Alligator Bayou (16 page)
Authors: Donna Jo Napoli
Tags: #Prejudices, #Family, #Country Life, #Segregation, #Lifestyles, #19th Century, #Orpans, #Other, #United States, #Italian Americans, #Country life - Louisiana, #African American, #Fiction, #Race relations, #Prejudice & Racism, #Uncles, #Emigration & Immigration, #People & Places, #Louisiana, #Proofs (Printing), #Social Science, #Historical, #Lynching, #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Social Issues
AFTERWORD
S
everal years ago I came across an old and brief newspaper article about five Sicilian grocers in Tallulah, Louisiana, in 1899, who served a black customer before a white one because he had entered the store first; they wound up dead—lynched. I was shocked. Bigotry pings the brain into numbness, it seems so inexplicable. But as I dug into the history around the lynching, I found answers that went far beyond bigotry. And numbness gave way to such a searing pain that I had to write this story.
I built characters for this book around people who testified or were talked about in the testaments taken after the Tallulah lynching, including: Will Rogers, Dr. J. Ford Hodge, Frank Raymond (eighteen-year-old itinerant artist from Iowa who spoke eloquently on behalf of the Sicilians at the inquiries, explaining the economic and voting issues that made the lynchers come after the Sicilians), Sheriff Lucas, John Wilson (lyncher—I merged him with an unnamed saloon keeper who offered free drinks to anyone who would help in the lynching), Father May (itinerant French priest from Lake Providence who spoke against the lynchers at the inquiries), Joe Evans (Francesco’s employee, who spoke on behalf of the Sicilians at the inquiries), Paul and Bill Bruse (employees who also spoke on their behalf at the inquiries), Anden Severe (citizen who furnished the rope), Mr. Coleman (citizen who climbed a tree and tied the rope that hanged Cirone, Rosario, and Francesco), Mr. Blander (barber who witnessed the lynching and spoke against the lynchers at the inquiries).
In building characters, I also used American slave narratives, narratives by Tunica people recorded by Mary Haas, and diaries and fiction written by people from that part of Louisiana in that period. My attention was as much on language and culture as on history. I added a sixth Sicilian, Calogero, and allowed myself to fill in the world beyond the facts I uncovered. Indeed, in the materials I found, there was disagreement over fundamental facts, including the names of the people lynched and their ages. But everyone agrees that Dr. Hodge was shot and that he recovered completely.
The materials I consulted agree that Giuseppe Difatta (age thirty-six, Italian citizen) and Carlo Difatta (age fifty-four) were both hanged in the slaughterhouse on July 20, 1899. Francesco Difatta (age thirty), Rosario Fiducia (age thirty-seven), and a third person whose name might have been Cerami or Cirone Fiducia or Giovanni Cirano or Cerano (and whose age might have been twenty-three or thirteen, Italian citizen) were dragged from the jailhouse and hanged from a cottonwood tree outside the courthouse later the same night. All the bodies were so riddled with bullets that they were disfigured almost beyond recognition.
There were two more Italians living in Milliken’s Bend, Giuseppe Defina and his son Salvatore. Buck Collins helped them escape being lynched that night by taking them in his boat to Vicksburg.
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, and Use
, edited by Solikoko Mufwene, John Rickford, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh (New York: Routledge, 1998) and
English in the Southern United States
, edited by Stephen Nagle and Sara Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
The spelling of speech does not reflect pronunciation. So just like
going to
would be pronounced “gonna” in many contexts,
sir
will be pronounced “suh” in many contexts. I’m counting on readers to let their eyes and ears work together as they read.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my family, Joseph Bruchac, Libby Crissey, Maurice Eldridge, Alice Galenson, Annette and Jack Hoeksema, Roberta Hofmann, Gabriel Kroch, Lisa Lee, Samara Leist, Michael Pfeifer, John Rickford, Lou Riley, and Richard Tchen. Thanks also to Iris Broudy and to my editorial team, Ruth Homberg, Caroline Meckler, and, especially, to Wendy Lamb, ever constant in her startling insights and firm support. And a final thank-you to Patricia McKissack, for her wonderful work and for lending me her name.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DONNA JO NAPOLI is the author of many distinguished books for young readers, among them
The Great God Pan, Daughter of Venice, Crazy Jack, The Magic Circle, Zel, Sirena, Breath, Bound, Stones in Water, Hush: An Irish Princess’ Tale
, and, most recently for Wendy Lamb Books,
The King of Mulberry Street
. She has a BA in mathematics and a PhD in Romance linguistics from Harvard University and has taught widely at major universities in America and abroad. She has five children and one grandson and lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. You can visit her on the Web at
www.donnajonapoli.com
.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Donna Jo Napoli
All rights reserved. Published by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books in 2009.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:
Napoli, Donna Jo.
Alligator bayou / Donna Jo Napoli.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Calogero Scalise and his Sicilian uncles and cousin live in small-town Louisiana in 1898, when Jim Crow laws rule and anti-immigration sentiment is strong, so despite his attempts to be polite and to follow American customs, disaster dogs his family at every turn.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89721-4
[1. Prejudices—Fiction. 2. Italian Americans—Fiction.
3. Uncles—Fiction. 4. Race relations—Fiction. 5. Country life—Louisiana—Fiction. 6. Louisiana—History—1865–1950—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N15Am 2009 [Fic]—dc22
2008014504
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