After The Titanic

By Anthony Buccino

 From the book

Anthony Buccino 

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When the Titanic sank in April 1914, my father's parents had already made their frightening voyage across the Atlantic from Laviano in Southern Italy.

They brought along their four children, and my grandfather set out to earn a living as a common laborer. My grandmother tended the vegetable gardens providing food for the growing family.

By the 1920s they bought a house and property in a rural community in northern New Jersey, a few miles west of the Statue of Liberty, in a place with a French name that reminded them of their native farmland, a place called Belleville.

They had settled in an area of the town called Guinea Hill, now known as Passaic Avenue. Many of their relatives settled nearby, some were in Belleville, others in Nutley. A visit to share the wine and speak their native tongue was usually a short walk on a dirt road.

In 1925 along came the power company to purchase the family's property which was in the way of the new power lines. Since the utility only wanted the land, my grandparents moved the house, literally with a horse and wagon, to some new property down the hill next to another house grandpa and his compares had built on a dirt road called Gless Avenue.

There, the neighbors were few and my grandparents set up their farm with goats, chickens, a vegetable garden and the all-important grapevines.

Grandpa's two houses had cellars with low ceilings where he stored  wine presses and barrels. For now, the basements provided space for the coal bins and the cool storage of provisions, and, of course the dark, strong home-made wine.

Dad's half sister was a teenager when she came to America. Her mother had died and my grandfather had married my grandmother.

Shortly after they came to this country, my aunt Assunta married and began her family. Aunt 'Sue' and her family lived in a three-room cold water flat on 5th Street in Newark. Her children were visited often by Grandpa Domenic with his horse and wagon. he took them for rides around the block and gave them each an nickel before he left.

Life in the new country was good. My grandparents had two more children born in America. Their American farm was just about the only house on the hill.

In Belleville, they had found a place where they could nearly live as the simple farm folk as in the old country. Grandma harvested the vegetables, figs, pears, grapes and eggs.

Her American farm seemed to stretch out forever although it was barely a hundred feet in any direction.

Through the grapevines no houses could be seen on the next block. The goats provided milk for the children, and the chickens fresh eggs and more.

With few other skills besides farming, no mastery of the language of the new country, my grandfather supported his growing family with the meager rent of the extra house and by working as a common laborer.

It was after a stint of digging ditches that on Feb. 4, 1929, he died of pneumonia. He left behind five young children on the precipice of the Great Depression.

Throughout the Great Depression and beyond, Grandma survived.

She had her 'rents' coming in, and her farm was full of fresh food in the dead end street.

The back porch railings were flush with tomatoes, peppers, and gourds set to dry in the sun.

Her children went to School 7 and assimilated into the 'Mitigan' culture and learned its language and customs.

When the boys were older, they worked for the town to pay the taxes on the family house. Later, they found work with the CCC and other work projects of the Great Depression.

About the time the work projects were ending, along came World War II and so many of these first generation boys joined the service to fight for the country that had held such hope for their parents.

Post-war found more houses on Gless Avenue. A mini-U.N. had developed on our block with families speaking Polish, Italian or Greek.

The old women and old men spoke to each other in their native, yet different, tongues and somehow seemed to understand each other. All their children spoke the language of the new land.

My parents spent a generation becoming Americanized, trying to leave behind their parents' ties to the customs and language of Southern Italy. After all, they had fled the old country because to stay would have meant continued hardship, poverty and destitution.

In the early part of this century the thing to do was blend in with the 'Mitigans.' My ancestors struggled to learn the new language and assimilate their children in schools.

At home and with their compares, they spoke their native dialect. My father hadn't spoken English until he started school.

By the middle of this century, when I came along, it seemed that only the very old relatives spoke Italian.

Therefore, we youngsters assured ourselves that when we got old, in our 80s or 90s like the relatives we saw around us, we too would speak Italian. We wouldn't have to take lessons, it would come naturally, we were sure.

Throughout every classroom in that school most of the children's last names ended in a vowel and their grandparents or parents had settled in Belleville and Nutley from Southern Italy.

These children had become Americanized. Few of their parents spoke Italian at home, none of the children spoke it at school.

To the pleasure and hope of our ancestors who left certain destitution, these descendants had become 'Mitigans' and would always know prosperity among these amber waves of grain.

In the 1950s and 60s the second generation enjoyed the fruits of our ancestors' sacrifices. I grew up in the house my grandfather built more than 30 years earlier. By today's standards, it was a crude shelter, a four-room cold-water flat. The house was warmed by two coal furnaces.

In the dead end street, this generation was blissfully unaware of the sacrifices and hardships endured few decades earlier so they could stand, without hunger, without persecution, among a mix of nationalities making up the boiling pot of the land called America where they could all enjoy the same freedom of opportunity to go anywhere and become anything.

Not until decades hence would these children sense the peril our ancestors endured to give us a chance at a better life as a 'Mitigan.'

Copyright 1998 © by Anthony Buccino

All Rights Reserved.

This essay first appeared in Belleville!

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