My History

I find it almost sad that I have made it this far in my project, yet I haven’t mentioned my history yet. My ancestors’ past, their stories. I guess I don’t because it isn’t as modern, isn’t as up-to-date, but I still wish to tell it. Because other than that, I don’t have another story to tell; this may not be the most accurate, but it’s still a story. And as I struggle with how I have the right to empathize with the interviewees, it might help to remember how my blood could tie to it.

This happened a long time ago. My family has been in America forever, with some accounts even saying we were on one of those first boats (or that we were the townspeople in the story of Rip Van Wrinkle). But one line of my family came from Italy, the land of Romeos and Juliets. Yet you would never know it. I speak no Italian, have no family recipes, and have a complete lack of foreign culture. The reason: assimilation.

I wrote about this branch in my November SDA as one of the anonymous stories, but I never explained what happened once they got to America. And that is at least half, if not more, of the story. Here was the story:

“The legend that has been passed down in my family is that my great-great-grandfather and his brothers fled Sicily because of a murder over a land dispute. The mafia was after them, so they all decided to go to America in hopes of creating a fresh start. The brothers ran a fruit stand on the East Coast for a while, but then my great-great-grandfather decided to leave the rest of his brothers behind and go to Chicago. And once my great-great-grandfather made it there, he had to keep running because they would sometimes find him. My great-grandmother, who was a little girl at the time, still remembers the panic and fear on his face whenever that would happen. And when one brother once tried to go back to Sicily, he was told to leave and never come back.”

And this is what happened once in America. When my great-great-grandparents moved to America, they were afraid to be Italian, to be marked Italian. So they taught my great-grandmother no Italian and never cooked any Italian recipes for fear of being discriminated against. My great-grandmother grew up as an “American girl”, for better or for worse, and she spent most of her life thinking she was allergic to garlic because her family had told her to avoid it, no matter the cost. For using garlic was the Italian signal. They never even spoke Italian in the house.

Due to their fear of being different, they killed a part of themselves, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to those in the future. And since this is my journal, and it is my thoughts, I’ll take a moment to get personal. Never try to become “American” because it’s so terribly boring. I want a culture. I wish I had a second language. I wish they wouldn’t have given up. I know it was safer, I know it was probably what they thought was best, but I would hate to live in a world where everyone was the same.