I often think about my maternal grandfather and the life he chose for himself. He was born in 1889 and came to the United States when he was 16 from the town of Terranova da Sibari in the Province of Cosenza, Region of Calabria, Italy. The story he told was that he left his town barefoot, along with his brother, and walked to Naples to embark on the ship that brought him to America. The year was 1905.
My grandfather was part of the mass immigration that came to our shores between 1892 and 1922, before the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Before 1892, Italians were not legally permitted to leave their country. Even though the French Invasion of 1806 led to the abolition of Feudalism in the Kingdom of Naples, and then the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, serfdom continued unimpeded until almost thirty years after the Unification of Italy in 1865. Once they were allowed to leave, some four million southern Italians fled at the first opportunity for a chance at freedom.
His name was Salvatore and he never sat at a classroom desk; schooling was not obligatory back then in the Kingdom of Italy and there was more need for him to work the fields than get an education. Regardless of his lack of formal education, he spoke 4 languages - Italian, Greek, Gheg (a northern Albanian/western Macedonian dialect) and, of course, broken English.
I remember my grandfather as a strong man. He had worked as a street cleaner in Philadelphia for many, many years and was able to raise his 12 children in a row home through the Great Depression doing so. It was now 1965 and he was frail, weak and his clothes were baggy. He was dying.
It was on an early Friday evening when I found myself alone with him in the front parlor of his home. The large window facing Dickenson Street was open and he sat staring outside at the intermittent passersby on the sidewalk. I approached him from the side and leaned against his chair. He looked up at me and smiled.
I asked him what he was thinking about and he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. The collar of his flannel shirt, buttoned up to his neck, slipped down a bit.
He told me that he was thinking of his family in Italy and of his brothers and sisters in Argentina. He hadn’t seen them in over sixty years. He told me he never knew his youngest brother, Antonio, who was an Italian soldier killed in the war at 23 years of age.
I don’t know why I asked him the question; perhaps because I wanted to break him out of his reverie or because I wanted to interact with him. What followed, however, was a bilingual discussion, partly in English and partly in Italian. For a supposedly “ignorant” man, my grandfather gave me a philosophical discussion I have never forgotten.
“… For the libertà!”, he responded as if by reflex.
He went on and described what he remembered as a child and as a teenager growing up in Calabria. He told me that his only memories of Italy were of hunger, fear of the Padroni and the police and the “terra bruciata” (burnt earth).
He told me that his family, like most of the population, belonged to the land that they lived on and that they had to ask official permission to visit family in the next town. If their Padrone sold the land, they were sold with it. If you got on the Padrone’s bad side and he kicked you off his land, you would starve to death or be put in jail for being a “brigante”. He also told me that he understood perfectly what the black man meant by slavery, because he lived it.
"The black man was freed here many years before we were in Italy!", he explained.
The “Padroni”, he told me,” could do anything and the giustizia would not find them; the Questure and the Prefetture and the courts were in their pocket. If a poor man like me would break the law, the law would be 'applied'; when a Padrone broke the law, it would be 'interpreted'. He would go free and I would be in prison.”
He described to me that the first thing that came to his mind when talking about “the Old Country” was hunger pangs. Food was scarce and hard to come by. They were lucky if they had one meal a day and that was usually one dish. As a child, he was instructed on which herbs, wild fruits and mushrooms were edible and could be collected. Meat came mostly from what they could raise; rabbits or poultry.
The hut that his parents lived in had a dirt floor. There was no running water and no bathroom. Their food was cooked on a wood-burning, open fireplace and water came either from a well or from rain water collected in a cistern.
Although they may have valued their lives and felt a kind of “dignity”, the “Signoria” valued them less than the animals that they tended. They were dirt poor and they had been that way for generations and there was no way out.
My grandfather explained to me that he came to America to be left alone. He was not seeking “equality”, but liberty – the freedom to choose his own path and make his own destiny. He knew what oppression was and found that America was the best place to unchain himself.
“Only a fool would look for equality!”, he told me,” It is an impossibility to say that I am equal to the Irish man or the German man or the English man; I’m not even equal to my own family members. I’m am ‘unico’.
I remember the “equality” very well, from Italy. We were all equal in our misery, equal in our lives senza speranza, equal in our hunger. I also remember the “equality” when the American Army man came to my door and took my radio ad onda corta (short wave) that I saved for years to buy so that I could listen to the Italian radio. They said Italians could be spies. I heard that Il Duce made the trains run on time and thought to myself, what good is that is you don’t have the money for a ticket to ride the train? All I wanted was to listen to music, but I was 'equal' to every Italian and could be a spy.
When I see the people on the TV marching in the streets with a sign saying they want “equality”, I can promise you that they will never be equal and they will never be free. What you are worth to yourself can never come from the approval of someone else; it must come from inside you! If you have to walk in the street with a sign to convince yourself or others that you are equal to them, you are going nowhere.
Some people say they came here for the “promise” of a better life. There is no such thing as a “promise of a better life”; there is only the promise of opportunities. It is for you to choose your opportunity and take it.
This was America to me; no handouts, no free lunch, just liberty. I could do the rest on my own.”
No more than a month later, I was called out of the school cafeteria to the Principal’s Office. My Nonno Salvatore had died and my mother was coming to pick me up to bring me to the city. My grandfather had left very strong impression in my life. He had an earthy wisdom within him and a frustration that he couldn’t express himself better in English.
He was an immigrant. His generation of immigrants, whether they were from Eastern Europe, Italy, Greece, Spain or anywhere else in the world, brought culture to a foreign land and created and took opportunities unavailable to them in their homelands. They brought resources and created opportunities for the Americans that were already here. There are those who say that America is a nation of immigrants; that we should open our borders to everyone. This is true; we are. The major differences between my grandfather and today’s immigrants, however, are that my grandfather came here legally, went through the process to stay and become a naturalized citizen and that there was no welfare state to throw money at him. He swam or sank on his own. He was never interested in other people’s money nor in being equal to anyone. There is a great difference having assets arrive at our shores and having liabilities arrive.
He just wanted to be left alone and free.
