A Writer's Life (32 page)

Since public kissing was a mark of unrefinement in conservative communities like my hometown, and since my parents effortlessly blended in with this conservatism, I came of age in a time and place where well-bred Americans were epitomized by their reserved manner and their taciturnity, their sobersidedness and other qualities that were at variance with all that was now surrounding me in Calabria and that, had I been able to manage it, I would have shunted and fended off. But my relatives would not let me go, holding on to my arms, pulling me forward, guiding me in the direction of the rows of houses higher on the hill, wanting (Lucio explained to me) to show me where they lived. And so we left the square, a procession with Lucio and I following my uncles, with my aunts flanking us, and the rest of them following us, chattering cheerfully and waving at the women who stood watching from the balconies of the big houses.

It took us about ten minutes to climb the narrow, uneven roads. As we walked along over loosely embedded rocks, and sometimes up the stone steps that led us past the crumbling Norman castle, I considered slowing the pace a bit because of my fatigue and dehydration. But none of the
others, neither the younger people nor my older uncles and aunts, seemed in the least daunted by our journey, and so I kept going and resisted the temptation to fetch my canteen, which Lucio was carrying in my bag. He had insisted on carrying it, along with my jacket. I also thought I should preserve my water for the train ride back to Naples. Lucio's car was, naturally, of no use on these roads, and he'd left it parked next to the fountain. The doors were unlocked and the key was in the ignition. Lucio told me that nobody in this area would try to steal his car because he was well known and respected, and also nobody around here knew how to drive.

We reached a flat part of the road and this led us into another square, which was architecturally less formal than the one below—no fountain in the center, no Baroque manors along the sides—but it was more vivacious and colorful in a helter-skelter way, with many pedestrians and footloose farm animals vying for the right-of-way while maneuvering around donkey-drawn wagons and children chasing chickens. A goat was walking down the steps of a tiny two-story house overlooking the far side of the square, and the smell of sausages rose from a coal-burning grill at the other side of the square. The church bells rang. The siesta was over, and farmers were returning to their land downhill. Several small shops that lined the square were now open for business. I wondered if it had been in one of these shops that my father began his apprenticeship, and if it had been in this square that his brothers and their friends used to play soccer after school. I thought of asking Lucio to pose these questions to one of my uncles but decided against it.

After turning a corner and heading up a wide cobblestone path, we entered a large house that had an ornate but shattered stone plaque engraved on the lintel above the main door. Even before Lucio had confirmed it, I thought this building had been the residence of my great-grandfather Domenico Talese, a landowner of some consequence who, according to what my father had once told me, had acquired this baronial property from an impoverished nobleman in the 1880s. While my father spoke admiringly of Domenico, he did concede that the latter was a man with a minimum of friends, and when he died, he had been mourned by few people except his family, and not all of them. However, they still owned the property, and on this day of my visit I would learn that some members of the extended family lived here, including an elderly woman whom I had been brought to visit.

She was bedridden, and as I was ushered into her room on the second floor, I was told that this was my father's mother. The shutters were closed and it was so dark that I could barely see the face of this white-haired woman who lay under the covers wearing a high-collared white nightgown,
and who, as I approached, reached in my direction with her frail arms and then, with a surge of energy that surprised me, rose from her pillow into a sitting position and began to cry out toward me again and again in a shrieking voice,
“Peppino! Peppino!”

I stepped back, bumping into my aunts and uncles, who were close behind me. I was startled, unprepared for this moment. She was calling me by my father's name! My father, Joseph, was often referred to as “Peppino” by our relatives in Brooklyn, and this nickname was undoubtedly how he was known here in Italy. But now it seemed that my father's mother believed that I was her son! I thought maybe she was becoming senile, or perhaps she was going blind, or possibly she had misunderstood or been misinformed by the messenger boy who had come here earlier. I turned toward Lucio, who was standing near the foot of the bed. I hoped that he would offer a word of advice, but he merely shrugged and remained silent.

“
Peppino
,” she repeated, softly now, beginning to cry. One of my aunts then walked hurriedly to the other side of the bed, comforting her while beckoning me closer. Awkwardly, I leaned across the bed to embrace my grandmother and hesitantly kissed her on the cheek.

My uncles then spoke tenderly to her, as did some of the other people who stood behind them. There were a dozen people in the room now, some that I was seeing for the first time. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I noticed on my grandmother's bureau, next to a crucifix and statue of Saint Francis, some wood-framed photographs, one of which showed my parents at their wedding reception in Brooklyn. As my grandmother sank back onto her pillows, we were ushered out of the room by my aunts and led downstairs, where coffee that had been poured in small cups, and a tray containing cookies and fried pastry, awaited us.

A man of about my age, carrying a child in his arms, called out to Lucio and told him to tell me that he was my first cousin—his father was one of my father's brothers—and that we had the same first name. He was my height, just as slender, and had dark brown hair and eyes similar to mine. He was wearing overalls, a cotton shirt, and boots crusty with dried mud. After I had embraced him, he asked Lucio to apologize for his appearance, explaining that he had been working in the fields and had come here directly on learning of my visit. He said he was excited and pleased to be meeting me. Then, seeing his young sons standing near the door among a crowd of adults, he waved them over and presented the two of them, ages seven and five. They raised up on their toes so I could kiss them, and the older boy introduced himself in English.

“I am Peppino,” he said.

Later, I met their mother, a cheerful young woman with a round face, who was wearing a slightly oversized faded brown dress that I believed had been on sale a few years before in my mother's shop. The woman said that her house was next door, and that her grandmother and my grandmother were sisters. She also said that she and her husband were expecting their fourth child in early autumn, adding that they were both very happy about this.

They
are
happy, I thought, and this impression accompanied me down the hill to the train station. My kinsmen in Italy—so poor, living so simply, so accustomed to hand-me-down clothing—were at peace with themselves, were resigned to their circumstances, were contented in ways that my family in America rarely seemed to be. This was particularly true of my father. He hardly ever smiled and was often contentious. I recall how sensitive and defensive he seemed to be whenever the issue of his failure to revisit Italy arose, and how he took every opportunity to suggest that his homeland was a hopeless and uninhabitable place, fixed in its ways and at fault for making him incompatible with it. Once when a customer in the store was commenting critically about the polluted industrial air hovering over Pennsylvania and New York, my father replied, “Well, if it's pure air you're looking for, you'll find plenty of it in my part of Italy, where the people are practically starving to death!”

On the way back to Naples, I thought about the consequences of leaving home forever; boarding a train, sailing across the ocean, and never returning to one's country. Lives of succeeding generations were changed forever by this single decisive journey. Were it not for my father's restive nature and willfulness, I might have ended up working in the fields of southern Italy with my cousin and kinfolk, eagerly anticipating the birth of a child and finding joy in simple pleasures.

You people must get out of here! You must pack your bags and bid good-bye to this place!

I was saying this under my breath to the seemingly complaisant black people I saw shuffling along the sidewalks and the dirt roads of Selma as I explored the ghetto with the deacon from Brown Chapel, collecting impressions for the magazine piece I was writing for the
Times
in May 1965. As a reporter, I had been trained to be objective, not to become emotionally involved, but in Selma, inwardly at least, I could not help myself—I was reacting critically, even angrily, toward many of these blacks who appeared to be reconciled to their surroundings. On my notepad I made comments that would remain private, but they reminded me of my no-fun father and, alas, myself, and how I had felt about my relatives
in Calabria. But I toned it all down for the
Times
, and in the Sunday paper of May 30, 1965, I wrote:

The rain has stopped in Selma, the storm is over. It is now May and it is a bright hot sun that beats down on Sylvan Street and makes pie crust of bumpy dirt roads, bakes the concrete pavement, scorches the grass. All along Sylvan Street are lined red brick houses, identically designed, and within them live the Negroes who, back in March, were hosts and hostesses to hundreds of whites who came to “make witness” in Selma.…

They are passive Negroes, by and large, and if they are going to make advances, they must be led, must be mobilized, must be marched by civil rights leaders. And today most of the leaders and civil rights freedom-fighters—both black and white—have abandoned Selma. They have either returned to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Atlanta; or perhaps they have found a new cause in another town … in any case, they are not in Selma, as any tourist who wanders into the Negro quarter of this town can see.

On Sylvan Street, that famous street of so many crowds ago—that street in which Negro and white demonstrators, nuns and S.N.C.C. boys and Radcliffe girls and labor leaders joined hands and stood all day and night in a driving rainstorm and sang “We Shall Overcome”—that street today, deserted except for a few small Negro children playing in the gutter and some adults who slowly come and go, is a street where the Movement is now crawling.

A
LTHOUGH
I
HAD LEFT THE STAFF OF THE
T
IMES
AT THIRTY-TWO
in 1965, I had since written an occasional book review for the Sunday edition, or an article for the sports section, or an essay for the op-ed page, which welcomed outside contributions; and when I learned in 1990 that the black leaders of Selma were marking the silver anniversary of Bloody Sunday with a large demonstration and a parade, I contacted a senior editor whom I had known from our days together as reporters and asked if he would help get me assigned to cover the story.

I was then fifty-seven and lost in the languor of my book about my Italian ancestry. What I thought I needed was a quick fix, a jolt of journalism to stimulate and motivate me with its urgent expectations, and finally to reward me, however briefly, with a sense of satisfaction and reassurance that a good piece printed in the
Times
can bring to a long-unpublished writer.

While the ephemeral gratification of daily journalism had not long sustained me even in the early days of my career, it was equally and lastingly true that I had never had so much fun as a writer as when working on daily assignments, hastily leaving the
Times
building to cover late-breaking events in and out of the metropolitan area, accompanied sometimes by a
Times
photographer and being joined at the site by my journalistic rivals from other newspapers. Some of these reporters I liked personally, drank beer with on weekends, competed with assiduously on stories, and later shared rides with back to our respective newsrooms to face the deadlines and struggle with our leads and constructions. We were one-day wonders, or so we believed; never before, or since, had I had so many friends and colleagues among my contemporaries with whom I had so many common interests and complaints.

We grumbled constantly about our copyreaders, who were the first people in the newsroom to read what we had written, and they had the authority to arrange our articles and to trim them or rewrite them extensively
without consulting us and without removing the bylines that identified us as the authors. We suspected that these desk-bound deprecators and grammatists, these humorless scriveners and censors of our work, privately envied the freedom and the modicum of fame we enjoyed as news gatherers in the outside world; I ordinarily returned home from the newsroom at 8:00 p.m. fearing that one of the heavy-handed copyreaders had mangled my lead, had blue-penciled most of my favorite phrases. Three hours later, I was likely to be found standing on the sidewalk in front of my neighborhood newsstand awaiting the
Times
delivery truck bearing bundles of the first edition, which would reveal to me whatever butchery had been imposed upon my prose. Even at a distance of many blocks, I could spot the hulking dark truck coming closer and closer through the traffic, its roof rimmed with tiny lights. As it pulled into the curb and as the wire-bound bundles of the
Times
were tossed onto the pavement and were clipped open by the news vendor, I stepped forward to buy the paper and flip through it until I found my article and saw how it had survived the scrutiny and judiciousness of the copyreader.

If it had been changed to blunt my meaning or had otherwise been manhandled, I would hurry to a sidewalk telephone and dial the director of the copydesk, asking that my byline be removed from the article. After he had digested my disgruntlement and reviewed what had been done, he would usually say that my work had been
improved
by the copyreader's changes and that it might be appropriate for me to be communicating my thanks rather than my displeasure. If I remained adamant, insisting that what had been printed in the first edition under my name was unrecognizable to me—a statement I would shout above the street noise while quoting from a carbon copy of the original, which I had pulled from my pocket—the director would sometimes agree to restore what I had written, and these words would appear hours later in the second edition. If, however, he decided to reprint the copyreader's version in the second edition, then my byline would be removed.