by John Keahey
FIVE
Sulfur
We enter the mountains. Before us lies a region of real desolation, a wretched land, which seems cursed, condemned by nature.
—Guy de Maupassant, Sicily (1889)
RARELY DO a visitor’s thoughts focus, as he sits basking in sunlight on a stone bench, on Sicily before the first half of the twentieth century. Most towns today are well-scrubbed, their residents driving their late-model cars down narrow, twisting streets lined with buildings that, in village centers, often hearken back to the Middle Ages. These historic structures may have an old, somewhat crumbling exterior, but inside many are modern and comfortable. Some villages have old buildings that have been abandoned for decades, perhaps from a time at the start of the twentieth century when owners fled the island’s crushing poverty for North and South America.
For example, Leonardo Sciascia’s birth home in Racalmuto is empty, its façade in disrepair and windows broken. It sits, waiting for some restorer to come along and turn it into the shrine it longs to be. Giovanni Verga’s place of birth and death is restored and on display in Catania; Luigi Pirandello’s family home—in the contrada, or rural neighborhood, near Agrigento known as Caos—draws thousands of homage payers yearly.
Sicilian villages generally do not look like they were cast in similar molds like those in, say, Tuscany to the far north, where one quaint hill town after another can start to look the same. In the last half century or more, most Allied-caused war damage in Sicilian villages has been set right—except for spots of bombed-out devastation that still linger in central Palermo near the port—and modern buildings have spread out around village perimeters.
Modernity is not always good. One of the worst examples is on the approach to Noto, a city in southeastern Sicily. It snuggles against rolling hillsides, its baroque character visible for miles, and in the foreground stands a modern hotel several stories high blocking the once picturesque view of a handful of stunning seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings. What could modern folks here have been thinking when they allowed such a structure to be built?
Friends in Noto, when I ask this question, shrug and say that it is the way things always happen: Rules are bent; zoning laws, if they exist, are ignored; a favor is exchanged here and there. Nothing is done about it.
These often sluggish and ineffective building codes aside, life in most parts of the island appears reasonably prosperous. Many older Sicilians have pensions, something that was rare just decades ago. Younger people who are unemployed—the South has an unemployment rate well into the high teens—receive some kind of financial support from the state, and many, if unmarried, still live with their parents.
Long gone are the days of the peasant family that sleeps on straw mattresses on the floor—all in one, maybe two, tiny rooms. Also absent, with few exceptions, is a significant homeless population that many large-city Americans see daily in the United States, a land that Sicilian and southern Italian immigrants a century or so ago viewed as the land of milk and honey with streets paved in gold.
Nowadays, except for the tumble of abandoned structures hidden away in places like Palermo, the only remaining vestiges of World War II are the scattered concrete bunkers sprinkled across ridgelines and the tops of wide, sloping fields. The island’s extensive highway system is reasonably well maintained except for some dramatic exceptions deep in the countryside. Nearly all tiny roadways between rural villages, once no more than mule paths, are paved, serving the island’s transportation needs quite well despite periodic signs warning of large potholes or places where a significant chunk of one lane has slipped down a steep slope.
Twenty-first-century Sicily seems light-years away from the Sicily of the mid-twentieth century. Enzo Sellerio’s black-and-white photographs, taken around the island in the 1950s and early 1960s, show few automobiles, a lot of mule- and horse-drawn carts, growers and their families handpicking grapes and hauling huge grape-filled baskets on their backs, elderly women clothed in black, small children in knee-length pants and ragged sweaters. This was a land still recovering from the ravages of war; northern Italy was well on its way to recovery, while Sicily was still digging out of the rubble twenty years after the last bombs were dropped.
But every decade over the last century showed some progress, however slow. Sicily in the mid-twentieth century may have been where America was in the century’s beginning, but it was far ahead of its nineteenth-century condition, either before or after Unification in 1861.
For a look at that era, Giovanni Verga’s fictional depictions of such late nineteenth and early twentieth-century living conditions for the Sicilian peasant class are hard enough for Americans to comprehend. But when a famed American traveler visiting the island during the autumn of 1910 describes it, the reality sinks in. That visitor was Booker T. Washington, the African-American principal of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute from 1881 until his death in 1915 at age fifty-nine.
Washington visited Europe with an idea of observing how the lives of the lower classes in various countries compared to those of African-Americans. In Sicily, he came to this conclusion: “The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.”
It is easy, then, for the casual twenty-first-century visitor—the tourist captivated by the charm of cobblestoned streets and quaint shops full of sweets and other good things to eat, high-end designer clothes, and upscale kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures—never to know what this place was like for the masses, who over the centuries lived well outside of the palaces and country homes of the rich barons.
One needs to see motion pictures such as Golden Door or Aclá’s Descent into Floristella to really grasp why, in an era closer to our own modern times, southern Italians by the tens of thousands left this land for a new world in North and South America and Australia.
Many years ago, riding on a train south of Naples, I sat next to an impeccably dressed older man on his way to visit his mother in Sicily. I casually mentioned that I wondered why southern Italians and Sicilians left their villages that today draw tourists by the thousands. He held me in a long gaze and said, in precise English, “Well, you can’t eat quaint.” As a middle-class American, he said in a kindly way, I could have no comprehension of what it was like in the South. Now, many years and plenty of visits later, I begin to understand.
It’s the kind of pre-twentieth-century picture Verga paints in his numerous short stories about peasants facing failed crops, landowners taking the workers’ share of a harvest because drought crippled production, and malaria taking half or more of the children the poor laborers brought into the world.
Perhaps most compelling is the story of south-central Sicily’s sulfur miners, laboring by hand and with sheer brute strength in an era before mechanical equipment, when much of the world’s sulfur came from this island.
Leonardo Sciascia knew about this miners’ hell. His village of Racalmuto rests in the heart of what once was sulfur country, that region generally northeast of Agrigento. Many of the older townspeople still alive after the turn of the twenty-first century worked in the now closed sulfur and salt mines that peppered this once bleak, dead landscape of rolling, blighted hills.
In the early spring of 2009, I walk into a small two-room building hewn from stone and plastered over. It has a logo next to the door that proclaimed the building to be LEGA ZOLFATAI SALINAI PENSIONATI RACALMUTO, the village Cooperative of Sulfur and Salt Worker Pensioners of Racalmuto. I am escorted by local resident Concetta Barbieri. She knows the elderly men inside, all of who worked in the mines on the village’s outskirts.
One of the mine owners, in 1955, donated this retirement center as a place where the men could meet, talk, and reminisce about their days belowground. Concetta tells me that when it o
pened, there were three hundred retired miners as members; early in 2009, eighty-four are left. There won’t be any others. The last mine closed in 1975.
I had first obtained a sense of how this region had been one of the major sulfur-producing areas in the world by reading a Frenchman’s account, Sicily, of an 1889 journey through here. Guy de Maupassant, on a grand tour of the island by horseback, had just visited Agrigento and the ruins of its Greek temples. Today’s beautiful green and rolling hillsides that surround the temple site and lie at the base of the cluttered city of Agrigento are in sharp contrast to de Maupassant’s view of temples that
appear standing in the air in the midst of a magnificent and desolate landscape. All is dead, arid and yellow around them, in front of them and behind them. The sun has burned and eaten the earth.… For everywhere around Agrigento stretches the strange land of sulfur mines.
Then he looks beyond the temples as he continues northeastward on his journey into the region that holds Racalmuto and numerous other villages that relied on sulfur and salt mining. This region, he writes, “seems like Satan’s true realm, for if—as was formerly believed—the devil inhabits a vast underground country, full of melting sulfur, where he boils the damned, Sicily is surely the place where he has established his mysterious abode.” This reflects what one Sicilian historian once said to me: “Sicily! Where hell and paradise meet.”
De Maupassant visits a mine and goes into great detail about how sulfur is hacked out of underground caverns and how the sulfur is processed. He reports all this matter-of-factly. Then, on a steep, narrow staircase, its uneven steps hacked out of the walls of the hot, stifling cavern, he encounters
a troop of children loaded with baskets. They pant and gasp, these wretched urchins, weighed down under their loads. They are ten, twelve years old, and they repeat, fifteen times in a single day, the abominable voyage … They are small, thin, yellow, with huge shining eyes … This revolting exploitation of children is one of the most painful things that one can see.
In Sicily, a line drawing shows these young boys with baskets balanced on their shoulders coming down a stairway chopped out of stone. They are fully clothed, and de Maupassant never described how they were attired. But it is well-known that the boys, known in Sicilian as carusi, along with the adult miners, worked in the hot, hellish pits in the nude or perhaps with only an apron covering their fronts.
The practice of sending youngsters into the mines goes back uncounted decades, perhaps centuries, and ended only in the 1920s or 1930s. None of the men now in the cooperative worked as small boys in the mines, a retired miner told me, but it happened during their parents’ and grandparents’ generations and earlier.
Nearly a year later, a friend handed me an article he had taken off a Web site. It was written by Tom Verso and entitled “Child Slavery in Sicily in 1910.” It confirms what de Maupassant wrote, what I saw in the film Aclá’s Descent into Floristella, and what the retired miner in Racalmuto told me that March afternoon. The article also refers to Booker T. Washington’s book.
Verso writes: “Mr. Washington presents an ‘oh-so-not’ romantic description of the horrific reality of diasporic Italy, including the de facto enslavement of sulfur mining children in Sicily.” The educator, born into slavery, not only watched these child laborers toiling naked in caverns far below the surface near Campofranco, a village only a few miles from Racalmuto, but also he saw youngsters as young as seven working in factories in Palermo and Catania.
His description of the boys’ lives belowground in 1910 matches the message found in the movie Aclá. The boys are essentially “sold” by their families to adult miners who use them to haul to the surface the rock the men bust out of the mine walls with their picks and sledgehammers. These miners had complete control over the boys’ lives—from Monday through Saturday; they could beat the youngsters if they didn’t work fast enough, work them long hours and, if they wanted, even sexually abuse them.
In Aclá, a scene has the village priest going to the mine to sermonize the miners about their habit of engaging in sexual relationships with each other, including the carusi, while housed at the mine, and then going home to their wives on the weekend. The men pay scant attention to the priest’s entreaties and laugh when he tries to get them to contribute a few coins to the church.
The young boys worked in this environment for the length of the “contract” the miners had with the families, perhaps for as long as eight years. If a boy tried to escape, as Aclá did, his family and the police would track him down—the police because a legal contract has been broken, the family because it would be forced to pay back the money if the youngster was not returned. Few carusi survived the ordeal; those who did became miners themselves; they had no other opportunity, and leaving their village was next to impossible.
Washington’s description is emotionally difficult to read; the movie Aclá is hard to watch. But the two show, as Tom Verso writes, the truth behind immigrants’ “nostalgic recall” and “pastoral romanticism about the conditions in Italy at the time of the diaspora.” His argument: They need a jolt of what the reality really was.
A quote taken from a book by Sicilian-American Jerre Mangione, whose father and mother immigrated to the United States, is particularly poignant. The section I read appeared at the beginning of an article by Harvard professor William Granara. In his book Mount Allegro, Mangione tells how his father described to his son the Sicily he had left. It was beautiful and full of lovely women and had many “golden sunsets on a blue sea.” But the father lowered his voice and described some of the hardships, saying, “Your mother may not like to have me tell you” about the bad things that drove them to America. The mother overhears and does not like it at all. She wants to tell only of the “fruits and flowers beyond the imagination of Americans.”
Verso says he agrees with a colleague, Anthony Tamburri of the Calandra Institute, who urges Sicilian-Americans and Italian-Americans “to revisit our past, reclaim its pros and cons … we need to figure out where we came from.” The land may have been deeply rooted in the souls of these hundreds of thousands of immigrants, but long before it became well scrubbed—made “quaint,” as my fellow traveler on the train described it, and thus inviting to hordes of tourists—it was in many ways a killer.
Leonardo Sciascia knew this. His grandfather had been a caruso who first entered the mines at the age of nine when his father died. The grandfather “continued to work there until the end of his days,” Sciascia writes. But he, unlike many of those boys, survived. He would come home at night and attend classes offered by the priest. As an adult, he became a foreman and then a mine administrator.
He died in 1928, when Sciascia was six. His success, rare among former carusi, made it financially possible for young Leonardo to escape that fate. That, plus the practice of using young, illiterate boys was dying out. One of the men in Racalmuto’s clubhouse for retired miners told me the practice ended in the 1920s. The film Aclá was set during that decade with groups of men walking home singing fascist songs.
Sciascia, in his early novel Salt in the Wound, remembers how sulfur affected his village of Racalmuto, thinly disguised in his novel by the fictional name Regalpetra. He writes:
[T]he air in Regalpetra became slightly acrid, the silver tarnished in the mansions of the newly rich, and the bitter odor of burnt sulfur penetrated the very clothing on people’s backs. The hills overlooking the town on the north and the high plateau that encircles it on the west took on a reddish hue, and wheat sown in the fields near the mines did not mature.
Then he quotes a fellow villager describing conditions in the mines themselves:
Just try, try to go down those steep steps … take a look at those immense caverns, those muddy labyrinths suffocating with infernal vapors, barely lit by the sooty flames of the oil lamps; sweltering heat, curses, the reverberating clang of picks; men naked, pouring sweat, gasping for breath; exhausted youths dragging themselves along slippery steps; small
boys who ought to be kissed and petted and set playing with toys instead of subjecting their frail bodies to this beastly labor only to increase the ranks of the deformed.
These laborers, writes Sciascia, while walking back to their houses on Saturday night—“houses broiling in the sun or leaking in the rain”—did so “without consciousness of the world.”
* * *
The half dozen or so elderly men seated in a semicircle in the darkened room watching a soccer match on a flat-screen television hanging high on the rough, stained wall had looked up with welcoming smiles when I walked through the door of the salt and sulfur miners’ clubhouse that March with Concetta Barbiere. These men, the youngest well into his eighties, are the pensionati, retired miners on pensions. This two-room, single-story building offers a place where they spend their afternoons when they are not walking back and forth along Via Garibaldi or sitting together on stone benches along side streets.
They greet me warmly, shaking my hand and patting my shoulder, and it’s obvious they know and like Concetta, who acknowledges each man. She tells them that I am a visitor from gli Stati Uniti, the United States. “They like visitors,” Concetta tells me. “It adds variety to their day.”
One, who seems to be the spokesman for the group, jumps up to show me around, pointing out a series of dusty, cracking, and faded black-and-white photographs that show stooped-over men—these were taken after the era of carusi—carrying large chunks of sulfur on their backs, each piece weighing sixty or more pounds. One photo shows a completely naked miner swinging a pick against a mine wall.
While this work was certainly brutal, the men I met had more modern advantages in motor-driven equipment to do much of the hauling. And like miners everywhere, they have a particularly strong bond. They spend their days together and go to each other’s funerals when the time comes.