LuLu Lolo Pascale's family. |
She is an actress and a playwright whose marvelous one-person interpretation of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy has been covered in these pages as well.
Her father Pete Pascale, together with his equally committed wife Rose, dedicated his life to the poor of East Harlem and, by virtue of said dedication, has a street in the neighborhood named after him.
In 1994, Pete Pascale recieved the Vito Marcantonio Award.
LuLu has regaled many with remembrances of Marcantonio and her father talking on the street corner in East Harlem as a child.
Because she is an "item" from the life and times of Vito Marcantonio, and because of its powerful sense of historical place, we share, here, her recent poem-prose publication in "Ovunque Siamo" entitled, "Growing Up Italian in a Wonderbread World." We do so thanks to the courtesy of that review's managing editor, Michelle Messina.
Come
back to our apartment.
To
our building filled with love!
Gumma
Millie lived across from us,
Gumma
Minnie lived above.
All
our doors were kept wide open
Sharing
laughter day by day,
And
also sharing the many heartaches
That
were sure to come our way.
One
Hundred and Sixteenth Street,
It
casts a magic spell!
Building
three-twenty-six,
Where
memories dwell!
When I was growing up in East Harlem's Little Italy, my grandparents' apartments were my second home. My grandparents immigrated in the 1900s from Basilicata, the towns of Santa Fele and Melfi, to East Harlem, but the traditions of Italy were evident in my every day life. Grandma Lizzie or Grandma 116 (which is what I called her) and Grandpa Louie, my mother's parents, lived in a tenement apartment at 326 East 116th Street.
Across the street from "326" were the brownstone homes of the doctors and lawyers of East Harlem, and also Haarlem House – the settlement house to which my parents devoted their lives. It was also the sunny side of the street, and my mother's family would often cross the street to take photos in front of the building directly across from them: 331 East 116th Street.
It was a tradition to visit Grandma 116 after church on Sunday. On her kitchen table would be a silver tray with cordial glasses, bottles of whiskey for the men, sweet cordials for the women, and all the children would get a taste of vermouth "because it was cold outside." Homemade cookies would be piled high on a tray, including round sugar glazed Janette cookies, which we also called "hard rocks" because when they got stale they were like rocks. My favorites were "the bows," light crispy deep-fried cakes shaped like bows for a birthday gift and dusted with powdered sugar.
Every Sunday all over East Harlem you would wake up to the smell of gravy cooking and the gravy meat frying. In our family we don't say "tomato sauce" we say "gravy." It always fascinated me how different everyone's gravy would taste – my grandmothers', my aunts', and my mother's. I can still smell and taste the differences in my memory. In that tenement building, I would be greeted by the different aromas coming from each apartment as I walked up the stairs. There were four apartments on a floor, the doors were always kept open, maybe it was due to the heat, but it was like a small town in Italy. We were part of a community. Neighbors would pop in and out of each other's apartments sharing food. Sometimes my grandmother would say they were nosy and just came by to see what we were cooking. Neighbors would borrow from each other. And you always gave them more than they asked. You knew people who were down on their luck – so you would knock on the door and say – "Oh, we made too much today – here this is for you." Saving face was important when you shared food. When someone came to your house you put everything you had out for them. Having something to offer was very important. When there were guests, the children were taught never to take any food from the table. You had to wait for a signal that you could. You had to make sure there was enough for the guest. My mother would say, "You don't ask a guest what they want because a guest would always so, 'No, I don't want anything.'" – for they didn't want to embarrass you in case you didn't have enough.
My father always told the story of a social worker who went to a family's house to evaluate them to qualify for some public assistance. My father knew this family was in a desperate situation. When the social worker came back from her visit, she said to my father, "I went to her house – the table had a lovely lace tablecloth and there were all these beautiful dishes filled with food, cakes, and cookies. This woman doesn't need any money!" My father had to explain to her that the woman had borrowed everything from her neighbors to save face – as a guest was coming into her home – and God forbid she didn't have anything to offer her.
Pete Pascale. |
The shopping of food was a part of daily life - the special shops in the neighborhood, the smells, the community interactions and the neighbors asking, "What are you cooking today?" First Avenue, which was once a large street full of pushcarts where my grandparents had shopped, had given way to storefronts: Madonna's vegetable market where we bought arugula before it was fashionable; Tacco's fish market with the beautiful mosaic walls of sea life, and baskets outside with crabs that often escaped onto the sidewalk; the butcher and pork stores where my mother would watch carefully as they cut the meat; the Lattacini where they made homemade mozzarella (It's floor was covered in sawdust. I would love to get the sawdust all over my shoes much to my mother's annoyance.); Lombardi's Grocery Store where my mother bought Ronzini macaroni (I remember cutting off the special coupons for an electric fry pan.); the bakery on First Avenue where all the Italian men would sit having their café, smoking their smelly cigars; Saratella's bakery downstairs from Grandma 116 filling our street with the aroma of bread baking in the coal oven; Cincotti's bakery on the corner of Second Avenue filled with all kinds of pastries, including my favorite the Charlotte Russe, the little sponge cake in a fluted cardboard container with whipped cream and a cherry on top; and the smell of roasting coffee beans that filled the neighborhood coming from a store that sold demitasse cups and also fixed your wrist watch. I would walk home holding that brown bag of coffee to my nose.
In Grandma 116's house after Sunday's meal, my cousin Leonilda and I would play store in Uncle Sonny's old bedroom, which was turned into a storeroom of sorts filled with homemade jars of vinegar peppers, pickled eggplant, tomato sauce, and Grandpa Louie's homemade wine. But my favorite of all were the homemade sausages hanging from the ceiling.
Food was a calendar in our lives too. We always ate macaroni on Sundays and Thursdays, Monday was soup, and Friday was of course fish. Fish also played a part in one of our biggest holidays – Christmas Eve. I can hear my Grandma 116 saying:
Rosie – fry the eels!
Dolly
– fry the calamari!
Everybody
will be coming!
We
gotta hurry!
We
have seven fishes,
That
means seven dishes
That
we serve on Christmas Eve –
Don't
get gravy on your sleeve!
Outside
the snow is flying,
Inside
the eels are frying
While
we soak the baccala
Finiculì
Funiculà
Everybody's
getting ready
For
the octopus and spaghetti,
Nobody
knows the secret really
How
grandma fixes the scungilli!
Finiculì
Funiculà
Who
cares if you get gravy on your sleeve!
Nobody
wants to leave!
That's
seven fishes
Eel-Bacala-Scungilli-Octopus-Clams-Shrimp-Snapper
Seven
fishes!
Seven
dishes!
Christmas
Eve!
Buon
Natale!
I
didn't eat lunch in school – no school lunch for me. My mother was
working, so I would walk to Grandma LuLu's house and she would watch
me from the window signaling to me when it was safe to cross the
street. Grandma LuLu ignored my American name and called me LuLu, and
I called her Grandma LuLu. Sadly I was not taught to speak Italian.
My parents were born in America and I was an American. I should speak
English. Grandma LuLu didn't speak English and I didn't speak Italian
- we only communicated through food. And then it would start as soon
as I entered her house:
Figlia
Mia - Mangia LuLu Mangia-
Mangia
minestrone!
Mangia
macaroni!
Mangia
meatballs!
Mangia
a sausage!
Mangia
abizz!
LuLu
Mangia! Mangia! Mangia!
Mangia
cucuzza!
Mangia
biscotti!
Mangia
torrone!
I would go home and tell my Mother: “Mommy, Mommy, what am I going to do? Grandma LuLu, all she does is say Mangia! Mangia! Mangia! Eat! Eat! Eat!"
She
says Mangia!
I
say I'm through!
I
say I'm finished!
She
says mangia di piu
Mangia
– I'm through!
Mangia
di piu!
This
is our lunch every day!
I
say I'm too full!
She
says mangia minestrone!
I
say not another mouthful!
She
says mangia macaroni!
Mangia
minestrone!
Mangia
macaroni!
This
is our lunch every day!
She
comes from Potenza,
South
of Napoli –
I
come from East Harlem's
Little
Italy
She
says mangia!
I
say I'm trying!
She
says mangia!
I
say I'm dying!
Mangia
– I'm trying.
Mangia
– I'm dying!
This
is our lunch every day!
I
wouldn't have it any other way!
Grandma
LuLu's house made me think of Italy filled with dark strong wooden
furniture. She would feed me vegetable soups, all shapes of macaroni
she had made, exotic fruits: persimmons and pomegranate. For a treat
she offered me chocolate covered cherries and torrone
– really hard torrone –
once I lost a tooth filling biting on her torrone.
In
Grandma LuLu's bedroom there was an altar with saints and a snow
globe of the Virgin Mary that when you shook it rose petals would
fall – I loved that snow globe. You could never sit on her bed or
God forbid put your coat on her bed because there would be a big
board with homemade macaroni drying there covered with a tablecloth.
We always said macaroni not pasta. We did specify shapes like
spaghetti or linguine or perciatelli,
but it was always macaroni and not pasta. In our house when the water
was boiling and my mother would say, “I am throwing in the macs!”
– that meant you had to wash your hands and sit at the table
because when the macaroni was ready you had better be sitting at the
table.
"Festa" by Ralph Fasanella. |
And
then it happened, my introduction to American dining. Growing up in
East Harlem, you didn't really leave the neighborhood, and for years
people always said East Ninety-Sixth Street was the invisible
dividing line. My introduction to American cuisine happened when I
was a little girl. My parents were working at the settlement house
Haarlem House, and I was to go downtown with Mrs. Domini and her
young son. She was an American, a large woman married to a tiny
Italian man. Their size difference fascinated me. We had to go to
City Hall and take a photo with Mayor Wagner. It was a publicity
photo for Haarlem House. After we left City Hall, Mrs. Domini said we
would go to lunch. I am thinking to myself this would be my first
American restaurant. The only time I had ever eaten outside our home
was at “Ferrara's Pizza Parlor." In those days you always ate pizza in a
pizza parlor, they didn't sell slices.
Well,
Mrs Domini took me to Howard Johnson's. I can remember being excited
that I was in a real restaurant. I was hoping I could pick out
whatever I wanted to eat. But Mrs. Domini didn't ask me what I wanted
to eat, she ordered for me, and then it was set down in front of me:
a glass of milk and a sandwich of white “Wonder Bread” with
peanut butter and jelly. This was alien food to me – this fake
white stuff that was called “Wonder Bread” – where was the crusty
bread like we got from Saratella's bakery? There was nothing
“wonderful” about his bread. And this sticky brown peanut butter
with jelly? I had never had anything like this before! I knew my
mother would get mad at me if I didn't eat it, so I took a bite and
it was bland and tasteless in my mouth. And then there was the glass
of milk – something we never had with our meals except in the
morning with oatmeal or cream of wheat – or a little milk when we
had a taste of the grownups' coffee.
All
of our meals always had tomato sauces, and for an Italian, milk and
tomato sauce don't go together. I remember once my father brought a
college student from Ohio to a family Sunday dinner. We were all
eating our macaroni with gravy and someone asked the student what did
he want to drink? On the table were wine, seltzer (in one of those
old squirt bottles), orange soda, and my grandmother's favorite cream
soda. He answered, “Oh I'll have a glass of milk.” Everyone's
fork just stopped in mid-air and a look of horror came over
everyone's face at the thought of someone having milk with tomato
sauce.
Ironically,
a sandwich played a pivotal part in my father's life too. In the
1930s my father joined the Three Cs (Civilian Conservation Corps). He
was working with a group of men building a road upstate. When it came
time for lunch, the men were tired and hungry, and they were served a
peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This outraged my father, and he
said, “How can we build a road when all we are getting to eat is a
peanut butter and jelly sandwich?!” So my father organized a strike
and he got kicked out of the Three Cs for being a troublemaker. He
always said, “You know, kid, if it wasn't for that peanut butter
and jelly sandwich, I would have been sent to California and you
wouldn't have been born.”
My
father loved to take me on a stroll through the Feast of Our Lady of
Mount Carmel, where the lights and stands of the Feast would stretch
all over the neighborhood. I would wait for him on the balcony of
Haarlem House watching the people walking in the feast, and when my
father was finished with the summer Fresh Air Fund registration, he
would take me by the hand and we would walk through the feast. The street
was filled with the aroma of sausage and peppers frying, the still
life tableau of the ocean of clam shells with lemon slices, the
dangling strings of ceci beans, mounds of torrone, and
the lupuni beans that you would slip out of their case into
your mouth, sidestepping the watermelon pits that dotted the street –
then we would stop at my favorite stand, the zeppole stand.
The zeppole (or as we said, “fried dough.”) was stuffed
hot into a little brown paper bag, sprinkled with powdered sugar. You
would shake the bag and then bite into that hot dough and the
powdered sugar would fall all over your clothes.
The
Feast was when the smells of food would fill the air of East Harlem
just like it did in the tenement building of my grandparents.
Growing
up in Italian East Harlem, food was the center of our family life. It
was food that held us together, the preparation, the presentation,
and the gathering around the table.
It
was what signified: La Famiglia.
"The Goodfather (A Novel): The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio," can be found here: MARC LIVES
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