On a Sunday morning in the early 1970s, on summer break from college, I joined my mother in an impromptu visit to my grandparents.
As we entered their home, I could hear grandma urging grandpa to take her to visit the old country, Sicily, one time before they died.
“You want to go? Go. I’m staying put. This country gave me a life. Italy did nothing for me – let me starve. This is my country.”
Now, grandpa was no blind patriot. At that time, he and I discussed the Viet Nam War and he cursed the politicians who perpetuated it. Then he would do that Sicilian-thing of his to show his disgust and anger – fake-spit on the floor and shout, “Poo - Disgraziato!” In basic Italian the word translates to “wretched” but to Sicilians it means the lowest of the low.
He heavily leaned socialist yet he made a clear distinction between the ideal of America, “We the people,” and the power-hungry, rich “animales” who continually chip away at that ideal.
To say he was quite a character is an understatement and his immigrant story is kind of unique. Born in Sicily, in 1892, he was the eldest of a man who also led an interesting life, but his is another story.
In 1900, when he was eight years old, his father moved his wife and three sons to the city of Tunis, in North Africa (under the control of France), for work opportunities. Grandpa’s youngest sister was born there soon after.
He attended French schools and could read, write and speak fluid French, in addition to being fully literate in Italian. During his years in Tunis, he also developed the ability to understand and speak local Arabic dialects. (By the time he landed in the U.S., learning to speak, read, and write English came fairly easy to him.)
Around 1907, due to political pressures in Tunis, his father moved the family back to Sicily with the intention of immigrating to the U.S. as soon as possible. But grandpa wasn’t ready to go with them. When his family immigrated to New York, grandpa, only 16 years old, stayed behind to join the Merchant Marine and see the world. By 1912-1913, as rumblings of the approaching World War 1 grew louder, grandpa, now around 20 years old, decided it was time to join his parents and siblings in the U.S.
“They treated us like animals.”
He returned to Sicily, got his papers together, then bought a ticket on a steam ship liner departing Naples for America. But, as they inspected his general health, he was turned away due to a condition he had all his life – a tear duct in his right eye would occasionally become clogged causing inflammation. They wouldn’t allow him to board the ship and told him to come back when his eye cleared up. As anyone who knew gramps would tell you, if he made up his mind to leave Italy that day, he would indeed leave Italy that day. No one can tell this story like my grandfather but I’ll do my best with a heavily abbreviated version.
He walked down the dock to another ship – “A German ship,” was all he said – and got himself hired as a cook for the Southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants in steerage. What he described was in sharp contrast to the movie, Titanic, with those scenes of happy, dancing steerage passengers. Dark and overcrowded, the stench of vomit and human waste, babies and young children crying nonstop, “A living hell,” grandpa said.
The food provided by the ship line for him to cook was either rotten or on the verge of rotting and there was little meat or vegetables. “I made a lot of pasta but most people were too seasick to eat much.”
Once a day, steerage passengers were allowed to escape to a roped-off portion of the lower deck and would pack in like sardines for a little fresh air. To add insult to injury, the wealthy Northern European passengers up above would throw fruit at them and laugh as they scrambled and fought each other to catch it. Needless to say, grandpa was pissed off.
That’s when he made a point to befriend another Italian guy who worked washing dishes in the first-class kitchen. “He was a little stunada. Begged me to make him pasta because his stomach couldn’t take all the meat they ate up there.” At this point in the story, grandpa would smile, “So I made a deal with him.” He got this guy to smuggle meat, fish, fresh vegetables and fruit, from the first-class kitchen, in exchange for cooking the man’s favorite Italian dishes. “All my people ate good the rest of the trip.”
When they docked in New York, grandpa jumped ship and officially became an illegal immigrant. Of course, this prevented him from getting work. His father contacted a paisan in Canada and they worked out a way to get grandpa up there then have him later reenter the U.S. legally.
At the ripe old age of 26 he met and married my grandmother in Brooklyn (she was 16). They were very proud they married for love, no arranged marriage for them. He worked as a laborer digging ditches for the expanding NYC subway line. My mother, their second child, remembers a day when she was around three, going with her mother to bring him a bagged lunch. “And there was my Daddy, down in a deep, dark hole, covered in dirt.”
He saved enough money to buy his own taxi cab and made a good living until the Great Depression hit — by then they’d had their first four kids (eventually they would have seven). That’s when he decided to move the family to Ohio and work with a couple of cousins — tenant farmers by day, prohibition bootleggers by night. Grandpa would shrug and say, “Hey – I had four kids to feed.” Once prohibition ended, they all returned to New York City and he managed to land a job as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks and join the union. He worked his way up to the job of “winch man” and unloaded ships on those docks till he was 65.
There was a stretch of time in the late 1940s when the local Mafioso were pressuring him to join their ranks. They thought he had “guts.” They wanted him to be a “button man.” Grandpa turned them down. “Someone threatens my family, I cut their heart out. But I’m not gonna kill another man over money to make some fat capo rich.” By 1950, shortly after my mom married my dad, Grandpa moved with grandma and their youngest three kids to Long Island. For the next few years until he retired, he would get up at 2 am to drive to the Brooklyn docks to work.
Once he retired, he couldn’t bring himself to sit around doing nothing. He bought a little food cart, got his vending license, and sold sausage and pepper sandwiches at a local shopping center, well into his 70s. He also cultivated a little terraced farm in his backyard — he grew vegetables, “strum-berries,” grapes and made his own wine. Sometimes he sold his tomatoes out of the trunk of his car by the main road just for fun.
He stood 5-foot-6 inches and weighed a wiry, muscular 140 pounds all of his life. And he had the most amazing cornflower blue eyes (thanks to his red-headed father, my great-grandfather, born in Northern Italy, the illegitimate son of a Duke and a chambermaid who was dumped in an orphanage in Sicily as an infant).
My aunt has a photo of grandpa, on his 80th birthday, doing a perfect dive off a semi-high diving board. But what the camera didn’t catch was how he then swam under water the entire length of the pool. We were all sure he would make it to 100 years old until, at age 88, he developed stomach cancer along the scar tissue of an old ulcer operation. I remember mom talking to a doctor at the hospital who said gramps’ heart was so much younger than his chronological age that, if not for the cancer, he would have likely lived well past 100.
One day my brother and I sat beside his hospital bed as grandpa watched a documentary about steam ships. In great detail, the retired longshoreman explained the differences between a three-stack steamship and four-stack steamship. His mind was as sharp as ever. When my brother joked, “Grandpa – I wish we could transplant your brain in a younger man and give you another 80 years.” Gramps shot back, excited, “Yeah - go get a doctor and see what we can do.” He died on Thanksgiving eve, eight months before his 90th birthday — July 5th.
“This country gave me a life,” grandpa had said.
I can’t count how many times other immigrants, from different parts of the world, have said something similar to me. They leave behind everything they know to come here seeking freedom and opportunity.
Like my grandfather, they’re willing to work backbreaking jobs few others want to feed their families. Like my grandfather’s sons, their children join the US armed forces to serve this country. Like my grandfather, they simply seek a better life.
And, if my grandpa were alive to witness how the orange menace in the oval office is abusing families at the southern border, I have no doubt he would fake-spit at the floor and shout, “Poo-Disgraziato!” And far, far worse.