Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (2 page)

Part Three, though, is just one part of the larger story spanning five generations over nearly 100 years. In its breadth, this is a story about immigrants who struggle to assimilate upon their arrival in America, who acquire most of the trappings of the American dream, and who then observe how their own children reinterpret what it means to be an American. This is a story about how the meaning of America changes over time—and how America means different things to different people.

But this is also a story about coming back together. This is a story about how people from within and across generations can look beyond their differences to discover, from one another, unexpected lessons to pass down to the next generation of children, who will presumably refine those lessons further and redefine America yet again. This is a story about what has endured in America and about what, I hope, will persevere.

Acknowledgments

I never realized how courageous the people in my family were until they shared their stories for this book. Those in the extended family of relatives and friends, whose names appear within these pages, have left me both honored and humbled.

My literary agents, Rosalie Grace Heacock Thompson and Catt LeBaigue, of the Heacock Literary Agency, graced this effort with their sage advice, indefatigable optimism, and valiant commitment to uplift humanity. My editor, Chandra Garber, imparted wise and transformative insights, teaching me that something good enough for journalism is not necessarily beautiful enough for art.

Historian Art Fischbeck and archivist Terry Harrison, of Iowa’s Mason City Public Library, embodied the ideals of selfless public servants in helping me to paint an honest portrait of a community that vanished long ago. Two terrific teams of librarians—one at the American Family Immigration History Center on Ellis Island and the other at the Los Angeles Regional Family History Center—also helped to document the truthfulness of the history portrayed here.

By offering literary and moral support over the course of ten years, these people have brought out the best in me in writing this book: Bill Mejia (who read more drafts than did anyone else), Laura and Paul Zakaras, Doug Aguiar, Robert Bulanadi, Bruce Burke, Ron Burke, María Victoria Cárdenas, John Faucher, Damon Fortier, Jane Larson, Eileen and Joe La Russo, Marlynn Lloyd, Vivian Perry, Anders Price, Carl Pritzkat, Julie Rosenberg, Steven Seizer, Gloria and Dominic Serafano, Nelda Sunday, and Alice Waugh.

PART ONE: NEWCOMERS

1. The Great War

They longed for a better life but had only one option left. With eyes restless from their journey, Nicola Di Gregorio and Vincenzo Marzola beheld a vast and clamorous freight train as it slowed to nearly a stall in an eastern Pennsylvania field in July 1902. Snaking toward them, the mass of railcars jostled and groaned like a great body willing to neither join nor die.

Nicola pointed to one of the boxcars crawling in their direction from about 200 yards off. The door in the middle of the boxcar had been slid wipe open, leaving maximum room for error. “I go first,” Nicola instructed in Italian as he sidled toward the oncoming car. He then hollered above the din: “You stay there. Watch how I do it. Then I’ll help you.”

Vincenzo nodded, making a quick sign of the cross.

Nicola’s wary brown eyes tried to gauge the right moment. His heart pounding, he took several deep breaths and bent his knees in anticipation. As the boxcar rumbled within 20 yards of him, he raced through the field toward the moving target of the open door, aiming to intersect it at a right angle. When he came within a yard of the door, he sprang from the earth, hurled himself through the opening, and landed on his abdomen onto the platform, using momentum to roll the rest of his body inside. “Hurry!” he stood up and shouted.

Vincenzo followed suit. He raced toward the moving target, leapt off the ground, dove through the opening, and landed on his abdomen. But momentum failed to propel him further, leaving his legs to dangle over the edge of the boxcar, between its grinding wheels.

Nicola grabbed the wrists of Vincenzo and lurched backwards, dragging him the rest of the way inside. Nicola then knelt on one knee to catch his breath.

They made it. Grinning at each other, they laughed and sighed in relief.

But there were already two other hobos in the boxcar. They had left the door open for ventilation. They were there first, and they didn’t want anyone else there, as indicated by the cold glances thrown at the newcomers.

The train picked up steam, the horn wailing in the distance.

Nicola and Vincenzo moved toward the corner of the boxcar opposite the other hobos and sat down. Nicola uttered something in Italian, unintelligible to the others.

The earlier arrivals mumbled something to each other, too. They stood up, strutted across the platform, and confronted the newcomers, towering over them. “Get your greasy asses outta here, you damn dirty dagos!” one of the native hobos cursed.

“
Okay, okay,” Nicola put up his hands. “We go,” he spoke in English. “At the next station.”

“
Get out
now
!” the other native shouted. “Cantcha understand?” he jeered.

Nicola arose to face the men. But before he could find his equilibrium, they shoved him to within a foot of the open door. “Now!” they yelled above the accelerating chugs of the locomotive.

Nicola regained his footing. “We go at the next station,” he held his ground.

Vincenzo stood up to intervene, but the jerking train knocked him to the floor, where he heard a bloodcurdling scream. By the time he looked up, Nicola was gone.

“
Musta stumbled,” one of the standing hobos muttered to the other.

Vincenzo ran toward the open door, bracing himself against the inside edge, and caught a glimpse of something that caused him to recoil in horror. Nicola, having slipped or been shoved sideways off the surging beast as if he were excess skin being shed, had struck his head on a rail and been decapitated by the charging wheels, his skull crushed beneath the bowels of the train and his body ejected away from the tracks.

Nicola was a 43-year-old peasant farmer when he had arrived in America from Italy aboard the SS.
Patria
on April 21, 1902. He had left his wife, Angelade Mergiota, and their seven children in the isolated Abruzzi village of Farindola. He and Vincenzo had traveled together from the village, hoping to find better work in America and to bring the earnings home to their families. The two men, both in their forties, had originally been accompanied by two other men from the village, both in their twenties.

There was so much excitement and promise at the start, as the four men rested their sea-weary eyes upon the uplifting gaze of the Statue of Liberty and disembarked at Ellis Island that spring day, each holding $10 and innumerable dreams. None of the four had ever been to America, and none was joining a relative. The final destination for all of them was supposed to be New York. Filled with hope upon sight of the great city, they knew that all they needed to do was to ride the ferry from Ellis Island across the Hudson River, arrive among the impressive buildings on the other side, and hunt for work in Little Italy, which awaited them smack in the middle of Lower Manhattan. Little Italy would be the launch pad of their American dreams.

Within two months, however, the dreams turned to nightmares for Nicola and Vincenzo. Like most Italian migrants of their day, they were illiterate and mostly unskilled. But unlike most Italian migrants of their day, Nicola and Vincenzo were also considered to be old. Their younger companions, in contrast, could also read and write in Italian. The four men discovered that there were many opportunities in Little Italy for men from Italy who were literate and in their twenties, but there were few opportunities in Little Italy for men from Italy who were illiterate and in their forties. Nicola also tried but failed to find work as a butcher in New York City’s meatpacking district.

By the end of June 1902, Nicola and Vincenzo found themselves penniless. Resigned to the disappointment of New York City, they decided to try their luck in Philadelphia, where others from Farindola had settled. The two younger men gave Nicola and Vincenzo money for food, but they still didn’t have enough money for the train. And so in early July 1902, ten weeks after their arrival in America, Nicola and Vincenzo were riding the rails on their way to Philadelphia, still looking for work.

The morning after the gruesome incident, Vincenzo returned to the eastern Pennsylvania field, having caught another freight train in the opposite direction. He walked along the tracks toward the area where he believed that he had glimpsed the mutilated corpse of his friend, intending to dig a grave and to erect a cross of wooden branches. But when Vincenzo arrived at what he thought was the most likely spot, he saw no sign of the body. He paced back and forth between the railroad ties and the berm alongside the tracks, his alarm growing. It seemed that all traces of his friend had been erased from the earth. Compounding the anxiety as he continued to follow the tracks, Vincenzo encountered so many fields, forests, meadows, twists, and curves along the route zigzagging through that part of eastern Pennsylvania that he could not be certain where the body might have fallen. Everything in his mind became cloaked in a darkness deeper than that of the surrounding forest.

He walked for hours in one direction, turned around, and walked for twice as many hours in the other direction, finding no evidence of Nicola alongside any stretch of track. Vincenzo dripped with sweat, not only because of the summer heat but also because of the burning realization that he would need to inform the family of not just one tragedy but two, both of which he had failed to prevent. He knew that it was his duty to give Nicola at least a respectful burial, but now even that gesture was in jeopardy. As the sun fell in the western sky, the weight of a family’s mourning bore down upon Vincenzo. “How could this be happening?” he kept thinking of Farindola and of being alone amid a hostile wilderness. “How could he just disappear?”

When Vincenzo came upon a railroad station, he tried to ask people about anyone who might have seen a body, but nobody paid him much attention, because he spoke only in Italian and was dressed like a hobo, his coat rumpled and his pants tattered. People barely acknowledged him. As dusk descended, he wandered in a daze along the railroad tracks heading north, awaiting the next chance to hop a freight train toward New York, where he would ask the others from Farindola to help him return to the village for good.

In the early autumn of 1902, Vincenzo trod the dusty footpath leading to Farindola, a bindle of belongings slung over his shoulder and a beard more grizzled than people in the village would have remembered. His voyage to America and back had been six of the most harrowing months of his 42 years of life, and he dreaded now bringing the horror home to the rest of the village. He practiced his words in his mind and prepared himself to avoid questions from anyone until he could speak to the family first.

As he proceeded through the wheat fields, with his eyes fixed upon the distant dwelling of Angelade Mergiota and her seven children at the edge of the village, people in the surrounding fields recognized him, wondered why he was alone, and put their chores aside. Everyone in Farindola had known everyone in the group of four who had set out together for America. Sensing that something must have been wrong, the villagers followed Vincenzo but did not accost him, forming a solemn procession in his wake and allowing him to guide them where he needed to go.

One of those joining the spontaneous vigil was Nicola’s oldest son, a 16-year-old boy named Serafino, who had dropped out of school in the third grade to tend the fields. As Serafino advanced alongside the rest of the villagers toward the door of his own home, he started to breathe heavily. His upper lip began to quiver, exhibiting a faint moustache that portended the end of his youth.

Moments after Vincenzo entered the home, Serafino heard the anguished cries of his mother from within. As he pushed himself through the crowd toward the door, the others let him pass, tipping their foreheads.

“
Serafino!” Angelade sobbed upon the sight of him, reaching out to clutch him.

“
Mama!” he broke down in her arms as she broke down in his.

“
È mort’!”
she told her son that his father was dead.

Serafino grimaced, swinging his head from side to side.

“
Anch’è perdut’!”
she could barely mouth the words. “He’s also lost!”

Those were words that jarred Serafino, impeding his mourning. He understood death, but he could not understand how someone could be misplaced in death, tossed aside as if a human presence on earth meant nothing. Serafino had lived his entire life in the village, where keeping in touch with everyone was as natural as tilling the soil and where tending the tombstones and gravesites of loved ones kept them in touch as well. Those gravesites were not places of death; they were places that kept the dead alive as part of the village. They were permanent places for people who were visited—people with whom discussions were held and from whom wisdom was received. In Farindola, the physical and spiritual connections among people were both as palpable as the earth, and the gravesites preserved a space for the living and the dead to commune. To hear that the body of his father had been lost offended Serafino to the core, cutting so deeply as if to slash his soul. It was something that Serafino could not abide, not then. He had little knowledge of the world beyond Farindola, but he was determined to do right by his father, no matter how far the journey or how long it might take. Serafino knew that he could never see his father again, but the 16-year-old boy needed to simply
be
with his father again. To pray at his side, seek his guidance, and listen for his reply. To know that he was not forever lost in a foreign land, his final resting place beyond reach of the ones he loved. To confirm that he was not some kind of abandoned soul but that he was indeed at peace. And to pay him the respect and dignity that he deserved.