In celebration of the season, I've gathered together some of the sights and sounds of Christmas in Molise. Especially for those of us in the diaspora, it is my hope that these will either remind us of – or acquaint us with – the traditions of our people. I have had the great fortune in my life to realize that the forces which bind us are strong enough to span the distances across oceans and the even greater and more perilous distances across time. I would like to thank Alfonso Notardonato of Pizzone for the use of his photographs. His devotion to his beautiful land continues to enchant.
The Christmas Story is portrayed each year in the streets of Pizzone. These are scenes captured by Alfonso in 2012. (All photos used by permission.)
Zampognari play in the streets.
Pizzone becomes Bethlehem.
Mary and Joseph arrive.
La Stella Cometa, the Star of Bethlehem.
They have seen La Stella Cometa.
The Manger.
Mauro Gioielli is a musicologist and singer from Isernia. He performs the ancient songs of Molise, often accompanied by traditional instruments played by Il Tratturo, the group named after the centuries-old trails used for the seasonal transhumance – the moving of sheep between the highlands of Abruzzo and the pastures of Foggia to the south. Here he sings a song of the Christmas Star, “Stella Cometa.”
In a live performance in the church of Alfedena in 2010, Signor Gioielli performs with Il Tratturo a Christmas concert: Il Tratturo in Concert, 2010.
I Zampognari, the groups named for the traditional bagpipes of the area, the zampogna, perform in the towns and villages throughout Molise during the Christmas season. Here is a group performing in the snow in the Campobasso town of Montefalcone nel Sannio:
In Pizzone, the streets and squares are decorated for the season.
On Christmas Eve, La Vigilia di Natale begins. In Pizzone, in the small piazza in front of the thirteenth-century Church of San Nicola, wood is stacked and set ablaze. Called il rito del fuoco, the ritual of the fire, the fire burns through the night, the event culminating at midnight with the ringing of the church bells.
Midnight and the ringing of the bells as recorded in Montefalcone nel Sannio:
To everyone, I wish a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And to my French readers: Joyeux Noël et bonne année. And, of course, in Italian: Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo! May all experience the best during this season of peace.
The Sherman House.
Photograph: Chicago History Museum
Emiddio helped support the family during the early years in Chicago working as a newsboy. I imagine him living as the hero in Horatio Alger, Jr.’s novel, going each morning to buy the morning papers – the Tribune, the Times, the Herald, the Inter-ocean – then taking them to his spot outside the Sherman House, keeping an eye out for the prosperous, those likely to buy one of his two-cent papers. He would have friends, other boys from the ages of seven to sixteen, who kept all hours here, staying out on the streets despite the weather and the darkness until all their papers were sold. For some, to go home with unsold papers would mean a beating. The boys were different races, different ethnic backgrounds – there were Chicago boys as well as Irish, black boys and other Italians. They worked side-by-side, played pranks on storekeepers, sometimes went too far and had to dodge a policeman or two, and on a good day, sold all their papers early and walked together to the Saratoga on Dearborn Street for a twenty-five cent bowl of oyster stew. The rich stew, made with butter and cream and thickened with flour, was as delicious as it was rare and warmed them as nothing else could on cold, gray winter days.
Arriving the first week of May, the family settled in on the Near North Side in a tenement on Indiana Street – now Grand Avenue – between Orleans and Franklin. Italians crowded into these tenements along the Chicago River – here and on the Near West Side. Others had come before, paesani from Pizzone and San Vincenzo. Just three months earlier, in February, several Di Cristofanos and Foscos had arrived along with Antonio Rossi. At Christmastime, after a frigid crossing, going ashore at Castle Garden on Christmas Eve, other Foscos had arrived ahead of their kinsmen along with Francesco and Nicola Di Vito and Antonio Di Silvio. In May of 1890, Filippo Di Cristofano arrived in the company of Domenico Di Vito, Nicola Gallo, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Domenico Rossi, Antonio Santucci, the fox Antonio Volpe, and, finally, Antonio Di Iorio, a distant relative of Cristina’s mother Felicita Di Iorio. Even earlier, in April of 1888, Pasquale Di Silvio had beat them all through the “Golden Door.”
Antonio Di Julio with one of his
daughters. Photo taken on
Halsted Street in the 1890s.
Photograph from the collection
of the author.
Carmine’s cousin Giovanni had found a place for his family a few houses down Indiana Street from Carmine and Cristina. A cousin to both Carmine and Giovanni, Antonio Di Julio, was also here, along with his wife, Angelamaria Grimaldi, and their two daughters, Santa and Cristina. Angelamaria was six months into another pregnancy that May. She would come to term during Chicago’s hottest months.
The tenements were mostly quickly and shoddily built wooden-frame “cottages” or two- or three-story multi-apartment buildings, often on unpaved, muddy streets, with small, gloomy courtyards crisscrossed with lines hung with washing. Often apartments opened onto garbage-strewn back alleys. Sometimes the courtyards contained a “rear house,” occupied by more tenants. The narrow passages between the structures were dark, often damp, and sometimes impassable due to the accumulated garbage. In winter, the snow would pile up in the passages.
Turn-of-the-century tenement showing
the wooden garbage boxes attached
to the street.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.
The children played where they could – in the alleys, on the boards of the wooden sidewalks, or in the streets. Just blocks away, toxic black smoke rose from the smokestacks of factories on the river. The smoke was so thick that sometimes it shaded the sun and left an acrid and unbreatheable haze in the air. The soot settled everywhere, in winter turning the snow into a gray, gritty slush. The apartments themselves were sometimes a single room with a tiny kitchen. A wooden partition or blanket strung across the room provided privacy for the parents. Privies were in the alleys, as were open wooden boxes for the manure collected from the horses on the streets. There were chickens loose in the courtyards and in the streets. In the heat of the summer months, the combined smells were overpowering and unhealthy. Disease coursed through the tenements as more and more immigrants crowded into these neighborhoods. What city services there were could not keep up with the ever-increasing population in the river wards. There were cases of cholera, of dysentery, diphtheria, whooping cough, and typhoid fever. As recently as the early 1880s there had been a typhoid epidemic which killed more than 2,400 people. Smallpox killed 1,500 during the same period. The children, often out on the streets to escape the crowded apartments, were particularly vulnerable.
Children playing in a garbage-strewn alley on the
Near West Side.
University of Illinois at Chicago photo.
Public Domain.
For many of the immigrants from Molise, the green heart of Italy, whose native landscapes and architecture and customs had been shaped through millennia, this was beyond their imaginings. Coming from a land of high mountains and deep forests rich with deer and camosci – the Abruzzo chamois – and boar and wolves, and even a bear related to the American grizzly, many could not take in this urban, frantic world of Chicago – a city which had grown from 4,170 people in 1837 to 1,250,000 in 1891 and which had sprawled from 10.7 square miles to 181.7 square miles in the same period, a city of commerce whose combined transactions totaled nearly 1.4 billion dollars just the year before in 1890. For some, it was too much. There were those who would become virtually unable to leave their apartment, sitting by the window to watch the clouds in a clear patch of sky. There is an account of a sickly Italian boy who in warmer weather kept a vigil over the blooms of a flower box outside the apartment’s single window, sitting all day in his chair, breathing in the caustic air through the open window.
The Rush Street Bridge, 1890.
Public Domain.
Mornings, Emiddio would escape toward the city center, easily walking the few blocks to the Rush Street bridge. Heavy traffic signaled the start of the day. Amidst the din of horses’ hooves, of the iron-rimmed wheels of wagons and carriages on the wooden planks of the iron bridge, Emiddio crossed carefully, the horses and wagons passing closely enough for him to feel in the cool morning air the heat of the animals. Once across the bridge, he would leave the river with its barges and its smokestacks and its factories and head towards the Loop. He would learn that the financial district on Dearborn and outside the fine hotels and restaurants were the most profitable locations to sell his papers. He would know what times of the day were best for each location. He would learn the routes of the cable cars. He would sometimes take his younger brother, Vincenzo, to get him out from underfoot, and together they would come to know the city and its people – from the street types and tradesmen to the businessmen and to the fashionable ladies shopping with their servants. He would come to know the neighborhoods of Little Hell, of the Near West Side and Maxwell Street with its pushcarts and its market, known pejoratively as “Jew Town,” due to the Eastern European Jews – generically referred to as “Russians” – who had settled there.
The corner of State Street and Madison Avenue, 1897.
Edison Studio. Public Domain.
On August 2nd, Cousin Antonio’s wife gave birth to her baby. She would have been born in the tenement apartment, the air through the open window hot and foul. The women of the family would have been present, including Cristina. A levatrice, a midwife, would have been found. Antonio and Angelamaria would name the child Assunta Maria.
Two weeks later, in Italy, it was the time of Ferragosto, the August festival celebrated since the time of Augustus. There would be festivals in San Vincenzo and Pizzone, in all the villages in the mountains of Molise and in all of Italy. The celebrations would culminate on the 15th and include the Feast of the Assumption commemorating the Virgin Mary’s Heavenly birthday, the day of her bodily ascent into Heaven.
Monte Meta with pilgrims on its slopes, 2013.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.
For the young and for the more robust, following the Assumption, a pilgrimage was made across the Meta massif to the Valle di Canneto and to the Santuario Madonna di Canneto. The appearance here of a shining Lady to a young shepherdess established this valley, already sacred in pagan times, as a holy place. By the year 1475, a document now preserved in the archives of the abbey of Montecassino granted indulgences of one-hundred days to the pilgrims who visited the shrine here. From all directions the pilgrims came. Cristina’s maternal grandparents, married in 1815, perhaps first saw each other here, each having travelled miles of rugged Apennine terrain – her grandfather Pietro Di Iorio from Pizzone to the east of the Canneto Valley, her grandmother Serafina Ferri from San Giuseppe to the south.
The hamlet of San Giuseppe, now a part of the commune of Picinisco.
Photograph by the author.
Madonna di Canneto.
Photograph by Alfonso Notardonato.
The pilgrims visited the shrine, paraded in procession. Some would travel the last distance to the shrine on their knees. Some would walk the distances barefoot. Some, having seen the effigy of the Madonna – made of lime wood and dating possibly to the twelfth century – would walk backwards as they left the santuario, not wanting to turn their backs to Her.
Antonio and Angelamaria’s daughter would live through these days of August. But as autumn began, she would become ill. The particular disease which caused the illness has been lost, but on October 12th the little girl died. The location of her grave and the circumstances of the funeral also have been lost. The family would have been there – Antonio and Angelamaria, Giovanni and his wife Rosa, Carmine and Cristina. Emiddio, too, would have seen Assunta Maria laid into earth, where she would be left to lie alone, the family’s first casualty in the New World. Later, her parents, her siblings would leave America. In a few years, they would make a home in France. Manifest Destiny would continue to remake the American continent, but Antonio and Angelamaria would continue to think of the little girl they lost and left behind on the edge of the American frontier.
The Barge Office in the Battery, New York City.
Public Domain.
Herman Volke, a locksmith from Saxe-Weimar who had just crossed the Atlantic aboard the Hamburg-American steamer Columbia, was among the first half of the 734 steerage passengers to board the transfer boat William Fletcher and to come alongside the Barge Office dock. It was April 19, 1890, and Volke, at shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, would become the first immigrant to be registered at the new, just-opened immigrant depot in the Battery of New York. As he was giving his name and age to the clerk, he was handed a five-dollar gold piece and heartily congratulated by the superintendent. Volke and his wife, both grateful for the welcome, shook the superintendent’s hand enthusiastically and expressed their thanks in German. Then, heading towards Pittsburgh along with the dog and cat who had made the voyage with them, they disappeared into their history.
Construction was still going on inside the Barge Office on this first day of business, but this didn’t seem to cause any problems. Nugent’s bar and lunch counter was bustling. There was only one detention this day. A cable from Liverpool had preceded the arrival of a William Henry Hopkinson of Lincoln, England, with the news that Hopkinson had abandoned his wife and children and taken passage on the Germanic with a young woman named Ellen Kelly. Travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Hill, they were detained. Eventually the couple admitted their actual identities. Hopkinson protested that he had left his family with money and was simply on his way to Kansas City to find work. Kelly, who is described as “young and pretty,” had friends in Hartford and would easily find work there. The superintendent allowed them to land.
Another view of the Barge Office.
Public Domain.
There were other stories of the heart. Christopher Kruisler, for instance, who had immigrated several years before. A Bavarian from Würtemberg, Kruisler was a diminutive man who had become betrothed to Marie Epple, also from Würtemberg, before he had come to America. Kruisler saved the money he had earned as a cigar-box maker and sent for Marie, who arrived at the Barge Office on July 9, 1891, after a crossing on the SS Rhynland. Kruisler had been waiting behind the wooden railing which separated the passengers from those waiting to meet them. When he saw Marie, he excitedly began to dance. Marie was unable to hide her disappointment upon seeing Kruisler. According to The New York Times, “The fair Marie thought that he would grow, perhaps.” They reported,“Evidently the climate of America had done nothing to increase his stature, as she fondly hoped that it would.” After Marie was admitted, and they were finally brought together, Marie told Kruisler that she had changed her mind. There would be no wedding. She said that she “was content to remain plain Marie Epple for the present.” The Times closes,“After a long and stormy interview the crestfallen lover left his faithless sweetheart and went away vowing to kill himself.”
The Statue of Liberty at its unveiling
in 1886. It would still have been this
dull copper color in 1891.
Puiblic Domain.
It was May Day of 1891 when aboard the SS Rhynland Carmine and Cristina with their children sailed into New York Bay. In Italy, there would still be snow on the Mainarde. The fields below San Vincenzo would have been burned and cleared and ready for the new crop. It was now time to plant. There would be bud break on the grape vines, the new leaves bright green in the sun. On its way to a Hudson River pier, the ship would pass the Statue of Liberty on its port side. The passengers would crowd the ship’s rails to view the American colossus, parents lifting their children onto their shoulders so they could see and remember. They would also pass Ellis Island, still under construction, not to open as the new immigrant depot until January 1, 1892. To starboard was Lower Manhattan and the Battery. The immigrants perhaps would have noticed the circular, sandstone walls of Castle Garden, the old fort which a generation ago had become an entertainment venue, hosting such shows as the famous soprano Jenny Lind and the dancer Lola Montez, former lover of both Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who danced here her notorious “Spider Dance.” In 1855, Castle Garden became the immigrant depot for the Port of New York. It would serve in this capacity until 1890. Six years later, it would become the New York City Aquarium, which for nearly fifty years would be one of New York’s most popular attractions.
Lower Manhattan and the Battery, 1900. Castle Garden can be
seen at the far right.
Public Domain.
The Rhynland would dock that morning on the Hudson, where the saloon and second-class passengers would disembark. The steerage passengers would be made to wait, held back by Red Star Line officials. They would be given a letter of the alphabet identifying their ship and a number, their number from the ship’s manifest. Carmine would be number 18; Cristina, 19; Emiddio, 20; Vincenzo, 21; and little Maria, 22. The immigrants would not be allowed to disembark here. Not quite understanding what was happening to them, they would be herded onto one of the broad-decked harbor boats supplied by the Bureau of Immigration. Aboard these boats, hundreds at a time with all of their belongings, the immigrants were ferried to the dock of the Barge Office, where they would wait on board, shoulder to shoulder, until there was room for them to disembark. On land for the first time in two weeks, they would be divided into groups according to their letter and number. They would learn to wait. Standing in line, crouching, maybe sitting on a bundle, they waited anxiously for what one immigrant described as “the nearest earthly likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our fitness to enter Heaven.”
A New York Times Magazine article of the time comments, “The Italian is the immigrant of the hour. The boot that is Humbert’s domain [a reference to Italy’s King Umberto I] seems to be leaking, and if you, oh! man, who reads and studies, should stand in the Barge Office day after day for a while you would think that every Italian town and village, yes, and every hillside, was being deserted in the race for the dollars of America.” The writer continues, referring to the Italian immigration as “the migration of the ‘Dago,’ as we have come to call him, and which does not seem an inappropriate term as the raw product is seen at the Battery before he has ‘squeezed through. . . .’”
Babies wail. Shouts of “Move on! Move on!” harass the immigrants, who shuffle their belongings along ahead of them. A woman loses her grip on a bundle tied up in some rags, and it comes undone, spilling its contents of a kitchen pot and other kitchen odds and ends. Gradually, the group is pushed and shoved upstairs to the area known as “the pens,” where the groups are kept together for examination. The medical examination would follow, much like the one they had endured in Antwerp. Here they would be marked with chalk and detained if there was a problem: “H” for heart, “K” for a hernia, “X” for a mental defect. The following description appeared in The New York Magazine:
Briefly, the inspection is a simple one. With health and a little money a man, no matter how great his family, is considered a desirable immigrant. The doors of the promised land fly open at a touch. Vigor and a cash capital of about $20 will carry the foreigner and his household through the lines without trouble. The vigor is evident to the doctors who scan each man, two or three watching the line in review, one for certain sorts of physical defects, another for conditions of health of another order. Thus a man is sometimes ordered abruptly out of the line. Another! Both doctors were rigid. This immigrant had an [infection] of the eyes, (the doctor noticed it by the way he walked). As to finance, the wanderer from abroad must hand up his little hoard to the Inspector for counting. With the best of the Italians who come here this consists of a few pitiful greasy bits of paper money, a coin or two, too few to even jingle.
The writer describes the appearance of a young woman before the inspector:
There is standing before the Inspector Angiolina Felicetta with $12.15 in her little purse. She has come to join her husband, who, it is afterward found, is waiting for her in the crowd outside. He has come ahead to test America. All is seemingly propitious; the girl wife has come over to join him. She is but seventeen, a slip of a Neapolitane. A clumsy-fitting frock of green and yellow stripes sets badly on her girlish figure. The white cotton lace on it is torn and soiled. She wears carpet slippers, and on her head a gay fazzoletta di testa (handkerchief) is coquettishly entwined. Angiolina, according to American canons, is dirty. In Italy you would kodak her at once, and fresh off the steamship she has not lost her Old World charm. For with the green and yellow stripes there is a gorgeous pink ribbon about her neck and in her hand a yellow and green basket – her entire wardrobe.
After the examination, the immigrant might be approached by a representative of the Italian Bureau, a agency of the Italian government. These officials attempted to identify immigrants who might be victims of the padrone system, in which a person might have contracted his labor in return for his passage. The officials of the Italian Bureau would record the entries of as many Italians as they could in the performance of their duties. Finally, actually inside the Barge Office, were ticketing agents for the railroads. The passengers would be ferried across the Hudson to the New Jersey shore to catch their trains. Carmine and Cristina arrived during a price war on trains travelling to Chicago and points west set off by a squabble between the Central Traffic and Trunk Line Association, who booked the travel on the various railroads for the immigrants, and the Chicago and Alton Railroad which resulted in the latter being granted their own agent within the Barge Office. Dazed, disoriented, and exhausted, Carmine and Cristina would not have understood this. Nor would they have understood the crush of people outside the Barge Office. Relatives and friends of immigrants, or just the curious, sometimes numbering into the hundreds, lined the street. Brass-buttoned, loud, and carrying sticks, policemen and detectives were present to “keep order.” A relative rushing forward to greet a newly arrived immigrant would be beaten back with shoves and sticks, regardless of the offender’s sex. In later years of the Barge Office, a homeless man by the name of Cripps, who slept in a box on the pier, took up his cane to do his part to manage the crowd. According to The New York Times,
He yells as savagely as the rest, and, being fiercer of countenance, his orders are more quickly obeyed than those of the authorized guardians of the peace. Nobody dares face the glitter in the eye of “Cripps,” and before his gaze Italians, Huns, Greeks, and men of various nationalities wither away in mortal fear and venture no more in reach of his eye or cane. He, without a smile and confident of his supreme authority over all “furriners,” never flinches in his duty.
Carmine and Cristina collapsed into their seats on the train. The children, too, having survived this “Day of Judgment,” were quiet. Perhaps, Cousin Giovanni and his family were also on this train, along with some of the others from San Vincenzo. All needed to rest. All would try. I imagine Emiddio, leaning his head against the window, watching the passage of wilderness, of isolated farms, of small towns with their unfamiliar architecture. From New York and New Jersey, they would travel west through Pennsylvania, then Ohio and Indiana, through the lands of great peoples now gone: the Pequot, the Iroquois, the Munsee, and the Susquehanna, on through the lands of the Erie and the Miami. Emiddio would not have been aware of this. After the dark came, he would see nothing. All would be black except for the occasional farmhouse with a coal-oil lamp flickering orange and yellow in a window. Nothing else would break the darkness, not for miles, not until the next farmhouse seen in the distance across the flat land.
In Italy during these first days of May, across the mountains some miles north of San Vincenzo, in the village of Cocullo, continuing a tradition going back to the Dark Ages and according to some back to the snake goddess worshipped by the Marsi, the Italic tribe who joined with the Samnites against the Romans, the serpari were gathering their snakes for the festival. Only certain snakes were chosen, all non-venomous: four-lined snakes, aesculapian, grass, and green whip snakes. The feast day for the patron saint of Cocullo occurred at this time on the first Thursday in May. Promptly at noon on this day, the effigy of San Domenico would begin his procession through the village. San Domenico is believed to be a mediator between the harsh realities of the world and the people who must suffer them. As San Domenico is carried through the village, the snakes are laid at his feet, around his shoulders and arms, up his legs. Snakes wrap around snakes. Thus, the villagers pass on to their beloved saint all that endangers them. It is their hope, their belief, that he will somehow strike a deal, a deal that will grant them all a better world.
In the United States on March 3, 1891, the Immigration Act of 1891, passed by Congress and signed by President Benjamin Harrison, became law. While Carmine and Cristina were preparing for their journey to Antwerp, this law, an expansion of the 1882 law already on the books, defined what conditions would make an immigrant not only excludable but also deportable – “idiots,” as it was put, the insane, paupers, polygamists, persons who might become a public charge, and those convicted of a crime. If an immigrant was found to be suffering from a “loathsome or dangerous” contagious disease, he would be quarantined until better or sent back to his port of origin at the expense of the shipping company which brought him. If immigrants were caught entering the country illegally, the shipping company would not only have to pay for their return but also pay a $300 fine for each offense.
Just over a month later, on April 9, 1891, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Rejected Immigrants” which begins, “Our new immigration laws will do us no good if we continue to endure with meekness, as we have in the past, the defiant attempts of the steamship lines to unload their human refuse and leave it here.” The editorial cites the case of the Iniziativa – this ship’s name translating to English as “initiative” or “venture” – from which three Italian immigrants who had been refused entry escaped from the ship. Agents of the Florio Line, which operated the Iniziativa, claimed they could not return these passengers or others who had been refused entry because the ship wasn’t returning to Italy. The writer blames the indifference of the officers of the immigrant steamers for the influx to America of “paralytics, beggars, and criminals,” as well as the local and national authorities of several unnamed foreign governments who “have cheerfully connived at the illegal deportation of their human trash to our quite too hospitable shores.” The writer then laments the leniency of our government which fails to punish the steamship lines, leaving America to ultimately accept these “diseased and stiletto-bearing individuals.”
Just four days before, on April 5, a previous editorial in the Times entitled “Sifting Immigrants” takes the position that the murdering of eleven Italians in New Orleans by vigilantes the previous month was the result of Italy’s dumping of these “stiletto-bearing individuals” on America, that if they had not been here, they would not have been murdered. The crime the murdered Italians were accused of committing was the murder of New Orleans Chief of Police David Hennessy on the night of October 15, 1890, when a group of men assassinated him with shotguns on Basin Street. Hennessy collapsed in the street. Those who ran to help him asked him who had done this. The story was that he managed to whisper a single word, “Dagoes.”
The community of New Orleans was outraged. The police rounded up suspects considered likely, all Italian. The newspapers not only in New Orleans but across the country ran editorials about the threat of the Italian Mafia and Italian immigrants in general. Finally, nine men were charged with the murder and tried in February, 1891. The men were presumed guilty by the public and the press, but the defense was able to show that the men had alibis. On March 13, the jury acquitted six of the men and deadlocked on the others. Though acquitted of the murder, all the men were still held in the parish prison on Marais Street on other charges.
Illustration of the rally at the Henry Clay Statue
from Harper's Weekly, 1891.
In all the New Orleans papers the following morning, a call to action appeared: “All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting on Saturday, March 14, at 10 o’clock A.M., at Clay Statue, to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy case. Come prepared for action.” This notice was signed by over sixty-two citizens, some leaders of the movement in favor of immigration reform. Men such as John C. Wickliffe, Walter Denegre, and William S. Parkerson – all signatories of the call to action – addressed the crowd. Parkerson climbed onto the pedestal of the statue of Henry Clay which then stood at the intersection of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue. He began by speaking to the “people of New Orleans,” stating that “when courts fail, the people must act.” He shouted to be heard, “Will every man here follow me and see the murder of Hennessy avenged? Are there men enough here to set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel?”
Walter Denegre was next. While allowing that “perhaps not all of the twelve jurors accepted a bribe, some of them did.” He ended with “Let everyone here now follow us with the intention of doing his full duty.”
The mob storming the prison where the
prisoners are held.
Finally, J.C. Wyckliffe climbed onto the statue to shout, “If such action as the acquittal of these assassins is to be further tolerated, if nothing is done to forcibly portray the disapproval of the public of this infamous verdict, not one man can expect to carry his life safe in the face of the organized assassination that so powerfully exists in our midst as to openly set law and order at defiance.”
The account on March 15th in the Times of what followed would detail how the “miserable Sicilians trembled in terror” in the women's prison where they had been moved to try to fool the mob. The deaths of each of the eleven men – the nine who were tried and two others who weren't – is described:
Gerachi, the closest man, was struck in the back of the head, and his body pitched forward and lay immovable on the stone pavement.
Romero fell to his knees, with his face in his hands, and in that position was shot to death.
Montastero and James Caruso fell together under the fire of a half a dozen guns, the leaden pellets entering their bodies and heads, and the blood gushing from the wounds. . . .
Scoffedi, one of the most villainous of the assassins, dropped like a log when a bullet hit him in the eye. . . .
Pollize, the crazy man, was locked up in a cell upstairs. The doors were flung open and one of the avengers, taking aim, shot him through the body. He was not killed outright and in order to satisfy the people on the outside who were crazy to know what was going on within, he was dragged down the stairs and through the doorway by which the crowd had entered. A rope was provided and tied around his neck and the people pulled him up to the crossbars. Not satisfied that he was dead, a score of men took aim and poured a volley of shot into him, and for several hours the body was left dangling in the air.
And so it went on. When it was done, the crowd carried Parkerson on their shoulders with loud cheering back to the Clay statue before departing. Two days later, on March 17th, in another editorial the Times would make this statement: “There was no longer any question of maintaining public respect for the law, for it was the acquittal of guilty men rather than the lynching of them that brought the law into contempt.”
The Italian community in New Orleans protested as they did in other cities both in America and in Italy. The Italian government protested and threatened to boycott the World Columbian Exposition then under construction in Chicago. There was a rumor the Italian navy was going to bombard cities on the American East Coast. The Times assured “decent and law-abiding Italians” that they “have nothing to fear from the operations even of lynch law in the country. They may suffer by being confounded in the public estimation with indecent and lawless Italians, but this injury they can avert. If the Italians throughout the country had taken pains to express their detestation of the murder of Hennessy and to disclaim all sympathy with his murderers, they would have secured themselves much more effectually against being classed with those murderers than they can now do by expressing indignation over the fate which these men justly incurred.”
From Judge magazine, 1906.
These were the weeks and days which preceded the arrival in New York of Carmine and Cristina with their children Emiddio, Vincenzo, and Maria Assunta. In 1906, after Emiddio’s return to America, when he was twenty-two, the magazine Judge would publish during the height of the Italian immigration a cartoon depicting rats with human heads carrying knives in their mouths climbing onto a dock beneath a flag-holding Uncle Sam. Other “rats” are swimming toward the dock or jumping from a ship named Directly from the Slums of Europe Daily. Many years later, as a man in his prime, Emiddio, thinking of France, would write in his poetry of “la belle mise de la douce paix,” or “the beautiful setting of sweet peace,” and “la protectrice de la liberté,” “the protector of liberty.” For the immigrants going through America's “Golden Door” in 1891, acceptance as Americans would elude them.The “beautiful setting of sweet peace” would come, at least for some, but only after a struggle, and not for decades.
Born in 1875, the Belgian painter Eugeen Van Mieghem grew up in the old port of Antwerp at his parents’ inn across Montevideostraat from the offices of the Red Star Line. A native of the docks, Van Mieghem would make them and their people his subjects. Millions of emigrants, the flotsam left behind by Europe’s crises, would board ships here – Jews from Poland and Russia escaping pogroms, Italians from the Mezzogiorno escaping starvation, disease, and violence at the hands of the brigante, and northern Europeans from Germany, France, and Belgium itself looking for land and opportunity. Van Mieghem would sketch and paint what he saw on the docks, beginning with the great migrations of the last decade of the nineteenth century and continuing into the troubled start of the twentieth, when he documented the desperate flight of the refugees of the Great War.
His people were humbled and tired, holding on to each other, waiting on the docks with their few possessions in straw baskets or tied up in blankets. In one painting, a boy, a ship to the New World at anchor behind him, plays an organetto. In another, a mother holds her baby, her older child clutches her skirt, while her husband, with his back to us, looks out over the harbor and into the future. Beside him, sitting, an elderly woman – the grandmother, perhaps – looks into herself. Van Mieghem painted the plight of these people in somber tones, or he drew them with charcoal, hurriedly, with quick strokes.
Olive grove in the fields below Castel San Vincenzo.
Photograph by the author.
One of Europe’s crises was happening far to Antwerp’s south. In 1891, Southern Italy was still suffering effects from the world depression, sometimes known as The Long Depression, which had begun with the Panic of 1873 in Vienna and spread throughout Western Europe and North America. Beginning in 1888, agriculture was especially hard hit with wheat prices dropping steeply. In the Mezzogiorno, the landowners had compensated by raising rents, the government by increasing local taxes. The contadini, those like Carmine and Cristina, though they might have owned a small patch of land themselves, still would have rented additional fields from the larger landowners. Each day, Carmine and Cristina would have taken a simple lunch, probably no more than bread and a little wine, and walked with other family and friends from San Vincenzo down the slope of Mont Vallone to their fields. The walk might have taken an hour or more. The return to the village in the evening would have been the same. Certainly, they would have grown vegetables in their fields. Perhaps, a field of wheat. The youngest daughter of Carmine and Cristina, Angeline, remembered the orchard. In the fall there would be grapes to harvest. In early winter there would be olives. The family would work their fields until the light was going. Stone huts, mortarless piles of rock stacked in concentric circles in the shape of a beehive, were scattered about the fields for shelter from storms. In many cases these had been in use by generations of ancestors, both in the fields and on the tratturi, the trails used during the year to drive sheep between the alpine valleys of the Apennines across the Rocchetta plain to the winter pastures in Foggia.
It was back-breaking work for all the contadini, and with rising rents and dropping prices, what had been a subsistence living was now no living all. In the evenings, perhaps in the bar over a glass of wine, maybe during La Passeggiata, the stroll about town when the people met, gossiped, and planned their futures, the talk had turned more and more to l’America. Men stood in groups in the piazza recounting how many of their relatives had already left, that there were jobs and money to be made in l’America. The police registry in Antwerp, which kept records of the emigrants who passed through there, had recorded many residents of San Vincenzo. Someone brought up the agent who had been recruiting in the area. By 1891, emigration had become an important business. Agents recruited, booked passages, arranged transportation to the ports. Perhaps, they could all go together. Those who had gone before were in Chicago. They wrote home. They sent money. A great world’s fair was being built there in what had been a muddy swamp. It was to be better than the last one in Paris. There was much work to be done. Who would go? Antonio Carracillo would go, and Antonio Di Silvestro, both fifty-eight. Young Donato Carracillo at eighteen years old would go, and Carmine and Cristina with their three children. Carmine’s first cousin Giovanni Di Julio would go with his wife Rosa Notardonato and their three chidlren. Another young man, Domenico Di Michele, nineteen, would go, as would Donato Colella and Beradino Di Cristofano.
Piazza Umberto today.
Photograph by the author.
Others would decide to go, as well. Some would back out. Then on a day in early April those still resolved gathered in the cool morning air with their belongings in what is now Piazza Umberto, San Vincenzo’s main square. The wives, the mothers who were staying behind, dressed in black in long sleeves and long, black skirts, hugged their husbands or their children. They kissed them. Their faces were distorted by grief and worry, and they hid them behind their hands as they wept. For the elderly, they could not know if they would ever see their loved ones again in this life. For some it was too much, the despair too great. A grandmother collapsed to sit on one of the baskets, her hands to her mouth as she was supported by a granddaughter. A young boy, standing apart from the crowd, screamed for his father, his sadness beyond consolation. A young wife wept to herself as she held her husband, who was leaving her to an unknown future.
A stagecoach at the Stelvio Pass in Northern Italy, 1881.
Public Domain.
Emiddio had just turned seven at the time. At the age of eighty, he would write that in his life he had “traveled by foot, by buggy and horse, by local trains, even by dinghy . . . by fast mail trains – by Southern two side wheels steamboats. By excursion boats [on] the lakes, by ships in the ocean.” According to nineteenth-century road maps of Italy, the roads in Molise were few. The nearest road to San Vincenzo appearing on these maps travelled through Alfedena, twenty kilometers to the north, which then connected up with a main road south to Isernia. From Isernia, another main road went by way of Venafro and Cassino and on through the Liri Valley to Frosinone. A railroad map from 1875 shows a rail line passing through there on its way to Rome. I can’t know exactly how they covered these distances. Probably, when they left San Vincenzo some were on foot, some in a wagon, perhaps, provided by friends or family and trailing behind a mule or a pair of donkeys laden down with the bundles and baskets. When they reached a road, they might then have connected with a diligenza, or stagecoach, the public conveyance of the time, which would have taken them on to Isernia and from there one-hundred kilometers further out of the mountains to Frosinone.
A valley on the way to Frosinone through which
the family would have travelled.
Photo taken by the author from Montecassino.
Once in Rome, another train would have taken them along Italy’s west coast to Genoa. From Genoa, they either went north to Lucerne or west to Nice. If they went north, once they traversed the Alps and arrived in Lucerne, they could have taken different paths to Antwerp – perhaps, to Dijon and on to Nancy, then through the deep, green forests of the Argonne and the Ardennes to Belgium. If they went west, they would have travelled across the foot of the Alps along the Mediterranean through Nice to Marseille. From there the line to Nancy would have taken them north through Provence to Avignon and then Grenoble and then across the wheat fields and vineyards of Champagne to Lorraine. Once in Antwerp, they would have found their way as all the emigrants in Antwerp did at this time to the Red Star Line warehouse in the oldest of Antwerp’s harbors, the Eilandje, on the Scheldt River.
Red Star Line ships alongside Rijn Quay, Antwerp.
Public Domain
Van Mieghem painted the scenes on Montevideostraat, where the emigrants gathered at the Red Star Line offices. He saw them cluttering the sidewalk, standing in groups, leaning on the red brick walls of the Red Star buildings, or sitting on their bundles. He painted the light muted here at this latitude on the North Sea. The emigrants occupied the entire length of the street, which still exists and still dead-ends on the Rijn Quay, where the ships were moored. From these sidewalks, from the cobblestones, the emigrants could see the masts of the ships and believe they had one foot in America. In 1893, the Red Star Line would create a dormitory in its warehouse to shelter the emigrants until their ships sailed, but in 1891, the emigrants stayed in crowded, airless guest houses around the quay. During good weather, they would stay outside as much as possible, even sleeping on the grassy Scheldt dike, as Van Mieghem captured. A medical exam would be conducted on the quay, no matter the weather. A doctor examined each passenger, looking for weakness or lameness, signs of mental illness, signs of infection. Any passenger rejected in New York by the American authorities would be returned at the Red Star Line’s expense. So, this was a careful inspection. There are records of family members failing this inspection and being left behind, cared for by one of the many agencies in Antwerp established to aid the emigrants. In some cases, they might wait for as long as five years before being released to join their families in America.
The SS Rhynland at sea.
From the collection of the author.
The SS Rhynland was built in England in 1879. Part sailing ship, part steamer, it was four hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On this crossing, it had eighteen saloon or first-class passengers, forty-one second-class, and seven hundred, forty-three steerage. The mass of those in steerage would be held behind barriers on the quay until the first- and then the second-class passengers had boarded. The emigrants would then be allowed to board, herded over the gangway on to the ship and directed down steep, almost perpendicular steps to “in-between” decks, as it was called, where a steward directed them to their compartments. They would be struck immediately by the smell of oil and tar, of the sawdust on the floor and the sour dampness of previous voyages. Simple wood partitions running the length of each side of the ship formed the compartments, each with a door identified by a letter of the alphabet – compartments “A” through “N” were forward, “O” through “Z” were aft. Within each compartment were two dozen or so berths in two tiers with their straw mattresses. If there were those who had made the voyage before, they would hurry to claim the upper berths. No one wanted to be in a lower berth beneath a fellow passenger who was seasick.
During the height of the emigration from Europe to America, numerous firsthand exposés were written by journalists posing as steerage passengers. In newspapers both in the United States and abroad, the details of life aboard ship were documented. The ships were often at capacity or near-capacity. As “in-between” decks filled up, the odors accumulated – the onions and garlic packed in the baggage, the salted fish, the cured meats and cheeses brought from home, all these smells mingled with those of the ship and of the unwashed passengers, who in some cases had not been out of their clothes since leaving home.
Carmine and Cristina along with their children were assigned to Compartment V in the aft of the ship. Also assigned to this compartment were Giovanni Di Julio’s wife and children. He, however, was assigned to Compartment B forward. It was not unusual to break up families between compartments. Single women could go into the compartments with families so space had to be made available for them. Single men were in the forward compartments. There were other families in Compartment V. Other Italians were there from regions foreign to the Molisani, also Hungarians, Germans, Austrians. The occupation of most of the single women was listed as “servant,” and there were several of these women in Compartment V – Mary Galinski, for instance, from Austria, and Julianna Ivan and Erszebeth Pörök from Hungary. Cristina would have difficulty with the sounds of these names and the sounds of the languages. Even Mattea Mattiotti, though from Italy, was not Molisani and her dialect was strange.
The Rhynland would cast off into the Scheldt on a day of a waxing moon. Tugs would accompany the ship through the bends of the narrow river. Finally, the river makes a last bend to the west into the broad Western Scheldt. The ship would keep the Dutch coast on its starboard side as it made its way to the mouth of the river and to the North Sea. Continuing west, the Rhynland would now follow the French coast through the English Channel. Perhaps, they came close enough to land to see the port of Calais. They also would have passed close to Cherbourg, which was perhaps the last sight of land for those who were on deck to see it.
Painting of the SS Rhynland under full sail by Antonio Jacobsen, 1890.
The open ocean would bring with it the routines of the crossing – the breakfasts of soup and bread, the dinners of stewed beef and potatoes, all served from kettles and eaten on the long wooden tables between the compartments in the twilight of “in-between” decks, in the light filtering through the portholes. In the beginning, there were not enough places at the tables. People would hurry to be at the front of the line to ensure getting a seat. Those who didn’t make it stood holding their plates and eating the best they could. Later, as seasickness affected more and more, there were always seats available.
There were periods of flat seas and warm afternoons when those from steerage would enjoy their time on the main deck. There they could take in the sunlight and watch the work of the sailors who climbed the shrouds to the yardarms to work the sails. They could find the shade from these sails if it was especially warm. They could play cards with others or sleep in the pure air or just daydream of their future. Often, some passengers would play their musical instruments, their tunes as varied as their languages. Sometimes there would be dancing, which all seemed to understand. Amidships, the second class and saloon cabins stood above the main deck. Off-limits to the emigrants, this area had its own decks for the promenades of the wealthy. The two groups would observe one another, but seldom was there contact, although there is one account in which a few saloon passengers gathered together and for amusement tried to guess the ethnicity of some of those in steerage. The single funnel, gold with a black cap and with a red star on each side, rose above all, trailing black smoke from the coal fires.
At times, the sea was heavy, the swells creating misery for those below decks, especially those who were all the way aft or forward. To the Molisani, seasickness was la miseria. Different cultures had their own remedies. Some tried apples or hard candy. Some had a patent medicine. Some believed in raw onions. Emiddio said that Cristina gave him white vinegar by the spoonsful and that they tried to stay amidships where the ship’s travel from wave crest to trough was less pronounced. The smell below became unbearable. Some would sleep on deck, but by policy the women were not allowed there after dark. The watchmen whose lot it was to enforce this policy sometimes had to chase the women from side to side of the ship before they could corner them. But for the men, they could lie on their backs and look up at the sky. April 24th, halfway through the voyage, the moon was full, its bright light glinting on the crests of waves, washing out the dimmer stars, its face the same here as it was in Germany or Russia or Hungary or high in the Apennines of Molise. I sometimes think of Emiddio lying there on the deck next to Carmine. Hands behind their heads, they contemplate this moon and, each in his own way, the future. For Carmine there must have been great excitement but also great fear. For Emiddio, the great city awaiting them offered adventure. The moon would not set this night until nearly dawn. In my mind, they lay here together, father and son, throughout the night, bathed in this moonlight, each with his own dreams.
In the early morning hours of May 1st, the passengers on deck would sense a change. As the ship sailed to the south of Long Island, though they could not see the land, they could smell it, or rather smell where the land meets the sea. The color of the water had changed subtly, now tinged with green. The emigrants leaned over the bulwarks at the front of the ship, leaning toward the horizon, leaning toward Sandy Hook, the narrow peninsula which forms an extension of the New Jersey coast into New York Bay. This was their first sight of land, their first sight of the New World. For the emigrants, Sandy Hook was the gateway to their new country. Geographically, this was true. But the “Golden Door” had not opened for them yet. It lay at the southern tip of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River near the abandoned Castle Garden. It was known as the Barge Office.
La Presentosa in silver from Abruzzo.
Photograph by the author.
The details of the wedding of my great-grandparents are no longer in living memory. No doubt, Emiddio would have heard stories through the years. Certainly, Cristina would have spoken of the event with her daughters. Perhaps, she showed them la presentosa. Maybe she pulled it from a drawer where she kept such keepsakes, unwrapping the tissue or handkerchief which enclosed it and displaying it for the girls in the palm of her hand, this most traditional of wedding gifts from the groom’s family, the gold or silver many-pointed star with the lovers’ hearts at its center.
A woman of Molise in
traditional wedding costume.
From Peasant Art in Italy
(1913) by Charles Holme.
Public domain.
She would have told them of being dressed by her matrons of honor – all would have been matrons, for unmarried women or girls weren’t allowed to attend. She would tell of how they first pulled over her head the white linen chemise, which was trimmed with lace from L’Aquila to the north, followed by the bodice, the comodino, worn like a vest, woven in black in the village of Pescocostanzo or in Scanno, embroidered with gold thread and trimmed with sky-blue ribbon. Next, the long sleeves, also embroidered in gold, joined to the comodino. The pleated wool skirt, the casacca, would then be wrapped around her by her matrons. It, too, would have gold embroidery and ribbon at its hem, which almost touched the floor. Over the skirt, the mantera would be added like an apron, folded over at the waist to display the intricate embroidery. Gold chains, a rosary, and finally la presentosa would go around her neck. After gold earrings, the headdress known as a tovaglia, made of red cloth, embroidered and with lace around its edges, would be placed on her head, folded and pinned to fall to her shoulders. Her matrons, dressed similarly to confuse evil spirits, would stand back and look at her. Never again in her life would Cristina enjoy such attention, such admiration.
Wildflowers in the Valle Fiorita.
Photograph by the author.
It was 1883 and May in the Apennines, a time of bright, crisp air, of trees leafing out, and of wildflowers in the valleys, especially in the high Valle Fiorita in the mountains above Pizzone, where there would still be late patches of snow, broken through by tufts of new grass and the occasional purple crocus. The melting snow fed icy streams, which crossed the valley floor, pooling in the low spots, the surface of the pools themselves white with wildflowers. Cristina would be the second of the daughters of Pasquale and Felicita to marry. Her older sister Francesca had married two years before and now had a son.
A street in Pizzone.
Photograph by the author.
It was a Sunday, domenica, the day which brings the best luck. The banns would have been read after Mass the Sunday two weeks before in the tiny piazza outside the door of San Nicola, as was the custom. Now, the day of the wedding, Cristina’s family would have gathered mid-afternoon at her parent’s house – all would be there, including grandparents and godparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. They would spill out into the narrow street and wait for the groom and his family to arrive from San Vincenzo. Carmine, his parents, Michele and Angelamaria, and other family members would join the growing crowd to begin the procession to the church.
A street in Pizzone.
Photograph by the author.
The wedding party would proceed through Pizzone’s streets, some little more than alleys that in winter months fill up with snow, most between the houses of neighbors, some of whom stood in their doorways or peered down from their balconies. Perhaps, a shower of wheat, of salt, even crumbs of bread might be tossed at the couple to represent abundance, fertility, and good luck. In the fields or working the orchard or tending the few sheep belonging to the family, Cristina would have worn sandals with over-long laces to wrap around and hold up the white cotton wrappings used to protect her ankles and lower legs from stubble and branches and to provide warmth. But today, she would have worn shoes, which during the procession would have felt awkward to her, slippery even when going up the steep hills on the cobblestones.
The campanile of San Nicola.
Photograph by the author.
They would round a final corner and see the campanile of San Nicola and then the front door of the church standing open. Perhaps, a blue ribbon and bow decorated the lintel, the church adorned with flowers from the valley. Carmine and Cristina would kneel before the priest and beneath the cool arches of San Nicola. They would kneel in the same spot where other couples before them had knelt together for over five-hundred years, and they would make their vows.
They would return to the home where Cristina was born and lived these last eighteen years. The family and close friends would go inside for dinner while others gathered outside. A lamb would have been roasted over coals. There also would have been cured meats, vegetable dishes, and pastas, as well as pastries and cakes. Food and drink would have been passed to those outside – frothy red wine and liquors flavored with sugar and herbs such as basil and fennel. Cristina would pass out to all those attending the sugared almonds known as bomboniere to take home with them. A musican playing a local bagpipe known as a zampogna and made in the neighboring village of Scapoli would dominate his fellow musicians on the organetto – similar to a concertina – maybe a tambourine, known as a tamburello, and the chitarrabattente, or “beating” guitar, used for pounding out the rhythms. The spallata molisana, the tarantella, both dances descendents of the saltarello which went back to the Romans, would echo across the surrounding mountains as twilight set in. The spallata, which literally means “shove with the shoulder,” was among the most popular and was traditional at weddings here in Molise and in Abruzzo just to the north and in all of the areas once belonging to the Samnite people. The party would last until the sky lightened above the mountains as dawn approached. The guests gradually would wander home, arm in arm, to sleep.
In the coming days, Cristina and Carmine would join his parents on Via Centrale in San Vincenzo. Almost immediately, she would be pregnant with Emiddio. The coming year would be difficult. A catastrophic earthquake centered in the Gulf of Naples would cause great damage across southern Italy. And then in 1884, a cholera epidemic in the months after Emiddio’s birth would claim the lives of thousands. Carmine and Cristina now owned a little land. Two other children followed: another son, Vincenzo, in 1886, and a daughter, Maria Assunta, in 1887. For now, Fortuna was kind. At least, they were getting by. But soon they would take a chance, convinced that a better future awaited them. The lure of l’America was becoming irresistible for many Molisani and for Italians in general. Soon, Cristina and Carmine would follow others from their villages and travel first to France and then to the great port of Antwerp. A ship of the Red Star Line, the SS Rhynland, awaited them there.
* * *
Below are videos of the dances and music referred to above.
