Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [43]
“You had Cirone to look after. I hid like a rat.”
“No one could do anything,” says Rosario. “They would have killed us. You know that. You sat beside me and listened as people read us the newspapers. You heard how that animal Theodore Roosevelt called the lynchings ‘a rather good thing.’ And that congressman from Massachusetts, that Henry Cabot Lodge, he said we were filth. All of America was against us.” Revulsion spreads across Rosario’s face. “Still, Italy settled.”
“What could Italy do?” says Carlo. “President Harrison said he deplored the lynchings. He gave money to the dead men’s families. Italy had to agree. Besides, war is no answer.”
Everyone’s out of words. Giuseppe’s hands still cover his face.
“Now the rest,” I say. “Giuseppe?”
“What?” Giuseppe opens his hands and looks at me with a tired face.
“You said the facts first. What’s the rest? Who killed the police commissioner?”
Giuseppe gives a sad little laugh. “I don’t know. It never really mattered. No one talked about him anymore. Once the lynching had been declared reasonable, people started complaining about the Italians. Posters went up. People said Italians monopolized the produce business. And fishing. They said we had taken all the jobs for peddlers and tinkers and cobblers.”
“So everyone fired us,” says Rosario. “Overnight, we were all out of work.”
“The only place that would hire us was the plantations,” says Giuseppe. “That was the point of the lynchings in the first place.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell this part,” says Francesco. “I know this part as well as anyone.” He studies his hands. “After the Civil War so many Negroes went North, the plantation owners didn’t have enough people to do the labor the slaves used to do. So they brought in Chinese. But the Chinese wouldn’t put up with the bad conditions and the lousy pay. So the plantation owners brought in Sicilians.”
“They put up posters in Palermo,” says Rosario. “They said everything would be terrific. We fell for it. Who could help it? We were desperate in Italy. Dirt poor.”
“We came,” says Francesco, “so many Sicilian men, and we worked their plantations. They made fun of how we eat and talk. And all we did in return was work. Sugarcane work is backbreaking. You swing heavy machetes in the scorching heat while the mosquitoes eat you alive. In autumn you work overtime at night in the sugar mills, grinding, boiling, refining. We got skinny as rails. Worked hard as dogs. Dogs! Because to us thirty or forty dollars for a harvest season of sugarcane was a fortune.”
“So why do they hate us?” I ask.
“Simple,” says Giuseppe. “We’re not dogs.” The look of raw pain on his face scares me. “We’re smart. We made gardens on slopes no one wanted and sold vegetables. We caught fish and oysters in the Gulf. We fed ourselves easy. We made friends of the South Americans, and traded with their fruit boats. We were good at Spanish. We had our own businesses fast. We didn’t have to work on their stinking plantations anymore.”
“That’s why they lynched those men,” says Francesco. “Hennessy’s murder was just an excuse to put Sicilians back on the plantations. That’s why they keep bringing over more of us. They’re so convinced we’re dumb animals, they can’t believe we’re good at business—they see it, and they still don’t believe. The lynchings were supposed to teach us a lesson, put us in our place.”
“But we showed them,” says Rosario. “Today Sicilians run the dock-import business again. Like before.”
“New Orleans is a good place to live now,” says Francesco. “But we didn’t know it would turn around. So as soon as we had enough to buy land, we came up here.”
“To someplace without Sicilians,” says Rosario. “Someplace where no one already hated us.”
“Beppe came over with Salvatore months later,” says Carlo. “But they went to Milliken’s Bend so that it wouldn’t seem like too many of us in one place. The plantation owners get afraid when there’s too many.”
“A fresh start,” says Francesco.
“Ha!” says Giuseppe. “We didn’t understand.” He’s silent. Then, “We’re hated everywhere.”
I remember Cirone