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Memories IPS Features |
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My maternal grandparents, Luigi and Filumena Libano, settled in Brooklyn long before it became a borough of New York City. Being rather poor, they had to live in the New World as they had in the countryside of their native Italy. Their cottage in East Flatbush had no gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They heated the house and cooked with a wood burning cast iron kitchen stove which was moved to a shed in the backyard in the hot summer. They suffered the use of an outhouse. A pump in the yard supplied well water. During the warm months they bought ice to prolong the life of perishable foodstuffs in the kitchen “ice-a-box”. In winters that were frigid enough to freeze the Hudson River solid, an outside tin box was sufficient for the purpose. The markets in neighboring Brownsville supplied them with shoes and clothing - except for the underwear the women sewed from flour sacks - and the things they could not grow. As a small boy in the 1940’s I was impressed at how rural the cottage looked even in “modern times” when my mother pointed it out to me. My mother only paused briefly to look at it as we walked from the trolley car stop on our way to visit relatives who still lived in the area. I sensed that it pained her to see it. I can still remember how it sat back from the road in the middle of a cluster of trees, in a field overgrown with tall grass. Even to this day when I close my eyes, I can visualize the old homestead. It appears as a bucolic farm scene like those in paintings by Flemish masters. Could it have been a remnant of the Old Dutch settlement of Breukelen? My grandfather worked as a day laborer. At the turn of the nineteenth century there was plenty of work for men with strong backs and weak minds...or maybe just hungry immigrants. Public works projects in the growing city, especially the digging of the New York City subway system, demanded an endless stream of cheap labor and Luigi was one of the faceless men who supplied it, men who eagerly accepted dirty and dangerous jobs because they had no other options. The wage rate: one dollar a day. With a family of six to feed that was not a lot of money in the America’s “Gilded Age”. But Luigi had managed to buy the cottage and land, and to a peasant land means subsistence. The family was able to supplement his income by growing vegetables in their garden, keeping chickens for eggs and meat and goats for milk and cheese. By hard work and thrift they managed to scrape by, but were they happy? I never knew my grandparents to ask them, and strangely, I can never recall my mother mentioning happy times when she spoke of her youth. Characteristically, the type of stories my mother related were mostly about hard luck, like the one about the police rounding up and impounding her parent’s “free range” goats. There were plenty of vacant lots in Brooklyn in 1890’s and the Libanos availed them- selves of this excellent goat pasture. Goats are a good choice for limited acreage. Unlike cows they are disease-free and a couple of nannies will supply all the milk the average family needs. Unfortunately, goats are independent creatures that place no boundary restraints upon themselves and head for the best pickings without regard for private property. But around that time Brooklyn was attracting a new breed of property owners; suburbanites who were more interested in green lawns and English gardens than in subsistence farming. (The expanding street car system and the Brooklyn Bridge had made it practical for people to live in the “country” and commute to jobs in “The City”.) Inevitably, one of these new neighbors left a gate open and all the voracious ruminants in the neighborhood seized the opportunity to devour the luscious flowers in his meticulously maintained garden. The outraged landlord called the police and the goats were herded to the local police station. All goat owners were notified to appear at the station house for a reprimand and to pay a fine of two dollars for violating the city ordinance regarding unrestrained livestock. Now, when you only earn a dollar a day for hard labor, two dollars is a lot of money. But the law is the law and you don’t get your goats back if you don’t pay! Unfortunately, the fine was to be the least of their problems. Worst consequences would follow. To avert further trouble the Libano goats were chained in the yard and someone had to go out in the fields and cut fodder for them. This daily task fell mostly upon my grandmother, a task she was familiar with from the Old Country. She would head out into the fields with a sickle and burlap bag and cut lush grasses, clover, and alfalfa for her hungry beasts. This was a harder job than just setting the animals free to select their own menu but she accepted it stoically. What she did not anticipate was that her foraging was exposing her to a debilitating hazard: Poison ivy. Whether she could not identify poison ivy or did not realize she was handling it was never made clear. What was made clear was that late one spring she contracted an oozing rash that spread to most of her body. An extreme allergic reaction to the toxin followed and her body swelled up and itched painfully. The doctor was called in but the treatments available in those days were no match for the malady and her suffering continued for the whole long, hot, summer. Year after year, whenever summer rolled around the rash and agony would reappear. My mother was sure that the suffering lead my grandmother to an early grave. If I have it right, witnessing this suffering was the beginning of my mother’s loss of youthful innocence. This, and the fact that she was encouraged to take on the burdens of marriage as a teenager, conditioned her for the melancholy resignation that seemed to hold a grip on her even in happier, later years. The “Gilded Age” and “Roaring Twenties” not withstanding, my mother had seen terrible times – drudgery, suppression of women’s rights, wars, influenza epidemics, infant deaths, ethnic bigotry, depressions, poverty - terrible times that can break even those who are made of hard stuff. For millions of working class uneducated women like her who were bogged down for years nurturing children, “Women’s Liberation”, “Equal Opportunity”, and “Civil Rights” were just irrelevant slogans. The only right I can remember her exercising religiously was her right to vote. No doubt, she could relate to just how hard-won that right was for women of her generation. Duty-bound people like my mother, who suffer repeated bouts of “combat fatigue” yet continue to fight on are true heroes. But self-sacrifice comes at a high price. It often saps the spirit. Combat veterans’ scars are not always visible. In this context my mother’s amnesia of “The Good Old Days” is not too hard to understand.
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