he able to dupe them all into thinking that he was on his own in Pennsylvania?
It doesn’t seem likely. His Sicilian village was truly a village. Everyone had to know what he and the orphan girl had done, were doing. What kind of homecoming did he have? How did Francesca receive him? Shortly after he first left for America, in 1901, their second child, their daughter, had died, at the age of two. Did father and mother console each other on his return? Or did she refuse to see him?
I think not. One of his trips back was in 1908. In 1909, Francesca gave birth to a third child, and Tony Shorto—or rather, Antonino Sciotto—is listed on the birth certificate as the father. (In Pennsylvania, at the same time, Mary, his American “wife,” was pregnant with their third child.) If the married couple were on intimate terms seven or more years after he had first left for America, that suggests to me that he kept his ties to his wife in other ways. Surely he was helping her financially throughout this period. I’m not entirely sure why this mattered to me—maybe I was trying to find his internal logic, what he told himself about what he was doing, how he justified this complex life he had fashioned. This seems to me so much a part of the work in doing family history—or for that matter any narrative digging into the past: trying to suss out what was going on in heads that are long dead. Maybe this is one’s own ulterior motive. Consciousness, even one’s own, is such a tenuous and unfathomable thing; maybe we try to look into our predecessors’ to shore it up in ourselves.
But no sooner had I reached this conclusion about my great-grandfather—that he must have been taking care of families on both sides of the Atlantic—than I received a surprising email from Joe Ruggeri, my informant in the village:
Hi Russell,
This morning I went to the dentist and I met someone I knew as a child (he is a few years older). He knew Francesca Spadaro, the wife of your great grandfather. He did not provide child support. She supported herself and her two children by washing the clothes of the wealthier families in SPN. This involved getting up early in the morning a few days a week, collecting the dirty clothes, walking down one mile to the river with the clothes and a tin container and soap, washing the clothes on the canal that carried the water from one grist mill to another, and then carrying the partly wet (and heavier) clothes back up the hill. Have a nice weekend. Joe
If this is true, then the story—and my great-grandfather’s self-justification—becomes even more complicated. How could Antonino have returned to Sicily repeatedly, lived with his wife while there, fathered another child with her, yet not have supported her?
I can try to game out different scenarios, but at the bottom one has to resort to the truism that human beings are complex creatures, buffeted by circumstances, sometimes of their own devising, whose motivations can shift on a dime, then later shift again, and then again. I’m left to conclude nothing more than what the evidence suggests: that Tony Shorto returned to his ancestral village repeatedly to visit his mother and others close to him; that on at least one occasion he was intimate with the wife whom he was actively betraying; that, despite this fact, as of a certain point—perhaps later—he stopped sending her money; and that the center of his life, these trips aside, was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
There, he and Mary had three more children in the next four years—all girls, making for a total of five girls.
Then, in 1914, came their first son. They called him Rosario, after Mary’s father, but it quickly became Americanized to Russell, or Russ.‡
The family’s first home in Johnstown was on a street filled with Hungarians. Neither Tony nor Mary ever learned much English, let alone Hungarian. They moved to another neighborhood near one of the entrances of the mill, rented the house, and took in boarders: four Italian men, all of them working in the coal mines. Besides a couple of Irish families, they were now surrounded by Italians.
And this is how the next generation grew up: Anna, Perina, Angeline, Sarah, Carmella (who went by Millie), and their little brother, Rosario, or Russell. Later there would be three more: Anthony, Catherine, and Nancy. Nine Sicilian American children raised in a Sicilian-speaking household in a rough coal-and-steel ghetto, surrounded by the thick wilds of the Pennsylvania mountains, by the plumes of smoke and dust from the mills, and by the matter-of-fact prejudice of Americans, who were threatened by this sudden rush of southern Europeans, who felt themselves whiter, more entitled to the available jobs. For the children, there wasn’t an issue of this being unfair. It was the way the world worked; it was reality—not the American dream but American waking life.
Then their lives changed. In 1920, Tony got word that his mother was dying. He left Mary and the children at the train station in Johnstown (seven-year-old Millie, who was old enough to appreciate the gulf of time he would be gone, was crying her eyes out on the platform as he waved goodbye), made the familiar trip east across the state, boarded the ship, traversed the imponderable ocean, rode the mule shuttle back up the hill, and so came again into the twisty, medieval streets of San Pier Niceto. The story my dad’s aunts used to tell was that by the time he got there the crisis had passed: his mother had recovered her health.
I don’t know how long he stayed, but there was an air of celebration at his departure. It had been a number of years since his last visit, and much had changed. I gather he was feeling richer. He took some family members to Messina with him the evening before he was to leave. There was a nice dinner at a proper restaurant, something unheard-of among the generationally impoverished villagers. Tony Shorto, the American, who these days was known to sport a three-piece suit, starched collar, tie, and cuff links, wanted to dazzle the hill people he’d been born among—wanted, I guess, to show how much he had distanced himself from them.
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