12. JOE AND LEDDA

hen Joe, the third Musacchio brother, first came to the United States, it was 1911. He joined John and Mike in the southside Chicago apartment on Greenwood Avenue they shared with Big Joe Musashe. Giuseppe Musacchio, our Joe, my father, although I would not be born for two dozen years, remained a year and a half, undoubtedly working as a laborer on the railroad, then returned to Falconara. It was for a purpose. On January 18, 1913, Joe married Angela Tocci, my mother, the younger sister of his brother John's wife, Zia Chiara.

     Like most of the Falconarese, Angela Tocci had another name by which she was better known in the village. The name was Ledda. When Hal and I visited Falconara for several weeks during the fall of 1983, we rented a second floor apartment near the main piazza. We were obvious strangers; not everybody in the village knew at first who we were or the purpose of our visit. For that reason, we were distrusted. People also didn't realize, at first, that I spoke Albanian or that our son David, who accompanied us, spoke Italian. We sometimes heard people talking about us behind our backs. "Coosh yon?" they would ask each other, meaning, Who are they? When this happened, I often would turn around, smile, and begin speaking to them in Albanian, causing the back-talkers great embarrassment. I delighted in doing this, but our linguistic ability eventually became known.

     One afternoon, we exited our rented apartment and encountered three older women chatting beside our door. Always looking for an excuse for fraternization, we initiated a conversation with them. They were surprised at first that I spoke their language.

     I explained to the women that my parents had been born in the village, mentioning that my mother's name had been Angela Tocci. The women looked slightly puzzled, as though trying to plumb old memories. After all, more than a half century had passed since my mother had lived in Falconara.

     "My mother was called Ledda," I said.

     "You're Ledda's daughter?" said one of the women, her face brightening. The woman had been a child when my mother had migrated to America, but she remembered Ledda once giving her a trinket. She still had the gift. With that, we suddenly became good friends with the three women. They posed for pictures. "Your mother had such beautiful hair," one told me.

     Ledda, of course, was one more Arberesh nickname of which neither the meaning nor the origin nobody in the family seemed to know. The nickname, however, helped differentiate Angela, the third of the Tocci children, from her younger brother, who was named Angelo. Her older siblings were Michele and Chiara.

     Ledda was taller than Chiara, about 5 feet 2 inches, and round where her older sister was skinny. As was common with those in the village, she had soulful, brown eyes. She let the lustrous black hair, still remembered by the one woman, grow long, then braided and wrapped it around her head.

     Born May 29, 1984, Ledda was five months older than her husband, Joe, whose birthday was November 5, the same year. Ledda considered Joe flighty, immature. "He can hardly carry on a conversation," she complained to Chiara.

     Ledda was an educated woman, more sophisticated that her sister, who was eight-and-a-half years older. Like most Falconarese women of her era, Chiara had not attended school. Ledda did attend school, her father, Chico probably having recognized that his younger daughter had a certain native intelligence that should be permitted to flower--at least within the limits imposed upon the females of Falconara.

     But after four months of schooling for her younger sister, Chiara began to grumble about unequal treatment. "I have to go out in the corn field all day, and she sits in school and does nothing," Chiara complained. Eventually Chico relented, and Ledda joined her sister in the fields. Ledda was deeply disappointed, because she dearly loved going to school and reading from books. She understood the logic of her older sister's position, however, and did not bear Chiara any lasting ill will.

     That Ledda had obtained even four months education was considered almost unusual at the time. There was deep prejudice in the village about females attending school. Zotti Nun, the priest, considered it a waste of time to educate girls. "When they get to be sixteen, they'll just run off after boys anyway," so claimed Zotti Nun.

     A cousin of Ledda, Theresa Tocci, who later married Big Joe, started school with her sister. A relative wrote her father, then working in the United States. The father wrote back immediately telling her mother to take the two girls out of school. "Boys need school," Theresa's father claimed. "Girls don't!"

     Marietta Musachio, Uncle Mike's wife, also recalled one day her mother hollering to her sister, "Go, you'll be late for school."

     This offended a next-door neighbor. "Push them to school so they can learn to write to boy friends," hissed the neighbor.

     "I've got news for you," claimed Marietta's mother. "If they can't write letters, they'll get someone to write them for them. I let them go to school to learn."

     Many of the younger women in the village did have boy friends, or husbands, who had left for the United States. If they could not read the letters sent home to them, these women would need to ask someone else--a relative, a neighbor--to tell them what the letters said. They discovered that soon everybody in town knew about their business.

     For the males of the village, schooling was compulsory only to the third grade. Among the subjects taught was Italian, for many their first encounter with the language of their country. Discipline was rigid. Despite the lack of appreciation for education, the local teachers were respected men within the community. The Pellegrini family provided several teachers for the village school. Our cousin John Molinaro later would recall how the teachers kept control of the children, at least in a latter decade when girls were more likely to attend school. "If one of the boys did something wrong," said John, "Mr. Pellegrini would ask a girl in the class to determine how many times he should be slapped on the hand with a ruler. If a girl did something wrong, the boys would determine how many slaps. If one group proved too ruthless, the other could get revenge." It proved to be an effective system of justice.

     Few among the young Falconarese realized the change they would witness in their lifetimes, more change than had occurred in the village in four previous centuries. Fourth grade had been the extent of my father's education. As for his lack of maturity, at the time of his wedding Joe was merely eighteen, a youngest child at that, who had been both pampered by his mother Marianna and protected by his older brothers, Gus and John, particularly John. The fact that Joe was a world traveler meant little. In his visit to the United States, Giuseppe Musacchio had seen barely more than the south side neighborhood of Chicago, where he lived among other Italians, and the railroad tracks on which he labored, also with his countrymen. Visits to the Art Institute or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were not on his schedule, although he loved listening to Italian opera. I can still recall him in the bathroom singing one aria from Pagliacci, “Vesta La Giubba.”

     In remembering my father, he lacked the wonderful charm of my Uncle John, also his gift of gab. Pa was shy, less outgoing, much less flamboyant than my dapper uncle. Pa also had a way of turning away from people who bored him. If he didn't like you, he didn't bother with you. He usually also let you know he didn't like you.

     Yet Pa, probably because he came to the United States at a younger age, sixteen, would assimilate the American culture most rapidly. He eventually would learn to speak English with barely a trace of accent, and not one that was easily recognized as Italian. In fact, Joe did not look Italian. With his upright bearing, his brown hair and light skin, he looked almost, well, Prussian. I thought that of all the relatives, my father was the one most likely to "pass" as a native-born American. Only Joe's last name, which he proudly resisted Americanizing, gave him away as of Italian stock.

     Even though Pa was a man almost elegantly handsome, there were other men in the village of Falconara who might have more readily captured Ledda's heart. I sometimes wondered if "love," in the romantic sense, existed between my mother and father. But love rarely entered into the picture in old country marriages. Love was a luxury that the Falconarese could not afford. The joining of Joe and Ledda was very much an arranged marriage, a wedding of convenience for the families Musacchio and Tocci. Two brothers married two sisters. While the two brothers earned money in America, the two sisters would remain in Italy to care for the inevitable children, look after the expected accumulation of property, and also see to the comfort of the grandparents. This was very much in the Italian structured family tradition, and although the Falconarese, because of their Albanian roots, were hyphenated Italians, they too saw the value of large families as a retirement plan, a form of nineteenth century social security. The only new twist imposed by the twentieth century was the necessity for the men to travel such distances to obtain work.

     Soon after the wedding, Ledda became pregnant, reason for rejoicing by all members of the family. Duty accomplished, his anchor in Falconara secure, Joe Musacchio returned triumphant to the south side of Chicago and the apartment on Greenwood. Shortly after Joe resumed work on the railroad, however, he received a sad letter from his wife. Ledda had lost their child in her third month. It would have been a boy, she informed her husband.

     The failure of Ledda to deliver the expected male heir must have nagged at both her and Joe. As a barren woman, Ledda had lost part of her hold on her husband, who was getting into who knows how much mischief, he being surrounded by foreign women of small moral character. Her sister Chiara worried and chattered so much about what troubles their husbands might be creating in Chicago that Ledda finally told her, "Ricitu!" Shut up! Joe also probably realized that his wife, without child, might have been more vulnerable to the wiles of the men of the village. If Joe needed any confirmation of those wiles, all he had to do was consider his father-in-law's past indiscretions or the problems his brother Gus had keeping his wife in line.

     "So what's your wife doing, Giuseppe, while you're working here in Chicago?" the older men in the taverns sometimes kidded Joe. Pa said nothing, just turned red and grumbled, withdrew into himself, which made them laugh. They rarely kidded John in the same way about his wife, since they knew Joe's older brother would respond in one of two ways. If John was sober, he'd say, "Who cares what that woman's doing?" If he had too many drinks, John, being cantankerous, would probably start a fight and they'd have to carry him home. John's wife, of course, had a child to occupy her while Joe's did not. Joe certainly knew that at the earliest convenient opportunity he would need to return to Falconara and remedy that problem by reasserting his manhood.

     Following her marriage, Chiara had moved in with her husband's parents, Antonio and Marianna. Ledda now joined her new family. The Musacchio house was north of the main church, San Michele di arcangelo, jammed among many similar houses attached to the hill on which Falconara-Albanese clung. The incline on which the houses had been built was steep enough so that, even though only two blocks from the church, the Musacchios looked out their windows down upon its roof.

     The houses in this, and other parts of the village, were jammed so closely together that in the morning, when you opened your window to air the bedding, you looked into your neighbor's bedroom window. "That was the trouble with the village," my mother later complained to me and my sisters. "Everybody was looking into each other's bedrooms. You couldn't blow a fart without people smelling it all over town." (That statement by my mother, written in English, appears more harsh than it probably did spoken in Arberesh.)

     Chiara did not agree with her sister's complaints about their apparent lack of privacy. She was more interested in what was happening to their neighbors than Ledda. Chiara enjoyed gossip. Other than caring for her child, she had no other diversions. "What else we got to do?" she would tell Ledda.

     Years later Ledda would talk to me about the women of Falconara, mostly dressed in black or other somber colors, standing around the village square and gossiping. "Yen machia," was the expression she used. "They're cats!"

     One of their duties was to wash clothes, a complicated procedure that involved first scrubbing the clothes with soap, then washing them again, finally boiling them over a fire in a large tub of water, a sheet covering the tub to protect the clean clothes from the ashes. No germs could survive such treatment. After boiling, the clothes were rinsed with clean water. Since there was no central plumbing, all water for this operation had to be brought in jugs from the town square. The women carried these jugs--as they carried food, firewood, or other bundles--atop their heads, a remarkable balancing act that seemed quite natural since they had practiced it since they were girls trailing their mothers. Their long hair, braided and wrapped around their heads, provided a cushion for the various bundles they transported in their daily duties.

     The hair was used symbolically in mourning. When someone in the family died, the women would loosen their hair and let it fall loose over their backs. This was known as "loosening the bisquit." They also would dress in black. After the funeral and the body had been lowered into the ground, or placed in a sepulcher, the women would rebraid their hair, although continuing to wear black. A widow would remain dressed in black for the rest of her life. Even if the woman were not a widow, she would wear black for a long period of time, sometimes a year or more, if someone in the immediate family had died. Since families were large and people were naturally and continuously dying, the women of Falconara dressed in black much of their lives. Designer clothes made little impact on the village of Falconara.

     Sometimes the women mourned for reasons other than the death of a loved one, according to one tale related by my mother. Several members of the Carnivale family migrated to Detroit, but to protect their property forced one of the girls remaining behind to marry her uncle against her will. Before the wedding, the father and mother of the bride and the future husband walked together to a store to purchase wedding clothes. The girl followed behind, crying at her misfortune. As she walked, the girl untied her hair, her statement that she was going into mourning because of her wedding. One almost wanted to pity the husband as much as the bride, but somehow such marriages survived. "It was a way of life," Tulio Calabria would say.

     Early in their lives female members of the family deferred to their mothers, grandmothers, and even great grandmothers, but as those revered persons aged and died, those on the bottom would ascend to positions of power in the family, the matriarch being second in authority only to the patriarch, and sometimes, in their clever way, they ruled even him. Marianna was matriarch in the Musacchio family, thus controlled the daily lives of the females beneath her. When Chiara and Ledda washed the clothes, or cooked, or cleaned, their mother-in-law Marianna would watch, telling them what they should do. Chiara would say nothing, but Ledda became irritated at her mother-in-law's constant supervision. "I know what to do," bridled Ledda. "You go do something else, and leave us alone."

     Nonna Marianna, however, was in her sixties and had little else to do other than see that her son's wives properly accomplished the work she once had done herself. It had been always thus, for four centuries in Falconara, and before that for countless more centuries in Albania. "That Ledda, she thinks she knows everything," Marianna undoubtedly complained to Antonio, her husband. "The Toccis never should have sent that girl to school."

     Compared to the strong-willed Ledda, Chiara was much quieter. Whereas Ledda would object if asked to do something she disliked, Chiara would agree, but find some way not to do it. Chiara used this tactic to cope with the written demands of her husband, John, who, far across the ocean, could not monitor her every move. Chiara became used to manipulating, more the typical "women's way" of dealing with a problem. Chiara would whine and make people feel sorry for her. I can almost picture Zia Chiara even now, wringing her hands, then striking her forehead with both fists, seemingly punishing herself for some mistake she might have made. In extreme cases, when particularly distressed, Chiara would bang her head against the wall. "It's amazing she has any brains left," Ledda in later years would say about her sister.

On June 28, 1914, the Austrian Archduke, Francis Ferdinand and his wife visited Sarajevo, a city in Bosnia, later to become part of Yugoslavia. A Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Ferdinand, an incident that gave the Austrian-Hungarians an excuse to invade Serbia. Within the next few months, Russia mobilized, Germany declared war on Russia and

France, then invaded Belgium causing Great Britain to declare war on Germany. World War I had begun. Within the year, on May 23, 1915, Italy, coveting Austrian land along the northern Italian border, joined the battle against the central powers.

     In this era before long-range bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, battles on the Italian-Austrian border hardly affected the southern part of Italy, except when young men from that region were called to fight in those battles. Many young Italians, particularly men from the south, were across the ocean earning money to improve their lot and that of their families. Thus, agents from the Italian army traveled to America to recruit their countrymen. This was two years before the United States would enter the war. Italians living abroad were offered free passage back to Italy to join the army plus a return ticket to the United States once the fighting ceased, assuming they survived--although this possibility usually went unmentioned. Regardless of the danger, the opportunity to return home at the expense of the government was too enticing an opportunity for many poor Italians working in the United States to pass.

     Added to that was the threat that if they did not return to serve in the army, the immigrant laborers never would be able to return to the Old Country again to visit wives and family. The pay was not much--$32 for each six months--but many agreed to serve in the war. It is also possible that some were motivated by a degree of patriotism, bravissimo being very much part of the Italian character.

     One who joined the Italian army was Joe Musacchio. Uncle Mike also wanted to enlist, but Mike's brother, Big Joe, talked him out of it. "You're crazy," said Big Joe. "What good's a round trip ticket if you're not alive to use it?"

     Uncle Mike eventually accepted the logic of Big Joe's position; my father did not. "I don't care," he told Mike. "I'm going back." Unquestionably, Joe was motivated by a desire to see his wife, as well as a realization that, though married two years, he still was without issue.

     Five hundred Italians living in the Chicago area reportedly signed to return to fight for their country. Included in this number were several Falconarese. In addition to my father, Falconarese who joined the Italian army in World War I included: Giovanni Cavotto, Franco Nesci, Battista Fionda, and a distantly-related Musacchio with the first name of Frank. Battista Fionda (later known as John Fionda) entered the service several months after my father, but recalled what happened: "An agent of the Italian army came to Polk Street. He said, 'You got your family in Italy?' I said, 'Yes.' So they paid the fare for me and the others, all Italians, by boat to Napoli."

     When the new recruits arrived in Italy, they were given time, as promised, to visit their families. Fionda and the other Falconarese boarded a train that twisted along the Amalfi coast down into the province of Calabria and to the town of Paola, where they could transfer to a secondary train that crossed the mountains to Cosenza. En route, it stopped at the station, which bore the name Falconara-Albanese, even though it was well beneath the actual village by that name. No road connected station to village at that time, only a wide path that had to be negotiated on foot if you didn't have a mule. The returning recruits had to walk.

     "We got home at night," recalled John Fionda. "In the morning, a sergeant from the police came to my family's house and said, I had to go join the army. They said I had to leave at 10:00 to be in the big city to be examined."

     The "big city" was Cosenza, the major commercial center for that section of Calabria. After reporting in Cosenza, Fionda and the other Falconarese were sent to duty in Naples. Joe Musacchio undoubtedly followed a similar route.

     My father was inducted into the service September 18, 1915. Joe's army record indicates he stood 1.67 meters tall, just under 5 feet 6 inches, short by the standards of later generations, tall compared to other Italians of his era, particularly the Falconarese, who all seemed short men. Because of Joe's height, but even more because of his bearing, he was selected to become a member of the bersoglieri, an elite infantry corps. He joined that group's 14th Regiment.

     The bersoglieri were the Italian army's World War I equivalent of the green berets. They had special uniforms and when they traveled from one place to another they never marched, they ran. Because of that, recruiters for the bersoglieri selected men with broad chests under the theory that greater lung capacity would make them greater runners. Later, when the Italian army got tanks, a half dozen bersoglieri would run beside each tank to prevent the enemy from throwing grenades beneath the treads. In battle, bersoglieri fought in the front lines, and they had a higher percentage of wounded than most other units. Their nickname was carne da macello, "meat for the butchers."

     They were men proud of their position, a cut above other soldiers, and this pride is apparent in a family photograph of Joe Musacchio in his World War I uniform. He wears a plumed helmet, a tight jacket with stars on each collar, the stripes of a corporal on his sleeves. His trousers flare at the hips. Around his waist is a polished belt with holster. There is regal air to his appearance, as though he was a worthy heir to Scanderbeg and the troops who had held the Sultan at bay for a quarter century.

    Pa was a strikingly handsome man with thin mustache over a firm mouth and strong chin. His nose was straight and long, what might be considered the Musacchio nose. His left hand is behind his back, right hand on his hip, as he stares to the right of the camera with a look on his face that might be described as expressionless.

     My family has another photograph of Joe from World War I. It shows him one among a group of sixteen at an Italian army hospital. Two of the sixteen are nurses, the rest wounded veterans. During the campaign against the Austrians, he had been shot in the leg. Reportedly my

father was wounded on at least two other occasions, minor injuries, Joe later would admit. The injuries occurred while the Italian and Austrian armies battled back and forth over the control of some pass through the Alps. These were battles similar to those described in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms. Battista Fiona fought in the same area, but was captured by the Austrians. He eventually escaped from their prison camp and spent the rest of the war working on a farm while hiding from his captors.

      My sister Marion recalls our father saying that if he had not been married, he would have stayed in the Army. "He loved it," claims Marion. He reached the rank of sergeant, thus held a position of authority. He could boss other people, tell them what to do. "He liked the discipline, the toughness, probably the three meals a day."

      According to family legend, Joe became attracted to a girl while in service. "Ma claimed Pa was never one for chasing women, as far as she knew," says Marion. "But this woman lived on a farm and had a goat. Pa liked goat's milk and hung around the girl so he could drink the milk." Or so went the family legend.

      Pa would remain in the Italian army for four years, returning to Falconara on occasional furloughs. Marianna, the daughter of Uncle John and Chiara, remembered one occasion when Joe returned home. His visit coincided with the time that one of the villagers fell off a cliff, killing himself. Joe apparently had to spend most of the time during his furlough making arrangements for the funeral.

On September 13, 1919, Joe Musacchio received his discharge from the Italian army, returning to Falconara. Within a few months, he had his wife Ledda pregnant again. Mission accomplished, Joe returned to the United States, before she delivered, to join John and the other

Falconarese living on the south side of Chicago. On October 20, 1920, the child was born and duly named Antonio after the paternal grandfather. This first male eventually would assume the more American name Anthony, but is more often called Tony.

     Years later, while his wife and child remained in Italy, he in America, Joe would express doubts about Tony's parentage. Like many of the Falconarese in Chicago, Joe was suspicious of what might be going on in the village behind their backs. "Who knows what those women are capable of?" grumbled the Chicago Falconarese, not all of whom were entirely faithful themselves. But one need only look at the face today of Anthony Musacchio, my brother Tony, and compare it to photographs of Joe. There could be no doubt concerning paternity. Father and son had the Musacchio nose.

     Despite its southern location, Falconara is a cold place to live because of being high in the mountains. From late fall to early spring, the nights are cold and damp. Fog frequently smothers the village in the mornings. Occasionally it will snow. The thick-walled houses seem to hold the cold in as much as they held the cold out. There is no central heating. Fireplaces and stoves, the "hearth" of Albanian legends, send as much warmth out the chimney as they allow to spread through the rooms. Villagers cope by covering themselves with layers of clothing, sweaters and shawls they have knitted. At night they burrow under thick quilts. In the late mornings, after the fog lifts, villagers warm themselves by going about their duties, shopping, lingering around the piazza, allowing the winter sun to shine on them. There is a saying about Italians, that when they go outside they layer themselves with sweaters to keep warm, then when they come inside they put on their overcoats. 

     In 1919, influenza--what came to be known as the "Spanish flu"--raged through Europe killing many people. According to some of the Falconarese, as many as half their village perished during the epidemic. Considering the fact that the 1911 census for Falconara listed 2,092 abitanti with a decline by 1921 to only 2,003, that level of mortality seems unlikely. Nevertheless, many villagers did die, including two sons of Michele and Serafina Tocci. Michele and Serafina were Rose's aunt and uncle, her mother's older brother and his wife. Serafina's maiden name was Formosa. Reportedly Michele was so distraught at the loss of his children, that he lunged for a gun and vowed to kill himself. His mother, Nonna Rosaria, had to restrain Michele, as he probably knew she would. Michele and Serafina, over the years, would have six surviving children. On several of our visits to Italy, we stopped in Cosenza to see Zia Serafina, still alive in her nineties, part of the household of her son, Everesto Tocci. Daughter Delfina also lived in town, and usually she and her husband joined us for the inevitably filling noon meal, il pranzo, that we had come to appreciate as part of the joy of being Italian.

     My brother Tony was born after the Spanish flu epidemic, but he was sickly as a baby, bothered by bronchitis. Ledda, having lost her first child during pregnancy, worried about him. To cure Tony, she and sister Chiara would melt sugar on the hot coals and add it to a pot of water, along with a medicine, or type of tea, known as clementina, that they boiled, so Tony could breathe the vapors.

     Tony was a small child. Chiara's daughter Marianna recalls walking through the town with her young nephew in her arms and meeting a villager named Antonio Condreva. The villager tousled little Tonio's hair, "Povero ragazzo, nato per sbaglio," he said, meaning: "Poor little boy, you were born by mistake."

     It was a common Italian expression most often offered in jest, but sometimes maliciously, depending upon the intent of the person making the statement. Marianna knew how much her aunt Ledda had worried over having this first baby. "He's here," Marianna snapped, "no matter how."

     Long after becoming a bride, Chiara continued to live with the parents of her absentee husband John, as was expected of her. So did Ledda for many years, but she was more independent, and did not get along so easily with her in-laws. When her husband had returned to Italy during the war, she insisted that he acquire a house for them. Within a few years after returning to America, Joe dutifully sent enough money from his earnings as a laborer to enable Ledda to acquire a house across the street from his parents.

     The house, though small, and though sorely in need of repairs and a good cleaning, was a handsome one. It stood on a corner, joined to, and hemmed in by, other houses around it in the section of Falconara above the church where most of the Musacchios lived. With its mud-covered stone walls, its shuttered windows, its tile roof, it looked like most houses in the village. Also like the other houses, it had four levels. The bottom level was where they kept the pig and other farm animals. A stairway on the front of the house led up to the second level, what in the European system of numbering was referred to as the first floor, la prima stanza.

     On this floor was the main bedroom. A stairway inside led to the second floor and a dining area. Above that, on the topmost floor, was the kitchen and an outdoor terrace high above the roofs of the other houses. Standing on the terrace, you could look down on the church and out across the valley and its cultivated fields to the grass-covered hill where shepherds pastured their sheep. Nobody in that era had heard the term "solar energy" before, but when it came time for Ledda to bathe Tony, she would set a tub full of water out on the terrace and let the sun heat it. Tony would play here while his mother worked in the kitchen. Sometimes he would be joined by one of his cousins, Raffaele Morelli, the half-nephew of Uncle Mike who worked in Chicago.

     My mother told of how dirty the house had been when she moved into it. It took her several years of steady work and repairs to get the house to a level of acceptability that satisfied her. "She was happy," claims her daughter Marion, "because she was her own boss. She had her mother-in-law coming over to tell her what to do, and Zia, but she had control of her life." Marion believes that it may have been the happiest period of her mother's life.

     Aside from caring for the two children, Tony and Marianna, Ledda and her sister tended gardens nearby to provide food for their tables. Chiara weaved to make linen. "You worked night and day like a jackass," recalls Tulio Calabria. "If you didn't you were no good." Anna Ristucci, who later joined her husband in Chicago, recalled seeing Ledda carrying potatoes, corn, or wood on her back, as did most of the other women of the village. The Musacchio family was hardly wealthy in comparison with the average family in the United States, or even with their Italian

neighbors, but compared to the others in their village they lived a marginally comfortable life.

     Anna Ristucci would recall going for walks with her young son Battista and Ledda and Tony. Sometimes they would walk to the top of the mountain across the valley, the same grassy "Sound of Music" field where Hal often had gone to gaze out across the sea on our visits to Falconara. During the summer, the Musacchio women and their children vacationed at the ocean, not far from where the seven families first came ashore. They rented several rooms in one of the houses in San Lucido near the beach, staying for a month. It cost very little. They would bring food down with them from Falconara to limit their expenses.

     They spent the summer of 1922 at the beach. Tony was then two, but remained sickly. He cried every night and Ledda needed to cradle Tony in her arms to comfort him. In September, when it was time to leave, a man came down from the village to help them carry their gear. They placed Tony and their belongings on a donkey, Chiara, Ledda, and Marianna walking nearby. On their way home, they passed the train station below Falconara. Earlier that summer, Chiara had received a letter from her husband John saying that he and Mike would be returning home. Seeing a train in the station, Chiara said, "Maybe they are on this train."

     But when people got off the train, neither John nor Mike were among the passengers. The women and children continued their trudge upward to the village. Soon afterwards, a young boy appeared at Chiara's door. He informed her that her husband had been on the train, but had left it one stop early at a cabin where Chiara and Ledda's older brother Michele Tocci lived. Michele worked for the railroad. They had gone to a farm nearby looking for friends, then returned to Michele's.

     Instead of coming up to Falconara, John had sent word that they were back. Michele Tocci's wife Serafina was preparing a meal, and everyone was invited. John's father Antonio, then seventy-two, accepted the invitation and went down to the house accompanied by Chiara and her daughter, Marianna. Nonna Marianna, however, balked. "I'm not going," she informed the family. She was insulted that they should not have come to her home and allowed her to be host for the meal.

     Antonio told John one day: "I'm sorry, my son, but you are a dream of a son when working, but a scoundrel with your home and family."

     Michele Tocci, whom John and Mike had stopped to visit, earlier had spent time in the United States. In 1912, Michele crossed the sea with his younger brother, Angelo, and their father, Francesco Tocci, who would have been fifty-six at the time. Also accompanying them was Chico's brother, Domenic. They were seeking work. Because the microfilm in the National Archives for the T-200 reel on which the arrival of anyone by the name of Tocci would have been recorded was blurred, we were unable to confirm when, or even if, all four traveled to the United States at this time, but family legend says it was so.

     They obtained jobs constructing an electric power house, apparently somewhere in Georgia, according to those who remembered them. Michele Tocci was as attracted to women as was Chico, his father. He became involved with a local girl, which didn't sit too well with some of the good old boys of the neighborhood. They arrived one evening with guns and started to shoot. Chico and the others in his family reportedly had to escape during the night.

     They headed to Chicago where the other Falconarese had begun to establish a foothold. Michele and Angelo, and possibly Chico, stayed

with the Musacchios. This was several years after John had married Chiara Tocci, but before Joe married Ledda. Perhaps the marriage between these two was arranged at this time. The Toccis also may have spent some time in Minnesota. But they didn't stay long and soon returned to the old country. Only Angelo of the four eventually would become an American citizen.

     Michele maintained his interest in the opposite sex upon returning to Falconara. "He had one woman after another," one family member told us. "He would love them and leave them. He had an illegitimate daughter in Port Chester, New York. Her mother was only fifteen when the child was born. Her mother had died, so she and her two sisters were sent to different houses. Michele slept with them all."

     Eventually Michele would marry Serafina. When he was in the Army during World War I, Michele often was transported from one town to another. Passing through Fiumafreddo, he would leave the train, then race up to the hills to sleep with his wife. "One hour and he left her pregnant," sighed the woman in the family who told us the story, slapping her forehead with one palm to indicate that this was crazy.

     Michele was discharged from the service when the baby was about to be born. Serafina had problems during delivery. After they took her to the doctor, Michele spoke with someone in the village who told him the child wasn't his. The villager may have been unaware of Michele's quick visits. Whether what the villager said was true or not, Michele was furious at this supposed indiscretion on the part of his wife. "Hasn't she burst yet?" he snapped at one of the women attending Serafina. Then he said to her, "I hope you make a monster."

     Michele and Serafina eventually had six children, moving to Cosenza. Many years later, he would contract tuberculosis and return to his mother's home to be nursed back to health. Marianna Molinaro was then living with Rosaria, but her husband in Rome objected to their children being exposed to tuberculosis. He had them send Michele back to Cosenza where he died in December, 1940.

     When John Musacchio visited Falconara in 1922, his daughter Marianna had been thirteen years old. It was the first time she saw her father, or he her. During his visit, Uncle John purchased a house for his wife. Away from the section of the village where his parents and both his brothers owned homes, his was on the edge of town overlooking the valley. It had an ornate, carved wooden door. Below were gardens. He hired a man named Michelangelo Pupino to make repairs.

     Also working in the village at that time was a man from the neighboring village of Longobardi. His name was Salvatore Molinaro. He was a contractor in charge of constructing a road from the railroad station to Falconara. Salvatore had a son named Massimo, who assisted him. Born April 30, 1905, Massimo was then seventeen years old. One day after feeding the pigs at her Aunt Ledda's house, Marianna sat on the front steps twirling some keys on her finger. Massimo Molinaro appeared. They became acquainted.

     John remained through the winter. Chiara, sick with an infection, had to go to the hospital in Cosenza. She brought her daughter Marianna with her, and Marianna slept on the floor beside her mother's bed. Because of visa restrictions, John apparently could not remain longer than six months. With his wife still in the hospital, he returned to the United States in April, 1923. Chiara recovered, but the month after John left, his father Antonio died. The date of Antonio Musacchio's death was May 20, 1923.

     Rose's brother Tony remembers the death of his grandfather, Non Tonio, a man he adored, actually his surrogate father. "He died when I was about three years old," recalls Tony. "I thought he was just sleeping, not dead." Previously it had been Tony's habit to run over to the house of his grandparents and climb in bed with Grandpa. There were no funeral homes in Falconara and they laid the dead out in the homes, in bed. Tony tried to get in bed with the old man, but they restrained him.

     "I don't remember too much else about Falconara," says Tony. "I remember the streets winding around. Pa sent money, so we had the house where we lived remodeled. I remember playing in the streets, or in the fields. Outside town, a cement irrigation ditch had lots of water. We used to play in it. We mostly kicked things around. We'd get barrel staves and roll them around with a stick. Played tag.

     "My father wasn't there, but my mother was religious. We used to go to church. I helped ring the church bells. I remember Massimo courting Marianna. He would give me little rides around town. He bought a little one-horse cart and that was something. I went to school for one year. They had a man teacher, who was strict. If you didn't behave, he'd crack you.

     "I remember going to peoples' houses, my mother talking to them, having young friends, going to see my mother's family and our relatives. Just the two of us lived in that house."

     The older boys in the village played football, soccer as it is called in America, using as their playing ground a flattened field above the cemetery, the campo sportivo. They also played hide and seek, cops and robbers. One game John Molinaro would recall involved a stick about the length of a baseball bat, about thirty inches long, constructed from the branch of a tree. There was also a shorter stick, about six to eight inches long. The large stick was used to hit the short stick, then the opposite team would carry the player all the way to where the stick fell, and back. The game was called chilio et matzola: chilio being the short stick, matzola the bat. They also played with home-made tops.

     Electricity would not come to the village of Falconara until the thirties, then was limited to only a fortunate few families. The Musacchios and Toccis, because they had sons and husbands supporting them from America, would be among those fortunate families. Illumination was provided by a wire hanging in the middle of the room with a single light bulb attached. It replaced the oil lamps used previously. Not everyone in the still backward village trusted electricity. "It's the work of the devil," was the feeling of some.

     After Non Tonio's death, Chiara tried to convince her mother-in-law to move in with her. Nonna Marianna refused. "I have to die where my husband died," she said. She remained across from Joe's house, where Ledda lived with Tony. Each morning Nonna Marianna would lean out the window and call for Tony to come see her. Then she would offer him a sip of her coffee, which she had laced with miscuglio. Ledda became angry that Nonna Marianna would offer the coffee and Tonio would accept. "Ma didn't think a young child should be drinking coffee," Tony recalls, "but I liked the taste of coffee better than I did of milk." Ledda,

however, never stopped her young son's visits. Four years after her husband died, Marianna had a stroke, paralyzing one side of her body. They brought her to the house tended by Chiara with its ornamental wooden door, where two years later Marianna Musacchio died. The date was April 7, 1929.

Chapter 13 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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