Contrary Notions

by Michael Parenti

  “When Mussolini came along,” an elderly Italian once told me, “they stopped calling us ‘wop.’” The statement is woefully inaccurate. The admiration expressed by the U.S. conservative establishment and the mainstream press for Mussolini did not generate a new respect for immigrants in America. If anything it bespoke a low regard for them. U.S. plutocrats thought no better of ordinary Italians than they did of their own American workers. To them, the Italian was a vice-ridden ne’er-do-well, a disorderly bumpkin lacking in Calvinist virtues, just the sort of person most in need of a dictator’s firm hand.

  The second generation—that is, the American-born children of the immigrants—usually spoke of Mussolini with scorn and derision, especially after the United States entered World War II. I recall bitter arguments in my grandfather’s house between the older and younger men. (With one or two exceptions, the women seldom voiced opinions on such matters.) As the war progressed and Mussolini showed himself to be nothing more than Hitler’s acolyte, the old men tended to grow silent about him. But in their hearts, I believe, they never bore him much ill-feeling.

  The military performance of Italy’s legions in the war proved something of an embarrassment to those who had been anticipating Benito’s version of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. The ordinary recruits in the Italian army had no desire to fight il Duce’s battles. Rather they manifested a decided inclination to flee or surrender the moment they realized the other side was using live ammunition. One of my uncles gleefully told the story of how the entire Italian army landed one evening in Brooklyn to invade the Navy Yard, only to be routed and driven into the sea by the nightshift maintenance crew. Grandpa was not amused by that story. When Italy switched sides and joined the Allies in the middle of the war, there was much relief and satisfaction among the American-born and probably even among many of the immigrants.

  Contrary to what we have heard, immigrant Italians were not particularly loving toward their children. They sent their young ones to work at an early age and expropriated their earnings. For most of the adults there was little opportunity to face the world with ease and tenderness. Of course, infants and toddlers were hugged, kissed, and loved profusely, but as the children got older it would have been an embarrassment, and in any case was not the custom, to treat them with much overt affection. Besides, there were so many of them, so many to feed or to bury, each new child being either an additional burden or an early tragedy but seldom an unmitigated joy.

  “La famiglia, la famiglia,” was the incantation of the old Italians. The family, always the family: be loyal to it, obey it, stick with it. This intense attachment to the family was not peculiar to Italians but was, and still is, a common characteristic of almost any poor rural people—be it in the Philippines, Nigeria, India, or Appalachia. More than anything the family was one’s defense against starvation, the padrone, the magistrates, strangers, and rival families. As in any survival unit, its strictures were often severe and its loyalties intense. And betrayals were not easily forgiven.

  The Italian family could also be a terrible battleground within itself. “Nobody can hate like brothers,” the saying goes, especially brothers (and sisters) who had a hard childhood ruled over by immigrant parents who themselves saw life as a series of impending catastrophes. I remember the many squabbles, grudges, and hurt feelings that passed between my father, his brothers and sisters and their respective spouses. The series of shifting alliances and realignments among them resembled the Balkan politics of an earlier era. Years later, as the siblings put the deprivations and insecurities of the immigrant family behind them, and mellowed with age and prosperity and the advent of children and grandchildren of their own, they tended to get along much better with each other. It was a good example of how structural relations of the larger society influence personal relations.

  I enjoyed the nourishing embrace of the big family gatherings, the outings at the beach, the picnics, parties and holiday dinners. The Italian holiday feast was a celebration of abundance with its endless platters of tasty, well-seasoned foods. I wonder if those marathon meals were a kind of ritual performed by people who had lived too long in the shadows of want and hunger, a way of telling themselves that at least on certain days the good life was theirs. Whether or not there was any larger meaning to them, the dinners were enjoyed for themselves.

  I have an especially fond memory of my maternal grandfather, Vincenzo, a stooped, toothless, unimposing old man who was my closest ally in early life. During his last years, finding himself relegated to the edges of the adult world, he entered wholeheartedly into my world, playing cards with me, taking me for walks around the block, watching with undisguised delight as I acted out my highly dramatized cowboy and Indian games. He always took my side and despite his infirmity was sometimes able to rescue me from the discipline of my parents—which is the God-given function of grandparents.

  Years before, when Vincenzo was still a youngster in his late seventies and a widower, he was discovered to have a girlfriend, a woman of about fifty-five years. She would steal into the house when no one was home and climb into bed with him. When family members discovered this tryst, they were outraged. My relatives denounced the woman as a whore of the worse sort, whose intent was to drive Grandpa to an early grave by overexerting his heart. (He died at age eighty-seven.) The poor lonely woman dared not see Vincenzo anymore; and poor Grandpa, after being scolded like a child, was kept under a sort of house arrest. In those days the idea that elderly parents might have sexual desires caused a furious embarrassment among their children.

  After passing a certain age, Italian grandfathers were frequently made captives by their sons, daughters, older nieces and nephews, who all competed to put the old man under their protective custody. If a car came too close for comfort while the grandfather was crossing the street, as might happen to any pedestrian, the family would try to keep him from taking unaccompanied strolls, convinced that he could no longer judge traffic. If he misplaced his hat or scarf, as might anyone, he would be deemed unable to care for his personal effects. At the beach, if an Italian grandfather waded into the water much above his knees, one or another of his self-appointed guardians could be seen jumping up and down on the shore, waving frantically at him and shouting: “Papa’s gonna drown! Somebody get him!” I read somewhere that this phenomenon of grandfather captivity still exists in parts of Italy.

  I saw the protective custody game repeated with my paternal grandfather, Giuseppe, who in his later years presided in silence at the head of the table during holiday meals, a titular chieftain whose power had slipped away to his sons and sons-in-law who now earned the money and commanded their own households. While a certain deference was still paid him because of his age, more often he found himself, much to his annoyance, a victim of overprotection—which is a sure sign of powerlessness.

  Years later in 1956, when an adult, I had occasion to have a few long talks with him and discovered that he was a most intelligent and engaging man—although he did have a number of opinions that were strange for that time, namely that country air was better for one’s health than city air, canned foods were of little nutritional value, and physical exertion was better than sitting around doing nothing. Giuseppe also believed that doctors and hospitals could be dangerous to one’s survival, automobiles were the ruination of cities, and too much emphasis was placed on money and material things. We treated such views as quaintly old-fashioned, having no idea that grandpa was merely ahead of his time.

  After my birth the doctors warned my mother that with her congenital heart condition another pregnancy would be fatal. So I went through life as an only child. My mother tended to spoil me, for which she was criticized by her older sisters. More than once she mentioned how sorry she was that I had no brothers and sisters to play with, and she encouraged my playmates to come spend as much time as they wanted at our house. But I entertained no regrets about being an only child, for why would I want to share my lovely mother with some other litt
le brat?

  My father played a more distant role than my mother, as was the usual way in Italian working-class families—and in just about any other family where the division of labor is drawn along gender lines. He labored long hours for meager sums, sometimes two jobs at a time. Born in Italy, he was transported to this country at the age of five. He did poorly in school because of the burdens the immigrant family imposes on its firstborn son. When he was only ten years old, his day went something like this: up at 6 a.m., work on his father’s ice truck until 8 a.m., then to school, then back to work from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. to complete a thirteen-hour day. On Saturdays he worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, an eighteen-hour day. On Sunday he labored eight hours, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.—that was supposed to be a half-day.

  My father understandably blamed his poor academic performance on his work burdens. As he put it: “I was too damn tired to learn to read and write.” His fatigue often overcame him and he would fall asleep in class. He dropped out of school at age fourteen to work full time. Almost sixty years later, shortly before his death, I talked to him about his youthful days and recorded his thoughts. The things he remembered most were the toil, the humiliation of not being able to speak English, and the abuse he received from teachers. There was one bright spot, as he tells it:

  “The only teacher that cared about me was Miss Booth because she saw me carry ice a few times on 110th Street and she asked, ‘How come you’re carrying ice at your age?’ I said, ‘I got to work. My father can’t afford a man. There’s seven of us at home to feed.’ So she saw I wasn’t really a bad kid. She saw I was no good in school really on account of I had to work. Miss Booth, she got me to wash the blackboard. Anything she wanted I did because she showed she cared about me.”

  In his adult life, my father’s friends were all men. Cross-gender friendships were not a common thing in those days. The women in a man’s life consisted of his mother, his wife, his sisters, and other female relatives. He might know various women in the neighborhood and stop and chat with them briefly but it would have been considered inappropriate to let things develop further. To illustrate the patriarchal mentality of my father’s world I might recall the time he informed me in troubled tones that Uncle Americo, while drunk one night, had started beating his wife, Aunt Fanny (my mother’s sister). Americo’s son, my cousin Eddy, forcibly intervened and wrestled his father to the floor. What shocked my father was not Americo’s behavior but Eddy’s. “I don’t care what happens,” he concluded, “a son should never raise a hand to his father”—a pronouncement that left me wondering what I would have done had I been in Eddy’s place.

  Hovering over us was the Great Depression, a mysterious force that explained why there was never enough money, why my father was away working all the time, why I couldn’t have this or that new toy. I remember during one unusually difficult period my mother bought a small steak and cooked it for me as a special treat. She sat watching intently as every morsel disappeared into my mouth. When I offered her a piece she declined, saying she wasn’t hungry. Only years later did I realize with a pang that she very much had wanted some.

  None of my relatives talked of “careers”; I don’t think the word was in vogue among us. But everyone talked about jobs—or the fear of being without one. A high school education was considered an unusual accomplishment, and the one uncle who had graduated high school was considered something of a celebrity. My mother’s dream was that I would someday get a high school diploma, for then all doors would be open to me. As she said, I would be able to “dress nice every day not just Sundays” and “work in an office,” a fate that sounded worse than death to a spirited street boy.

  Toward the end of World War II the struggle for survival eased a bit. My father got steady work driving his uncle’s bread truck and my mother found a job in a neighborhood dress shop, toiling at a sewing machine all day. I pledged to her that someday I would earn lots of money so that she would never have to set foot in that sweatshop again, a vow that heartened her more because of its expression of concern than because she believed she would live to see the day. As it happened, when I was seventeen she died at age forty-three, still employed by the same shop.

  During my childhood I would wonder about the world beyond East Harlem, about the strange inhabitants of downtown Manhattan, tall, pink-faced, Anglo-Protestants who pronounced all their r’s, patronized the Broadway theater, and traveled to Europe for purposes other than to locate relatives. I would think of other equally exotic peoples and unexplored worlds with anticipation. This “intoxication of experiences yet to come” left me with the feeling that East Harlem was not my final destination in life.

  When I was about twelve or thirteen I chanced upon a copy of Life magazine that contained an article describing East Harlem as “a slum inhabited by beggar-poor Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Italians,” words that stung me and stuck in my memory. Slum or not, most of the Italians, including all my relatives, abandoned East Harlem in the late 1950s, moving to what sociologists call “second settlement areas,” leaving the old neighborhood to the growing numbers of Puerto Rican immigrants. The money the Italians had saved during the war years and post-war period became the down-payment passage to the mass-produced housing tracts of Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey, where as proud homeowners they could live a life that approximated the middle-class suburban one they saw in the movies.

  But the new lifestyle had a downside to it. One uncle, who used to have huge parties for friends and relatives in his home on Third Avenue, complete with mandolins, accordions, and popular and operatic songs—drawn from the amateur talents of the guests themselves—now discovered that no one came to visit him on the outer edge of Queens. An aunt of mine, who had lived all her life within shouting distance of at least three of her sisters, tearfully told my mother how lonely she was way out in Staten Island.

  In time, I went off to graduate school and saw far less of my extended family, as they did of each other. Years later in 1968 I got a call from my cousin Anthony asking me to attend a family reunion. It took place in Anthony’s home in Queens, attended by a crowd of cousins and their fourth-generation children, the latter being youngsters whom I was meeting for the first time and for whom East Harlem was nothing more than a geographical expression, if that.

  Time had brought its changes. The women wore coiffured hairdos and stylish clothes, and the men looked heavier. There was much talk about recent vacations and a slide show of Anthony’s travels to Europe, and a magnificent buffet of Italian foods that made the slide show worth sitting through. And there were a lot of invitations to “come visit us.” Much to my disappointment the older surviving aunts and uncles had decided to stay away because this was an affair for the younger people, an act of age segregation that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. In all, we spent a pleasant evening joking and catching up on things. It was decided we should get together more often. But we never did have another reunion.

  In the late 1970s I began to have recurring dreams, one every few months or so, continuing for a period of years. Unlike the recurring dreams portrayed in movies (in which the exact same footage is run and rerun), the particulars and fixtures of each dream in real life—or real sleep—differ, but the underlying theme is the same. In each dream I found myself living in a lovely apartment; sometimes it had spiral stairwells and bare brick walls and sometimes lavish wood paneling and fireplaces, but it always turned out to be a renovation of 304 East 118th Street, the old brownstone in East Harlem where I had spent most of my early life.

  We might think of recurring dreams as nightmarish, but these were accompanied by sensations of relief and yearning. The life past was being recaptured and renovated by the life now accomplished. The slum was being gentrified. The working-class Italian youth and the professional-class American academic were to live under the same roof. I had come home to two worlds apart. Never quite at home in either, I would now have the best of both. Once I understood the message, the dreams stopped
.

  17 BREAD STORY: THE BLESSINGS OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

  Years ago, my father drove a delivery truck for the Italian bakery owned by his uncle Torino. When Zi Torino returned to Italy in 1956, my father took over the entire business. The bread he made was the same bread that had been made in Gravina, Italy, for generations. After a whole day standing, it was fresh as ever, the crust having grown hard and crisp while the inside remained soft, solid, and moist. People used to say that our bread was a meal in itself.

  The secret of the bread had been brought by my Zi Torino all the way from the Mediterranean to Manhattan, down into the tenement basement where he had installed wooden vats and tables. The bakers were two dark wiry men, paesani di Gravina, who rhythmically and endlessly pounded their powdery white hands into the dough, molding the bread with strength and finesse. Zi Torino and then my father after him, used time and care in preparing their bread, letting the dough sit and rise naturally, turning it over twice a night, using no chemicals and only the best quality unbleached flour. The bread was baked slowly and perfectly in an old brick oven built into the basement wall by Zi Torino in 1907, an oven that had secrets of its own.

  Often during my college days, I would assist my father in loading the bread truck at 5:00 on Saturday mornings. We delivered in the Bronx to Italian families whose appreciation for good bread was one of the satisfactions of our labor. My father’s business remained small but steady. Customers, acquired slowly by word of mouth, remained with us forever. He would engage them in friendly conversations as he went along his route, taking nine hours to do seven hours of work. He could tell me more than I wanted to know about their family histories.