ITALIAN DINNER DANCE Speech
16 NOVEMBER 2002

by: Martha T. Cummings

Thank you, Mr. Caso. It is, of course, a pleasure to stand before family, friends, and a sea of Italians tonight to speak, as Adolfo suggested, about my pride in my Italian roots. When I began to write my remarks, I paused to consider when I do feel pride. Immediately I realized that I only feel pride when I also feel love, because for me, the latter has to be present for the former to emerge. It is barely a leap, then, to understand why I am proud of my Italian roots – for love abounds when Italy and Italians are in my view, and Italy and Italians have rested comfortably in my vision since the moment of my delivery, when I was placed in my mother’s arms and rewarded with my first glimpse of an Italian angel.

An Italian mother is a concept that is preciously and assuredly linked to destiny and glory and mission. An Italian mother is the gold standard. She is the human counterpart to the German automobile, the Cuban cigar, the Egyptian pyramid, the African spirit, the Irish sweater, the Russian vodka. When a child has an Italian mother, he or she is the envy of the world, because life is filled with warmth, music, and foods that make souls dance. Life is filled with a sense of history, achievement, culture, and unparalleled love. Life is filled with life.
Such was my introduction to the world of Italy, and, I would imagine for many of you, such was yours – through the eyes of a first-generation mother, whose parents were torn, out of necessity, from their old homeland, to settle in their new homeland, to exchange hardship for possibility. Beatrice Rubeo, my nonna, my mother’s mother, was born high in the mountains of Abruzzo, into a cramped one-room home in Campo di Giove, in the shadows of mountains whose beauty tried to soften the tribulations of her existence. At least five Rubeos lived inside four walls, without running water, without light, and without modern heating. While the men worked the fields and shared the livestock duties with the women in the family, the women collected firewood, made clothing, and hiked up into the hills in the early morning to gather grain. Together they tried to maintain a home, construct a hope, be a family, build a community, and just survive, and despite the urgency of that last motivation, they did what Italians do, and invited the aesthetics of life to enter with wild abandon; it was a custom of living that had graced the Italian way for centuries.

Despite that inclination, however, that understanding of the intellectual and emotional gifts of our existence, when Nonna stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, it was noted that she could neither read nor write. So in her new land of potential, she started to carve her exalted personal goals, by committing herself to acquiring the English of the learned, minimizing the Italian nuances of her pronunciation, and insisting on proper grammar. She was determined to embody the refinements of scholarship, and while her personal goals were lofty, the goals for her children were loftier, and the goals for her children’s children were loftier still. That was the immigrant way. My nonna, and all of our ancestors, expertly orchestrated a path to their futures, and our futures, that married the lessons of their youth to the freedoms of their adulthood. They turned the skills of hard work, the challenge of language, the fear of hunger, the pain of cold, and the closeness that such distress inspires, into a shrine of determination, power, will, and family-above-all-else. It was that very combination, that very consciousness, that very essence, that fueled their imagination for our fates and invited us into the realm of achievement, comfort, and a future that we were allowed to design and realize for ourselves.
Antonio Ragonese, my nonno, my mother’s father, was born in Tusa, Sicily. He, too, was enriched by a landscape of magnificence, for he lived high in a hill town that looked over the Tyrrhenian Sea. From that vantage point over the years, he could have watched scores of warriors stake their claims over Sicily – affecting language, architecture, and the appearance of the island’s people. He could have watched the nearby African sunshine and the peaceful ships, farmers pacing their crops, and mules making the nine kilometer climb to the village summit. And he could have watched Sicily suffer the hardships of a harsh economy and an arid island interior, both of which were further weakened by a debilitating and relentless drought that, during Nonno’s youth, strove to thwart all attempts at survival.

At the same time, the gifts of America were making themselves known throughout Italy, and particularly in Sicily, so my grandfather and three younger siblings bid a permanent good-bye to Tusa, their parents, two brothers and a sister, to light upon the shores of America. When my nonno reached his new country, a better economic life and education for all, or the reasonable hope for such an existence, were everywhere to be found. America spread out wide and deep, houses seemed palatial, jobs were relatively well-paying, and the spirit of newness and discovery rang out in the land that, by European standards, was still freshly-settled and young in its sense of definition and purpose. Some of the American bounty was profoundly tainted, however, for Nonno was pushed into a wall of bigotry against Italians, both because of a pecking order that plagues all civilizations and because of society’s preoccupation with the unfortunate aberrations of a culture rather than the exhilarating innovations. He was armed, though, with an unwavering pride and belief in his background and in his ability to change their narrowness of thought. As a result, Nonno embraced the character of his new land, but he was determined to celebrate the nuances of his old one. Opera rang out in his home, his humor countered the parochial characterization of a Sicilian temper, and his mandolins and guitars were strummed lightly and with skill. And most of all, perhaps, he learned English with an impassioned Italian accent. His speech embodied the reality of the immigrant existence for it reflected the truth of what they were straddling. Through the cadence of his accented words, my grandfather was saying: I am happy to be in America. I will be American. But make no mistake, I am Italian, too, and I will not strip my core to be accepted. And so my nonno, like many of your beloved ascendants, lived his life with one literal foot in America and one figurative foot back home, and in doing so, he taught my mother, who passed it on, one admired but elusive truth – that our backgrounds, our stories, and our nationalities, make us interesting and different and particular, and that culture should not be eradicated in the name of conformity – because truth is truth. We are what we are; we are not what others say we are, and we should spend our lives, patiently and firmly, making that known, about us, and about others, to as many who will listen and even to those who will not. It was a lesson of foresight. It is a lesson of hope. It is a lesson that expanded the minds and attitudes of his family to follow, and it is a lesson of an Italian grandfather and a Sicilian island that gave birth to such clarity and vision.

From Beatrice Rubeo and Antonio Ragonese came Antoinette Frances Ragonese, my mother for the first 43 years of my life, until June 16, 2002, when she slipped away from us all in the middle of the night. My mother was my core, and her passing has rendered my heart heavy, to the degree that talking about her remains too difficult; so tonight, I offer only this glimpse: The spirit of my ancestors, the awareness of their experiences, and the aesthetics of Italy, wove their way to my mother’s mind and soul – for she had a wisdom, an omniscience, that spanned the years and eclipsed her short time on this earth. My mother pulled threads from her parents’ pasts: threads of Italy, threads of determination, resolve, scholarship, the mountains, the seas, threads of humor, opera, threads of culture, generosity, and open-mindedness, and threads of warmth, a warmth like no other, that allowed her to knit a bridge that summoned her children to cross, and to climb, up, up, up, and to soar beyond her own self. That was the immigrant way, and although my Mum was not an immigrant, that essence was inside of her and was proof of the rivers and the blood that flow from one generation, one mind, one life, to the next.

So from a great-great-grandfather born in 1803 in the mountains of Sicily, whose hands worked sartorial magic on his clients’ fabrics, to a great-great-grandchild in the early 21st century, whose hands invent words that imagine the magic of those skills, I look down at my olive-colored fingers as they lead me through the notes of my history, and I nod to myself and smile to myself as a realization warms me.
My pride in my Italian roots is most certainly about Boccacio, Dante, and Petrarch, or gelato, fighi d’india, parmigiano, e pomodoro, or mountain ranges, sculpted coast lines, olive groves, and vineyards, or Puccini, Rossini, and Verdi, or fashion, brilliant hair, and flawless skin, or Fermi, Galileo, and Leonardo.

But more so, much more so, my pride is about our ancestors, and my ancestors, Antonio Ragonese, Beatrice Rubeo, and most especially, Antoinette Frances Ragonese. For to feel pride, I have to feel love. And I feel love, immeasurable love, for their gift of freedom, for staring down the face of despair, for their spirit of possibility, and for their capacity to dream. And for nurturing an appreciation of a history, my history, that allows me to sing and swing and laugh and sigh for knowing, each day of my life, that I am proud, so proud, to be the daughter of an Italian angel, to be the daughter of Italian pioneers, to be a daughter of Italy.