Humor, Ethnicity, and Identity

in Jerre Mangione’s Storia

 

“You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” Zora Neale Hurston proclaimed to white America, in the title of a piece she intended to publish in The American Mercury. She comically complained that whites were getting their images of African Americans second hand, from popular but racist entertainments written by white people, such as Marc Connelly’s play, The Green Pastures, or Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun; the latter, she claimed, had “just about as much Negro folk­lore in it as Cal Coolidge had in him.” Such works, and similar ones written by black writers seeking a quick buck, were part of the “oleomargine era” in Negro writing, in their substitution for the real thing. And worse, it was pushing the real Negro literature, like hers, out into the wilderness, like Ishmael. “Show some folks a genuine bit of Negroness and they rear and pitch like a mule in a tin stable. But where is the misplaced preposition?,” they wail. “Where is the Am it and I’se?” (Hurston 1–6). This complaint, despite its comic expression, was a central and serious one for Hurston, for she simultaneously became an artist and vented her frustrations through a dynamic and innovative use of folklore and folkhumor, in both her life and her art. It was mad­dening to see the preference Americans seemed to have for the distor­tions of racist stereotype and caricature; but Hurston never made the decision some ethnic writers made to throw the baby out with the bathwater—that is, to forego using genuine folk humor in an effort to purge the phony. When she wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she was determined to provide butter, not oleo.

Hurston’s cleverly worded and thus palatable complaint of “you don’t know us” found echoes in various immigrant communities, for they too had been stereotyped on the stage, in popular fiction, and the funny papers. Italian Americans received such treatment all too often. The history of their stereotypes has been well documented;[1] I will only mention here one example, and this from a “friend.” In 1906 Edward A. Steiner, an immigrant himself, and a man who made his career out of writing sympathetic books about immigrants, nevertheless character­ized “the Italian emigration, the largest which we receive from any one source . . .” as coming largely from the “crowded cities” of Southern Italy “with their unspeakable vices; the smallest number of emigrants come from the villages where they have all the virtues of the tillers of the soil. The most volatile of our foreign population, and perhaps the most clannish, they represent a problem recognized by their home gov­ernment . . .” (Steiner 28). All groups, however, are presumed by Steiner to be literally and figuratively in the “same boat” for the “immigrant of to-day . . . starts upon this trail, with no culture, it is true, but with a virgin mind in which it may be made to grow” (Steiner 29). To be fair to Steiner, what he meant by culture was “high culture,” although that doesn’t let him off the hook for astonishing patronization for one who professes to argue the immigrant’s case; his claim of “no culture” equates with the “empty nation” the Puritans supposedly saw upon their arrival, while the “virgin mind” brings forward the “tabula rasa” image, soothing American nativist fears by implying an empty vessel poses no threat, and indeed, an opportunity for cultural imprinting. Later, inventorying the passengers, he notes they’re all dirty, “the Italians being easily in the lead . . . [they] were from the South of Italy and had lost the romance of their native land but not the fragrance of garlic. They quarrelled somewhat loudly and gesticulated wildy; but were good neighbours during those sixteen days. . . . All Italians are not alike . . . they do not look alike, and . . . they are not all Anarchists.” Sicilians suffered more than most from such analyses, as they were already burdened with a special onus within the Italian community, one which increased with their exodus to America, where all of them were presumed to be members of the mafia, or uneducated, primitive peasants, or both. Jerre Mangione, a member of that community whose nine published books include four memoirs, faced the same problem Hurston did when he wrote the first one, Mount Allegro (1943), about his early life in the Italian ghetto of Rochester, New York. He was determined that “at last, the Sicilian immigrants, the most maligned of the Italian Americans, would be presented as I knew them to be, not as the criminals projected by the American press” (Ethnic 242–43). But how was one to reverse negative perceptions of one’s ethnic group without lecturing, and thereby turning off one’s audience? One way was to capitalize on the tremendous interest in ethnic life by writing apparently benign, but actually corrective versions of their communal life into the consciousness of “mainstream” Americans, and the engine that drove such ethnic texts was frequently humor.

Autobiography proved particularly useful in this experimental pro­ject, for as James Olney has pointed out, there are no rules or formal requirements for the writer, or for the critic of autobiography (Olney 3). Moreover, both the genre and the discourse of humor annull the distance between speaker and audience/reader, creating warmth, intimacy, and new perspectives. Subjects at a distance are not comical, but brought near they may be satirized, toppled, or even transformed.

Mangione chose a key cultural moment for the publication of his per­sonal storia, when Americans were dedicating themselves to a redefini­tion of their purpose and identity, during World War II. The fact that Italian Americans were dying for their country in battle against their ancestral homeland demanded attention.

Although I will concentrate on Mount Allegro, aficionados of Mangione’s work know that it comprises only one chapter of his life writings; he wrote two other autobiographical texts, Reunion in Sicily (1950) and An Ethnic at Large (1978), and added a “Finale” section to the 1981 edition of Mount Allegro. As I will demonstrate, these later texts echo and extend events and themes of the earlier one.

As Fred Gardaphe has observed Mount Allegro, although focusing on Mangione’s early years, occurs in a mythic, non-specific time in some ways (Gardaphe 162); Reunion in Sicily centers on that country’s effort to come into a new modern world after World War II, and provides an opportunity for Mangione to contrast his American identity with his Sicilian relatives’ views of the United States. An Ethnic at Large offers a sixty-nine year old Mangione’s reassessment of his life up to the age of 35, revisiting many issues in the earlier books but in a more tradi­tional autobiographical manner, much more centered on his individual story, and with strikingly less humor.

America, of course, has a tradition of relishing immigrant autobi­ographies, for they replicate in personal form America’s original strug­gle to establish an independent identity, which formed one of the cen­tral subjects of the American Renaissance, especially in Emerson’s Essays, where the sage of Concord urged his countrymen to cease their slavish imitation of Europe.

Consequently, Americans developed a way of reading subsequent immigrants; although Ethnic-American life stories usually do include a focus on the bifurcated self, they are virtually always read as contain­ing one. When Reunion in Sicily was published in 1950, The Boston Post’s reviewer said that Mangione had an “American eye” and a “Sicilian heart.” For Deidre Bair, the book offers the narratives “of a young man of two worlds who wishes to understand and be able to live with ease and acceptance in both of them” (xii). Mangione’s account of duality, his desire for acceptance, and his preference for scientific per­spective all helped foster the clarity and balance of his account. In fact, he more or less operates as a self-taught sociologist and ethnogra­pher in Sicily in his memoirs. This meant acquiring a certain kind of detachment; in 1983 Mangione told an interviewer that Mount Allegro was designed to describe Sicilian-American life, but also to chart his own “Pilgrim’s Progress” from being a “kind of confused Italian American living in two cultures, to observing them and writing about them objectively, as I came to understand them, as I grew older and more mature—and also from a distance. If I had never left Rochester, I would never have been able to write about them as I have . . . I could also contrast them with the non-Sicilian and non-Italian world in which I found myself” (Mulas 75). On the other hand, Mangione chose not to discuss the more horrific encounters between ethnic and main­stream culture: Italian Americans had been persecuted in myriad ways, and in a few cases, actually lynched. Mangione eventually had reser­vations about his autobiographical omissions; in his 1978 memoir, An Ethnic at Large, he particularly focuses on the interment of Italian Americans during World War II. Subsequently, in the 1981 finale to Mount Allegro he admitted he had painted his father as a vital figure, leaving out most of his black despair; similarly, the anxiety always present in their home went unmentioned, along with the details of var­ious deaths and family crises. He professes to have been ignorant then of the many incidents of Italian-American persecution, and suggests that the book would have turned out differently if he had been less innocent. On the other hand, casting his characters as victims and lec­turing his mainstream audience would have radically transformed the book and its reception. And once again, we should remember that in 1943, Mount Allegro’s buoyant, sunny nature made it an alternative to American and European despair and alienation, and contributed to the nation-building mood of the wartime effort. Moreover, Mangione, who clearly saw himself as a mediating figure, operating between “mainstream” and ethnic cultures, realized the time was right to build bridges. As guide and interpreter, he wanted to disarm readers’ fears, and charm them with the joyous creativity, humor, and wit of Italian Americans.

Perhaps the fond lens of memory made this inevitable in any case for Mangione; he has stated that Mount Allegro’s exuberant characters took on a life of their own: “The book was intended to be primarily informative, quite sedate in tone. It did not work out that way. After several false starts, it seemed best to present my material as a memoir, but before long my chief protagonists were asserting themselves in a manner that exceeded the etiquette of the conventional memoir” (302). His characters’ supposedly idiosyncratic, irrascible, and frequently comic behavior made them, instead of caricatures, human; Mangione claimed to have received hundreds of appreciative letters, including many from Anglos, who identified pleasurably with his Sicilian relatives.

The constant sense of doubleness of ethnic discourse—two cultures, the folk versus the intellectual, the high versus the low, and so on—suggests the bi-vocal mode of humorous discourse is not only advisable but desirable for the type of narratives Mangione had in mind. Their roles as mediating narrators/tricksters establish ethnic writers on the threshold, playing with boundary and hierarchy. And in fact, both ethnicity and humor have meaning only by acknowledging their bound­aries. R. A. Schermerhorn claims an ethnic group is “a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, mem­ories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic events defined as the epitome of their peoplehood . . . kin­ship patterns, physical contiguity . . . religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenoypal features, or any combination of these [and also] . . . necessary . . . some consciousness of kind among members” (12). Boundaries are maintained through hu­mor, as well, which in itself possesses flexible margins. Thus pressures from without the group and from within operate in determining iden­tity, and they often take the form of jokes or corrective kidding.

What is “ethnic” and what is “funny” depends on current conceptual and social boundaries. Freud always maintained that the basic comic unit involved a forced juxtaposition of opposites. Bakhtin saw that this was also the opening gambit in dialogism. And in fact, one of Mangione’s favorite narrative modes is the comic confrontation; when people collide in a quarrel they create entertainment, but also, fre­quently, a resolution that reveals a truth. As Bakhtin states, “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual . . . it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. Socrates called himself a ‘pander’; he brought people together and made them collide in a quarrel” (Dostoyevsky 110). As a small example, Mangione describes a a comic scene in Sicily; he’s crowded inside a taxi with his uncle, five cousins, and luggage. “In bickering over the fare, insults and personal data were exchanged freely. The driver told of the number of mouths he had to feed, of the exorbitant prices he paid for rent, gasoline and repairs, and called us ‘extortionists.’ My uncle countered with a recital of the large number of children he had to support, his wife’s recent illness, the tiny salary he earned, the exorbitant price of bread and macaroni, and called him a ‘dirty capitalist.’ The haggling was still in full swing when we drew up in front of my uncle’s place . . . I thought surely that the argument would lead to blows. But after ten more minutes of insults, they suddenly settled . . . and courteously bade each other good morn­ing” (Reunion 32). This exchange operates on the border of joking and insult, and is akin to the custom in African-American culture of the dozens, where adolescent boys verbally duel, usually hurling insulting comments about the opponent’s female relatives, especially “yo mama.”

Joking relationships form one of the more interesting aspects of Mangione’s books. In stable eras, one knows whom one can kid; Mangione, however, living through eras of flux, constantly has to adjust his perspective, especially after the war when he visits a devastated Sicily, in ruin from American bombs. One of his uncles tells a supposedly funny story about how American soldiers, drunk, were “sold” from gang to gang and finally robbed; Mangione reacts more as an American than as an Italian: “My uncle looked embarrassed when I failed to laugh at his story” (60).

Ordinarily, a joking relationship permits exchanges to occur which create sham battles, as with the taxi driver, which thus avoids real conflict. As Radcliffe-Brown comments, such a situation affords each person safe conduct through what is otherwise hostile territory (107). In Mount Allegro or Sicily these codes are understood; but sometimes, when boundaries of identity shift, as it does when Mangione visits his Sicilian relatives, they must be reinterpreted, renegotiated.

Mangione offers abundant evidence in his work that joking relation­ships are quite complex constructs for Italian Americans, involving rad­ically different codes in gender-defined, ethnic, and class-defined situ­ations, and every combination conceivable. Mangione saw this as a child when his native Rochester and surrounding towns were experienc­ing a time of immigration and consolidation. More than five million Italians settled in the United States, and four million of them came between 1880 and 1920, mostly from southern Italy and Sicily. The so-called “Great Migration” of Southern blacks to northern cities began during this period and like the influx of Italians, caused great concern to xenophobic whites residing there. As late as World War II and beyond, books like Mangione’s were welcome attempts to create under­standing and even intimacy between Americans, and to offer vital portraits of real people that would flesh out the dessicated histories of the period. As part of that program, ethnic life narratives were liber­ally studded with miniature stories, literary fruitcakes bursting with flavor. In Mangione’s books, these tales are told amid the feasting and drinking of Amoroso family get-togethers on Sundays, and have a simi­larly festive and nutritive quality. Mangione asks “what better means of consolation are there than people and wine?”[2] and tells us that “a meal was more than a meal; it was a ritual and . . . adults . . . were the high priests” (17).

Bakhtin says that “no meal is ever sad,” and these never are. Tale tellers use vulgar gestures, noises, obscene puns, a whole arsenal of Rabelaisian humor, in telling tales in which, as in African-American stories, the lowest peasant prevails, scheming artistocrats are pun­ished, and love conquers all. As William Boelhower comments in his brilliant analysis of these scenes, “It is the social voice alone that is able to talk down the private written word of the American autobio­graphical tradition, thus celebrating its own subaltern condition” (205). Mangione tells stories himself, but more frequently he lets his charac­ters hold forth in their own unique voices. But all the voices are pro­duced because time and place have had their say. Mount Allegro’s ten­ements, streets, and shops, with their relentless sifting of the communi­ty’s characters through gossiping tales, replicate the congested Sicilian villages and the communal viewing and reviewing of the passeggiata, the long evening strolls around the square, where one sees and is seen, comments and is commented on. As we get to know Mangione’s relatives (significantly renamed by him as the Amoroso family), we increasingly appreciate the subtleties of their individual comic modes of narration, and begin to perceive them as representative of American-Sicilian cul­ture, a people keenly and equally alert to their joint history and social nuance. In An Ethnic at Large, for instance, Mangione relates the reac­tion of his aunt, whom he had given the fictional name of Giovanna in Mount Allegro: “[she] was greviously hurt that I, one of her favorite nephews, had deliberately given her the name . . . which I learned (too late, alas) . . . [was] of a notorious Sicilian queen who enjoyed hav­ing sexual intercourse with stallions” (Ethnic 299).

But comic tale-telling and verbal duelling are not the only modes in the book. Mangione alternates between the earthy, pointed, body-ori­ented humor of comic exchanges, and brooding, often tender, reflective passages. For instance, describing his father and partner Uncle Nino playing briscola, in the days before they tellingly “became Americanized enough to learn poker” (and therefore abandon the old country’s game), Mangione notes, “You would have had to go a long way to see a signal system as complicated as the one my father and Uncle Nino used. They would tweak their noses, belch, purse their lips, scratch their heads as though they really had lice—in fact, go through any gesture, permissible or not in decent company, that would tell their partner what cards they held and at the same time confuse their oppo­nents to such an extent that they could not keep their thoughts straight” (14). Alternately, like the relatives he celebrates, Mangione may wax poignantly poetic: “Sometimes, at night, the sickly yellow glow of the factory was in the sky like a smouldering ceiling of sulphur. Underneath it my relatives sang and played guitars and, if they noticed the sky at all, they were reminded of the lemon groves in Sicily. They were stubborn poets” (Mount Allegro 41).

At this point, we need to consider the way in which Sicilian comic signification works in what Bakhtin calls a carnivalizing process, a mode that ceaselessly encompasses and rejoices in oppositions, such as birth-death, youth-old age, top-bottom, face-backside, praise-abuse, affirmation-repudiation, tragic-comic, and so on (Dostoyevsky 176). Bakhtin locates the process in the activities of the European town square, a key space in Sicily that finds various replications in Rochester, but most usually on apartment house steps, or in someone’s large kitchen or dining room, where the briscola game might be played. Mario Puzo has claimed, in fact, that “every tenement was a town square” (9), so the spaces obviously equate. The serio-comic narratives that carnivalization produces are opposed to the more monologic “serious” discourses such as tragedy and epic, in that comic forms open up and anatomize. William Boelhower goes as far to say that Mangione’s “detailed presentation of the Sicilian Way” at a time when Italian Americans were being put in detention camps offers “a combative response to the American Way and an overturning of it” (182). This is an important point, for I believe Mangione sought to pre­sent the general American reader with an encyclopedic view of the cul­ture that generated him. In order to cover the social spectrum, Mangione stitches together scene after scene that fosters carnivalization of com­munal discourse, thereby giving a voice to every member of the community and creating an encyclopedic gaze. Moreover, rather than operating as aggressive, selfish individuals, community members seek each other out for joking, feasting, and gossip. Much of the joking and gossiping would be corrective. Mangione introduces this concept by demonstrating how the women, sewing near the briscola table, handle disorderly conduct: “The disadvantage of playing with children who were related was that any of the mothers sitting within striking dis­tance felt she had the prerogative of delivering stinging slaps with the back of her hand, regardless of whether the target was her own child or not. Of course, if your own mother reached you, the slap was likely to be twice as stinging because she loved you more” (15). There is an ironic comment here, but beneath, one suspects, an actual truth. And the situa­tion speaks metaphorically for the less physical processes of correction that joking and kidding initiate, as members of the extended family use their wits to hammer away at deviance from group norms and expecta­tions.

Mangione effortlessly makes the briscola scene more ethnically spe­cific, tactile, and complex by comically bringing that “Verdi fiend,” cousin Caluzzu, into the picture, who plays “opera after opera on an asthmatic phonograph. He must have had an extraordinary ear for music, because the blare of the children and the thunderous blasphemy [of the card players] usually coincided with the climax in Aida, Il Trovatore, or Rigoletto” (15–16), and thereby provides a brief but telling reminder of the rich musical culture of Italy that forms a part of every class’s heritage.

Mangione peppers the book with such examples, which demonstrate not only cultural density and magnificence, but also a kind of creative buoyancy, even under oppressive conditions. In his appreciative intro­duction to the 1981 edition of Mount Allegro, Herbert J. Gans points out that the people of this community were under relentless pressure from American culture to conform, especially in the workplace and in schools. However, they were free to preserve their customs in much of their personal life, particularly in “cooking, eating, and social life” (xi). And it is precisely in these realms that they found an outlet for their humorous traditions, which of course would be muffled, along with those of other ethnic groups, in the stern world of American enter­prise and education.

Mangione came to the task of illustrating the Italian-American pri­vate realm providentially armed; he had been coordinating editor in Washington for the Federal Writers’ Project from 1937 to 1939, had also worked at other government agencies, and later wrote a famous book: The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–43. He learned a great deal about his own culture during this time, but also how to explore the contours of any ethnic culture in an organized but encyclopedic way. It was his genius to seize upon humorous discourse and frequently comic tale-telling episodes to structure and vitalize these autobiographical projects. Humor’s multivalent discourse was better suited to do this than other available forms. In the cauldron of “mouth-almighty,” everything and everyone is relative and poten­tially equal.

Freud is frequently cited—mistakenly, I believe—as putting forth the theory that all humor is basically aggressive. While some of it is, including that generated by our village square, much of this humor is what Bakhtin calls “uncrowning,” and corrective, and thus in many ways acculturative and democratic. In many ways, this kind of group process augments the necessary transformations of a people adjusting to social change. On the other hand, humor can sometimes operate in neg­ative ways too, lancing the boil of group anger and also sometimes unfairly limiting individual achievement in order to further group goals (Coser 180). At the same time, truly revolutionary activity may be prevented through this process.

In Mangione’s case we discern this through his presentation of the Italian-American community’s position within Rochester, as seen through the daily lives of his extended family. Curiously, however, he focuses on his parents and aunts and uncles, or his cousins, rather than his siblings, perhaps exercising a form of protective omerta (silence) over them, as they were all still alive at the time he wrote his last memoir in 1978. Omissions of “standard” autobiographical props are prominent; in Mount Allegro Mangione chooses to begin his story when he is a schoolboy, omits almost all references to ugly encounters between Sicilians and wider American society, and changes the names of his characters. He devotes much attention to the difficult role Mussolini’s regime caused for Italian Americans, particularly during World War I, but strikingly omits any reference to the many jokes about Italian cow­ardice in battle. Individually, this seems related to his own guilt over not serving in the war. This too could be seen as Mangione’s practice of omerta, a subject much discussed by critics of Italian-American culture, especially feminists who are interested in the way in which females have been kept in place. He does break group silence in speaking at least briefly of the mafia, but only intermittently. Like Hurston, he is more interested in probing positive aspects of the culture and in creating an accurate image of its life-affirming matrix.

Nevertheless, by describing the incarceration of Italian, German, and Japanese Americans during the war, which he witnessed as a gov­ernment agent, he could demonstrate his domestic wartime service, and also participate in both humorous traditions that always occur in wartime. One is the “official patriotic humor” which serves the war effort, and the other is the irreverent, informal humor that attacks military hierarchy. As sociologist Christie Davies notes, these two forms not only coexist—they overlap (172), and it proves to be the case in Mangione’s text as well.

In international humor, a joke about cowardice in battle is presumed to be about the Italians, a tradition that began during World War I, when Italy was our ally, but continued during and after World War II, when Fascist Italy was the enemy. Ethnic humor is a given during times of war, for conflicts between nations are inevitably ethnic in nature. As Davies reminds, us, cowardice forms a subject for laughter because we understand it as both natural and yet a scandalous form of military failure. These jokes, however, are by no means confined to the Amereuropean arena; the Egyptians, for instance, are the butts of these types of routines in the Middle East. I would like to tell just one joke from the British arsenal about the Italians, for it fits in with Mangione’s Reunion in Sicily: “The Italian army has a new battle flag—a white cross on a white background” (Davies 174). Mangione omits jokes like this, but refers to them indirectly in Reunion in Sicily. At Easter, a risen Christ is revealed in the church, usually holding a red flag. Mangione is puzzled when this year it’s white. It seems in the recent election campaign the communists had spread the story that Christ had been a Communist; as proof they cited the red flag he holds in resurrection. So a white flag is substituted, but “Some of the priests objected to this on the grounds that a white flag signified surrender. As one of them argued, a Christ who gave up easily was almost as undesir­able as a Communist Christ. For a while the clergy reached a compro­mise: Christ should not carry any flag. But the prelates overlooked an important factor—Christ, without a flag, looked as though he were giving the Communist salute, clenched fist and all . . . ‘And now,’ Andrea said, ‘the Communists are claiming that the priests are sabo­taging Christ by making him look like a weakling instead of the mili­tant comrade which they are certain he is’” (183). The story amuses, but also contains some rather obvious lessons about religion, politics, and semiotics, while also commenting in a guarded manner on the forbidden topic of stereotypical Italian cowardice.

Another humorous tradition, however, one prominent in Italian lit­erature through the ages, receives no such silencing. The Catholic church in general and priests in particular get the comic needle more than once, perhaps most memorably in Mangione’s section on language and dialect. Uncle Luigi tells of an American priest who speaks perfect Italian, and travels through Italy taking confession. Northern Italy’s sinners prove boring, but he understands them. As he moves increasingly South, however, he has more and more problems communicating. “‘It must have been very annoying when he got to Naples,’ my uncle said, ‘for Neapolitans are some of the most fascinating sinners in the world’.” An ethnic slur? or possibly a tribute, marking distinctions between the larger group of Italians. When the priest hits Sicily, however, he can’t understand a word and has to conduct confessions in sign language. Mangione provides the kicker: “when anyone who had not heard the story was gullible enough to ask Uncle Luigi how that was possible, he would gleefully grab the opportunity to show off his histrionic talents and act out a sin or two in pantomime. Invariably, of course, they were sins of the flesh” (53–54). This passage performs several operations; it uses levelling humor to bring priests in general and American priests in particular down to the people’s level (and Mangione points out through a story in Mount Allegro that non-Italian priests—particularly the Irish—were frequently condescending to Italian-American parish­ioners); it also levels the pretentions of “standard Italian,” just as many backwoods American humorists have done for centuries with English. Similarly, in his chapter on “God and the Sicilians,” Mangione favors the people’s wisdom over that of priests, who receive comic treatment throughout his works.

The piece de resistance of this section on religion once again concerns Uncle Luigi (in many ways, Mangione’s favorite character). This fig­ure’s fascination with America’s plethora of religious denominations brings out Mangione’s comic genius, in the form of perfect and hilarious metaphor: “he [Luigi] . . . reacted . . . in the manner of a lecherous male who, having led a monogamous existence all his life, is suddenly thrown into the midst of a harem . . . he became a veritable playboy of religions . . . On Fridays, after a meal which invariably included two courses of meat, he attended a synagogue with some of his Jewish friends. When he wanted drama and excitement, he went to the Holy Roller services . . . He claimed he sat in a back seat . . . so that he could slip out easily when things became too hot. None of us ever doubted that it was at that point that Uncle Luigi would be sure to move up closer to the front of the church, so that he might get a better view” (Mount Allegro 78–79). This passage also skillfully shows, without underlining, Uncle Luigi’s mischievous determination to spite the Catholic church in particular, and also demonstrates that Mangione is speaking as part of a familial chorus. One understands without being told that the tales of Uncle Luigi’s religious adventures have been told and retold with considerable relish (and no doubt, on occasion, some pious dismay) among the Amorosos.

Many of the stories, religious or not, revolve around parental sib­lings. Like many other American ethnic groups, Italian Americans have large, closely knit extended families, which exhibit a special fondness for aunts and uncles. Mangione’s tales about them both charm and inform, and he embellishes many of them through choral narration. He does this even when—perhaps especially when—they express ideas he obviously doesn’t share. The aunts and uncles in particular excel at this joint enterprise whenever something dramatic develops in family life.

Uncle Luigi’s comic saga has sequels as well. His daughter Teresa, like her four siblings, follows her father’s command and becomes a Baptist; the others proselytize and convert their spouses too, even though fickle Uncle Luigi has moved on to other denominational ties. Teresa, however, dreams of going to Sicily to explore her past, even though she knows little Italian; when she embarks, she takes with her a life of Daniel Boone, an Italian-English dictionary, and pink American underwear for her aunt—signifiers of frontier myth, history, language and hedonistic materialism. Once there, despite the linguis­tic problem, she meets and marries an Italian dreamboat who joins her in America, but only when she agrees to revert to Catholicism!

This mini-parable offers humorous but human proof of the ebb and flow of change in immigrant life. Teresa isn’t the only Italian American to go to the old country; as the text and historical records reveal, others go back for good. Teresa’s former evangelism comically segues with an Americanizing mission; the way Mangione describes her dogged journey to the Old World makes it clear that she, in her own way, is just as much a pioneer entering the wilderness as Daniel Boone was, a reverse current in the flow West that will nevertheless end up with another new American. Her reversion to Catholicism sets an ironic twist to Uncle Luigi’s antics, and provides, in a curiously satisfying way, conti­nuity, both to Old World traditions and New World romance and progress. The newlyweds, of course, will form a new branch of the extended family.

Group-identity segments alternate with those devoted to the indi­viduality of the authorial persona. Like many other ethnic writers, Mangione creates prototypical “recognition scenes,” in which one’s sense of ethnicity is painfully realized (often for the first time) through con­tact with ethnic others; and yet these scenes are frequently rendered through comic description, and employ ethnic semiotics. Mangione describes his own recognition scene in two ways, once in the familiar classroom setting often used for such passages by other ethnic writers (including, for example, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912]); here, in Rochester, “. . . one day one of your new teachers looked at you brightly and said you were Italian because your last name was Amoroso and that too was puzzling” (2), but the real distinction comes, ironically, when a blond child of Northern Italians, Robert Di Nella, nicknamed “the Kaiser,” points to the “tiny orange splash” that is Sicily on the globe Jerre carries around, and calls him a “lousy Siciliano. I hit him on the jaw and . . . ran to safety with the globe tucked under my arm like a football . . . He ambushed me at every possible opportunity and preceded each attack by calling me a Sicilian. From the way he hissed the word at me, I soon realized that while being a Sicilian was a special distinction, it probably was not one that called for cheers and congratulations. The ‘Kaiser’ must have been descended from a Borgia . . .” (3) for he also claims Sicilianos are blackmailers and murders—but significantly, Jerre still has the whole world in his hands.

Ironically, whenever Jerre’s father reads in his newspaper that a recent killer is Italian, he anxiously tries to find out if he’s a Sicilian. If so, he “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 potential thieves, black­mailers, and murderers” (5) They even invent folklore about an evil Carrapipi judge who sends criminals to the US instead of jail to save money! As Mangione states, “It was a shock to discover a few years later that Carrapipi was a very short distance away from Girgenti, the city where most of my relatives were born, and that the people of Carrapipi considered the natives of Girgenti responsible for the bad reputation Sicilians had here”—they even have a nasty comic couplet, “Girgenti/Mal’agente”! (6). Later, Mangione would receive angry let­ters from citizens of Carrapipi when Mount Allegro was published.

This scene focuses on the young boy’s bewilderment as he has to absorb lessons based on a culture far away, one frequently at odds with what he is learning in school. It is to Mangione’s credit, however, that he also demonstrates overtly here that a persecuted people can in turn stereotype groups within their own, even one so near as the citizens of Carrapipi.

Mangione never ceased commenting on these individual “recognition scenes”; as he discloses in bitterly humorous fashion in An Ethnic at Large, during the thirties he was an unhappy participant in ethnic “passing.” Touring the South as a Farm Security Administration offi­cial, Mangione tries to get along with the natives, and uses humor to mask what was a trying time for him: “Before long we learned that one of the standard procedures among southern men for achieving some degree of cordiality with strangers was to urinate together . . . Dogs have a similar protocol. However, no amount of group urinating could dispel the prejudice that the Italian sound of my name instantly inspired among the Southerners we met. As soon as they heard it and took into account my Latin features, they literally turned their backs to me. From their viewpoint, I rated far worse than a damnyankee; I was some goddamned foreigner . . . After a few days of this, Brown and Sperry [his co-agents], disgusted with such blatant bigotry . . . began introducing me as Smith instead of Mangione. That solved the problem” (Ethnic 220–21). This passage puts Mangione into company with many other ethnic writers; Langston Hughes, for instance, used to ride in white railroad cars by pretending to be Spanish.

So we see that humorous writing doesn’t always wear a broad smile. Writing amusing but quite serious, even despairing parables such as these about one’s own and group life story was a way of getting revenge for syndromes such as forced “passing,” but also a way of teaching one’s fellow Americans to look beyond stereotypes.

Helen Barolini warns us of reading Italian-American narratives merely as entertainment: “There are depths of bitterness, frustration, rancor, repression and disappointment behind the surfaces of those warm and humorous portrayals of family life by Jerre Mangione . . .” (41), and indeed, there are. Humor is often a coded vehicle for the most serious matters, and so it proves in Mangione’s narratives. I don’t believe Barolini’s warning is necessary for most readers, however, for Mangione never settles for mere laughter; a human truth lies under­neath, and it may be joyous, celebratory, ominous, or tragic.

Although Mangione, as indicated, pays much attention to the come­dies and tragedies of Americanization, in some ways he seems more con­cerned with basic conflict of the old and the new worlds; in all of his autobiographical books, he returns to Sicily and immerses himself in its culture; indeed, one could say that Mount Allegro builds throughout to this penultimate moment. Throughout his storia, Mangione seems to love Sicily more than any other place, yet always thinks of himself as an American, and never lives in Sicily for more than a year. The scenes there are full of comedy too, but often of misunderstanding between old world relatives who make the mistake of thinking this young kinsman is a Sicilian rather than an American, as I noted earlier.

 

* * * * * * *

All these episodes and constructs have a powerful systolic rhythm, as Mangione alternates between opposed ethnic signifiers, various dualities that have mapped his identity and his culture. Throughout his storia, Mangione seems intent on using this process to reconcile oppo­sitions within himself, in his relations with America, the ethnic com­munity, and situations and relationships within the community itself. But he also sees his narratives, in all these aspects, as reflecting and perhaps fostering the continuing effort of his people to come to grips with the process of achieving personal identity and Americanization, without sacrificing the unique positive characteristics possessed by the Italian tradition.

He demonstrates this through wonderful stories generated by the group itself, but retold here by griot-like figures who memorialize what in some respects are dead traditions, while simultaneously signi­fying, in their own voices, the rebirth of these narrative rituals in new forms. But these stories must be told in context, and in the proper spirit and voice.

An example of humor’s transforming and transfixing power may be seen in one of these set pieces. The imagined sadness of losing one’s eth­nic heritage may be described comically; Mangione’s neighbor Remo decides to go to Hollywood to become a “shorter and plumper Valentino” and enrolls in acting school, sends his sister sucessive pic­tures of himself as a matador, a sheik, a cowboy, and an Indian. She then hears he’s married an Assyrian and works in a Chinese restaurant! (40–41). Mangione himself, however, bifucates rather than melts, achieving both an American and an Italian-American identity, and the process of striving for one eventuates in the achievement of the other. At the end of Mount Allegro, the old neighborhood has been razed, sig­nificantly to make room for a gleaming coca-cola plant, but one shaped like a coffin. Still, as in the best tradition of carnivalization, Mangione makes it clear that the death of the old community has given birth to new ones, scattered in various suburbs and cities. “Although the family reunions, which still take place in Rochester, are not as frequent as they were in my parents’ time, nor quite as noisy and prolonged, the spirit of gregarious conviviality reigns as of old.” The old people and their peculiar forms of humor are gone—“No one to emulate my father’s feat of toasting with rhyming puns each guest around the table . . .”—but the food is the same, and the children run, tease, and giggle, pre­sumably employing a more American inspired brand of family joking. Mangione is borne back to his past, hearing his relatives “talking in Sicilian at the top of their voices, sometimes simultaneously . . . All the while I listen for my father’s laughter and luxuriate in the warmth of my mother’s eyes, as I try to efface the image of the bottling plant and the barbed-wire fence” (Mount Allegro 309).

Certainly, Mangione’s books are conservative in sounding such ele­gaic notes. But this judgment becomes more complicated when we notice that he often conveys a sense of both biological insiderism and yet, at the same time, critical detachment from the group in question. He takes pains to demonstrate in some detail his wide experiences outside Italian America, and proudly displays his hard-won credentials in various mainstream hierarchies. Although he often gently or comically criticizes and questions individuals and customs within the Italian-American community—especially in his repeated attacks on the fatal­istic concept of Sicilian “destino,” which he wryly says hardly jibed with the Horatio Alger novels he devoured (80)—there is, in the end, a sense of “return” to the group, of reunion, and of deep love for, and loy­alty to, the ethnic community. This stands in contradistinction to more problematic ethnic autobiographies, of which the most notorious ex­ample is no doubt Richard Rodriguez’s beautifully written, but suppos­edly “disloyal” portrayal of his family and the Hispanic-American community in Hunger of Memory, a book that concludes not with re­union, but in many readers’ eyes, a resigned sense of renunciation and rupture.

Mangione, on the other hand, provides, at least in his attitudes and conclusions, more acceptable, traditional narratives. We should be aware here of the way in which many people expect ethnic Americans to to remain ethnic, as revealed in the scornful putdowns, “He’s not much of a Jew,” or “she’s as white as I am,” an ultimately racist version of the differently inspired, but similarly scornful tags within ethnic groups for members who are “white inside,” such as “oreo” (African Americans), “coconuts” (Hispanics), or “apples” (Native Americans). In his autobiographical narratives, Mangione finds a laboratory in which to work out an alchemy for the self, a process that frankly acknowl­edges the often opposed elements of his being that nevertheless must be fruitfully combined. This process has an exponentially expanded equivalent in the ethnic community, often at odds with the surrounding Anglo world of Rochester. Mangione’s life stories become mechanisms for bringing opposites together, fixing in words a mirror whereby oppo­sites look at one another, understand each other, and thereby come to a firmer understanding of their own selves. The vehicle for much of this process, the circumambient ether of the experiment, is laughter, agent-supremo of the carnivalizing mode.

Mangione, in the conclusion of An Ethnic at Large, sums up the state of his being in 1945. “I had learned how to protect myself from the bruising paradoxes of everyday American life, and how to cope with the ever-recurring sensation of being a foreigner in my own native land. That I had managed to hold my own . . . stuck me as something of a miracle . . . one which I could in part attribute to a growing awareness of my own worth as well as to a propensity for the comic. Humor was essential for it enabled me to put distance between my psyche and the various assaults made upon it” (367). Mangione’s texts show us again and again that these assaults upon individual freedom and personal identity can come from both sides of the ethnic divide, and that the tug-of-war for his soul was furiously fought by the old world and the new. Humor provides surcease from that pressure and a magical balanc­ing space where the self can grow, finding nourishment from both cul­tures, and thereby making a wondrous hybrid possible that can benefit both its shaping “parents.”

 

John Lowe

Louisiana State University

 

Sources Consulted

Bair, Deirdre. “Introduction to the Morningside Edition,” Reunion in Sicily. “Introduction” by Jerre Mangione. 1950; rpt., New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Barolini, Helen. The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. New York: Schocken, 1985.

Boelhower, William. Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self. Verona: Essedue Edizione, 1982.

Coser, Rose Laub. “Some Social Functions of Laughter: A Study of Humor in a Hospital Setting.” Human Relations 12.2 (1959): 171–82.

Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor Around the World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Gans, Herbert J. “Introduction to the 1981 Edition.” Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

Gardaphe, Fred L. “My House is Not Your House: Jerre Mangione and Italian-American Autobiography.” Multiculturaal Autobiography: American Lives. Ed. James Robert Payne. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992. 139–73.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “You Don’t Know Us Negroes.” Unpublished essay, n.d. Library of Congress. Quoted by permission of Lawrence Spivak.

La Gumina, Salvatore J., ed. “WOP! A Docmumentary History of Italian-American Discrimination in the United States. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.

Mangione, Jerre. An Ethnic at Large. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.

___. Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian-American Life. 1943; New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

___. Reunion in Sicily. New York: Houghton, 1950.

Mulas, Franco. “A MELUS Interview: Jerre Mangione.” MELUS 12.4 (1985): 73–83.

Olney, James. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 3–27.

Puzo, Mario. The Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Bantam, 1964.

Radcliffe-Brown. “A Further Note on Joking Relationships.” Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen and West, 1965.

Schermerhorn, R. A. Comparative Ethnic Relations. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970, 1978. 12.

Steiner, Edward A. On the Trail of the Immigrants. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1906.

 

 

 

 

 


[1]For a detailed and intentionally provocative rehearsal of this syndrome, see Wop! A Documentary History of Italian American Discrimination in the United States, ed. Salvatore J. La Gumina; the author provides a detailed bibliography, which needs updating.

[2]Wine, in fact, functions repeatedly in the narrative to grease the wheels of some scheme, most notably perhaps in the hilarious feud and even funnier arranged reconciliation between Mangione’s father and Uncle Nino, which includes the wonderful fragment of gossip used by Mangione’s mother to lull her husband, the story of the two old ladies nearby who suspect each other of bewitching them with the “evil eye.”