Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

4. Mother: The Madonnas of Tenth Avenue

chapter 4 Mother The Madonnas of Tenth Avenue She is to her children, as the Madonna is to the believing Catholic of her society, all-forgiving, all-protecting. —Ann Cornelisen, 1976 Pietro di Donato’s short story “Christ in Concrete” has proven valuable on several accounts: its aesthetic strength as a linguistic and narrative experiment, the fascinating contradictory history of its reception, but above all because it provides special insight into the working men of the first generation, what di Donato himself characterized as an untold story that would have gone, he felt, unheard, if he hadn’t brought himself to tell it. In this chapter I turn to what is, in effect, the central story of settlement and transformation, the other side of the gender coin, a compulsively retold story, a story told in the homes about the home but, fortunately, not only there. This is the paradigmatic story of the hard-won understanding, far-sighted intuition, and tough love of those immigrant matriarchs, who without education or seemingly relevant urban experience provided not only warmth and protection for their children but compelled them, as brutally as necessary, to become Americans. I am a Neapolitan-Calabrian-Sicilian American of the fourth generation , more or less; biologically a Southern Italian pure bred or an interregional miscegenated mess, depending on how old-fashioned the perspective, but with no direct household connection to Italy, to immigration , or even to immigrants. Although born in Manhattan, I was raised in a cozy city in New Hampshire, the son of a nurse and a surgeon, 72 where I lucked into the neighboring prep school, then Amherst College, and laterYale University.1 Demographically speaking, I therefore grew up very far in time, in space, and in class terms from the crucible of immigrant experience, those Little Italies of poverty and isolation and rage that served the building of industrial America. Yet of all the texts and artifacts I present in this book none is more viscerally familiar to me than Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical novel of immigration and settlement set in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s. With no other work is my comprehension less dependent on what I have learned in school or at the library, and none is more emotionally immediate or relevant. How could this be? I know Lucia Santa: not Puzo’s actual mother of course, but her uncanny double, my father’s maternal grandmother, Rosa Marguerita Granito-Zito, who was not just any one of my original immigrant progenitors but the one that all the stories are told about. At most 4 feet 11 inches, at least 215 pounds, dressed always in black, she lost one husband in a construction accident, a second in ways no one talks about; she was illiterate, without marketable skills, a contadina who transported herself through marriage from a Neapolitan hill town to Bayonne, New Jersey. Savvy and fierce and indomitable, she raised four children practically on her own, each of them into the middle and uppermiddle classes, where they won security and respect in ways that were literally unimaginable in the old country. All praise be to Donna Rosa. Who, then, were these immigrant women? What did they do so that their families might survive and prosper, and how is it that we remain fascinated by their stories? What do we already know, and what, if anything, are the storytellers at home, the historians at large, not telling us? Three-quarters of the way through The Fortunate Pilgrim, when the Angeluzzi-Corbo family has weathered crisis after crisis, Puzo gives us a snapshot of its matriarch against the backdrop of the imminent dissolution of their New York City neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen (now the outer edges of Chelsea): In a few years the western wall of the city would disappear and the people who inhabited it would be scattered like ashes—they whose fathers in Italy had lived in the same village street for a thousand mother 73 years, whose grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born. Lucia Santa stood guard against more immediate dangers, dangers she had conquered over the last five years: death, marriage, puberty, poverty, and that lack of a sense of duty which flourishes in children brought up in America. She did not know she defended against an eternal attack and must grow weaker, since she stood against fate itself...