Crazy in the Kitchen

by Louise DeSalvo

  Because it's wartime, there is much talk of death in our household. My mother and grandparents discuss the carnage of the war at the supper table and I have heard it. I have seen the pages of newspapers filled with pictures of GIs victorious, of GIs slain, though my mother tries to hide them from me. Images of the war, though, are everywhere and can't be hidden— on the newsprint the vegetable man uses to wrap my mother's purchases; on the front pages of the newspapers for sale at Albini's, our corner drugstore.

  Italy is at war against the United States, and my grandparents wonder how their relatives in Italy are faring. Throughout the war, they send them packages of clothing, of dried beans, dry biscuits. My grandparents want the Allies to win. Still, they don't want anyone from their villages to die.

  And whether my father will come back from the war alive, we don't know. My mother knows he's in the Pacific, near some heavy fighting. She knows this because of coded messages in my father's letters.

  During the war, my mother eats whatever is put in front of her (and it is almost always cooked by my grandfather). She is happy to have someone else attending to the business of food, happy to be with her father, happy to have help managing me. She enjoys what he cooks. She has not yet developed her revulsion for the peasant fare he and my grandmother eat. This comes later, when she moves to the suburbs and tries to put her Italian past behind her.

  My grandfather was a farm boy, born into a family of farm laborers. As a small child, he worked the wheat fields with his parents. My father tells me about one difficult day, when my grandfather's small hands were covered with cuts from the stalks he was binding after his parents cut the wheat, and he looked up to the road above the field. He saw a small boy, about his age, walking along the road, alone, carrying a bookbag.

  This was during the 1890s, when workers in the South were poorer than they had been before. They borrowed money to live, couldn't pay their debts, lived like indentured servants. There was never food enough or money enough, though they worked from long before dawn until after dusk, and had to walk to and from the fields to the villages where they lived.

  "Papa, where is that boy going?" my grandfather asked. His father looked up at the boy walking alone on a road, for a boy walking alone on a road was an unusual thing.

  "That boy," his father said, "is going to school."

  "Papa," my grandfather said, "I would like to do that. I would like to go to school." For surely my grandfather must have thought that walking alone on a road in the morning was preferable to what he was doing, even if he was doing it with his parents.

  Figlio mio," his father said, "you cannot do that, you cannot go to school."

  "But why can't I go to school, Papa?" my grandfather asked.

  "You cannot go to school," his father answered, "because you are a laborer and your lot in life is to work in the fields."

  "But Papa," my grandfather said, "what about my children?" "Your children," his father answered, "cannot go to school, for their lot in life is to be peasants to work in the fields, like you."

  When my father tells the story, he says that my grandfather paused a moment, looked at the boy on the road, and said, "But Papa, my children's children. Surely they will go to school."

  According to my father, one of the reasons my grandfather came to America was so that his children, and his children's children, could go to school.

  When my grandfather first came to America, he worked on the Lackawanna Railroad. In 1908, the year he left Italy, the income of farm workers in the South had plummeted; workers could not buy enough food to sustain life. My grandfather once told my father that, in Italy, he had always gone to bed hungry. Whenever I had a meal with my grandfather, he would pat his belly and smile. I would pat my belly and smile. Here, he always ate enough. And for this he was grateful. But it was not always so, not when he first worked on the railroad.

  I don't know how my grandfather paid for his steamship passage to America. But, as with other Southern Italians, it was probably paid for by a padrone or a recruiter who went to the South to find laborers. He talked about the man who brought him here to work on the railroad. He always said this man was not a good man. My grandfather would have received instructions to lie about why he was coming to America, because recruiting workers in Italy, though a common practice, was illegal. He would have been told to say to the officials that, no, he had no promise of work, but that yes, he intended to work. Please God he answered correctly, or he would be shipped back to Italy.

  Family lore has it that his passage was paid for, that its cost was deducted from his pay, that he paid far, far more than his passage cost, and that it took him many years to pay off the debt. This was why his young wife worked.

  A dream of America was sold to laborers to lure them to America, where they provided the cheap labor needed for building railways, subways, buildings. During my grandfather's first years here, the dream faded. Though he never would trade life in this country for life in the Old World.

  "Here," he said, "you work hard, you get paid little, you eat, maybe not too much, but you eat. There, you work, you work, you work, you don't get paid, you don't eat."

  For years I believed (as I was taught in school) that the men who built America, made it great, were men like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie. But the people who built America were people like my grandfather.

  The men who worked on railroad gangs awakened at three in the morning and walked to the line they were building, as they had walked to the fields in Italy. They worked from five until twelve without rest.

  They had hard bread for lunch. Water, if it was available, was usually fetid. But always, there was wine.

  After lunch, they worked again until four. Then they walked back to the boxcars where they lived, ate whatever supper they could manage, fell into a comalike sleep.

  They slept, eight men to a windowless boxcar, on bags of straw crawling with vermin. They covered themselves with discarded horse blankets and they slept in their filthy work clothes, for there was no place to wash them, there was no place to wash themselves. Their bodies were lice-ridden, encrusted with dirt, covered with oozing sores.

  People who saw them along the line made fun of them. Called them dagos, wops, filthy guineas. People who saw them working were afraid of them, of their filth, of their foreignness, and mothers pushed their children behind their backs, for they believed these men were dangerous.

  If the men complained that they had no fresh water, the padrone would say they were never satisfied, they should starve to death, they didn't belong here. But they were here. And it was a padrone who brought them, who profited from their labor.

  Their work was difficult and dangerous. They worked hunched over, in pain. They were too hot or too cold. They picked their way across the gashes the railroads made in the land, laying track, repairing track.

  They were gone from their new homes in America for months, sometimes longer. Because many of them couldn't write, their families didn't hear from them, didn't know where they were. When they returned, looking older, more beaten than when they left, they said little, for there was little to say. They wanted to sleep.They wanted to wash. They were filthy. Filthy with the soil of America.

  Here, the unexpected happens: my grandfather becomes a cook on the railroad. The gang boss has decided that the men will work better if someone cooks for them, if they eat good food. So my grandfather trades pickax and shovel for frying pans, pots, and knives.

  My grandfather knew how to cook— knew how to cook outside, for that's where you cooked, if you had something to cook, when you worked the fields. On the railroad gang, my grandfather wanted a hot meal at the end of a hard day's work, not just the bread and cheese rationed to the men for supper.

  He began by cooking meals for himself along the railroad line, using what he scavenged. Then he cooked for himself and a few friends who scavenged with him. In time, my father told me, he persuaded the padrone to let him cook for all the men in his gang,
with provisions provided by the railroad. By then, muckrakers were writing about workers' living conditions and the railroad owners were forced to improve them.

  How he persuaded the padrone, I can only imagine.

  Before the railroad provides him with equipment to cook for the men, he gathers twigs, pieces of wood, pieces of charcoal by the side of the railbed, marveling that there are such things to be had for the taking. If things had been this easy in the old country, if you weren't punished for taking what you found, he thinks, there would have been no reason to leave.

  I see my grandfather trudging back down the line after his day's work, collecting twigs, putting them into the sack he carries on his back. I see him digging a hole, surrounding it with rocks, lining it with kindling, placing the wood carefully, paying attention to the direction of the wind, and lighting the fire with a match from the metal matchbox he carries.

  He fans the fire, coaxes it to life. Takes a grate he's taken from over a drainage pipe, places it over the fire. But what will he cook?

  My grandfather was a country boy. He knows how to study the land. How to hunt animals, how to forage. This, he learned from his parents.

  He knows how to find land snails after a heavy rain. How to scout for edible wild herbs and greens— bay laurel, savory, thyme, sorrel, dandelions, spinach, chicory, nettle tops— and for onion shoots, wild leeks, berries. How to make a trap, make and use a slingshot. How to rig a net so he can wade into a shallow stream and catch fish, river crab, river eel.

  While the fire burns, I see him dressing what he's hunted. A squirrel, perhaps, killed with his slingshot. He puts on a pair of gloves, pulls the skin over the head, the legs. Cuts off the head and feet. Removes the glands and the internal organs. Cuts the squirrel into pieces. Rubs the meat with the pork fat he carries in his backpack, then rubs it with the wild thyme that he's found.

  He puts the squirrel on the grill over the fire. After a while, the wild onions he's gathered. Then the bread he's given.

  I see him eating his meal, slowly. Sharing his food (for he was always generous). I see him drinking from his flask of wine. A laborer, in filthy clothes, sitting on a rock by the side of a fire near a railroad track somewhere in New York State, eating food that satisfies him, not just food that fills his belly.

  HANDWORK

  Most days, as I was growing into young womanhood, my old Italian grandmother used to sit, silently, all day long, very close to the radiator in the corner of the dining room of our house in Ridgefield, New Jersey, her old black shawl covering her shoulders, her feet supported by an old painted stool, as she crocheted white tablecloths, or knitted sweaters or afghans with wool unraveled from old sweaters we had outgrown, had outworn, or despised.

  Before leaving the house, I would stop by where my grandmother was sitting, to see what she was working on, to get a coin from her to buy a treat. Though she had very little money, she was generous, giving me surprise gifts of silver dollars, a paper bill she had safety-pinned to the underside of her skirt so my mother wouldn't find it and steal it. Her love for me defied explanation; she detested my mother, and I did little to deserve her love, nothing to invite it, except bake with her on occasion, or bring her a cool glass of water now and then so she would not have to interrupt her work, or let her teach me how to knit.

  I spoke to her in English (for I spoke very little dialect); she answered in dialect (for she spoke very little English). My mother discouraged us from speaking dialect, from speaking Italian. I think my mother didn't want us to know our grandmother, and through knowing her, come to love her, as my mother did not love her. (I did love my grandmother. But as one might a forbidden, graven image. For my mother, I felt no love, but rage, and, yes, a deep and bitter yearning.)

  My grandmother cared for me as she could not care for my mother. Mia figlia, she called me: my child. Something she never called my mother. For my mother wasn't her child but some other woman's child. The child of a woman more beautiful than she, a woman my grandfather loved until he died. A woman my mother mourned until she died, though she had experienced that mother's love only briefly.

  "Mia figlia," my grandmother would say, a finger to her lips, when she thought it was a day that would be dangerous for me, a day I should stay out of my father's way.

  "Mia figlia," as she pushed me behind her body when my father came at me, behind the body no one embraced.

  "Mia figlia," when I graduated from grammar school, high school, college, though my education would separate us. "Mia figlia," when I married, when I became a mother, though she held no regard for maternity.

  "Mia figlia," in a whisper, when she was dying.

  As she worked throughout the day, my grandmother nibbled on almonds that she kept in her apron pocket. When I asked her why, in English, she would respond, in dialect, "For strength and for remembrance."

  For strength and for remembrance.

  I thought that it was my dead grandfather my grandmother was remembering. But that she had left family behind when she came here, I didn't realize. In the myopia of my childhood, this woman existed as my grandmother only, baker of bread, maker of pizza, knitter of garments I didn't often wear, crocheter of white lace tablecloths my mother used on our dining room table on holidays. I did not understand that she was a woman with a past.

  Maybe it was not my grandfather my grandmother was remembering. But a father who loved her gruffly or not at all. A sister she slept with, or worked with in the fields or in the orange groves behind her village. A brother who tormented her or who looked after her when the boys of the village chased her and made fun of her, for she was no beauty, and long past the age when women marry.

  Maybe it was a mother, too. A mother who sent her daughter to be married in America. A mother anguished in the knowledge that she would never see her child again, perhaps never hear from her. But happy, too, that her daughter would have a better life.

  Was my grandmother remembering the mother who took her broom and swept the steps to her dwelling the day after her daughter left for America? Remembering the mother who wept as she wiped away the footprints her daughter had left in the red dust that blew up with the winds from the Sahara, footprints that had remained on the threshold through that mournful, windless night?

  But sweep she must, for this was the work of women, and her duty, this sweeping, like working in the fields when there was work to be had, and fetching water when there was water to be had, and gathering herbs and vegetables— chicory, cardoons, fennel— on damp and misty days when it was possible. Yes, sweep and work and fetch and gather and weep she must, for her daughter, and for all those who left this small and ghostlike place. And weep, too, for those who remained behind.

  During the winter, the radiator hissed and clanked, creating more noise than heat, though its corner was nevertheless one of the warmest places in our drafty old house. But sitting there had a price: it meant that my grandmother never sat in sunlight, and that she could barely see her work, for her corner of the dining room was forever in shadow, and the economies of our household forbade the use of artificial light during the day.

  I knew that my grandmother was there, for she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do after she did her small bit of shopping and her baking, but crochet and knit. She had no friends and no employment in Ridgefield. She was far from Hoboken, far from a meaningful life earning her keep as a building superintendent and complaining with her cronies on the stoop of our building.

  I knew nothing of the South of Italy where all my grandparents came from. Knew nothing of my grandmother's village in Puglia, though I thought it was a barbarous place, for she sang me a song about a wolf coming through a window to steal a baby. This song scared me, but it was a song about something that happened only in that faraway place where my grandmother used to live.

  All I knew of my grandmother's village was that she had left it behind. She never described where she came from, never told me its name, never said she missed it, never said she wan
ted to go back. So my grandmother's Italy became an Italy I created, a little white village with cubical houses tumbling down a rocky hillside to a crystalline sea. Imagined flowers blooming, trees fruiting. I saw black-clad women in headscarves walking through narrow alleyways, balancing huge bundles on their heads. I saw these women cooking in tiny kitchens with tiny windows.

  When I thought about my grandmother's Italy, I did not imagine invasion, conquest, war, hunger, thirst, fatigue, resignation, despair. I did not see a waterless, sunbaked, grief-stricken, apocalyptic land bleeding its people to America.

  My grandfather's first wife, his girlish wife, sold vegetables door to door from the handcart she pushed through the streets of Hoboken; she took in washing during her pregnancy and after, wearing herself down.

  She died of influenza, like so many others, when her baby, my mother, was only three months old. Undertakers were so busy during this time they could not take the dead away, could not bury them quickly enough. My mother's mother was buried in an unmarked grave without ceremony, for during this time it was against the law for people to gather to mourn the dead.

  Years later, my mother would wander that cemetery, looking for her mother. My mother would make a cross from pieces of wood she found, to mark a place that might have been her mother's grave, to stop her mother's soul from wandering.

  Soon after his first wife died, my grandfather worked out an arrangement through people he knew with a woman from his province who was looking for a situation. He needed someone to care for his child, for the people who cared for his child did not take good care of her. He was desperate and had very little time, and he settled for Libera because she was known by people he knew and she came from his province, Puglia. She was desperate and had very little hope and needed him so she could come to America, and so she settled for him.

  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.