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Friday
One of the most gratifying aspects of last week’s book trip to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where I taught for 36 years, was seeing students that I’d lost contact with. I learned that one of them, Angela DiBenedetto (now Edwards), has been exploring her father’s Sicily and Manhattan heritage in fiction and poetry. At a time when immigrants are being demonized and rounded up, it’s good to remember the richness that immigrants have brought with them from the beginning of our republic. It’s what makes America America.
In her forthcoming poetry collection Tribute, Angela’s “Pictures of the West” talks about the courage that it took for immigrants to
strike out, as in a storm, into a quagmire of
Prairie grass and Indian hatchets,
Sod huts, salt pork, and newspaper cut-outs
Hung in windows to make their
Holes in the ground
Look sweet.
Then, updating the trek, she notes that it also took courage to strike out for Manhattan,
a quagmire of
Skyscrapers and liberty statues,
button hooks, white bread, and chalk marks
signifying
Who stays and
Who gets tossed back.
So how is she to find her own courage? Retrieving family stories is a good start.
Pictures of the West
By Angela Edwards
There they are: paragons of legend.
Settlers from near and far:
Swedes and Chinamen, Mormons,
Mexicans, Irishmen, and Negroes.
Sophisticated Bostonians who left
Behind the sinking vestiges of civilization
To strike out, as in a storm,
into a quagmire of
Prairie grass and Indian hatchets,
Sod huts, salt pork, and newspaper cut-out
Hung in windows to make their
Holes in the ground
Look sweet.
Women rip-roaring on
Sleigh-footed horses over the plains of Kansas.
A stoic, unsmiling brood of Scandinavians,
Mother at the helm, holding on to her
cooking spoon—
Her last link to the newness,
the vastness,
Of the unknown West—
And everything she’s left behind.
I see the courage in their eyes. And wonder…
Am I courageous?
Who are my paragons? My marble statues?
Are they anchored on prairie grass,
beneath a yawning sky
swallowing clouds on western breezes?
Are they windmills tilted by tornadoes,
Indian Wars, whims of nature
weaving a
Locust net across fields of plenty?
Perhaps.
But the look of the woman with the spoon is haunting.
I’ve seen it in my own yellowing pictures
Of a girl, a young woman, who shot across
The foaming grasses of the Atlantic
To strike out, as in a storm,
into a quagmire of
Skyscrapers and liberty statues,
Button hooks, white bread, and chalk marks
signifying
Who stays and
Who gets tossed back.
An innocent who navigated New York
in ankle skirts and laced boots,
Slowed by arcane notions of family honor, cumparatu,
And Etna’s smoking fury.
Looking in her eyes, I see
I don’t need to transect a prairie in a wagon
to know what courage is. I don’t have to
Cross an ocean in a sallow-bellied hunk of steel.
Only to think of the ones
Who did these things:
Look at their pictures, ponder their lives.
And wonder how I will live my own life
without their steel-anchored hearts
and wisdom-weighted words
To guide me.
What kind of stories will be passed down to their descendants by those immigrants fleeing from violence and poverty in Central America, Venezuela, and the Caribbean? This country was forged by people undertaking such dangerous undertakings. We impoverish ourselves, and desecrate our own histories, when we turn our backs on them.
