Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  Shortly after my grandmother died, my mother bought a Strega Nona doll at a children’s bookstore, and we started to call the doll Nanny.

  The witch of Tomie DePaola’s children’s book, Strega Nona, looked uncannily like Nanny: the two had the same protruding chin and nose that together make a crescent moon, wore aprons that cascaded over round stomachs, and had head kerchiefs that rested above twinkling eyes. And they were both witches, though Nanny never had a magical cauldron, like Strega Nona, that spewed yards of spaghetti; she managed pasta production all on her own.

  The doll, embodying Nanny, has been to weddings, to Christmas dinners and afternoon coffee hours, and to the Italian market on Long Island where the local ladies gossiped. When my family went to Italy for vacation and to revisit Mongrassano, Strega Nona came too. We took photographs of her sitting on a crumbling ledge at the Coliseum, peeking out of a backpack on the tracks at the Naples train station, perusing the ruins at Pompeii, and sunning herself on the Amalfi coast. How could we not take her with us? We were going to Calabria to see the people that Nanny used to know, to walk in her steps and remember where we all began before she and Nonno changed their lives completely so we could traipse the clean-swept streets of America, and go to school, and to the city to work, and live in homes with no livestock of any kind in the house.

  Strega Nona wasn’t in Italy just to sightsee. There was also a piece of unfinished business that we had to take care of for Nanny while we were in Calabria. I had heard my grandmother lament, when she was alive, that she had never gotten the chance to return to Italy. I had thought she had wanted to see her hometown one more time.

  “No, are you kidding?” my mother said to me on the train as it left Naples and headed south. “What could she possibly want to see in that dump? You know, Jean, it’s interesting for us to go see Mongrassano because we never had to live there, at least not for very long. But for her? Believe me, she was just fine staying on Oak Street.”

  Instead, my mother told me, Nanny wanted to return because she had long ago promised to make a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Saint Francis of Paola, to repay the grace of the saint for having fulfilled a wish.

  As the train headed toward Paola, on the Tyrrhenian coast, I stared out the window, looking down from cliffside tracks onto unpopulated aqua beaches and half-built homes of stucco and concrete, and wondered what Nanny had done that required her to make a pilgrimage and a bargain with a saint. I had always thought when Nanny prayed at home to her figurine of Saint Anthony, or at Saint Patrick’s as she lit a candle, that she sought health or general well-being for her family. But it turns out that what she was after was a more particular quid pro quo.

  Maybe she had a secret that she did not want uncovered. A secret love? Did she pray to Saint Francis that her true love never be exposed to the world so she could go to America and leave him behind without anyone the wiser? As I watched the familiar landscapes of her life race by my window, Nanny leapt off her living room couch in my mind, threw down her cane, and tore aside her widow’s black to reveal a Technicolor life.

  “Nanny, we’re going to finish your pilgrimage!” I said to the doll in my mother’s lap. My mother made Strega Nona clap her hands.

  The sanctuary of Saint Francis is on a hilltop overlooking the city of Paola, which is forty minutes from Mongrassano in the province of Cosenza. Winding up the hill toward the sanctuary, I watched shuttered stucco homes and disused factories give way to black patches of grass, smoldering from the brush fires that plague Calabria throughout summer. I knew that the sanctuary was close when I began to see the Stations of the Cross go by, mounted in the exposed rock. They finished at an enormous parking lot filled with tour buses and overlooking the sea.

  I turned away from the sea to the sanctuary, tucked into the side of the hill. The saint’s compound is a palimpsest itself. Walking up to the entrance along a broad piazza that marked the homestretch of our pilgrimage, I passed architecture of several centuries that seemed to melt into one rambling structure. A modern glass building found a place within medieval stone walls, and a sixteenth-century cloister attached itself to a church, which was originally early Gothic but rebuilt in the Baroque style. The structures were so ingrained in the land, so organic, that it was difficult to tell where the sanctuary ended and the rocky hillside began.

  My mother held Strega Nona carefully, facing out, as we went inside the church, and I dabbed her with holy water. Pilgrims swarming around us, we followed the crowd to the saint’s relics, mounted in black and white marble and surrounded with offerings of flowers, real and plastic. My mother propped the doll up on the shrine, and I took her picture. Then she stepped out of the way and left Nanny there by herself.

  A nun walked over to where we were standing, and watched us, Nanny’s daughter and granddaughter, looking at the doll. Catching the nun’s eye, my mother gave her a sheepish look and pulled Nanny down from her perch.

  The nun smiled at us, and without speaking, showed my mother a short strand of black yarn ending in tassels, a conocchia e fusu. It was a miniature of what the priests and nuns wore around their waists and a souvenir of the sanctuary. The nun tied it around Strega Nona, and walked away as quietly as she came.

  I had been a little embarrassed about Strega Nona on our trip, and worried that people who saw my family with the doll might think that what we were doing was strange or disrespectful to the dead. But I cried at the sight of Strega Nona with the conocchia e fusu around her waist, her pilgrimage completed. The doll, though a silly thing found in a shop, had kept Nanny close to my family after her death. Something in us, passed on from generations before, understood the sanctity of objects, the comfort of holding something in hand that was a physical symbol of all the things that could never be seen and all the things that we would never want to lose. The impulse we had to carry Strega Nona with us was not unlike lighting a candle, or praying to a figurine, or using the potions and amulets that guarded our family from the evil eye. She was our reinvention of that ancient impulse, and a sign that the old ways were still alive in us and always would be no matter where we lived in the world or how different our lives became from those who came before us.

  I sighed. My mother smiled at me, seeming to know what I was thinking. “Let’s hit the gift shop,” she said.

  We loaded up on rosary beads, prayer cards, and ceramic statues of Saint Francis. Wandering the aisles, I passed by thermometers, ashtrays, dishcloths, calendars, all ablaze with brightly colored images of the saint. Behind an overstock of Saint Francis snow globes, I found a tiny wooden figure, green, shaped like two arches and hinged in the middle like a locket, one inch high. On the left side was a picture of Saint Francis, and on the right, in tiny print, on a sticker fastened to the wood, were the words,

  “Due cose al mondo non ti abbandono mai: l’occhio di Dio che dovunque ti vede e il cuore della mamma che sempre ti segue.”

  “There are two things in the world that never abandon you: the eye of God which always sees you and the heart of a mother which always follows you.”

  I sat close to my mother as we got back in the taxi. With my grandmother, her mother, watching over us, my mother took me to see the place where she was born.

  JEANNA LUCCI CANAPARI is currently at work on a collection of essays on Italian American culture and identity. A graduate of Columbia University and a Long Island native, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Allium Longicuspis

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  STEPHANIE SUSNJARA

  The ancient roots of the garlic bulb and the ever-unfurling roots of my family tree are so intertwined they’re impossible to separate. Grounded in the past and stretching into the future, these roots are braided together in solidarity, keeping the branches of identity alive and intact.

  I feel a special kinship with garlic, one that transcends bodily nourishment. However, my relationship with garlic has not always been so rapturous. At one point I hated garlic and thought I would have
to banish it from my life.

  Garlic’s ascent from second-class citizenry to comfortable bohemian chic mirrors my own family’s twentieth-century immigrant experience. Between 1880 and 1920, over four million Italians, including my maternal relatives, migrated to the United States. Language barriers, cultural differences, and relative poverty placed them toward the bottom echelon of society along with other recent immigrants. To worsen their plight, the Italians were garlic eaters at a time when garlic was hardly in vogue. In those days, the smell of garlic on one’s breath was like the Scarlet Letter pinned to Hester Prynne’s chest, the mark of a pariah.

  If my Neapolitan great-grandmother were alive today, the mainstreaming of garlic would surprise her, considering the prejudices she encountered when she emigrated from her rural village of Calitrie to Washington, D.C. She’d recall how her son and daughter (my grandmother), the only Italians at their school, were chased home daily with the kids shouting at them “guinea” and “wop.”

  Despite the cruel taunting of her classmates, my grandmother never betrayed her culinary roots. When I was a young girl in the early ’70s, I’d stand on a stepstool beside her stove and watch as she tossed whole garlic cloves into a pot of crushed tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. The sauce would simmer all day until the cloves dissolved, their richness creating a fragrant potion. As I helped my grandmother prepare Sunday family dinner, garlic showed up in every dish. We’d chop garlic coarsely and add it to roasted red peppers that had been doused with extra virgin olive oil for the antipasti. We’d mince garlic and mix it with breadcrumbs and Parmesan for stuffed artichokes. We’d slice thin garlic slivers and press them into veal roast. As the garlic’s papery skins crackled in my hands and the spicy scent tickled my nostrils, I realized that garlic imparts sensuality to a dish, satisfying a deeper hunger within.

  My mother, a second generation, assimilated Italian American, was the first to rebel. In the late ’50s she left her hometown of Brooklyn for Rosemont College outside of Philadelphia. The all-girl student body at Rosemont was predominantly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a culture far removed from my mother’s earthy Italian roots. Whenever she brought friends home from school, she asked my grandmother to omit the garlic. Cook without garlic? My grandmother was stung by this request, which brought back all the painful, taunting memories of her childhood.

  But Mom’s rebellion was short-lived. Toward the end of college—to the joy of my grandmother—she met a man of Slavic heritage and married him. My father was a serious food lover who was raised on garlic-laden cuisine.

  Garlic’s association with the lower classes extends beyond my great-grandmother’s day. Americans inherited their dislike for garlic from the British, whose disdain can be traced back over 2,000 years to the Roman Empire. Aristocratic Romans abstained from eating garlic, detesting its powerful odor. In Elizabethan times (1558–1603) the word “garlic-eater” signified low social class, and later become a derogatory term used to label foreigners. On December 22, 1818, the poet Percy Shelley wrote from Naples: “There are two Italies … The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious. What do you think? Young women of rank actually eat … you will never guess what … garlick!”

  Contempt for garlic reverberated into the twentieth century, swooping down upon my mother’s WASPy college campus and extending into my teenage life. In the late 1970s I was attending seventh grade at Garden City Junior High School on Long Island. One day I received an anonymous phone call.

  “Susnjara, everybody hates you,” a voice cackled at the other end of the line. “You’re ugly and skinny, you have bushy eyebrows, and you smell.” I recognized that high-pitched, whiny voice. It belonged to the female leader of the most popular clique in junior high, a group I had been trying to nudge my way into. I was too stunned to respond before the ringleader hung up.

  “Who was that, honey?” asked my mother.

  “Wrong number,” I said, slipping out of the room. I couldn’t possibly tell my mother what had transpired on the phone. I didn’t want her to know her daughter was a loser, washed up at thirteen.

  That night I curled up on my bed like a frightened snail of a girl, tucked within her shell. Safe and warm, coiled within white sheets, I wondered why God allowed the most powerful clique in junior high to direct their collective hatred toward me. It was true. I was skinny and had thick eyebrows. But smelly, too? What my enemies could be referring to, I had no idea. As a dedicated reader of Seventeen magazine, I was well aware of all the beauty products targeted at young girls. Didn’t I shampoo every day with Herbal Essence shampoo, sprinkle my body with Shower to Shower bath powder, dab Love’s Babysoft behind my ears, and slick my lips with Lipsmacker strawberry-flavored lip gloss? I was dousing myself with so many scents—fruity, floral, spicy, and herbal—there was no way an offensive smell could have been emanating from my pores. I drifted off to sleep, wondering how the hell I would survive seventh grade.

  The next day in the cafeteria, I passed by the popular crowd’s table and heard someone snicker, “There goes stinky breath.”

  My cheeks burned. I scurried over to the designated nerd table and hid my head in my lunch box. A strong whiff of garlicky salami, piled on a hard Italian roll, accosted my nostrils.

  From then on, I had my mom pack peanut butter and jelly or domestic ham on squishy Wonder Bread—the same stuff the other kids had. Still, I didn’t win favor with the popular crowd. On weekends, I slept late and lazed around in my pajamas watching TV. My mother would beg me to call a friend. How could I tell her I didn’t have any?

  Halfway through the school year, I developed chronic body aches and a low-grade temperature. My mother took me to our family doctor. He believed my illness was psychosomatic, but he wrote a note excusing me from the remaining three months of school. The teachers sent work home, and I earned all A’s. They offered little solace. I wanted to be popular, not smart, and at my school the two were mutually exclusive.

  The loneliness was unbearable. In the fall of the ninth grade, I reached out to other misfits, those deemed too quirky or brainy or unattractive by the cheerleaders, football players, and other members of the junior high elite. We gathered in each other’s basements to smoke pot, read hipster novels by Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Wolfe, and listen to the Grateful Dead. We romanticized our outsider status, and my broken teen spirit began to mend.

  In the eleventh grade I fell in love with Larry, an artist who dressed in black, smoked Gitanes, and carried a copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger in his back pocket. While our classmates were hanging out at McDonald’s and the Roosevelt Field mall, Larry and I would take the Long Island railroad into Manhattan. In the shade of Washington Square Park, we read each other poems by William Blake and listened to musicians strum guitars. At night, we wandered the narrow streets of Greenwich Village chasing down Jack Kerouac’s ghost and dined on falafel, humus, and tabouleh at the Middle Eastern cafes that lined MacDougal Street. Sometimes we’d meander down to Chinatown for heaping platters of crabs drowned in black bean sauce.

  Eating my way through the cheap joints of Manhattan, I regained respect for garlic, a star ingredient in all those ethnic dishes we were discovering. Like the Indian print blouses that billowed on racks outside the boutiques on Bleecker, garlic now struck me as bold and spirited. Empowered by my new identity as a bohemian refugee, I began walking the high school corridors with my shoulders thrust back, my head held high, puffing garlic’s exotic scent over the “in” crowd and their homogenous suburban values. It was a grand moment in my coming of age, with both crises, over garlic and identity, finally resolved.

  Throughout my twenties and thirties, I considered myself a genuine garlic lover as well as an enthusiastic connoisseur of its delights. In reality I was a fraud, living in ignorance on generic garlic from my local supermarket. The most common garlic found in supermarkets today, a variety known as Italian, the progenitor of Cal
ifornia Early and California Late, was introduced to the United States at the turn of the century. At this time, the influence of Victorian manners on American high society, coupled with the wave of Italian immigration, smashed garlic to an all-time low level of repute. My grandmother’s upbringing coincided with this dark period in garlic’s history.

  One late August morning at the outdoor Greenmarket in New York City’s Union Square, I was initiated into the extraordinary gourmet garlic world, populated by a sect beholden to the herb for its many powers over mind, body, and soul. A hazy sun beat down on a throng of early risers who bustled about the stands, gathering the last bounty of summer: succulent corn, spicy-sweet bouquets of basil, and just-picked tomatoes heaving with juice. I pushed through the crowd, past barrels overflowing with eggplant and squash, and past shelves laden with homemade pies, their cross-hatched crusts stretched over mounds of blueberries and other sweet fruit. Soon I found myself standing in front of a table piled high with garlic bulbs still attached to their stiff, ruler-length stems. Unlike the bulbous supermarket variety, these heads were small and uniform, ivory-colored and streaked with pale violet. Scraggly roots hung from their bottoms, coarse and kinky.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “What kind of garlic is this?” The woman behind the garlic-filled cart wore her silvery hair tied back in a ponytail. She had a clear complexion and a glowing tan.

  “Allium longicuspis,” she answered, as she picked up a wand of garlic and swirled it in the air like a magician. “It’s the most ancient garlic in the world, the only one that hasn’t been genetically altered.” The woman handed me a tiny sliver of raw garlic. “Taste,” she commanded. I examined the wafer of garlic glittering in my palm, then closed my eyes and placed it on my tongue. It was hot and spicy but quickly mellowed, leaving a strong but pleasant aftertaste, not at all bitter. The flavor danced in my mouth. It was as if I were tasting garlic for the first time. At that moment rays of sun zeroed in on the bulbs, igniting them with a supernatural glow.