Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [74]
That was the sum total of Italians living in Madison Parish in 1899.
This is a work of fiction. The references aided me in so many ways, but, ultimately, the personalities and words of the characters in this story, both Italian and not, are, with only few exceptions, a product of my imagination, since I found little information on any of them.
Now, after I’ve read so much, and have tried to imagine what life was like then, the economic motivations for lynchings seem obvious to me. But they were not presented like that when I was in school. Indeed, racism was presented as something incomprehensible. Sometimes I think we like to imagine that evil is like a disease—it strikes at random and for no good reason. But the evil behind lynchings in the American Reconstruction period was often based on people’s trying to maintain their wealth and power. That’s far worse than a disease—that’s a calculated decision. That’s chosen evil.
This is a story that hurts. But pain isn’t always bad. Pain can help us gain the empathy that compels us to act decently. We can’t afford to be ignorant about bigotry. Not in our history. Not in our present day.
NOTES ON RESEARCH
There are documents in both English and Italian about the Tallulah lynching, in the form of newspaper articles (many available online) and diplomatic letters and depositions between the United States and the Italian governments from July 26, 1899, to December 4, 1900. A fine article about it, “Guns, Goats, and Italians: The Tallulah Lynching of 1899,” by Edward F. Haas, appeared in North Louisiana Historical Association 13 (Summer 1982) and is available on this Web site: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lamadiso/articles/lynchings.htm.
There are also numerous scholarly articles about lynching in general and about specific lynchings, the vast majority of them of African Americans, but some of Italians. Beyond the eleven Sicilians murdered in March of 1891 in New Orleans (about which there are many articles), three were killed in May of 1891 in Wheeling, West Virginia; four in June 1892 in Seattle, Washington; one in Denver, Colorado, in 1893; another three in Hahnville, Louisiana, in 1896. And others.
Newspaper articles called Italians “treacherous” and “bloodthirsty” with a “natural propensity toward crime.” A Seattle newspaper claimed all Italians carried stilettos. A fine article to consult is “The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the American South, 1886–1910,” by Clive Webb, in the journal American Nineteenth Century History 3, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 45–76. For my Italian-speaking readers, a superb book is Corda e sapone: storie di linciaggi degli italiani negli Stati Uniti, by Patrizia Salvetti (Rome: Donzelli, 2003). An article that offers an economic analysis of the situations surrounding this story is “Italian Immigration in the State of Louisiana: Its Causes, Effects, and Results,” by Paolo Giordano, in Italian Americana 5, no. 2 (1979): 160–177. And a very fine book with multiple articles about the racial status and relations of the Italians in America is Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003). You can access some particularly relevant parts of this book online at: books.google.com. Type in “Are Italians White?” in Search Books. Click on the title in Search Results. Go to page 60.
Some final remarks about language. First, please note that Negro was the unbiased term for an African American during the time period of this novel. For Joseph’s speech and stories, I relied heavily on the work of the linguist Mary Haas. With regard to Southern speech, I found multiple inconsistencies of usage in the original works I consulted, both by African Americans and whites. And while inconsistency is not uncommon in actual speech, it doesn’t always ring true in fiction (ironically). So I turned to academic works for guidance, including several articles by John Rickford and the books African-American English: Structure, History,