Death 4 Drowning （Immigration） #3
The first time Antonio emigrated, he knew nothing about where he was going.
He spoke no English, but he wasn’t worried.
He had learned in the Austrian Alps, where the officers and the men they commanded had barely been able to communicate with each other, to think of self-preservation as a physical choice, and he was a strong man.
Antonio was lucky, because others had already paved the way for him.
By 1920, there were microcities of Italians embedded in every American metropolis.
For those who had emigrated one generation earlier, the dangers had been acute.
Without knowing how to read or write, Italian men signed away their souls, at the mercy of their employer’s unregulated sense of humanity.
Many were killed by overwork, accidents, and explosions.
Some simply disappeared. Some were prey to the nascent Italian American organized crime syndicates that flourished by creating protection and extortion rings among their own disenfranchised and fearful countryfolk.
But as I said, Antonio was lucky. His boat arrived at Ellis Island.
Over the years of human history, many people have made the choice to get on a boat to go to a strange and hostile place—can you imagine the desperation they must have felt in order to step onto that boat knowing there was a chance they would not reach their destination?
Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents.
Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames.
History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.
ANTONIO FORTUNA ARRIVED IN NEW YORK in February 1920 on a ship called the Providence. You can see for yourself, if you like—it’s right there in the Ellis Island manifest.
He had sailed from Napoli with an army buddy from Catanzaro named Nico Carbone.
When the young men arrived in Napoli, they had no friends in the world besides each other and only a notion that by going to l’America they would be able to become rich men.
They’d obtained prepaid tickets and labor contracts from a padrone and spent the spring and summer laying railroad track in western Pennsylvania.
I can only assume this first period in America was difficult, because Antonio sailed back to Italy as soon as he could afford to.
He returned to Ievoli in November 1920 with the clothes on his back and a change purse of American coins.
He had very little to show for his time in America; he’d barely been able to pay back his passage debts.
But he had learned many things about how the world works, and he was alive.
The railroad hadn’t been worse than the war. It hadn’t been worse than Tracci.
The second time he emigrated, Antonio did not fall for a padrone scam; he paid for his own ticket using the stash of money from his first trip.
He found his own way to a railroad job, seeking out the Reading office in New York’s Pennsylvania Station.
He knew enough English this time to explain that he had some experience.
He got a job right away rebuilding the mid-Atlantic corridor.
His second trip was even shorter than his first, because Antonio rushed home for the birth of his first son—you already know that story.
But this time, there were witnesses to his time in America.
One of them was a soft-spoken, dapper Abruzzese man named Tomaso Maglieri.
Tomaso was twice Antonio’s age and only two-thirds his size, but they were on the same track-laying team, digging, clearing, anchoring the sleepers and connecting the rails.
Antonio Fortuna and Tomaso Maglieri had little in common, but Tomaso, too, had served on the Austrian front.
In May, after they had been working together three months, Antonio and Tomaso received letters from Italy on the same day.
Antonio’s letter said that Assunta was pregnant; the baby was due in October.
Tomaso’s letter said his wife, Cristina, had been safely delivered of a baby boy on Easter Sunday. She had named him Carminantonio.
“Maybe you will have a daughter,” Tomaso Maglieri joked, “and someday my son will marry her.”
“No, the first two were daughters, so this one must be a son,” Antonio told him. “But your son Carminantonio can marry my Mariastella.”
“Eh, an older woman!” Tomaso laughed. “Every man’s dream. Here, let’s shake on it right now, and then we won’t have to worry about betrothing them later.”
Tomaso and Antonio didn’t see each other again for twenty years.
They didn’t keep in touch, and probably never thought of each other in the interim.
It was all a joke, I think—we all think.
Well, Carminantonio “Carmelo” Maglieri always loved a good joke, even if Stella didn’t have the same sense of humor.
WHEN ANTONIO FORTUNA MADE his third trip to the United States, he joined his old army buddy Nico Carbone in New York City.
Nico lived on Mott Street in Little Italy in a windowless tenement rooming house in which eight young men took turns in bunk beds and cots.
There was a job on Nico’s construction crew waiting for Antonio when he arrived; Manhattan was sprouting like a vegetable garden in June, buildings stacking on top of one another, and there was plenty of work for Italian boys.
Over the next seven years, Antonio built a bank, a church priory, a subway station, and a palatial stone edifice that turned out to be a university dining hall.
In the blizzarding colder months, when New York paused its frenetic contracting, Antonio hung around the Elizabeth Street bars with Nico.
The Roaring Twenties were Antonio’s own roaring twenties and, to be blunt, he forgot his family.
He wasn’t used to fathers who loved their children, and it didn’t occur to him to love his.
Between construction jobs and protection sidelines, he must have been making quite a bit, but he sent none of it home.
While Assunta was jarring every last wrinkled fruit so her children wouldn’t starve through the winters, Antonio was growing fat on beefsteak and the bathtub gin they served in the speakeasies. He spent what was left on women.
But Antonio was reminded of his patrimony in the spring of 1928, when he attended the funeral of Rocco Scavetta, the tall, round-bellied old Mott Street grocer.
The entire neighborhood came to pay respects, even the mobsters Rocco had tussled with over the years.
As Antonio sat in the church’s second-to-last pew, he surveyed the hundreds of bowed dark heads and thought about his own funeral.
Signor Scavetta was a man with a legacy, seven sons and two daughters, grand- and great-grandkids, and all of their friends mourned him now.
Antonio understood, finally, what children were for.
Only a few weeks later, a man from Pianopoli tracked Antonio down. Tony Cardamone was the younger brother of Assunta’s sister-in-law Violetta. Since Antonio hadn’t spent much time in Ievoli since his marriage, his and Tony’s paths had seldom crossed.
The two men sat at the heavy marble-top table of one of the Mott Street cafés, drinking cloudy percolated coffee so strong its steamy aroma obscured the smell of the illegal anise liquor the proprietor had tipped in.
Tony Cardamone was passing through New York on his way home to his wife in Hartford.
He had worked on the railroads for a while but was settled down now with a construction job.
He didn’t seem to want anything from Antonio, although Antonio was on his guard.
“When it’s time to bring your family over,” Tony Cardamone said meaningfully, “you should think about coming to Hartford. You can live in a real house, not like here, everyone piled up like chickens in a coop.”
Antonio shook the man’s hand and they wished each other well; Tony Cardamone had to catch a train home and couldn’t stay for dinner. “Come to Hartford,” he said again before he left. “We’ll take care of you. Get you set up.”
There was no particular reason for his generosity that Antonio could see. Most likely Tony Cardamone felt compassionately toward Assunta, who was, as everyone knew, a saint, and who had been abandoned for a very long time. But he didn’t press; if something was meant to be, it would be.
A year passed. In August 1929, Antonio was out at a Lower East Side saloon with Nico Carbone when they were involved in a bar brawl in which a man was killed.
I don’t know whether there was any deeper history behind the episode or it was just a particularly unlucky drunken night on the town.
But I know that the murdered man’s name was Johnny Mariano, that he was one of Frank Costello’s personal goons, and that it was Antonio’s knife that ended up in his ribs.
Antonio escaped the scene, leaving Nico, who’d been knocked unconscious, to take the rap.
Antonio hid in his landlady’s coat closet for two days until he could sneak onto a ship bound for Napoli.
Nico Carbone was given a fifteen-year sentence for Johnny Mariano’s murder, but was found dead in his jail cell only two months into his incarceration.
Your guess is as good as mine whether or not it was really suicide.
Antonio knew he couldn’t return to New York anytime soon, but he was chagrined to be back in Ievoli, this place he thought he’d put behind him.
Tony Cardamone’s offer was on his mind as he bided the winter of 1929.
As soon as he felt it was safe to set foot on American soil again, Antonio asked his sister-in-law Violetta for her brother’s address in Hartford.
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