THE LABOURER AND THE LAND IN SICILY
Among the things that make Sicily interesting are its ruins. There are
dead cities which even in their decay are larger and more magnificent
than the living cities that have grown up beside them--larger and more
magnificent even than any living city in Sicily to-day. There are
relics of this proud and ancient past everywhere in this country.
In the modern city of Catania, for example, I came suddenly one day
upon the ruins of the forum of a Roman city which was buried under
the modern Italian one. At Palermo I learned that when the members
of the Mafia, which is the Sicilian name for the "Black Hand," want
to conceal a murder they have committed, they put the body in one of
the many ancient tombs outside the city, and leave it there for some
archæologist to discover and learn from it the interesting fact that
the ancient inhabitants of Sicily were in all respects like the modern
inhabitants.
Among the other antiquities that one may see in Sicily, however, is
a system of agriculture and method of tilling the soil that is two
thousand years old. In fact, some of the tools still in use in the
interior of the island are older than the ruins of those ancient
heathen temples, some of which were built five centuries before Christ.
These living survivals, I confess, were more interesting to me than the
dead relics of the past.
These things are not easy to find. The guide-books mention them, but do
not tell you where to look for them. Nevertheless, if one looks long
enough and in the right place it is still possible to see in Sicily men
scratching the field with an antique wooden plow, which, it is said,
although I cannot vouch for that, is mentioned in Homer. One may see
a Sicilian farmer laboriously pumping water to irrigate his cabbage
garden with a water-wheel that was imported by the Saracens; or one may
see, as I did, a wine press that is as old as Solomon, and men cutting
the grapes and making the wine by the same methods that are described
in the Bible.
It was my purpose in going to Sicily to see, if possible, some of the
life of the man who works on the soil. I wanted to get to the people
who lived in the little villages remote from the larger cities. I was
anxious to talk with some of these herdsmen I had seen at a distance,
wandering about the lonesome hillsides, tending their goats and their
cows and perhaps counting the stars as the shepherds did in the time of
Abraham. As there are some 800,000 persons engaged in agriculture in
one way or another, it did not seem to me that this would be difficult.
In spite of this fact, if I may judge by my own experience, one of the
most difficult persons to meet and get acquainted with in this country,
where many things are strange and hard to understand, is the man who
works out in the open country on the land.
Even after one does succeed in finding this man, it is necessary to
go back into history two or three hundred years and know a great deal
about local conditions before one can understand the methods by which
he works and thinks. In fact, I constantly had the feeling while I was
in Sicily that I was among people who were so saturated with antiquity,
so out of touch, except on the surface, with modern life, so imbedded
in ancient habits and customs, that it would take a very long time,
perhaps years, to get any real understanding of their ways of thinking
and living.
In saying this I do not, of course, refer to the better classes who
live in the cities, and especially I do not refer to the great
landowners, who in Sicily do not live on the land, but make their homes
in the cities and support themselves from the rents which are paid them
by overseers or middlemen, to whom they usually turn over the entire
management of their properties.
Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties I have mentioned, I did get
some insight into the condition of the rural agricultural classes in
Sicily--namely, the small landowner and the agricultural labourer--and
I can perhaps best tell what I learned by starting at the beginning.
The first thing I remember seeing of Sicily was a long black headland
which stretches out into the sea like a great black arm toward the
ships that approach Palermo from Naples. After that the dark mass
of the mainland, bare and brown and shining in the morning light,
seemed to rise suddenly out of the smooth and glittering sea. A little
later, the whole splendid panorama of the beautiful bay of Palermo lay
stretched out before me.
I recall this picture now because it suggests and partly explains the
charm which so many travellers find in this island, and because it
stands out in contrast with so much that I saw later when I visited the
interior.
Sicily is, in this, like a great many other places I saw in Europe:
it looks better on the outside than it looks on the in. All the large
cities in Sicily are situated on a narrow rim of fertile land which
encircles the island between the mountains and the sea. Palermo, for
example, is situated on a strip of this rim which is so rich that
it is called the "Shell of Gold." In this region, where the soil is
constantly enriched from the weathering of the neighbouring mountains,
and where agriculture has been carried to the highest perfection that
science and the skill of man can bring it, are situated those wonderful
orange and lemon groves for which Sicily is famous. As an illustration
of what irrigation and intensive culture can do in this soil, it is
stated that the value of the crop in this particular region has been
increased by irrigation from $8 to $160 an acre.
When one goes to Sicily to look at the agriculture it is this region
that one sees first. During my first day in Palermo I drove through
miles of these magnificent fruit farms, all laid out in the most
splendid style, surrounded by high stone walls, the entrance guarded
by heavy iron gates, and provided with extensive works for supplying
constant streams of water to the growing fruit. The whole country,
which is dotted with beautiful villas and winter palaces, is less like
a series of fruit farms than it is like one vast park. Here the fruit
ripens practically the whole year round. The trees are heavy all winter
with growing fruit, and one can wander for hours through a forest of
lemon and orange trees so closely crowded together that the keen rays
of the southern sun can scarcely penetrate their foliage.
Palermo, however, like many other European cities in which the masses
of the people are just now emerging out of the older civilization into
the newer modern life, is divided into an old and a new city. There is
the northern end, with broad streets and handsome villas, which the
people call the "English Garden." This is the new city and the quarter
of the wealthy classes. Then at the southern end there is the old city,
with crowded, narrow and often miserably dirty streets, which is the
home of the poorer class.
After visiting one or two of the estates in the suburbs at the northern
end of the city, I determined to see some of the truck farms of the
smaller farmers which I had heard were located at the south end of
the city. I made up my mind, also, if possible, to get out into the
country, into the wilder and less settled regions, where I could
plainly see from my hotel window the olive groves creeping up the
steep mountainside and almost visibly searching out the crevices and
sheltered places on the steep slopes in search of water, which is the
one missing ingredient in the soil and climate of this southern country.
Now one of the singular things about Palermo and some other cities in
Sicily is that, as soon as you get to the edge of the town, you find
yourself driving or walking between high stone walls which entirely
shut out the view in every direction. We drove for an hour through
these blind alleys, winding and twisting about without seeing anything
of the country except occasionally the tops of the trees above the high
stone walls that guarded the farms on either side. Occasionally we
passed heavy iron gates which looked like the gates of a prison. Now
and then we came upon a little group of houses built into the walls.
These barren little cells, lighted only by an open door, looked as if
they might be part of a prison, except for the number of sprawling
children, the goats, and the chickens, and the gossiping housewives
who sat outside their houses in the shadow of the wall sewing, or
engaged in some other ordinary household task. There was scarcely a
sprig of grass anywhere to be seen. The roads frequently became almost
impassable for wagons, and eventually degenerated into mere mule paths,
through which it seemed almost impossible, with our carriage, to reach
the open country.
What added to the prison-like appearance of the place was the fact
that, as soon as we approached the edge of the town, we met, every
hundred yards or more, a soldier or a police officer sitting near his
sentry box, guarding the approaches to the city. When I inquired what
the presence of these soldiers meant, I was told that they were customs
officers and were stationed there to prevent the smuggling of food and
vegetables into the city, without the payment of the municipal tax
which, it seems, is levied on every particle of produce that is brought
into the city. I am sure that in the course of half an hour we met as
many as twenty of these officers watching the highway for smugglers.
As we proceeded, our driver, who had made several fruitless attempts to
turn us aside into an old church or cemetery, to see the "antee-chee,"
as he called it, grew desperate. When I inquired what was the trouble
I learned that we had succeeded in getting him into a part of the city
that he had never before visited in his whole life, and he was afraid
that if he went too far into some of the roads in which we urged him to
go he would never be able to get back. Finally we came to a road that
appeared to lead to a spot where it seemed one could at least overlook
the surrounding country. We urged him to go on, but he hesitated,
stopped to inquire the way of a passing peasant and then, as if he had
made a mighty resolve, he whipped up his horse and said he would go on
even if that road took him to "paradise." All this time we were not a
quarter of a mile beyond the limits of the customs zone of the city.
Finally we came, by good fortune, to a hole in one of the walls that
guarded the highway. We stopped the carriage, got out, clambered up the
steep bank and made our way through this hole into the neighbouring
field. Then we straightened up and took a long breath because it seemed
like getting out of prison to be able to look about and see something
green and growing again.
We had hardly put our heads through the hole in this wall, however,
when we saw two or three men lying in the shade of a little
straw-thatched hut, in which the guards sleep during the harvest
season, to keep the thieves from carrying away the crops. As soon as
these men saw us, one of them, who seemed to be the proprietor, arose
and came toward us. We explained that we were from America and that
we were interested in agriculture. As soon as this man learned that
we were from America he did everything possible he could to make us
welcome. It seems that these men had just sat down to their evening
meal, which consisted of black bread and tomatoes. Tomatoes seemed to
be the principal part of the crop that this farmer was raising at that
time. He invited us, in the politest manner possible, to share his
meal with him and seemed greatly disappointed that we did not accept.
Very soon he began telling the same story, which I heard so frequently
afterward during my stay in Sicily. He had a son in America, who was in
a place called Chicago, he said, and he wanted to know if I had ever
heard of such a place and if so perhaps I might have met his son.
The old man explained to me all about his farm; how he raised his crop
and how he harvested it. He had about two acres of land, as well as I
could make out, for which he paid in rent about $15 per acre a year.
This included, as I understood, the water for irrigation purposes. He
admitted that it took a lot of work to make a living for himself, and
the others who were helping him, from this small piece of land. It
was very hard to live anywhere in Sicily, he said, but the people in
Palermo were much better off than they were in other places.
I asked him what he would do if his son should come back from America
with a bag of money. The old man's face lighted up and he said
promptly, "Get some land and have a little home of my own."
Many times since then I have asked the same or similar questions of
some man I met working on the soil. Everywhere I received the same
answer. Everywhere among the masses of the people is this desire to get
close to the soil and own a piece of land of their own.
From where we stood we could look out over the country and see in
several places the elaborate and expensive works that had been erected
for pumping water by steam for the purposes of irrigation. One of the
small farmers I visited had a small engine in the back of his house
which he used to irrigate a garden of cauliflower about four acres in
extent. This man lived in a little low stone and stucco house, but
he was, I learned, one of the well-to-do class. He had an engine for
pumping water which cost him, he said, about $500. I saw as I entered
his place a little stream of water, not much larger than my thumb,
drizzling out of the side of the house and trickling out into the
garden. He said it cost him between $4 and $5 a day to run that engine.
The coal he used came from England.
I had seen, as I entered the Palermo harbour, the manner in which this
coal was unloaded, and it gave me the first tangible evidence I had
found of the cheapness of human labour in this over-populated country.
Instead of the great machines which are used for that purpose in
America and England, I learned, this work was all done by hand.
In order to take this coal from the ship it was first loaded into
baskets, which were swung over the side of the vessel and there piled
upon a lighter. This lighter was then moved from the ships to the
shore. The baskets were then lifted out by hand and the coal dumped
on the wharf. From these it was reloaded into carts and carried away.
It was this coal, handled in this expensive way, that this farmer was
using to pump the water needed to irrigate his land.
After leaving Palermo I went to Catania, at the other side of the
island. The railway which climbs the mountains in crossing the island
took me through a very different country and among very different
people than those I had seen at Palermo. It was a wild, bare,
mountainous region through which we passed; more bare, perhaps, at the
time I saw it than at other times, because the grain had been harvested
and plowing had not begun. There were few regular roads anywhere. Now
and then the train passed a lonely water-wheel; now and then I saw,
winding up a rocky footpath, a donkey or pack-mule carrying water to
the sulphur mines or provisions to some little inland mountain village.
Outside of these little villages, in which the farm labourers live, the
country was perfectly bare. One can ride for miles through this thickly
populated country without seeing a house or a building of any kind,
outside of the villages.
In Sicily less than 10 per cent. of the farming class live in the open
country. This results in an enormous waste of time and energy. The farm
labourer has to walk many miles to and from his labour. A large part of
the year he spends far away from his home. During this time he camps
out in the field in some of the flimsy little straw-thatched shelters
that one sees scattered over the country, or perhaps he finds himself a
nest in the rocks or a hole in the ground. During this time he lives,
so to speak, on the country. If he is a herdsman, he has his cows' or
goats' milk to drink. Otherwise his food consists of a piece of black
bread and perhaps a bit of soup of green herbs of some kind or other.
During my journey through this mountain district, and in the course
of a number of visits to the country which I made later, I had
opportunity to learn something of the way these farming people live.
I have frequently seen men who had done a hard day's work sit down to
a meal which consisted of black bread and a bit of tomato or other raw
vegetable. In the more remote regions these peasant people frequently
live for days or months, I learned, on almost any sort of green thing
they find in the fields, frequently eating it raw, just like the cattle.
When they were asked how it was possible to eat such stuff, they
replied that it was good; "it tasted sweet," they said.
I heard, while I was in Sicily, of the case of a woman who, after her
husband had been sent to prison, supported herself from the milk she
obtained from a herd of goats, which she pastured on the steep slopes
of the mountains. Her earnings amounted to not more than 12 to 14 cents
a day, and, as this was not sufficient for bread for herself and her
four children, she picked up during the day all sorts of green stuff
that she found growing upon the rocks, and carried it home in her apron
at night to fill the hungry mouths that were awaiting her return.
Persons who have had an opportunity to carefully study the condition of
this country say it is incredible what sort of things these poor people
in the interior of Sicily will put into their stomachs.
One of the principal articles of diet, in certain seasons of the year,
is the fruit of a cactus called the Indian fig, which grows wild in all
parts of the island. One sees it everywhere, either by the roadside,
where it is used for hedges, or clinging to the steep cliffs on the
mountainside. The fruit, which is about the size and shape of a very
large plum, is contained in a thick, leathern skin, which is stripped
off and fed to the cattle. The fruit within is soft and mushy and has a
rather sickening, sweetish taste, which, however, is greatly relished
by the country people.
One day, in passing through one of the suburbs of Catania, I stopped in
front of a little stone and stucco building which I thought at first
was a wayside shrine or chapel. But it turned out to be a one-room
house. This house had a piece of carpet hung as a curtain in front of
the broad doorway. In front of this curtain there was a rude table made
of rough boards; on this table was piled a quantity of the Indian figs
I have described and some bottles of something or other that looked
like what we in America call "pop."
Two very good-looking young women were tending this little shop. I
stopped and talked with them and bought some of the cactus fruit. I
found it sold five pieces for a cent. They told me that from the
sale of this fruit they made about 17 cents a day, and upon this sum
they and their father, who was an invalid, were compelled to support
themselves. There were a few goats and chickens and two pigs wandering
about the place, and I learned that one of the economies of the
household consisted in feeding the pigs and goats upon the shells or
husks of the Indian figs that were eaten and thrown upon the ground.
As near as I could learn, from all that I heard and read, the condition
of the agricultural population in Sicily has been growing steadily
worse for half a century, at least.
Persons who have made a special study of the physical condition of
these people declare that this part of the population shows marked
signs of physical and mental deterioration, due, they say, to the lack
of sufficient food. For example, in respect to stature and weight, the
Sicilians are nearly 2 per cent. behind the population in northern
Italy. This difference is mainly due to the poor physical condition
of the agricultural classes, who, like the agricultural population of
the southern mainland of Italy, are smaller than the population in the
cities.
In this connection, it is stated that considerably less than one third
as much meat is consumed per capita in Sicily as in northern Italy.
Even so, most of the meat that is eaten there is consumed in the hotels
by the foreigners who visit the country.
In looking over the budgets of a number of the small landowners, whose
position is much better than that of the average farm labourer, I found
that as much as $5 was spent for wine, while the item for meat was
only $2 per year. There are thousands of people in Sicily, I learned,
who almost never taste meat. The studies which have been made of the
subject indicate that the whole population is underfed.
Upon inquiry I found it to be generally admitted that the condition of
the population was due to the fact that the larger part of the land was
in the hands of large landowners, who have allowed the ignorant and
helpless peasants to be crushed by a system of overseers and middlemen
as vicious and oppressive as that which existed in many parts of the
Southern States during the days of slavery.
This middleman is called by Italians a gobellotto, and he seems to
be the only man in Sicily who is getting rich out of the land. If a
gobellotto has a capital of $12,000 he will be able to rent an estate
of 2,500 acres for a term of six to nine years. He will, perhaps, work
only a small portion of this land himself and sublet the remainder.
Part of it will go to a class of farmers that correspond to what are
known in the South as "cash renters." These men will have some stock,
and, perhaps, a little house and garden. In a good season they will be
able to make enough to live upon and, perhaps, save a little money. If
the small farmer is so unfortunate, however, as to have a bad season;
if he loses some of his cattle or is compelled to borrow money or seed,
the middleman who advances him is pretty certain to "clean him up," as
our farmers say, at the end of the season. In that case, he falls into
the larger and more unfortunate class beneath him, which corresponds
to what we call in the Southern States the "share cropper." This man,
corresponding to the share cropper, is supposed to work his portion
of land on half-shares, but if, as frequently happens, he has been
compelled to apply to the landlord during the season for a loan, it
goes hard with him on the day of settlement. For example, this is the
way, according to a description that I received, the crop is divided
between the landlord and his tenants: After the wheat has been cut and
thrashed--thrashed not with a machine, nor yet perhaps with flails,
but with oxen treading the sheaves on a dirt floor--the gobellotto
subtracts from the returns of the harvest double, perhaps triple,
measure of the seed he had advanced. After that, according to the local
custom, he takes a certain portion for the cost of guarding the field
while the grain is ripening, since no man's field is safe from thieves
in Sicily.
Then he takes another portion for the saints, something more for the
use of the threshing floor and the storehouse and for anything else
that occurs to him. Naturally he takes a certain portion for his other
loans, if there have been any, and for interest. Then, finally, if
there is nothing further to be subtracted, he divides the rest and
gives the farmer his half.
As a result the poor man who, as some one has said, "has watered the
soil with his sweat," who has perhaps not slept more than two hours a
night during the harvest time, and that, too, in the open field, is
happy if he receives as much as a third or a quarter of the grain he
has harvested.
In the end the share cropper sinks, perhaps, still lower into the ranks
of day labourer and becomes a wanderer over the earth, unless, before
he reaches this point, he has not sold what little property he had and
gone to America.
I remember meeting one of these outcasts and wornout labourers, who had
become a common beggar, tramping along the road toward Catania. He
carried, swung across his back in a dirty cloth of some indescribable
colour, a heavy pack. It contained, perhaps, some remnants of his
earthly goods, and as he stopped to ask for a penny to help him on his
way, I had a chance to look in his face and found that he was not the
usual sort. He did not have the whine of the sturdy beggars I had been
accustomed to meet, particularly in England. He was haggard and worn;
hardship and hunger had humbled him, and there was a beaten look in his
eyes, but suffering seemed to have lent a sort of nobility to the old
man's face.
I stopped and talked with him and managed to get from him some account
of his life. He had been all his life a farm labourer; he could neither
read nor write, but looked intelligent. He had never married and was
without kith or kin. Three years before he had gotten into such a
condition of health, he said, that they wouldn't let him work on the
farm any more, and since that time he had been wandering about the
country, begging, and living for the most part upon the charity of
people who were almost as poor as he.
I asked him where he was going. He said he had heard that in Catania an
old man could get a chance to sweep the streets, and he was trying to
reach there before nightfall.
Several hours later, in returning from the country, I turned from the
highway to visit the poorer districts of the city. As I turned into one
of the streets which are lined with grimy little hovels made of blocks
hewn from the great black stream of lava which Mt. Ætna had poured over
that part of the city three hundred and fifty years before, I saw the
same old man lying in the gutter, with his head resting on his bundle,
where he had sunken down or fallen.
I have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers
in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who
are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should
know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others.
The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured
farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America,
even where he has the least education and the least encouragement,
is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the
agricultural population in Sicily.
The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not
infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances"
and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated
in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between
the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In
Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own
practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of
agriculture which they employ, there is not enough land to employ the
surplus population. The result is the farm labourers are competing for
the privilege of working on the land. As agriculture goes down and the
land produces less, the population increases and the rents go up. Thus
between the upper and the nether millstone the farmer is crushed.
In the South we have just the contrary situation. We have land crying
for the hand to till it; we have the landowners seeking labour and
fairly begging for tenants to work their lands.
If a Negro tenant does not like the way he is treated he can go to the
neighbouring farm; he can go to the mines or to the public works, where
his labour is in demand. But the only way the poor Italian can get free
is by going to America, and that is why thousands sail from Palermo
every year for this country. In certain places in Sicily, in the three
years including 1905 and 1907, more than four persons in every hundred
of the population left Sicily for America.
One thing that keeps the Sicilian down is the pride with which he
remembers his past and the obstinacy with which he clings to his
ancient customs and ways of doing things. It is said by certain
persons, as an excuse for backward conditions of the country, that even
if the landlords did attempt to introduce new machinery and modern
methods of cultivation the people would rebel against any innovation.
They are stuck so fast in their old traditional ways of doing things
that they refuse to change.
I have sometimes said that there was a certain advantage in belonging
to a new race that was not burdened with traditions and a past--to a
race, in other words, that is looking forward instead of backward, and
is more interested in the future than in the past. The Negro farmer
certainly has this advantage over the Italian peasant.
If you ask a Sicilian workman why he does something in a certain way,
he invariably replies: "We have always done that way," and that is
enough for him. The Sicilian never forgets the past until he leaves
Sicily, and frequently not even then.
The result is that while the Negro in Africa is learning, as I saw
from a recent report of the German Government, to plow by steam, the
Sicilian farmer, clinging proudly to his ancient customs and methods,
is still using the same plow that was used by the Greeks in the days
of Homer, and he is threshing his grain as people did in the time of
Abraham.