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2. "I hated America" he immensity of the ocean, the boy would later say, "drove everything else out of my head." The ocean crossing was a rebirth for Francesco Capra. America would write his story afresh. It was the first and most radical of the character transformations he would undergo in his lifetime, and,he admitted, "It scared the hell out of me." His memory of the ship crossing always remained extraordinarily vivid, so much so that he would speak of it often in the present tense, as if for the rest of his life he was, in some profound sense, always on that ship, always in the process of becoming an American. om Naples on May 10 the Germania traveled on a northwesterly route along the coasts of Italy and France to pick up more passengers. By the time the big black steamship crossed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the open Atlantic, it was jammed with as many people as it could hold. For Capra and his family, the experience was hellish: "You're all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot.Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you could ever be. "The people who owned the boat made a lot of money on this. They just pile a lot of people in there, the boat keeps getting filled, and we get nothing. Oh, it was awful, awful. It seemed to be always storming, raining like hell and very windy, with these big long rolling Atlantic waves. Everybody was sick, vomiting. God, they were sick. And the poor kids were always crying. My father was the worst one of the bunch. He was vomiting all the time. I don't know if he was more delicate than mymother, but he was more aware of blood and people's sickness. T F 3 0 F R A N K C A P R A "She couldn't be. There were people to feed down there. She got our meals by walking up an iron ladder with a tray. Then she came back with this tray down the iron ladder hoping she can make it. Those stairs were straight up. There were six of us, and my mother was the only one of our family who would go up in a storm. "I was two days in the hospital on the boat. I remember I could see out of a porthole, I could see the water down below. I didn't know where the hell we were going. All it was was pain and trouble. As far as I was concerned, if we'd stayed where we were I would have been much happier." e journey took thirteen days. Eight days out,May 18, was Francesco Capra's sixth birthday. It was at four o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday, May 23, 1903, that the Germania arrived in New York harbor and steamed slowly toward the J. W. Elwell & Company dock with its cargo, described in The New York Times as "mdse. and passengers." In the stifling steerage hold, Francesco Capra was wretched with fatigue . His father picked him up and carried him up the ladder into what he remembered as "that sea of people kneeling on deck." For Saridda, below deck with the others, there was no exultation in their arrival. There still was one more night to spend on the boat, and she was patiently organizingthe family to leave for the next leg of the trip. But as reluctant as Salvatore Capra had been to make the journey, with his emotional, imaginative nature he now had fallen under the spell of America 's promise of freedom and opportunity. Frank Capra remembered looking up from the deck and seeing "a statue of a great lady, taller than a church steeple, holding a torch above the land we were about to enter." His father exclaimed, "Cicco, look! Look at that! That's the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! That's the light of freedom! Remember that. Freedom" But when Cicco left the boat, all he could think about were the fleas gnawing at his dirty skin under his rancid clothing. ate in life, alluding to the words inscribed on the base of...

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