Feeling Italian

The Art of Ethnicity in America

Thomas J. Ferraro

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814728390
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

2006 American Book Award, presented by the Before Columbus Foundation

Southern Italian emigration to the United States peaked a full century ago—;descendents are now fourth and fifth generation, dispersed from their old industrial neighborhoods, professionalized, and fully integrated into the “melting pot.” Surely the social historians are right: Italian Americans are fading into the twilight of their ethnicity. So, why is the American imagination enthralled by The Sopranos, and other portraits of Italian-ness?

Italian American identity, now a mix of history and fantasy, flesh-and-bone people and all-too-familiar caricature, still has something to teach us, including why each of us, as citizens of the U.S. twentieth century and its persisting cultures, are to some extent already Italian. Contending that the media has become the primary vehicle of Italian sensibilities, Ferraro explores a series of books, movies, paintings, and records in ten dramatic vignettes. Featured cultural artifacts run the gamut, from the paintings of Joseph Stella and the music of Frank Sinatra to The Godfather ’s enduring popularity and Madonna’s Italian background. In a prose style as vivid as his subjects, Ferraro fashions a sardonic love song to the art and iconography of Italian America.

CHAPTER 1

Honor

Friday Bloody
Friday

A woman knows the cost of a life better than a man does.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1895

The southern Italian peasants who came to the United States during the Great Migration (1880–1917), first as sojourners, later as settlers, to help build and run the industrial cities, were the proudest of peoples. Having suffered for centuries at the hands of the landowners and the governmental authorities and the Church, the weather and the gods, they had long before established distinctive ways of making do and of making sense: the mother-centered order of the family for all practical intents and purposes, the Virgin for the expression of hope and the renewal of courage, the cult of Honor for communal intrigue and masculine self-esteem. They were ferocious realists who understood where power lay and why it was wielded, but they would have hated—hated—to be considered anyone’s victim. I begin, then, with a story about a common laborer from the darkest era in Italian American history—the first era, that of arrival. Yet it is, in their spirit, a story not of backbreaking work and studied isolation unto death, a commonplace narrative, but of a curious victory or rather, to be more precise, a series of victories, in their earliest dealings with official America: victories so improbable—paradoxical in how they occurred, contrary in their implications, yet wondrous for all of that—that they feel like acts of grace.

At the end of the nineteenth century, America was actively seeking cheap labor—expandable, expendable labor—for its booming industries and burgeoning cities. Italian peasants, some with skills in the construction or extraction or hand trades, most just farm workers with strong backs and tough constitutions, answered the call, upwards to three hundred thousand a year.¹ The vast majority came from the notoriously backward regions of rugged Italy, especially the Mezzogiorno, the area south and east of Naples, where—as classic rumor has it—the hill-town people are so suspicious of outsiders and so tight with one another they refuse to give a stranger directions. What these emigrants wanted was the opportunity for the first time ever to escape hunger and degradation; their American Dream was the (not so) simple transformation of penny wages into saved dollars. A significant proportion, at least the majority, settled in the industrial Northeast, where they worked and lived together in conspicuous concentrations in the toughest city neighborhoods, including Hell’s Kitchen, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side of New York.²

Feeling Italian in America began, I believe, as a function of the original urban ghetto, especially its breakdown. The Italian colony, as it was first termed, was built in accordance with ancient habits (la via vecchia, including fierce familialism, low expectations, and distrust of authority) and new necessities (including chain migration, language barriers, and restricted housing). Its insularity caused as much alarm among the majority of established Americans who disdained contact with others as among the small minority who welcomed it. And, most importantly for our purposes, cracks appeared in those symbolic ghetto walls almost the instant they were raised. Feeling Italian in America began, then, in the contact zone of mutual Italian/American (re)construction, as a founding interplay between how the immigrants understood their new country and what the citizens at large thought of them, when the hermetic seal of Southern Italian culture cracked itself open to external inspection.

Why did the Italians come all the way to the United States only to cling so fanatically to themselves? How, nonetheless, did their private lives and communal doings become the focus of widespread curiosity and national concern? When such affairs spilled into the public sphere, what happened? Was it the case, as latter-day defensive thinking would have it, that these aliens, these foreigners, these racialized others were screwed from the very start? Or were there ways and means—once recognized only to themselves—to take advantage of America’s special conditions, even when (perhaps especially when) their backs were to the wall? And, if so, how can we possibly now know?

On July 17, 1895, an illiterate seamstress in Lower Manhattan by the name of Maria Barbella became the first woman in the world to be sentenced to die in the electric chair. At the time the basic circumstances of the case suggested she had been used, abused, and hung out to dry several times over. But the case did not turn out as anyone could have reasonably predicted, and sixteen months later, after an extended sojourn in Sing Sing Prison and an O. J. Simpson–style retrial, Barbella was, amazingly, set free. Until a decade ago, no one in the United States, not even the professional historians of immigration and the female proletariat, had ever heard of Barbella, but we now know most of what transpired, thanks to painstaking research by Idanna Pucci, an anthropological filmmaker and author from Italy. Pucci’s The Trials of Maria Barbella is a sobering reminder of anti-Italian prejudice, of course, but it is much more than that.³

Pucci researched for ten years like a woman possessed. She not only had the tenacity to persist against all odds, turning up court transcripts, the trial appeal, all kinds of letters from various interlocutors, Il Progresso Italo-Americano for 1896, and of course the voluminous English-language newspaper and magazine archive, but she also had the patience, skill, and sensibility to shape the myriad pieces of the public record into what is, in effect, a documentary novel. In its overall architecture, The Trials of Maria Barbella preserves the ambiguity of the archive, as Pucci lets the materials speak in their contrary complexity, and she invites the reader to share in the intrigue of deciphering the historical record, with subtle pointers to Pucci’s own investigative suspense. In what follows, I attend to what Pucci seems to be saying sotto voce, and I do so with increasing urgency because what I hear there, under Pucci’s breath, reminds us that the good stuff is never neat, never nice. Ultimately at issue in The Trials of Maria Barbella is, I believe, a mystery dance between political correctness and lived history—that is, between the contemporary intellectual mandate to unearth how Southern Italians were once racially denigrated and systematically mistreated, which is true, and the transatlantic Italian appetite for ascertaining illicit sexuality, exacting just revenge, and crediting divine intercession, which is even more true.⁴

At 9:45 a.m. on Friday, April 26, 1895, Maria Barbella came out of the Tavolacci Bar at 428 East Thirteenth Street with her body wholly unscathed, her heart and mind under great duress but not permanently destroyed, and the better part of her dignity reinstated. Left dying on the bar floor behind her was the bootblack, Domenico Cataldo, whom Maria, a long-sheltered naif, understood to be her fiancé, the love of her life, but who was in fact by all accounts (including his own) an unconscionable exploiter of vulnerable women—the sort of man the immigrants used to call a Lothario, the kind we would call a stalker, a dealer in false pretenses, and a serial date rapist. Maria said, “Me take his blood so he no take mine. Say me pig marry.” Only pigs marry! is what Maria actually heard, in regional Italian dialect. It was romantic misadventure turned dramatically violent, and as such a scenario more familiar from village legend than from fact.

The scene of the crime was New York’s infamous Little Italy, the Five Points district of Lower Manhattan, which housed a dense concentration of unskilled and semi-skilled Italian laborers, the majority of them adult males living under penurious contract in stable-like conditions. The protagonists came from neighboring hill towns in the very worst part of Southern Italy, the mountainous anklebone called Lucania or Basilicata, a place ravaged forever by climate and outsiders and history itself. Banished to Basilicata in 1935, Carlo Levi found a world of exploitation and alienation older than communal memory and harsher than humane measure: “No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding.”⁵ It was a land of the most stubborn poverty (la miseria) where either you suffered terribly all life long (many died young) or took leave of your history, most often to go to America.⁶

Idanna Pucci reports that when the Barbellas came to rent a standard-issue airless railroad apartment at 136 Mott Street, they might as well have still been in Basilicata. Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the immigrants of lower Mott Street, all from the region, speaking variants of the same dialect, had transplanted the most intense elements of their long-evolved culture. Christ was on the altar but Mary was worshiped; women made the ultimate decisions because they did the hardest work; and people owned nothing to speak of but what they could speak of, that is, communal lore and individual fantasy.⁷ The worship of Mary was a strange exultation of Virginity-cum-Fertility, which translated, in practice, to a woman’s chastity-before-marriage and motherhood afterward being a matter of Honor for all the family, especially the men—who had so much time on their hands, unemployed, unemployable, without political franchise, with so little to be proud of, so little to contest.

The immigrants brought their Honor cult with them, but circumstances had changed. In Basilicata, there was no place without prying eyes, and an unmarried woman, especially a young unmarried woman, would never be left alone. In Basilicata, to claim sexual conquest was a ubiquitous form of male braggadocio, offering solace while resisting proof. In New York City, Domenico Cataldo took advantage of the jam-packed Lower East Side—young women walking unescorted and beyond familiar eyes a fair distance to and from work, ubiquitous barcafés admitting women where drinks could be doctored, and very cheap apartments available at a moment’s notice—to make good on what in Italy was, for logistical reasons, mostly just talk.

Maria Barbella was a chaste dutiful daughter of the old school who had never had a suitor and who worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for minuscule wages, taking piecework home at night and bringing her check to her parents, unopened. In November 1893, when the two first talked on the street, Cataldo was nearing thirty years of age and had been in New York long enough to have put almost a thousand dollars in the bank, to the immigrants a prodigious sum; Maria admitted to having just turned twenty and to having arrived only eleven months before—during which time she had done nothing but work, seen nothing but the sweatshop, nor conversed with anyone beyond their tenement stoop. Heartlessly and stealthily Cataldo pursued Maria, while refusing to meet her family as custom prescribed and the Barbellas demanded. To elude Cataldo, Maria changed walking routes, then switched sweatshops, but he found her again months later, and eventually his charm melted away some of her traditional resolve. It is unclear how exactly they came to lie down together, but when she awoke that first morning in Cataldo’s apartment, Maria knew that her father would not let her step across the threshold into the family’s fifth-floor walk-up until and unless she were properly married. Maria had dishonored herself and thus the family, which were, to people from the south of Italy, the same thing.

It took truly dreadful immediate circumstances—a sudden forty degree rise in heat late on the afternoon of April 25 to an unprecedented ninety degrees, ten hours of handling rough wool in a suffocating sweatshop, sexual brutality following Cataldo’s middle-of-the-night return home, and his morning declaration that he was returning to Italy—to bring the relation to a fever pitch of violence; but Cataldo had, as the local Italians understood it, given Maria no choice. For over a month, he had resolutely refused to marry her, and a young Italian woman scomunicata⁸ from her family was nowhere and nothing. There was only one way to get her honor back. The neighbors on Mott Street mourned with the family when Maria was taken to jail, though most assumed Maria was responsible and the killing justified. To the Italian vice-consul, it was surprising only that a member of Maria’s family hadn’t already done the deed.

There was no proof, however, that Maria had actually intended to kill Cataldo, whom she seemed genuinely to have loved and, in her post-traumatic daze, often spoke of in the present tense. She only wanted, as she put it, to draw blood—which would bring the pair before the American authorities, whom Maria seemed to think would hold Cataldo to his promise of marriage. So not only was it part human tragedy, part minor miracle that the diminutive Maria had, in fact, killed Cataldo, who was much stockier and stronger, but there was something providential in the truly mysterious manner of the death, which allowed Maria to walk a precarious ethical and psychological line. Maria had satisfied the old-world criterion of the vendetta. At the same time she could tell herself that she had only intended to enforce Cataldo’s promise of marriage—which satisfied the new-world ideal of a love match. Maria seemed as well truly not to remember exactly what happened in the bar, which was, as we shall see, a boon in itself.

Cataldo’s throat had been cut. The weapon, which Maria had taken from their makeshift bureau, was an old-fashioned straight-edged razor, altogether too evocative of the long thin knife called a stiletto that had already entered English parlance as a sensationalistic stand-in for the immigrants themselves. I don’t think we can underestimate the symbolism of that straight-edge, anymore that we can underestimate the prejudices triggered by the combination of occupations (bootblack and seamstress), extramarital domestic discord, a seedy bar, card playing, emotion-driven violence, and—of course—the psychosocial overinvestment in the idea of Honor itself. In the America of 1895, the Southern Italians were a despised and feared people, despised especially for doing the work they were brought to do, and feared (characterized as dark-skinned dagos and African-blooded guineas) because they were known to work at half wages (pay rates in the North advertised below that of “coloured labor”) seemingly without complaint, clinging to each other and their established ways of doing things. Only four years earlier in New Orleans, eleven Sicilians who had just been exonerated in one way or another of the murder of a corrupt police captain were lynched—a couple of them literally, the rest massacred by bullets—by a huge mob organized by the KKK-like White Defense League; and rightly so, according to such distinguished arbiters of national public opinion as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the editors of the New York Times.⁹

“Maria the murdering seamstress,” with the hot temper and the deadly straight-edge, was made for the tabloids even if she hadn’t been a foreigner; that she was Southern Italian was—for the purposes of a national psyche alarmed about newcomers, factory workers, “Roman” Catholics, and darker-skinned peoples—too good to be true. The very sight of the average Southern Italian was frightening to most Americans of older stock: markedly short and thick of trunk, often misshapen from malnutrition and lack of medical care, dark of skin and hair, in clothing that bespoke their origins, their poverty, and their occupations. In the illustrated papers just coming into being in the 1890s, they were drawn, all too often, with the simian features of the very creatures—performing monkeys—that helped the first arrivals survive. In The Dangerous Classes of New York, Charles Loring Brace pursued the Italian organ grinders of Five Points into their homes, reporting “a bedlam of sounds, and a combination of odors from garlic, monkeys, and the most dirty human persons.”¹⁰ The immigrants were loud—speaking dialects much harsher than Tuscan Italian—and they smelled, from lack of washing but also from their wretched surroundings and unfamiliar cuisine. Even their foodstuffs set them uncomfortably apart: “fish that never swam in American waters . . . Big, awkward sausages, anything but appetizing,” noted Jacob Riis.¹¹

Riis, a former police photographer turned housing reformer and no fool, swore that in 1890 almost none of the parasitical criminality of the Five Points—be it opportunistic or organized—was of Italian origin. But the Southern Italian’s vaunted tendency to sudden excessive emotion, according to Riis, could and did cause trouble between friends—competing in cards or love or whatever the local coinage of esteem—that occasionally resulted in violence, which was, more importantly, “settled,” if at all possible, without the involvement of the police:

The wounded man can seldom be persuaded to betray [his attacker]. He wards off all inquiries with a wicked “I fix him myself,” and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers. If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and the police know that “he” has been fixed, and the account squared.¹²

This method of communal self-reliance—closemouthed problem solving—may not have yet gained a prominent place in the national imagination, but word of its existence was already getting around (the omerta), to the anger of the civic authorities and the anxiety of the general public.

Maria’s initial treatment by the police and penal system, especially her incarceration in the Tombs, was rough to the point of brutality. The media was gleefully vicious, rechristening her “Barberi” to echo the sound of “barbarism,” thereby invoking the reigning view of Italians as dirty, stupid primitives prone to the violent outbreak of emotions. The first trial before the New York Superior Court less than three months later was almost comically corrupt, featuring a defendant being tried for first-degree murder who didn’t understand the concept of premeditation, an incompetent translator whom the judge often prevented from doing his job, and an obscure public defender who met with his terrified client for less than an hour several weeks before the trial and who owed his appointment to political support he had thrown to the judge. Nasty biases and procedural irregularities were to be expected, but they only served to exacerbate the cultural standoff that was the primary lesson of Maria’s first trial, regarding alternative constructions of female self-determination, righteous conduct, and just punishment.

The Lower East Siders understood that, whatever exactly had happened in the bar, Maria had in the larger sense of things defended herself. “I take his blood so he no take mine” is what she, under duress, with only the present tense of English available to her, had said: American-style self-defense, perhaps; Italian-style ...