|
From Southern Italy to Southern USA: The last part of the
nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, many thousands of Italians
from the “mezzo giorno,” from Sicily, from all parts of Italy came hopefully
to the US. Although many of these were “contadini” attached to vast land
holdings with their “padroni” overlords, others were textile mill workers,
and still others common laborers and small farmers. Within this last group I
would include both the paternal and maternal sides of my own family. On my Father’s side,
my Grandfather farmed a small plot of land near Senigallia. Senigallia is a
small agricultural town, somewhat north of Ancona, on the east coast of a
peninsula on the Adriatic Sea. My Mother’s people came from a town very near
there, called Montemarciano. Here my Mother’s father, Arturo Boldreghini,
kept a small chicken farm, but mostly made his living as a shoemaker. Although
both of my parents came from towns very close to one another, they did not
come to know each other until they had immigrated to America. Here they met
for the first time as adults, in of all places, the American South, in
Memphis, Tennessee. My Mother, as her
brood of little ones grew during the l920s and l930s, was a great teller of
tales about her early life. With her children as an audience, she would
frequently relate stories, episodes, experiences of her childhood in Italy.
She would regale us with tales of how the Italian women would meet at the
town’s well, where they would gather water for their homes, and how it was
the center of all the town’s gossip. How, she would go on, they would go to
the Adriatic shores to wash their linens and persons; of the beauty of the
surf and sand. “Il Mare,” she would say dreamily, full of nostalgia for her
land and her youth. She told how she learned to wring the necks of chickens
to prepare them for the market; of how her many brothers became apprentice
shoemakers to her father; and of her schooling and of the church and
religious life in Montemarciano. For, as we later learned, the Catholic
Church in America was for these immigrants the source of all activity and
relief. It was not only their escape from a hostile outer world, but a one
sure and lasting tie to the old world. For them, there were two things to
live for: their church and the future of their children. It is difficult for
the generations that followed them to realize this closeness; their children
were, in general, indifferent to religious life. At the outset, we can
see molding and shaping occurring here; the mother as story teller; the son
as reader and teacher of stories (literature) and as a writer. My father
however had no such tales; he had come to America when he was only four. His
first memories were of cotton fields in Mississippi, of the many Blacks who
worked them, and of a primitive country school. A school that he and his
brothers, after a few sessions, refused to attend, and were left with no
formal education of any kind at all. At any rate, as
matters worsened in Italy economically, as the population was fast growing
and improverished Italy had neither industry or business to accommodate it,
both the Montesis and the Boldreghinis came to the US. As for my mother’s
family, how they traveled from Ancona to Genoa, I have never been able to
determine. Surely it must have been by rail. Once in Genoa, my mother’s
family left that seaport town in the l880s or early l890s from Ponte Vecchio.
On one occasion I found myself in that very seaport town trying to retrace
their footsteps as they prepared to embark for America under circumstances
that I will relate later. But the Ponte Vecchio is no longer in use, and has
been replaced by a new pier. Once aboard their
ship, as my mother repeatedly told this account so that it became more of a
ceremony than a recounting, they were massed with hundreds of others in the
bottom hold of the ship where they experienced cramming, disease, and vermin
to such an extent that the voyage was frequently unbearable. Despite these
miserable conditions, the voyage was not altogether grim as she would
repeatedly point out. She was sixteen or thereabouts when she was traveling;
and there was a brief encounter with some ship’s steward or sailor. He was
very attentive, and would bring her little gifts of food whenever she would
go above deck to sit and watch the sea or read the novel that she brought
with her. For although Mother
functioned feebly in the English tongue, she loved the Italian language and
its literature. Later as a member of the newly established Italian community
in Memphis, she wrote letters home for those Italians who could not write.
Moreover, I was named Albert after some character she had encountered in
Italian fiction. Again there is the influence of the Mother-figure and the
son’s later career as a teacher of literature. Finally they arrived
in New York harbor, and stood in awe and admiration of the newly constructed
Statue of Liberty (completed and dedicated in 1896) that greeted them as they
came into the city’s waters. Yet the relief of finally ending their brutal
sea voyage was tempered by the fear that they might not pass their official
inspection at the newly established immigration center, called Ellis Island. And these fears
became reality when on being checked out as a group by the Ellis Island
doctors, the mother of the brood, Mama Boldreghini, was found to have some
disease of the eyes, probably glaucoma. Having been rejected, she was being
sent back to Italy. Shocked and miserable, the family could hardly bear this
bad turn of events. They could not envision life of any sort without their
mother; but they finally realized that they must separate. However, promises
were made that once they were economically established in the new world and
money could be obtained for medical treatment for her eyes, they would send
for Mother Boldreghini. However, because of their economic struggle during
their early years in America, they never did send for their beloved Mother,
who finally died a few years after her rejection. In my childhood home
in Memphis, Tennessee, there was an item of furniture in the living room,
called a library table. Placed conspicuously upon it was a photograph of my
Grandmother Boldreghini. This photo remained there throughout the years; my
own mother, turning to it frequently, would recount the days on Ellis Island
to her small children. And weeping she would conclude with, “I never saw
Mama again.” The next step in my
Mother’s odyssey was to travel from New York to Helena, Arkansas. For it was
here, at a cotton mill, that the entire family worked for a time, paying off
to the mill’s owners their passage fare to America. Years later (in San
Francisco, after the 1991 earthquake) when I gave a paper at an American
Italian Historical Association conference, I came upon a civil servant, who
represented the Italian Government. He was in the States, tracing the labor
conditions of early Italian immigrants. He knew very well of the cotton mill
at Helena, Arkansas. It was notorious for working these early immigrants for
months for their meager passenger money. He even pointed out that the Italian
government of that day had sent a protest through their embassy for the
gross maltreatment of these exploited workers. Surprisingly enough, in all
the tales told by my Mother about these early days, no mention was ever made
by their long internment in Helena, Arkansas. The agent pointed out that the
people from my parents’ area, the Marche, were particularly gullible in these
matters; that they were easily taken in by these recruiters. But my Mother
never alluded to this event in any manner suggesting exploitation. This
acceptance must have come from the fact that my people were so happy to get
to the States, that they had no sense at all that they were being exploited. In time, they left
Helena, and went on to the nearest large city, which happened to Memphis.
They were attracted to this town by the fact that a large community of
Italian Americans had already settled there. We know that a similar community
had grown up across the Mississippi in Arkansas. These Southern Italians were
in a sense rare; most immigrants of their national roots had remained in
eastern cities. Mills of the sort that had existed in Helena, Arkansas, must
have been responsible in great part for these Italians’ arrival and
settlement in the American South. In Memphis, the oldest son, my uncle
Earnest, opened a small shoe shop, and by degrees Charlie and Sam, Mother’s
two other brothers, also became shoemakers with their own modest shops. Memphis, at first
sight, seemed to welcome the Italians with open arms. From the middle of the
last century to the present, the city of Memphis, Tennessee has not been
without significant Italian-American leadership. As the record plainly
shows, as early as the 1870s, fraternal organizations had begin to form with
their members limited to Italians alone (Societa di Unione e Fratellanza
Italiana, 1870; the Societa di Mutuo Succoroso Vittorio Emauele, l905; and
the Italian Society in l936). City and county elected officials of Italian
descent included Frank L. Monteverde, who had been mayor of Memphis from 1918
to 1919; and several members of the State Legislature: Joseph Montedonico, a leading
banker, who once headed an all-Italian Memphis bank; Paul Croce, a labor
official; and John Gabella, a leading lawyer. There were also
Italians who had been selected as honorary Italian consuls, a distinction
sought by may. These included: Gino Pierotti, a city official; Ronald Arata,
a lawyer; and Mario Chiozza, a restaurateur. I note these facts because these
were the positive sides of Italian-American relationship in this city. I will
note the negative sides later. [1] To continue my
narrative about my family, I will now turn to my Father’s people and their
early arrival in the States. My Father’s relatives by some method, which was
never entirely clear to me, acquired a small farm in Shelby County,
Mississippi, where three of the sons, my uncles Fred and Joe and my Dad were
raised. Since they were needed on the farm, and because, as I have indicated,
their school was so unrewarding, they received no schooling whatsoever.
However, they were self-taught readers and writers of their adopted language.
And even though my Uncle Fred Montesi became a most successful grocery
magnate, whose name became a household term in Memphis homes, he did so
without any formal training. My Uncle acted,
however, as somewhat of a polar opposite to my father, who was not very
successful economically. Aleco, as my father was called, was the youngest
son—both overprotected and over-bossed. And while my father was the best of
all possible men, he did not cut as great a figure as did my Uncle Fred. My
Uncle Fred at one time was the owner of seventy grocery chain stores, and
later vied with Clarence Sanders, one of the pioneer creators of the
supermarket, for control of the grocery business in Memphis. Clarence Sanders
was the founder of the old Piggly-Wiggly grocery chain and is remembered in
Memphis for his so-called ex-mansion, the “Pink Palace.” The “Palace” is now
a Memphis museum. So we can well see that the Montesi boys did manage rather
well in any language interchange. However, my Father
drank, and even though he worked for my Uncle in a meager job with a meager
salary, he was constantly being fired by my Uncle. At the outset, then,
because I loved my Dad so much and because we lived in the shadow of a great
fortune, my sympathies from the very beginning were with the underdogs, the
failures, and the classes that represented them. Yet despite the fact
that on the surface, Italians were accepted without reservations into Memphis
society, there were sinister sides to this arrangement as well. Despite the
fact that the newly arrived immigrants were able to secure an economic
toehold in this Southern city, they were indeed outsiders to the community at
large. There was even at this early time, an Italian elite, which I have
indicated, an Italian middle class, and an Italian bottom class. Among this
bottom class was my own family as they struggled to establish themselves in
the new world. While many of the Italians in the South worked as
sharecroppers, railroad workers, and factory hands until they were
self-supporting, many of those settling around Memphis became truck farmers
or textile workers. In time some of them became solvent and returned to their
homeland, but most remained in their new country to raise their families.
However, since they were doubly alienated from the larger Southern community
by being not only Italian but Catholic, they formed little social groups of
their own. It was at one of these closed events, a dance of sorts, that my
Mother and Father met and began a courtship that finally ended in marriage. Despite their
ostracism from the larger Southern community, the exiled Italians were not
entirely starved for culture. They lived among Americans, but they seldom saw
their lifestyle as something to be obsessively copied. They also felt
intuitively that art must play an important part in every man’s life. They,
therefore, bought early Enrico Caruso recordings on their heavy disks and
played them by the hour to their children; sang, as did my Aunt Josie, arias
from all the operas; and read and told old-world stories and legends to their
children in their beloved Italian tongue. As for popular culture, they played
the violin and accordion on their “Italian Hour” during the early days of
radio in order to reconcile the community at large to the Italian world. I am
certain that these attitudes marked many of my future paths and beliefs as to
culture and art. But the outer world,
on occasion, was not only indifferent and hostile to their isolated
life-world, it could suddenly turn ugly and brutal to these “foreigners”
indeed. I can recall instances in my own boyhood, living as we did in a
working-class neighborhood, when the Klan would place burning crosses in
front of St. Thomas Church. Our little parish church saw other indignities as
well: a black was ostentatiously lynched in a vacant lot nearby. This barbarous
deed was performed to warn both the immigrant community and the black one to
keep their place. In an effort to
provide a shield between us and the culture at large, the Italians, as I have
said, created their own little ghettos. And later we combined with other
Catholic minorities, the Irish and some Poles, to enjoy Irish-Italian
carnivals and Polish church suppers. As time went on, the immigrants created
their own Catholic Club, housed in a very enormous and opulent building in
downtown Memphis. Moreover, from this class, lawyers, doctors, and other
professionals began to appear regularly in the town with Italian last names.
As the years passed on, the Italians became not only major public figures in
Memphis, but in the entire South. But an era was dying and a new generation
supplanted the old one. At this crossing of generations, the Italian past was
either ignored, deliberately neglected, or even scorned by these second tier
of Italian Americans. How this considerable denial of the great heritage of
Rome and Italy came about demands some explanation. As I have related,
the patrician Southern world of Memphis, the group that held the old city
together, seldom admitted a “dago” to its ranks. And the children of these
immigrants, feeling the compulsion to belong to the new world of America,
began to look at this upper class for guidelines as to how they could enter
this world and be accepted in it. As I personally review my own history in
that city, I am aware of a vague but persistent sense of alienation and my
determination to eschew all matters that were old-worldish Italian and to
become totally Americanized. If I were to become totally Americanized, I must
have thought then, the feeling of being an outsider would finally disappear. Since in those remote
days, the populace did not adopt the fashions of the bottom class (as we do
today: male earrings, jeans, and “kinky hair,” and leather dress from ethnic
or cultural outlaws) but turned to the upper classes for role modeling. A
young member of the immigrant society would perforce have to turn to the
squirearchy of cotton and plantation owners for his role models and
ego-ideals. He must ape this class if he were to fit properly into its ranks. Years later, after
the post-WW2 prosperity, when a more tolerant non-Waspish America began to
emerge, it became fashionable and even “au courant” to trace one’s roots. It
was demanded by those deracinated to look more closely at one’s heritage, at
one’s ethnic and cultural background, no matter how despised it might have
been. In this great rush of guilt and self-condemnation, many recanted their
contempt for the Old World and realized at last that they had canceled out a
rich past. But at that early time, a student entering the American schools
was encouraged by his parents to speak only English. In this manner, he soon
foolishly neglected and soon forgot the language of his parents. Further,
when he entered the environment of his elementary school, the need to conform
meant the eradication of all things old-worldly. Today when we decry the
“disunification of America,” and some find that the melting pot theory was a
myth, we must remember in those early days, that blending into the American
sensibility was a norm and the “summum bonum” for all. So with myself who
could think in Italian before school, if it could be said that I could think
at all before six, and was barely able to use the language after my indoctrination. Well, how did my
education fare under the guidance of the Wasp ascendancy, the Southern
squirearchy, that ruled the Middle South? As an impressionable child I
became super-saturated with the Southern life-world. I experienced the
Agrarian soul of the area, felt the grief of the post-Civil War malaise,
listened to the inspired preachers of Bible Belt persuasion, and admired the
country-western music that even then bellowed out of Nashville. I was indeed
a true-blue Southerner: one who aped assiduously all the clichés, bromides,
and shibboleths of the Southern patricians, meeting them on the common ground
of art and literature, subjects that I hungrily devoured. For this was the
period of the Southern Renaissance; of a flowering of letters in the South
that was unequaled in the rest of the country. William Faulkner was writing
out of Oxford, Mississippi; the Agrarians were expounding in poetry and tract
the disappearing values of the Old South at Vanderbilt; and Katherine Ann
Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams were just
starting out. Later I was to do my doctoral thesis on the Agrarians’ major
periodical, “the Southern Review,” which was published out of Louisiana
State, under the editorship of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. There
was a good reason for a young English major to be attracted to all this
excitement and ferment in an area that was considered barbaric and dying.
One of my best friends in Memphis was the Agrarian poet, George Marion
O’Donnell, who with Randall Jarrell and Tennessee Williams, was published in
the New Directions series of young American poets. However, although the
Agrarians were my aesthetic models, their political views were hardly my own.
They were for the most part traditional and reactionary in their political
stances. Although Red Warren tried in his late career to do justice to the
Negro in his essays and books, his first articles were hardly pro-Black. (See
“I’ll Take My Stand.”) My position toward the Black in my early life, and
now, I believe, was tempered by my Catholic and Christian beliefs. One simply
did not maltreat another human being, no matter his gender, color, or race. I can name incident
after incident from my youth in which I was enraged by what I saw by way of
barbarous treatment of the Black. I saw at the grocery stores where I worked
episodes in which Blacks were caught stealing. They were often taken to the
back of the store, stripped, and beaten until they dropped. I saw stupid
country rubes run black women off of street cars because they responded
brashly to some of their stupid demands. I saw educated Blacks refuse to
return to the back of streetcars when requested by the motormen. I saw a
vigilante group chase down a black man on a hot Sunday afternoon, putting
bullet after bullet into the his body through the door of a closet where he
had tried to hide. I was only ten then but when I protested I was told
quickly to shut my ugly mouth. Soon, as I grew older, I took to riding with
the Blacks in the back rows of streetcars. Moreover as my private war against
the injustices that I saw in the American South progressed, I, in the
abstract, toyed with several socialist and radical stances. I was accused of
being too radical and too revolutionary in what I wrote in my “blackboard
newspaper” in my high school. But as I was at war with what I considered unfairness
in the American judicial system, I felt very pure, smug, and righteous
indeed. I was a rebel with a cause. So as a youth, I
sought allegiances with lynched Blacks, with despised poor Irish and
Italians, with Catholics in a Bible Baptist South, with poor impoverished
whites, with labor over management, with my poor butcher Father over my rich
super-market Uncle. Surely my present attitudes toward the poor and the unfortunate
of the world were greatly influenced and shaped by these early beliefs and
experiences. And to be sure, I am totally delighted that I have remained so.
I, being like Sir Leslie Stephen, who was unable to believe in anything
otherworldly, but nonetheless believed firmly in morality.[2] However, now, I no
longer naïvely romanticize the victim—those who live by the street finally
die by the street. But I am still romantic about the future and well-being of
the human race, despite their shortcomings and their reptilian brains, and
about this I have not changed my views since my firebrand adolescence. During my youth, one
of my best friends, an older woman, named Ann Covington, conducted a salon to
which were attracted college professors, wild radicals of the Red Party,
publishers, poets, and all sorts of interesting people. Immersed in this
world of the mind, I entirely blocked out the world of my parents. For to us,
our parents were considered old-fashioned and conservative because they
refused to forsake certain Old-World habits and beliefs. There, then, is a
rough summary of my early years. I am puzzled still as to how to put a tag
on it. Let me say that I do feel that I have remained a good democrat through
my adult life, not in the party sense, but in the “people” sense. That this
was shaped by my conditioning in my youth: by my immigrant parents, by the
poverty of my father and the richness of my Uncle; by the fact that most
people in the South during that period were an underclass, economically
handicapped by an area that had very little money and prospects or none at
all—must go without saying. But I must add that the mind looks at all
political stances, at all ideologies, at all cultural and aesthetic
activities as provisional and compromised. It is this last attitude, I
believe, that more than any other printmarked my teaching and learning
career.[3] |