GUALTIERI-SICAMINO AND THE SQUADRITO FAMILY
It was a rare morning when we got out of our ill-smelling second-class
compartment at Reggio di Calabrie, and strolled down in the bright
sunlight to the steamer lying at the makeshift dock ready to ferry
passengers over to Messina.
We were bound at last for the mountain village of Gualtieri-Sicamino,
where lived Antonio Squadrito’s family, and as we contemplated the
island across the straits it seemed that they must live in a very
Elysium indeed.
A cool wind swept down from the north, barely ruffling the wonderfully
colored water of the six-mile-wide channel; English colliers were
ploughing up “light” from the south; scores of boats fishing for
sardines were in sight; directly opposite was Messina, with its
sickle-shaped arm that protects its harbor; and against the abrupt
purple hills the creamy white houses of the town piled themselves up for
more than a hundred feet in places. In the grand distance to the south
lay the huge shape of Mount Ætna, the crater appearing like a bite out
of the skyline.
As the steamer neared the shore, we could see that to the south of the
city extended miles of fruit orchards very thickly set, and to the north
an excellent road ran out to the Point of Faro, where rose the light
that marks the entrance to the Straits of Messina.
As we entered the harbor, steaming in close by the forts, and so near to
the water-front street that we could read the shop signs, we were
interested to observe a large steamer lying at anchor taking on
emigrants, who were being brought from the quay in rowboat loads. We
could see a large group in and about the offices of the La Veloce Line,
and everywhere along the water front great posters announcing the
departures of emigrant ships, for the United States for the most part,
though some were for Australia and some for South America. Those for
Australia were the ships that sail from Brindisi and have their
principal patronage from the Adriatic coast villages.
The posters were the same, and the general character of
emigrant-departure bustle the same, that we had seen in the Boot, but
over Messina there seemed to be a spell of greater prosperity and
activity than over any of the other southern Italian towns. The streets
were strikingly clean. The people walked almost as rapidly as Americans.
The pretentiousness of Naples and Rome was missing. Business houses
seemed to be built and used for business houses only. On the water front
three American emblems were visible,—one over the door of the consulate
where I knew Mr. Charles M. Caughey of Baltimore to preside, and the
other two over wide-open doors decorated with huge white signs “AMERICAN
BAR.”
I learned later that the two wine-shops where they really can set out a
good dry cocktail and a standard gin rickey are owned, one by a father
and the other by his son. The father emigrated to New York about the
time of the Civil War, and according to reports boasts of having jumped
the bounty three times, and amassed a fortune in the saloon business in
New York. The son is also keeping bar, because it is the only thing he
knows how to do, and is waiting for his father to die, when I fancy
there will be one less American flag on the water front of Messina. Both
father and son are American citizens, and are much in demand with the
emigrants; and from all I could gather they and their operations could
be very well dispensed with.
We stopped in Messina only long enough to get fed, freshened, and in
some small degree rehabilitated, and then took train for
Gualtieri-Sicamino, intending to use that place as a base of
observations in Sicily.
Having heard from Italians of the north that the people of southern
Italy were for the most part low-browed swine, and having found the
people in the Boot to be decent, kind-hearted and hard-working, though
ignorant and poor, we were prepared to doubt the Sicilians to be the
bloodthirsty, stiletto-using banditti, such as they are popularly
supposed to typify. It was a real gratification to find the first
representatives we met to be of a thoroughly desirable type _considered
from the standpoint of good raw material for a great growing nation_.
Nor did we have occasion thereafter to change our first estimates.
As our train roared through the tunnels and toiled around the bold faces
of the mountains the greater portion of that mid-afternoon, we were
talking anxiously of what Gualtieri must be like, for it was set down in
the books as a town of 5,000 people, and we feared that it would be much
too large a community to yield the typical country family such as we had
found made up the great mass of Italian emigrants. Soon we left the
heights and the narrow defiles, and came down to the sea in plain view
of the island volcano Stromboli, belching great volumes of vapor into
the azure dome, and finally pulled up at Santa Lucia, bracketed in the
time-table as the station of the town of Gualtieri. When we stepped out
of the compartment the only building near at hand was the square, squat,
stuccoed station, while a few houses straggled away in the distance. We
were for climbing aboard again, but the guards were calling “Santa
Lucia-Gualtieri-Sicamino, Pagia, San Filippo,” and even as we hesitated
the _capo_ blew his horn and the train crawled away towards Milazzo, in
view on the far blue cape, and left us standing there.
To the north was the blue-green sea close at hand, to the east and west
the bold knees of the mountains coming out to the water line, to the
south the hills piled one on another, broken by twisting valleys. In the
late afternoon sunlight, falling athwart the inland slopes, I could see
how they were terraced like gardens in order to allow them to be
cultivated and the terraces ran up to great heights. Certainly there was
nothing about us to make us think we had come to a too city-like
community for our experiment. Many, many miles away on heights we could
see some white houses in clustering villages, but if there was a town of
five thousand people lying about somewhere it was rather artfully
concealed.
As I surrendered our tickets to the _capo di stazione_ I said:—
“Is this the station for Gualtieri-Sicamino?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, where is the town?”
“You go along this road.”
He pointed to a narrow wagon road running along the tracks for a short
distance, then winding into the heart of the hills. It was two inches
deep with dust, and the sun beat down on it with great fervor. In
addition to our being encumbered with the heavy camera, and one
carefully packed valise, I realized that it was about 110° Fahrenheit on
that bit of the king’s highway.
“How far is it to the town?”
“Eleven kilometers, sir.” (Seven miles and more!)
“I—I—suppose I can hire a carriage hereabouts,” I said,—a little
faintly, I fear.
“No, there is no cart around here now.”
“How about a donkey or two?”
The station-master swept the surrounding country with hand-shaded eyes
and shook his head deprecatingly.
“No, all that I can see are carrying loads of grapes.”
Seven miles’ tramp in that dust and sun with our luggage, which
contained photographic things too precious to leave out of our sight!
Half a mile from the station we passed three women going along in a sort
of dog-trot with great baskets of figs, just picked, on their heads, a
rolled-up bit of cloth between head and basket.
“I think I have the point of view of _those_ women,” said my wife’s
voice from the pillar of dust that surrounded and hid her as the salt
did Mrs. Lot.
In a short time a farmer who had been on our train overtook us. He was
carrying a heavy sack of things the neighbors had commissioned him to
buy in Messina, and in one hand he bore two salt cod, still dripping
with brine. Later I learned that salt fish are a delicacy in Sicily and
that the south of Europe is one of the best markets for Gloucester
fishermen. My imperfect Italian caught his ear at once, and when he
learned that my native tongue was English he demanded eagerly whether I
had been in America or not; and when I answered in the affirmative he
said I must excuse him, but were we not the friends that rich young
Antonio Squadrito was expecting? Reluctantly enough I said we were, for
my parting words with young Squadrito on leaving the _Lahn_ were that he
should keep our coming quiet and say nothing as to our nationality.
There was very little now in our appearance or conduct to show we were
Americans, and all through our travels we took refuge in the wide
disparity of North of Italy dialects from the Sicilian, and those
persons who did not think us Milanese or Turinese knew we must be French
or Spanish—except in Gualtieri. There Antonio had let the cat out of the
bag. As a result the whole town had been in a state of exalted
expectancy for weeks. The people had a _carreta_, one of the open,
springless mule carts, trimmed and decorated ready to be sent to meet
us, and in fact our arrival was to be a public festival, but there was
one slip—I had not sent Antonio a letter or telegram, and so we plodded
on in the dust unmet and unwelcomed.
The farmer announced himself as our friend and said he would guide us
straight to the Squadrito house, for he had a cousin in America, close
to New York,—in Cincinnati in fact,—and, with the blessing of the Holy
Mother, if his wife ever got well enough, he was going there too, taking
her and the family.
We might have been a traveling circus or an army with banners. Of every
five people we met, two at least turned to escort us back to the town,
while the news of our arrival was shouted to the inmates of every house
we passed and to the hundreds of men, women and children who were
toiling in the fields. We overtook a flock of sheep being driven two
miles to water, and soon we formed the van of the most picturesque
cavalcade imaginable—men, women, sheep, babies, donkeys and goats. At a
distance the country looked sparsely settled. Close at hand we found
that it veritably swarmed with life, for the average population is 2,500
souls to the square mile.
The hills shut out the sun; a cool breeze sprang up; the boys gathered
fresh figs for us from the wayside trees, grapes from vineyards as we
passed, blackberries from bush-grown stone-heaps, apples, pears, plums
and _Ficus indicus_, the thorn-covered, mango-shaped golden-yellow fruit
which grows on the edge of the thick leaves of the cactus hedges of
Sicily, and forms a very important and staple article of food with the
poor. There is a Sicilian proverb which says: “No matter how dire the
misfortune, there are fico-d’indias.”
Finally, as we turned a sharp corner in the road, we beheld the town,
lit by the last rays of the sun filtering through a defile in the hills;
and, weary, hot and dusty as we were, something akin to relief and
soothing satisfaction stole over us as we saw that it and the country
about was typical of all we had seen in the other provinces of southern
Italy.
Gualtieri-Sicamino is a mass of stone-built, plaster-covered houses with
a uniformity of architecture which hardly allows one to distinguish
public buildings, stores or churches from private houses, and the whole
is piled up against the face of a lofty hill. Nearly all villages in
southern Italy are on the hilltops or the hill slopes, so that, as a
Roman wrote nearly two thousand years ago, “the land that can be
cultivated with ease should not be cumbered with habitations.” The
general plan was identical with that of dozens of other villages we had
visited: a street or two circling the base of the hill, one or two tiny
squares, bare as new-laid eggs, then a succession of zigzag ways towards
the top of the hill: ways,—they are not streets, because in some places
they are not more than three feet wide, and one third of the way the
ascent is so sharp that stone steps are used. The village is much as it
was eight hundred years ago. Below its edge is the 200–foot ribbon of
sand and shale, strongly walled in along its whole length from the sea
to the heart of the mountains, the then dry _torrente_, or river bed.
Below us lay Gualtieri, with its white walls and dark tiled roofs, a
rose-haze over it from the sinking sun, embowered in the clustering
hills dark green with vineyards, olive and lemon orchards, the white
belt of the _torrente_ below and radiating ribbon footpaths along which
came pannier-laden donkeys; little flocks of milk-goats;
stoop-shouldered men bearing their long-bladed hoes and spear-shaped
spades; erect women with brilliant-colored skirts, scarfs or kerchiefs,
water-jars, baskets, panniers or bundles on their heads.
Our little procession wound down to the bridge, which looked almost
Syracusan, it is so old, and across into the “square,” on one side of
which is the principal church, and on the other the municipal offices.
The description sounds well enough; but the church is a low, squat
building with a small tower in which reposes a cracked bell and a noisy
clock, while the “municipal offices” are two rooms on the second floor
of a merchant’s combined store and home; the square is possibly sixty by
one hundred feet, the largest open space in the community. In all the
town there is not a street over twelve feet broad, and some would
measure four or three. As we wound out of the square into one of these
narrow ways and heard voices proclaiming on every hand that “Antonio’s
Americans” had arrived, all fears that Gualtieri was too urban, and not
a true type of the rural districts which send the emigrants, forever
vanished from our minds.
[Illustration: The Messenger—The Guide—The House of the Squadritos—The
Town (Gualtieri)]
Suddenly, in the narrowest part of the way in which we were, I saw over
the door of a small hole-like room in the wall:
BOTTEGA
DI
NICOLA SQUADRITO,
and, seeing two boys at work with a small anvil and hand-drill, knew
that this was the blacksmith shop of Antonio’s younger brother. Two
doors beyond, a kindly old face appeared at the door an instant, our
procession set up a shout, and something told me this was Antonio’s
mother. We were ushered into a large, cool, windowless room with a
red-tiled floor and bare, white walls, along which were rows and rows of
hand-made rush-bottomed chairs. There must have been forty of them, and
it seemed to augur well for the size of the family; but we learned later
that the chairs stood there ready for the throng of neighbors who came
nightly to hear Antonio tell of the marvels of America and to laugh over
his prodigious yarns of buildings twenty stories high. Nightly they
would shake their heads and laugh, and then Antonio would say: “Just
wait till my American friends come, and you can ask _them_.”
Poor Mrs. Squadrito was almost beside herself. Our sudden descent upon
her, the absence of all other members of the family in the vineyard east
of town, the highly excited crowd which was pushing its way into the
doors behind us, were too much for her, and she hastened to show us into
an upper room—Antonio’s room, we could see at a glance—and to bar out
the crowd.
In ten seconds she had brought a flask of fine old Marsala, in thirty
more a plate of sugared cakes, in fifty a heaping basket of several
sorts of grapes, fresh figs, pears, apples, etc., and it was with
difficulty she could be restrained from bringing more. Swift-footed
small boys had sped to bring Antonio and others of the family. Their
number is so large that, unless the individuals are properly identified
the reader may get them confused. At this point in the narrative Antonio
and his father, being home on a visit, are to be subtracted from the
portion in America. Giuseppe, twenty-nine years of age, Carlino,
twenty-two, and Tomasino, fourteen, are in charge of the barber shop in
Stonington. The total is father and mother, ten children, one
daughter-in-law and one grandchild; and the nine in Italy, besides
Antonio and his father, are as follows:
Giovanina, the oldest daughter, is twenty-eight, and a lovable girl. For
some years she was rather frail, and her marriage with her soldier lover
was deferred. He decided to stay in the army for another term, and he
has been in the service fourteen years. In one year more he is to be
discharged with a life pension, and Giovanina thinks that then the long,
romantic dream of her life will come true. I have often looked at her
face, sweet by reason of the soul that shines through its mask of flesh
already beginning to fade, and have wondered if there was not a great
disappointment awaiting her at the crest of the hill.
Next in the family comes Maria, a bright-eyed girl of twenty-three, wild
with eagerness to go to America.
Carlino, I have said, is already in America, and next younger than he is
Nicola, the blacksmith, with a shop in which he does really wonderful
things with his hands. One day, for instance, he made a trunk lock with
four tumblers, all parts from raw metal, which was truly a marvel of
handicraft.
Vincenzo is a half-grown boy, merry, tuneful and irresponsible.
Giovanni, Jr., and Tono are ten, eight and six years of age
respectively, and are boys of the most thoroughly boyish type, only that
they have early learned the great lesson of southern Italy that “he who
eats must toil.”
The most interesting character of all is the mother, now fifty-four
years of age, a woman of most kindly heart. Her hands are gnarled and
knotted with toil. In her ears are heavy gold earrings with antique
coral centres. Once they belonged to her grandmother, and some day they
will descend to Caterina, her first granddaughter, the child of Giuseppe
and his wife Camela. The wife, who is a plain, hearty woman, can
scarcely wait for the day when she reaches New York. Tears of joy rise
in her eyes at the very mention of her husband’s name. Little Caterina,
or Ina, is but five, and is the pet of all.
But here the family and half the neighborhood come trooping up the
stairs, escorting Antonio, who, since his arrival, had been treated like
a king, and now he welcomed us royally and we were dragged into a
perfect maelstrom of introductions to cousins and friends, to emerge a
trifle confused as to relationships and names.
When we had removed some of the grime of our tramp and displayed the
mysteries of our kodak to the throng, which could not contain its
impatience concerning the black box and rolls of films, we were taken on
a twilight walk in the little plot of vineyard ground which Antonio had
bought three years before, east of the town.
The ostensible object of the walk was to show the _town_ to us, but the
real one, as we soon understood, was to show _us_ to the town. My wife
walked with Antonio and his father; Carmelo Merlino, the shoemaker and
steamship agent, took my arm, and the people who could crowd into the
narrow street, formed a procession behind us.
From that time on we lived in procession. Whatever we did, big or
little, was done in procession. Did I desire to take a photograph of the
town in the late afternoon from the hill opposite, five hundred
inhabitants came to my help. If my wife went to the public laundry with
the women, you would have thought the festival of the patron saint of
laundries was in celebration. Did I go forth to the fields with the men
at dawn, there was a centurion’s host to witness.
On our return from the garden it was after six o’clock, perhaps near
seven, and we found many people waiting to see us, and in the next half
hour the neighborhood called. Family after family poured in, all dressed
in Sunday attire, and as we sat in the large second-floor room of the
Squadritos’ house the entire apartment was thronged to suffocation,
while in the street outside there were people enough to fill a circus
tent.
We had had an abundance of fruit, but were not averse to a little
dinner, yet none appeared to be forthcoming. Unsubstantial as it was to
us, all that we had to say was meat and drink to the people. Rapt in
excitement they stood listening to the stories of the land of their
heart’s desire, and no thought of food disturbed them. At seven o’clock
my wife had told all that could be told of dresses, manners and customs
in America. At eight o’clock I concluded an impromptu lecture on the
topic of American liberty; still no dinner. At nine o’clock my wife had
answered the last of the questions on the cost of groceries, rent and
clothes, but no one mentioned dinner. At 9:30 I had described with
minuteness what factories and mills were like, and my wife was
expressing her liking for Italian dishes. At ten (having lunched at
eleven o’clock that morning) we both showed signs of faintness, but
still talked on. At eleven all the children were asleep on the floor or
in their mothers’ arms, my wife seemed dead of fatigue, and my own
exhaustion was complete, when something broke the spell and Mrs.
Squadrito suddenly threw up her hands with a pious ejaculation and
darted up-stairs. In ten minutes we were seated at a most delightful
supper, including a heaping dish of boiled snails. The whole family had
forgotten in the excitement that neither they nor we had dined, but they
certainly made up for the oversight.
In this house, as in most others, the top floor was used for the
dining-room and kitchen. The kitchen was in one corner—a sort of low
altar of stone and plaster, with a hollow in the centre for charcoal. As
some American architects have learned, cooking done on the top floor
neither scents up nor heats the house.
We sat chatting about the table until the cracked bell in the tower of
the church in the square struck one, then my wife and I sought the
repose and comfort of the big, high-set bed of the guest-room.
It was a strange sound which awoke me. Paradoxically, it was something
very familiar. Clear and sweet, very distinct in the air of the early
morning, a boy’s voice high up in the terraced vineyards on the slope
before the town was singing:
“Who was it called them down?
’Twas Mister Dooley, brave Mister Dooley,
The finest man this country ever knew;
Diplomatic,
Democratic,
Oh! Mister Dooley—ooley—ooh.”
Then there broke forth the chatter of men, women and children who were
gathering grapes, and had stopped to listen to an American song. The boy
had been in America two years, his father had contracted consumption
working in the New York subway, and the family had returned that he
might recover in the balmy air of Sicily. One day the boy told me that
as soon as he was big enough (he is eight years old) he was going to run
away and go to America, because he could make more money selling papers
after school than he could working all day in the fields in Gualtieri,
and here he “never had no time for no fun.”
The spirit of this incident is the spirit which to-day stirs all Italy,
all Greece, all Syria, all Hungary and Roumania, and has spread deep
into the hearts of the people of the whole of southern Europe. The eyes
of the poor are turned with longing fancy to “New York.” That is the
magic word everywhere. The sound of it brings light to a hundred million
faces in those lands, and oddly enough not one out of a thousand but
believes that to come to America it is necessary to come to New York.
When I opened the battened shutters that took the place of windows,
there was a cool inrush of fragrant air, and looking down from the
balcony I saw Nicola already at work at his anvil. Carmelo Merlino was
at his shoemaker’s bench set out before the door, and across the way the
Di Bianca girls were giving the fat baby a bath in a large yellow bowl.
The baby was splashing the water with great delight. All was peace and
industry. We had begun our first full day in Gualtieri life.
People are up betimes in Italy. The very early morning hours are best
for work, and a couple of hours’ labor is often accomplished before
breakfast. An ordinary breakfast is vegetable stew, bread and fruit,—in
summer fresh fruit, in winter dried. In fruit-ripening season, on every
house-top and balcony, figs are drying, raisins and prunes are in the
making, and prematurely plucked fico-d’indias are being made ready for
winter use. Canned fruit is little used. A mash of tomatoes to use in
winter with spaghetti is always drying at door or on house-top in
sunshine.
The midday meal is eaten usually about 11:30, and is much the same, only
less is eaten in the summer, and perhaps, though only once or twice a
week, some meat, eggs or fowl are made to take the place of the
vegetable stew. In the evening soup is served, made with some one of the
thousand sorts of spaghetti and macaroni, as I will call it, though that
word covers only a part of the great Italian dish, _pasta_. A meat stew
may be added and more fruit and wine. I have seen poor families dine
heartily off black bread, fried pumpkin and fico-d’indias, and in homes
of more pretension I have eaten very good course dinners.
The men, women and children work in the fields, vineyards and orchards,
transport products to market on mule-back, in donkey carts or on
platform carts drawn by great white or gray, long-horned oxen. A team of
the latter is a beautiful sight. The women not in the fields, in
addition to household work, carry heavy jars of water on their heads;
wash clothes in the public _lavacro_; pick grapes, olives, fruits,
almonds, walnuts; cut, mangle and clean hemp; gather, flail out, and
clean peas, beans, etc.; and bear children. The duty of maternity is the
first thought of the Italian woman. Fecundity is the prime marital
virtue and her principal hold on her husband’s esteem.
There are many labors which are shared by men, women and children, such
as herding the goats, treading the grapes in the winepress,
vegetable-gathering and attending to the irrigation. This latter is very
important. The loads which men and women can carry on their heads are
huge. I have seen a man coming in at the finish of a five-mile trot with
120 pounds of grapes on his head, and all the way he has maintained a
gait very similar to that of a dog. Very early in life the children are
taught to carry loads on their heads.
The morning of the second day, people began to come to us for advice and
information. There were two or three old men in Gualtieri,—old beyond
the ability for anything but very light labor. They wanted to send their
sons to America that the boys might get a foothold and then bring them.
They all asked me what was the best work for a young man to do in my
country. All were farmers living in the village, who went out each day
to work the little patches of ground they called farms.
[Illustration: Part of the Family Gathered in the Kitchen (_From left to
right: Ina, Tono, Giovanina, Antonio, Mrs. Squadrito, Giovanni, Jr.,
Nicola, Maria_)—Felicia Pulejo—Concetta]
These holdings were almost invariably owned by some one else, a few by
well-to-do people in the village, most of them by the Duke of Avarna,
who lives in Naples and never comes near Sicily, though he owns nearly
all the ground around Gualtieri. The actual farmers tilled the soil,
bought or preserved the seed, supplied the implements, looked after the
construction and maintenance of the irrigation, harvested the crop and
often marketed it, then gave the landowner’s agent, the middleman at
Faro near by, half of all they produced. Of what they had left, three
per cent went for direct or indirect taxes, and they gave “voluntarily”
to the church one tenth. A little calculation will show one that even if
a farmer have a prosperous season and be not in debt or have any
misfortunes, he retains, when he has finished his contributions to the
support of the non-producing classes, aristocrats, tradesmen, army,
church, and middlemen, but thirty-eight per cent of what he produces by
toil from before dawn till after dark. When I say that ninety-four per
cent of the production in southern Italy is agricultural, and that the
one important source of wealth is the cultivation of the soil, and the
control of wealth the ownership of the land, it can be understood how
and why the poor farmer, having heard what betterment there is in the
United States will borrow money at twenty per cent for six months to get
himself or a son over here to establish a foothold from which he can
broaden a space of relief and liberty. Many of these boys in Gualtieri,
anxious to go, desired to escape the forcible conscription every two
years, which takes every other able-bodied young man, and keeps one
fifteenth of the able-bodied men of the country under arms at all times.
The Italian government never relinquishes its claim on its men for
military duty, and no matter whether they become American citizens or
not, if they have not served their term and return to Italy, they are
arrested and conscripted. A notable test case of this was that of the
young man from Baltimore,—Schipriano, son of an Italian general,—in
which the government won.
Even though the Squadritos have raised themselves to an independent
footing in Gualtieri and own a little land, the power of the landlord
was demonstrated fully to me when, on the second day of our stay,
Giovanni Squadrito got out from among the things he had brought back
from America a nice piece of oilcloth, a treasure in Italy, and tramped
off to Faro and presented it to the middleman, the agent of the Duke of
Avarna, as a sort of propitiatory offering. At the agent’s office there
was a considerable staff of clerks and bailiffs, which showed me what a
business is this collecting of the crops and rents.
One poor old woman toiled across the hills to see my wife to implore her
to take her to America. She had a daughter who had gone there as a
servant last year, and in the three months previous to the old woman’s
first visit to us she had had no letter or word of news. She was nearly
frantic and wished to go in search of the girl. In the time we were in
Gualtieri before our party started for New York, no tidings came. My
wife was forced to tell her that she could never go to America, the age
limit and the public-charge law would stop her at Ellis Island and send
her back.
It was not unusual for a whole family from far over the hills to arrive
late some afternoon to pay their respects, and before they had been
seated long a certain uneasiness on the part of the women culminated in
the oldest man of the party producing from inside his shirt a strip of
paper, much thumbed, torn and pasted. In faded ink it bore the names and
addresses of a son, a brother, father, perhaps daughter across the
ocean. Though they knew my home to be New York, they were often
disappointed because I could not give them news of the beloved relative
in Bangor, Me.; Birmingham, Ala.; Brownsville, Tex.; in Chili, Brazil or
Canada. One man had a button photograph of Francesco Zotti, who had
formerly been my neighbor in New York. As it chanced I once shook hands
with Zotti, and when I told his relatives this they actually cried for
joy.
The people have no true conception of America, though Italy is flooded
with books of views principally of New York and the Pan-American
Exposition, and there is a brave effort made by the Italians in America
to write home adequate descriptions of the new land. Once I was called
upon to settle a most bitter and acrimonious dispute between two men as
to what America was like. One, who had a brother in Wilkes-barre, Pa.,
thought it was all coal mines, steel mills and railroads, while the
other, whose cousin worked in a New York barber shop, maintained that
America was all high buildings and railroads which run over the
house-tops. Each new letter caused the argument to break out afresh.
One woman, who had a husband working in a saloon in Pittsburg, was very
effusive in her greeting and her conversation with us until, in answer
to her question as to what kind of parrot we had, I replied:
“Why, my dear madam, we _have_ no parrot.”
I noticed a look of suspicion shoot across her face, and her manner
became strangely reserved. I could see that from that moment she was
extremely skeptical about anything we said. In a little while, when
talking aside with some member of the family, she openly expressed her
doubt that we were Americans or had ever been in America. This was
laughingly repeated to me for a reassertion as to our nationality.
“What makes you think we are not Americans?” I asked the dubious
visitor.
“Because you have no parrot.”
I do not hesitate to say I thought she must be demented, but in further
explanation she produced a bunch of her husband’s letters to prove her
statements, and, reading them through hastily, I found that there is a
parrot in the saloon where he ’tends bar, and one across the street, and
the things these two parrots do and say make up the burden of his
letters home, so his wife was convinced that America is a land of
parrots.
For days there was a constant succession of gaieties, and I was glad we
were not compelled to eat and drink one tenth of what was set before us.
We were loaded with messages from fathers, mothers, brothers,
sweethearts, wives, children, and friends for those already in America.
The Mannino family, living across the _torrente_ in the western section
of the town, being relatives of the Squadritos, were foremost in trying
to do the honors of the relationship and were much concerned that a
young nephew go with us, but I saw at a glance that he had _favus_, and
I told them he would be excluded. He was insistent and started for
Naples to take a steamer of another line, having been assured that by
the payment of one hundred francs to some persons at Naples he could be
smuggled through. Soon a telegram came from Naples, saying the people
who were going to smuggle him had robbed him of every cent. He asked for
more money, it was sent him, and he sailed. I have so far failed to find
any trace of him, but he did not return to Gualtieri and I believe he
must have entered the United States through Canada, as this is a mode of
ingress the United States is yet seeking to completely block. Of all the
wealth of trickery and immigration fraud which I afterwards was able to
lay my hands upon, this was the very first hint, and yet what would have
been a fine specific case has escaped me.