The Ethnic Trickster’s Carnival in

  Twentieth-Century African-American

     and Italian-American Short Fiction

 

Introduction

The pressures of racism, ethnocentrism, and alienation have been brought to bear on African Americans and Italian Americans in the twentieth century. How do the short stories produced by these groups reflect the cultures’ responses to such pressures? What similarities exist in the literary expressions of these groups in their attempt to cope with these culturally destructive realities of the twentieth century? The questions are overwhelming — but only if we interpret them seriously. That is to say, they may not be answered before the end of the next millennium.

But wait — what if the critic factors in the use of humor as a coping mechanism? With humor involved, some clear patterns can be traced amongst a sampling of ethnic stories. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, the deployment of humor to level social hierarchies, pro­vides us with a comic key to discovering similar motifs in the work of ethnic story writers. In the case of both Italian Americans and African Americans, ethnic authors use the comic sensibility to give voice to a dialogic and heteroglossic narrative selfhood. For this analysis, I will draw upon Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez’s article “The Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies” for a theoretical model of multiple selfhood relevant to ethnic humor and assimilation.[1] In both Italian-American and African-American use of humor, we see many ethnic authors embrace similar forms of carnival in the early twentieth century, the depression era, and contemporary times respectively. The theoretical concept of carnival’s “sacral and communal nature,” its life-affirming principle, discussed in Alexandar Mihailovic’s Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse will also be brought to bear with Hernandez’s theory to expose the journey of ethnic comic narrative from self-degradation to self-empower­ment.

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez’s “The Plural Self: The Politici­zation of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiog­raphies” provides us with a useful model of multiple selfhood in ethnic autobiography also applicable to ethnic short fiction. Draw­ing on the Bakhtinian model of heteroglossia (namely, the ability of literary language to speak multiple worldviews as if they formed different languages), Hernandez describes the ethnic autobiographies of N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldua, and Au­dre Lourde as “double voiced” discourse that alters the Western tradition of autobiography. This “double voiced” discourse of the ethnic writer de-emphasizes the Western tradition of individuality as the autobiographer speaks in two tongues simultaneously: one as simply him/herself and one “in which the individual identity is subordinate to the collective identity” (42). Such non-Western elements of ethnic autobiography as “oral tradition” and other “ritualistic acts” function to multiply the voice of the ethnic author, “link(ing) the individual to the (ethnic) collectivity, the present to the past” (42). The resulting text, in Hernandez’s terms, is a communo-biography or biomythography, enacting a “dia­logue between (the) particular ethnic group (of the author) and the dominant American culture” (42). Hernandez gives us appropriate examples of the “collective sense of self” in the ethnic autobiogra­phers including N. Scott Momaday and Gloria Anzualda. Mo­maday’s “collective sense of self” emerges for Hernandez in the text “the names” as the author recounts his childhood memories: “the voices of my parents, of my grandmother, and others. Their voices, their words, English and Kiowa — and the silences that lie about them — are already the element of my mind’s life” (49). This multi-voiced element yields a text which embodies the collective as Momaday writes from the perspective of his great-grandpar­ents. Relevantly, Hernandez’s second example Gloria Anzualda in her autobiography defends the collective voice of mestiza/Chi­cano culture in its language:

 

I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my ser­pent’s tongue — my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. (52)

 

Hernandez notes that Anzualda’s “serpent’s tongue” of a narra­tive voice “speaks the self in a pluralistic mode” (52). So why are Anzualda and Momaday relevant to Italian- and African-Ameri­can writers? Anzualda’s “refusal to accept the culturally enforced duality of speaking either Spanish or English” (52) reminds us that assimilation can be seen as a disintegrating attack on the plural­ized self of the ethnic writer.[2]

Speaking for himself as well as for his ethnic collective, Mo­maday notes that the man of his ethnic culture

 

must accommodate himself to what we call the dominant society. That is his future . . . the question is how. How to do it without sacrificing the valuable parts of one’s traditions and heritage? (57)

 

The ethnic writer must struggle to preserve his multiple, plural­ized identity in the face of the retreat of past heritage, the present pressures of the dominant Anglo-American culture and an un­knowable future. If assimilation becomes an attack, an erasure of ethnic identity or “passing” for white, this plural self and its rich voice disintegrate. Hernandez does not note an answer to Mo­maday’s burning question nor a means of defense against the pressure facing the plural self.

From other sources, however, one can discern that humor can be seen as the refuge and defense of the pluralized self of the eth­nic author. Mikhail Bakhtin states that one of the “basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel” is “a comic playing with languages” (323; emphasis mine). Bakhtin stressed the importance of comedy in his approach to dialogic and heteroglossic forms of communication. His further notion of “car­nival,” or the parody that knows no bounds in its exposure of ideological norms as contradictory stresses humor’s importance in relativizing truth. Carnival thus exposes the limitations of a domi­nant cultural group’s viewpoint. In the context of ethnic humor, the process of assimilating can be relativized. Instead of the as­similation process, the journey of the ethnic self is a an example of carnival, further elaborated upon by Alexandar Mihailovic as fol­lows:

 

carnival is characterized as re-establishing the link between the individual, the community, and the universe that sur­rounds them both . . . carnival temporarily dissolves the celebrant’s usual alienation from others, the individual be­coming seemingly reborn in his or her relations with them. Thus, carnival is sacral and communal without being insti­tutional. (184–86)

 

Ethnic humor thus celebrates carnival over and against “passing” and its disintegration of the ethnic self, despite a degree of partici­pation of the ethnic author in the economic practice of the domi­nant group. As Bakthin scholars Morson and Emerson wrote, “Carnival travesties, it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank and exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense from sense” (Morson 12–13). This is precisely what the humor of the multiply-selved, “serpent-tongued” ethnic writer does to preserve the dialogic viewpoint of one who writes from both within and without mainstream Anglo-American culture. By definition, then, this dialogic view unites the ethnic self to others.

More precisely, Mel Watkins, in his all-encompassing history of African-American humor, writes that an ethnic group’s “intimate involvement with contradiction and chaos” eventually leads to “a heightened comic sensibility” (401). Their need to cope with the absurd illogics of racism and the contradictory pressures of as­similation produces the carnivalesque, comic narrative perspective that is the refuge of the multiple self. Adds Watkins: “one of the key defining sources of African-American humor” is

 

the tension between the trickster’s ploy of using masked be­havior, a charade, as a pragmatic means of dealing with ra­cism and the covert perception that such behavior betrays one’s heritage. (433)

 

This image of the mask suggests the collectivized, multiple trick­ster self of Anzualda and Momaday as well as the ethnic writers to follow. So ethnic humor, self- and other-mocking, is particularly dually voiced and therefore particularly suited to the defense of the plural self of the ethnic writer. Finally, this dialogic nature of ethnic selfhood goes beyond any individual self. The many inte­rior voices must not only be brought into harmony with each other, but also must speak outside the self to the ethnic and white communities beyond.

The Serpent Bites Itself:
The Ethnic Trickster’s Self-Degradation
in George Schuyler and Pietro di Donato

How does this masked, forked-tongued voice express itself in the writings of Italian- and African-American writers of the early twentieth century? In the early twentieth century, the ethnic writer’s satiric bite seems to inject the greater part of its venom into the mores and attitudes of the author’s own people. Writers like George Schuyler and Pietro di Donato mock their own ethnic compatriots, openly ridiculing the faults and foibles of their own cultures.

This tendency toward radical self-depreciation in ethnic humor shows itself most clearly in the work of George S. Schuyler. His text, “Our Greatest Gift to America,” features barbs directed at the “sable literatus,” — the new black intellectual social class of which Schuyler himself was part:

 

It has not become unusual in the past few years for the Tired Society Women’s Club of Keokuk, Iowa or the Delicatessan Proprietor’s Chamber of Commerce or the Hot Dog Vender’s Social Club to have literary afternoons devoted ex­clusively to the subject of the lowly smoke. On such occa­sions there will be some notable Aframerican speakers as Prof. Hambone of Moronia Institute or Dr. Lampblack of the Federal Society for the Exploitation of Lynching, who will eloquently hold forth for the better part of an hour on the blackamoor’s gifts to the Great Republic and why, therefore, he should not be kept down. . . . The cracker editors are pay­ing generously for this stuff, and as a result, the black scrib­blers, along with the race orators, are now wallowing in the luxury of four-room apartments, expensive radios, Chicker­ing pianos, Bond Street, canvas-back duck, pre-war Scotch and high yellow mistresses. (437–38)

 

Schuyler is of course mocking the white audience who listens to and capitalizes upon the recountings of black suffering by the “race orators.” Yet the goal of this antebellum rhetoric for the “black scribblers” was the elevation of the African-American race. Notably, this same goal is shared by the sardonic and witty author even as he lampoons his fellow intelligentsia. He turns his subject matter to the effect of a largely poor and underemployed black populous in elevating the less-intelligent white lower classes, comically touting the “color caste system that roused the hope and pride of teeming millions of ofays” (441). This, he finally claims, is the African Americans “Greatest Gift to America,” yet he does so ostensibly to correct the reformers who hope to address the racial situation. Thus, Schuyler himself shares the rhetorical goal of his strait-laced contemporaries. Schuyler is here taking a cynical, Twainesque realist stance, exposing the functions of an ideology and mocking those deceived by it. However, he inadvertedly mocks his own central rhetorical position of recounting the Afri­can-American condition in a socially unequal context. Therefore, Schuyler’s satire ultimately is self-directed, exposing inequalities at the expense of his own ethnic group.

Similarly, in the famous text Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato mocks the Italian-American ethnic culture. His main purpose is to portray the sufferings of Italian-American stone masons in terms of the Crucifixion, thus inviting the reader to see the oppressed of the working class as a moral and spiritual blight as well as a socio­logical one. Yet at two of the most startlingly powerful moments in the narrative, di Donato includes scenes of bitterly self-mocking images of Italian Americans. Annunziata, mother of the protago­nist Paul, is described in terms that resonate powerfully with tra­ditional Italian symbols such as the Dark Madonna. However, the scene is portrayed in terms of mockery. Dame Katerina, the mid­wife, refers to the women attending the birth as “holes askew” while they jest that she has had sex with Satan. The moment of birthing is obviously an element in the tradition of Italian-Ameri­can midwifery marked with great respect. But here di Donato does not temper the self-mocking tone of the scene significantly. Fur­thermore, the central metaphor of the text, which is the notion of laborer-as-suffering Christ, is also mocked. Before Geremio, father of Paul, is enshrined as a symbol of the oppressed Italian-Ameri­can worker, the baffoon Nazone is crucified on a mock cross of concrete that is erected (pun intended) by his fellow drunk and whoring workers. Nazone and company drink, vomit and laugh a “shaking laughter that made the Cross laugh” (160–61). Such “shaking laughter” conveys a powerful motif; it is as if the suffer­ing oppressed ethnic figures must face necessities humor as a re­lief. Yet, this relief is not in any way healing. With this “shaking laughter,” di Donato portrays a means by which humor eases their suffering, yet he is also portraying them in a derogatory light, pre­senting a satiric version of the central metaphor of his own text. So in both di Donato and George Schuyler, the author’s own ethnic group becomes the target of satire. Each writer’s “greatest gift to America,” ultimately is self-referential in its most satirical aspects. The serpent-like ethnic trickster first bites itself.

Self-approbation in Harlem
Renaissance Figures and Jerre Mangione

With the depression of the 1930s and the early 1940s, ethnic writing flourished in both the Harlem Renaissance and amongst Italian Americans through federal funding of authors. For the eth­nic author of these years, self-ridicule yielded to a healthier self-corrective humor, exposing the problems within an ethnic group for the purpose of solving them. For our first example, we turn to Rudolph Fisher. Fisher’s short story “High Yaller” concerns the plight of Jay Martin and Evelyn Brown, a young African-Ameri­can couple who experience difficulty in love because his complex­ion is darker than hers. Evelyn is tempted by her own opportunity to “pass” for white. Her assimilation would then become a com­plete betrayal of her racial and ethnic background. Evelyn’s com­panion Jay Martin attempts to cope with the social pressures sur­rounding the couple through humor. Evelyn states, “I’ve been thinking over my best friends. They’re practically all ‘passing’ fair. Any one of them could pass-for a foreigner anyway” (505). Jay replies, “Me, for instance . . . Prince Woogy-boogy of Abyssinia” (505). It is worth noting that Jay’s humorous comment speaks on two levels: on a superficial one as simple entertainment and on a deeper level to highlight the irony of racial prejudice. Foreign per­sons of dark complexion would not necessarily be subject to the same kind of discrimination affecting Jay, who is beaten, intimi­dated, and even harassed by the police for dating the fairer skinned, near-white Evelyn. Fisher’s humor points out her implicit racial views. Ultimately, though Evelyn finally collapses under the pressure to pass, humor is still interjected into Fisher’s text. Using a dialogic technique, Fisher puts into the story a street character, Jimmy Macleod, as a sounding board of folk humor, and real-deal wisdom to help Jay Martin deal with his troubles with Evelyn. Their humorous dialogue highlights the reality of passing:

 

“See me go for breakfast?” [Jimmy] asked.

“No,” grinned Jay, “but I’ll add it to the five I’m by you al­ready.” . . .

[Jimmy] “Think she went dippy and jumped in the river or somethin’?”

[Jay] “No, but I think she’s jumped out of Harlem.” (517)

 

This exchange implicitly compares passing to suicide, evoking the fact that Evelyn’s turning her back on her black friends, lover, and neighborhood brings about the destruction of her identity as a multiply-selved ethnic. In a reflective mood, Jay wonders aloud, “Lord only knows what she’ll be now” (518) referring to Evelyn in her passing out of the black community to attempt to live as a white. Humor valorizes the non-passing character, Jay, and points out the problems with denial of one’s ethnic identity.

More fortunate is the protagonist of Wallace Thurman’s story “The Blacker the Berry.” Emma Lou Morgan suffers an intragroup prejudice against darker-complected blacks in the small African-American community of Boise, Idaho. But rather than remain in the self-defeating mindset of her hometown, Emma Lou finds ac­ceptance amongst more enlightened peers at UCLA. Humor’s role in this text is to show the camaraderie of the African-American students in the form of boys ribbing the girls, who in turn can dish it out (476). Emma Lou is unlike Evelyn in that she resists the temptation to conform to the oppressive racist mindset, and so retains her selfhood in a way Evelyn does not. In the works of both of these Harlem Renaissance era writers, comic narrative and multiple selfhood themes emerge, with characters who “pass” serving as negative paradigms of the loss of the multiple self. In contrast, characters who manage to hold on to their sense of hu­mor hold on to the integration of ethnic selfhood as well. So Thurman and Wallace point out the intra-group prejudice against darker color to suggest problems in the authors’ community. Their more favorable treatment of those who reject this prejudice sug­gests that this attitude must be corrected by fellow African Ameri­cans.

Similarly, Jerre Mangione, a major fiction writer of the 1930s and 1940s, shares this use of the multiply voiced, dialogic narra­tive self of Fisher and Thurman, though with a different emphasis and relationship to the reader. As an Italian American, Mangione’s primary issues relevant to assimilation involve race, but not to the same degree as African-American writers are concerned with it. Along with race comes issues of language and geographic disloca­tion as concerns for the Italian-American ethnic group as we as­similate. Mangione introduces the issue of a national assimilation (as opposed to a racial one) immediately

 

“When I grow up I want to be an American,” Giustina said. We looked at our sister; it was something none of us had ever said. . . . “We’re Americans right now,” I said. Miss Zimmerman says if you’re born here you’re an American. (1)

 

Geographical location emerges as a central issue here; to be born in the US makes one American, in the eyes of the child Mangione. But, since Mangione’s geographical roots remain in Sicily, his eth­nic identity is in question, as his father states, “Your children will be Americani. But you, my son, are half-and-half” (1). As with the Harlem Renaissance writers Fisher and Thurman, an intragroup prejudice complicates the multi-faceted struggle of ethnic life. As shade prejudice in the African-American community can further the oppressive racist mindset (as it does for Fisher’s Evelyn Brown), so a certain regional bigotry disrupts the communal life of Italian Americans in Mangione’s Mount Allegro. Just as main­stream America views Italian Americans as all criminals, so do Italian Americans ascribe criminal tendencies to Sicilians, a fact that prompts Mangione’s father to comment, “It is bad enough for an Italian to commit a murder, but it is far worse when a Sicilian does” (5). In turn, Sicilian Americans at least as Mangione remem­bers them, have a regional prejudice:

 

In the event the murderer turns out to be a Sicilian, my fa­ther would solemnly announce that the criminal undoubt­edly came from Carrapipi, a small town in Sicily which-ac­cording to my relatives-produced nothing but a population of thieves, blackmailers and murderers. (5)

 

But, just as Thurman and Fisher expose intragroup prejudice in their dialogic narratives for comic correction, so too does Man­gione, mocking the provincialism of his relatives by exposing the effect it had on him as a child:

 

For a long time I believed everything my relatives said about Carrapipi and imagined the town to be an island cut off from civilization and inhabited wholly by desperate characters whose chief ambition was to get to Rochester and prey on the natives there. (6)

 

In perspective, Mangione plays the trickster to the memories of his ancestors as well, a curious twist on N. Scott Momaday’s an­cestral ethnic narrative. Yet Mangione’s comic corrections apply to both Italians and Americans, as he indicates, “it gave us great sat­isfaction to tell non-Sicilians who wanted to borrow a knife from us that we never carried one” (7). Mangione carries this critique to non-Italian culture by describing the American films he went to with his Sicilian brothers and sisters: “I think my mother would have been disconcerted to know that there were just as many characters in those movies who won their arguments by the use of knives” (14). Images like this satirize mainstream Anglo/Ameri­can value systems also in Mount Allegro, calling for a respect for the Italian-American heritage frequently denigrated in this same cultural mainstream. Mangione’s narrative follows Bakhtinian lines in that it is dialogic, interjecting voices and value systems not from the author. Furthermore, his satire reflects the Bakhtinian carnival. Mangione elevates neither Italian nor American cultural viewpoints as the social ideal but rather, in Fred Gardaphe’s terms “serves as a diplomat of the new world of Italian America that he fashions in his writing” (Italian Signs 75). And by giving voice to all these viewpoints (Sicilian-American and Anglo-American) his narrative reflects the “forked tongue” of the multiply-selved eth­nic writer Hernandez describes. The Italian-American ethnic struggle, then, is to go from being “half-and-half” to being both, and thus more coherently maintaining that multiple selfhood in narrative form. Unlike the African Americans, Mangione did not deal with the ethnic reality of “passing.” But like Thurman and Fisher, Mangione’s early ethnic humor is a self-approbation of the Italian-American community in its intragroup, regional prejudice.

From Shaking Laughter to Healing
Laughter: Contemporary Ethnic Authors
and Dialogical Selfhood

Finally, in our times, the ethnic writer moves beyond self-ap­probation of his or her community to a carnival-like celebration of ethnic, dialogical selfhood. Currently, Alice Walker’s short story “1955” provides a contemporary example of the use of humor as a mode to convey the multiple ethnic self. “1955” is a story of a ten-year acquaintance between an Elvis Presley-like white hillbilly rock singer, Traynor, who purchases a song from an African-American blues singer who Walker names “Gracie Mae Still.” Gracie Mae functions as the narrator, interpreting a variety of viewpoints dialogically included by the author. Walker uses Gra­cie Mae’s humorous descriptions to convey issues of race in a hu­morous fashion; describing Traynor’s bodyguards, she states, “With wings they could pass for angels, with hoods they could be the Klan” (2516). The views on race here are far more radical than earlier African-American writers could afford to be. The self-ap­probation of the African-American literati is long gone, as Gracie Mae revels in her un-assimilated, un-erased ethnic identity. But as with others, Walker’s multiple, dialogic narrative voice speaks the perspective of the ethnic group as well as of one self. The descrip­tion of the bodyguards above is a critique of the white Americans, yet a gentle one; it could be paraphrased thematically as “white folks are as they do.” Further, Gracie Mae herself fits the descrip­tion of a comic ethnic trickster voice perfectly, as this account of her weight indicates:

 

I’ll never see three hundred pounds again, . . . I got to think­ing about it one day an’ I thought, aside from the fact that they say its unhealthy, my fat ain’t never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain’t never com­plained. Plus they’s fat. And fat like I is I looks distin­guished. You see me coming and know somebody’s there. (2516)

Gracie Mae’s decision to keep her 300 plus pounds is essentially a comic self-acceptance; she “looks distinguished” and feels that way due to her healthy relationships with her kids and “mens.” To contrast this, Gracie describes the tragic figure Traynor as he “comes waddling up the walk. . . . Plump and soft and with never a care about weight. Because with so much money, who cares?” (2516). Traynor’s burgeoning waistline reflects not self-acceptance, but tragic self-destruction; while Gracie surrounds herself with loving children and men, Traynor’s life is summed up by “who cares?” Here, Walker is writing from the ethnic dialogic perspec­tive, both within and without mainstream Anglo-American cul­ture, as she further does at the end when criticizing the whites who mourn the death of Traynor and “didn’t even know what they was crying for!” (2520). Finally, along the lines of the Bakhtin­ian carnival, Walker inverts the social power relationship between Gracie Mae and Traynor. White rock and roll profited from the usurping of black blues; now with Gracie’s first-person testimony, Walker performs a comic turnaround. Ultimately, Gra­cie’s ethnicity is humorously celebrated, a motif that stands in sharp contrast to both a) the radical ethnic self-criticism of writers like Schuyler and di Donato, and b) the more focused, self-correc­tive use of humor found in Mangione, Fisher, and Thurman

On the other hand, Italian-American women employ humor in a comparable fashion in contemporary short fiction. No longer in a mode of “shaking laughter which (makes) the Cross laugh,” these writers replace shaking laughter with healing laughter. As in Walker’s “1955,” Susan J. Leonardi’s “Bernie Becomes a Nun” conveys a comic turnaround in social power relationships. Leon­ardi performs a comic celebration of the ethnic culture, but here through the main character’s transformation. Bernadette Frances Palermo is a natural for the Catholic sisterhood, from her report card filled with “A’s, straight A’s from first grade through fifth” to her stuffy “bib on her uniform jumper” (205). As with many Ital­ian-American Catholics, “Bernie” denies herself and her own needs to serve the needs of her family. She is the eldest of six: four sisters and a brother. As the narrator recounts,

 

what could you do around the house when there was so lit­tle of it and so many of them? . . . Bernie only had to set the table on Mondays and Thursdays. On Tuesdays and Fridays she washed dishes; on Wednesdays she made dinner, on Saturdays she cleared the table and swept the scratched wood floor. . . . (206)

 

Mass on Sundays rounds out Bernie’s self-sacrificing schedule. Bernie is appointed library organizer by Sister Mary Ascension, an appointment that exposes her to the school’s book Bernie Becomes a Nun. This text-within-a-text aligns Leonardi’s narrative with simi­lar layered texts such as Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman sto­ries. To elaborate, the book Bernie finds serves the function of the self-destroying assimilation narrative. Our protagonist Bernie will not be able to fit herself into “Bernie in the Book” mold. Leonardi points this out as follows — a stark contrast, highlighting Bernadette Palermo’s ethnicity, is formed when we juxtapose her to the “Bernie in the Book”:

 

“Bernie” had a cute flip hair-do and she was a very pretty girl who was normal in every way including liking boys and going to parties every weekend, though she was always home on time. Bernadette loved her and hated her and wanted to be just like her and thought she was a drip. Bernadette wondered if the Maryknolls picked out the cut­est girls to join their order. (212)

 

“Bernie” in the book is the blonde, blue-eyed ideal of Anglo-American femininity, to whom Bernadette herself does not feel equal. Her description can be contrasted along recognizable Ital­ian-American lines: “[Bernie] found herself distinctly unattrac­tive. . . . She had darker than acceptable skin, a big nose, . . . and twelve pounds more than the chart recommended” (217). These Southern Italian features are not a source of pride for Bernie at this early point in her life. Italian-American ethnicity is thus polarized against this ideal of white assimilation; as a more mature and wiser Bernie Palermo later reflects, “White, thin, Anglo-Saxon, pretty, popular Bernie-the kind of girl God likes best” (229). But, the journey Bernie makes cannot be simplified as an “underdog” tale of the persecuted Italian-American woman overthrowing some unjust Anglo bigotry. This is because Italian Americans are not idealized as an ethnic group in the short narrative. Certainly, Bernie Palermo’s desire to join the Catholic sisterhood springs subconsciously from her need to escape an unhealthy so­cial/sexual environment: “there were a lot of things nuns didn’t have to worry about” (212). One of these things is the left hand of Bernie’s Uncle Pete, usually found “on the nearest female ass if it wasn’t on a beer can” (213). Here we can see traces of earlier eth­nic self-approbation. But on the other hand, this vocation the pro­tagonist is moved to can neither be simplified to an immature eth­nic rebellion against her Italian-American background. There are positive characters in Bernie’s colorful family also, like her caba­ret-singing Aunt Tony decked out in a “red net skirt with black stockings.” Bernie is embarrassed by her Aunt’s open sexuality, but puts up with her because “Aunt Tony had a good heart” (214–15). Thus, Susan Leonardi’s portrayal of Italian-American culture is not the biting self-mockery of Schuyler and di Donato, nor is it akin to the self-approbation seen in the works of Man­gione and the Harlem Renaissance writers. Indeed, Leonardi’s treatment of ethnicity emerges in Bernie’s sexual and ethnic strug­gle for the same type of comic-self acceptance that her Aunt Tony has, and that Gracie Mae Still expresses and represents in Walker’s “1955.” So, Leonardi’s tale can be classified as the same expression of the polyvalent ethnic/comic self we have seen in much of this short fiction, Further, as with the other late twentieth-century fic­tion, humor here is a laughter that heals the self, reconciling the Italian-American ethnicity of the protagonist with her role in An­glo-American society. Like Gracie Mae, Bernie must transcend the oppression she has suffered, and attain even a humorous and critical perspective on the oppressor.

How she does so forms a underscoring of the psychological importance of humor. Bernie maintains her sense of humor, as is shown by her reflections upon entering the convent:

 

for the first time in her life Bernie had a room to herself. . . . You could study after nine o’clock, you could cry, you could sleep for eight hours straight without listening for a waking babe or hearing a sister toss and turn. . . . When Bernie fell in love for the second time she discovered a sixth advantage, but that’s another story altogether. (22)

 

Further, her struggle for identity emerges in the symbolic use of names and nicknames in the narrative. The protagonist struggles to get people to call her Bernadette instead of Bernie, a moniker she despises as a “baby name” (209). The diminutive name re­duces her in status in the eyes of her family. Bernie wants to be doctor, but is afraid that everyone will laugh at her. Alternately, her real name “Bernadette” is associated with St. Bernadette at Lourdes, treated as a positive image in Leonardi’s text. Her move to the convent is a viable one in this struggle to come to her own self-identity as an adult with a meaningful life.

Prior to her leaving for the convent, Bernie’s struggle is pre­sented in terms suggestive of the story’s key image:

 

The year that Bernie was a junior in high school (by this time the battle to be Bernadette had been lost to the pressure of the pack,) Mrs. Palermo decided that since Nona Palermo was not up to cooking big holiday meals anymore, she would do the St. Joseph’s Day celebration herself with help from Bernie and Mary Angela and Theresa and Clara. (213)

 

Here a community of Italian-American daughters fills the void left by the ailing matron. But does Bernie experience family or church as a human community? The phrase “pressure of the pack” heark­ens the reader back to the humorous opening of the story when the narrator perceives “the Hound of Heaven was barking at her heels. And she didn’t like dogs” (205). Leonardi is alluding to the religious poem “The Hound of Heaven” by Frances Thompson, which deals with vocations in the traditional sense of the would-be religious individual being “called by God.” Leonardi’s satirical manipulation of this image above in the idea of the “pressure of the pack” introduces the central conflict of the tale in a manner that is humorous, and that occurs right at the exposition of the short story. This pattern will recur in several other Italian-Ameri­can short tales as well. To return to Leonardi, Bernie’s yielding to the Hound may simply in danger of falling further into the self-destructive approbation that stifles her selfhood, the herd-mental­ity that has forced her to put her own healthy ambitions and needs aside for those of her family and church.

But as I have shown, Bernie’s “battle to be Bernadette” is none other than the struggle of the ethnic multiply-voiced self. Further, Leonardi does not reject Italian-American Catholic culture out­right, though Leonardi has honestly represented this culture with all its flaws. The protagonist’s vocation is treated by the author as a covenant to self, as well as to a community of women and a wider world. As Bernadette matures in her situation, she becomes a psychiatrist and works with victims of AIDS, cancer, and domes­tic abuse. Maintaining her ethnic identity is thus beneficial for others besides Bernie, going beyond the boundaries of self. She further learns to reach out to other sisters of her chosen commu­nity instead of attempting to win the battle for integrated selfhood alone:

 

“What’s my name, Beatrice, Tell me my name.”

“Bernadette, Bernadette, Bernadette.” (232)

 

Her asking Beatrice, “a woman not without a sense of humor” (231), for help evokes the integrative role of humor in establishing a dialogic selfhood. This dialogic selfhood for Leonardi (as well as for Momaday, Walker, and Anzaldua) is established in a lan­guage-based relationship to others, here one of question and re­sponse drawing the other into Bernie’s quest. Bernadette’s strug­gle for selfhood is united to the communal struggle; in becoming Bernadette, she becomes a speaker for the Italian-American and Catholic community. To relate back to Hernandez’s theories of ethnicity, Leonardi’s protagonist becomes able to speak in both her own tongue as an individual and in “words she hadn’t recog­nized as her own” (Leonardi 232), as the voice of the collective her multivalent name represents — all the Bernadette’s of her Catho­lic, Italian-American past. In Mihailovic’s terms, Bernie has passed through her journey, “seemingly reborn in her relations” with others in learning to depend on them.

Lastly, a power turnabout is achieved in Leonardi’s “Bernie Be­comes a Nun” as it was in Walker’s “1955.” Leonardi portrays an­other sister to whom Bernie also turns for communal support.

 

Sometimes Bernadette talked to Karen who was about her age and very tall and thoughtful. Karen said their mass, Karen heard confessions, Karen laid hands on the sick, Karen said things like, “Go in peace, my sister, and next time bring your own kleenex.” “No and yes,” Karen said when Bernadette wanted to know if the bishop knew about her priestly activities. “I think he’s afraid of us, especially Beatrice. . . .” (228)

 

Just as Alice Walker’s Gracie Mae knows the nature of white folks, Susan J. Leonardi’s Bernie plumbs the gendered power dynamics within Catholicism. Yet, due to the positive portrayal of commit­ted Catholic sisters, Bernie’s becoming the nun Bernadette is a celebration of her ethnicity as well as her religion. Again, to quote Mihailovic, the Italian-American Catholicism of Leonardi’s story is a carnival portrayed as “sacral and communal without being insti­tutional.”

As Italian-American writers continue through history, this eth­nic/comic celebration retains the form of the use of humor in the exposition of the central conflict. Humor is employed by the Ital­ian-American, short-story writer to present his or her major themes, to foreshadow a resolution, or simply to highlight the forces that cause tension in the narrative. Examples abound in the recent major anthology From the Margin: Writings in Italian Ameri­cana. Daniela Gioseffi’s “Rosa in Television Land” presents the reader with the pattern of humorous exposition of the major issues of the narrative. Her text presents us with Rosa Della Rosa, a poor factory worker in 1976 Brooklyn New York. The crisis Rosa faces is her inability to support her chronically ill sister on her meager salary and no Social Security.

Food is a crucial issue for Rosa, who treasures even the crumbs of her anisette breakfast toast. Thus, the central drama of the story concerns her audition for a television commercial and her reaction to the sumptuous, tantalizing pseudo-feast the production proffers only to the camera. Southern Italian religiosity becomes a very serious vehicle for Gioseffi to criticize America as a “television land” of capitalist waste, but she introduces the taboo against wasted food humorously, as follows:

 

A schoolboy, just ahead of Rosa, stops to pick up a delin­quent grapefruit which has rolled from a broken crate onto the sidewalk. He aims it at the seat of his schoolmate’s pants. As the boys scurry into the schoolyard, Rosa bends down into the gutter to rescue the fruit and deposit it in her string shopping bag. “Only trees should throw fruit to the ground!” she exclaims softly, repeating an adage learned long ago in southern Italy, . . . Rosa, by her act of salvage, hopes to redeem the schoolboy’s soul from his naive prank as well as have a nice piece of citrus for her breakfast. (20)

 

The humorous sight of the boy trying to wallop his friend in the butt with a grapefruit introduces the more serious issue of waste that follows.

Fred Gardaphe uses a similar humorous prelude to introduce a major issue in his story “Mora Amore,” featured also in From the Margin. Gardaphe’s protagonist, Frankie Benet, is a plump prepu­bescent youth caught between the baseball-playing youngsters relegated to the family’s “children’s table” and the adult world of his wine-drunk uncles who play the Italian finger game “mora.” Love and risk are themes of the piece, with young Frankie’s con­fusion over the meaning of the Italian words “mora” and “amore” representative of his naivete on adult matters of violence and love. In mora, his uncles relate, you can risk losing your fingers, but in amore, Frankie discerns, one risks losing a great deal more. Hu­mor is again utilized in the exposition to introduce Frankie’s di­lemma: his mother no longer requires him to wear his

 

summer shorts, the tight tan pair that made his legs bulge like two of Grandpa’s freshly stuffed sausages, to his younger brother, Mario, . . . [Frankie was] happy they were no longer his. The hair on his legs had sprouted into black wires and he swore he would only bare those legs to swim. (Gardaphe 102)

 

The simile of the sausages adds a touch of humor to introduce Frankie’s struggle with the onset of puberty. He risks ridicule to ask his grandfather the meaning of these words, and the audience senses his need for adult male guidance on a deeper level. Serious issues, but they are introduced with a humorous touch.

One might logically question the contrast between the contem­porary African-American and Italian-American uses of humor in terms of the exposition. This may occur because humor for us forms a reflection of the present moment of the Italian-American writer, a comic present through which the author looks back upon the potentially tragic past. To prove this, the plots of such tales unfold through potential tragedy to a comic or subjectively happy resolution. In “Rosa in Television Land”, Rosa does witness the destruction of a phony TV feast, but she emerges unscathed and with extra income for her family.

However, the similarities between the African-American and Italian-American humorists outweigh the differences in humor in fiction. As the twentieth century progresses, we see ethnic humor shifting from a venomous self-mockery, through a medicinal self-corrective, and finally to the carnival of the ethnic trickster in the works of these many writers. Clearly, my approach to this fiction is not complete nor exhaustive. But in each case surveyed above, the “double-voiced” discourse of the ethnic humorist preserves a sense of his or her culture’s point of view as well as a distin­guished individual viewpoint along the lines Browdy de Hernan­dez, Milhailovic, and Bakhtin suggest. Schuyler, di Donato, Thurman, Fisher, Walker, Mangione, Leonardi, Gioseffi, and Gar­daphe enact a dialogue between the dialogic ethnic self and main­stream American culture through their humorous short fiction. This ethnic carnival we read here calls us beyond the boundaries of self, of one’s “own” ethnicity into the celebration of other-de­fined, many-voiced selfhood, the sacral and communal celebration going on between ourselves.

 

Paul S. Giaimo

Highland Community College

 

Works Cited

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es­says. Ed. Michael Holquist. Transl. Caryl Emerson and Mi­chael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Davis, Athur P., J. Saunders Redding, and Joyce Ann Joyce, eds. The New Cavalcade. Vol. I. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1991.

de Hernandez, Jennifer Browdy. “The Plural Self: The Politiciza­tion of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobi­ographies.” Memory and Cultural Politics: A New Approach to American Ethnic Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan, Amrijit Singh, and Joseph T. Skerrett. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 41–59.

di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. 1937. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939.

Fisher, Rudolph. “High Yaller.” Davis, Redding, and Joyce 503–20.

Gardaphe, Fred. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

___. “Mora Amore.” Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphe 102–09.

Gioseffi, Daniela. “Rosa in Television Land.” Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphe 20-28.

Leonardi, Susan J. “Bernie Becomes a Nun.” The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian-American Women’s Fiction. Ed Mary Jo Bona. New York: Guernica, 1994. 205–32.

Mangione, Jerre. Mount Allegro. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1948.

Mihailovic, Alexandar. Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1997.

Morson, Gary Saul, ed. Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Schuyler, George. “Our Greatest Gift to America.” Davis, Redding, and Joyce 436–41.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphé, eds. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991.

Thurman, Wallace. “The Blacker the Berry.” Davis, Redding, and Joyce 466–76.

Walker, Alice. “1955.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol 2. Ed. Lauter et als. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 2511–20.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lynching and Signify­ing—the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

 

 

 

 


[1]This article expands Browdy de Hernandez’s findings to refer to Italian-Ameri­can and African-American literature as well.

[2]De Hernandez also features a rather evocative description of Anzuala as she writes: “I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers is to my right . . . (writing) feels like I’m carv­ing bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart — a Nahuatl con­cept” (73).