11. The Immigrants

ccupying a central position in the capitol city of Washington, D.C. is the National Archives, a massive, grey, doric-columned building, on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, between Eighth and Ninth streets. At least when we did the research for this book a quarter century ago, visitors interested in genealogical research entered the Archives at the ground level from Pennsylvania, signed their names in a register, submitted to having their bags searched, then took an elevator to the fourth floor, Room 400, the microfilm reading room.

     I’m sure that all of the procedures related to records have changed in this era of the Internet, but this is how the National Archives functioned during my husband Hal’s visit in the 1980s.

     Among the microfilm records stored in that room were passenger lists from boats that, mostly from the early-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, plied the Atlantic from Europe carrying their cargo of immigrants: people who came to the United States to escape poverty and oppression, who came seeking freedom, who came to work, who came to earn money to support families back in the old countries, who came to stay.

     Each weekday, beginning at 9:00 and continuing until the closing hour of 5:00, Americans searching for information on their immigrant ancestors jammed Room 400 seeking clues to aid them in their genealogical searches. Genealogy had become an important hobby for many Americans, particularly after the publication of Alex Haley's autobiographical family novel, Roots a generation ago. Usually those visiting Room 400 first consulted microfilmed indexes that listed the names of passengers on boats that landed in the major ports: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

     All of these indexes had been arranged according to a Soundex system, rather than alphabetically. This compensated for the fact that the names of arriving immigrants often were misspelled by boat pursors or customs agents, who could not comprehend what the strange-speaking people told them. To determine the code for a particular name, you first eliminated all vowels and double letters, then assigned to the remaining letters a pre-designated number. The soundex code for Musacchio, for example, was M-220; the code for Tocci, T-200.

     Once having determined the soundex code for your ancestor's name, you moved to a side room containing boxes numbered to conform to the code. Microfilm rolls provided pictures of the original index cards for anyone with such-coded names who landed by boat since the early nineteenth century. Also, a lot of other names that sound somewhat similar, but were spelled differently. So were individuals among the hordes of immigrants who arrived in the New World, their eyes filled with hope, reduced to numbers.

     Nevertheless, by examining the M-220 reel for the port of New York, Hal discovered, during his visit to the National Archives, a card bearing the following information:

MUSACCHIO, GIOVANNI    20

Italy

 Republic    W-C

February 21, 1905

27      2

The number on the line with the name of Giovanni Musacchio, Uncle John, referred to his age: 20. Italy was the country from which Giovanni arrived. Republic was the name of the ship Giovanni sailed on, W-C a reference to the steamship line. The ship landed at the Port of New York on the date cited. The reference 27 was the registry page on which Giovanni Musacchio's arrival was listed, 2 the line on that page. Hal said later that he felt a chill of excitement when he discovered this information related to Uncle John. It made me realize that this member of our family, whom we had known and loved, was a part of American history, no matter how inconsequential a part.

     Finding an index reference, however, only sent the genealogical researcher on a further search. All of the registry books for the Port of New York also had been preserved on microfilm, on reels, in boxes, in drawers, in cabinets, further back in the same aisle where the indexes are found. Volume numbers, as well as dates, were listed on the outside of the drawers.

     From these drawers could be selected the box containing the microfilm reel showing reproductions of the registry books from the date on which an ancestor arrived in the United States. Thus on line 2 of page 27 on the registry of the steamship Republic, which left Naples on February 8, 1905 and arrived in New York on February 21, Hal found written in clearly legible letters, by the hand of one fortunately schooled in good penmanship, the name: Giovanni Musacchio.

     Giovanni's sex was listed as Male. He was also Single. His occupation was Farmer-Laborer. He could neither read nor write, at least not English. His residence was Falconara-Albanese, and he was en route to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where there lived an Uncle, Francesco Morelli, at 26 Broad Street. Giovanni had paid his own passage and had $10 in his pocket. He never had been in the United States before. His health was good. Giovanni Musacchio also affirmed that he was neither a polygamist nor an anarchist!

     So did one member of the Musacchio clan, who would later establish roots on the south side of Chicago, arrive in the United States. Four hundred and twenty-nine years had passed from the time when the Muzaki, fleeing the Sultan's wrath in Albania, had found a new home in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean in the south of Italy.

     Actually, Uncle John was hardly the first of the Falconarese to travel across the ocean. During the previous decade Francesco Tocci, as well as others from the village, had traveled to South America. John's older brother, Gus, apparently preceded him to North America. There was also Francesco Morelli, the Uncle listed on the ship registry as the individual who presumably would offer Giovanni at least some supervision during his visit--or so U.S. Customs hoped.

     If Uncle John stopped with the Morelli in Bloomfield, New Jersey, no record remains of it. At least nobody among the present Musacchios have any contacts with any Morellis in America, although we do with the Morelli family still living in Falconara, Raffaele, mentioned in the previous chapter. Giovanni, or John as he would soon be known, most certainly soon traveled inland to Chicago, again probably following the trail of his older brother, Gus.

     In selecting 1905 for his move to America, Uncle John found himself riding a crest of Italian immigration. During the decade between 1900

and 1910, 2,045,877 Italians migrated to the United States, four times the number from the preceding decade and twice the number from the decade that would follow. Modern-day Italians, those with a sense for the flow of history, look back on this period with a feeling almost of regret--that so many talented and determined of their countrymen were allowed, in many ways almost forced, to flee abroad. But at the turn of the century, most of these immigrants were merely poor people with few skills other than their hands and a willingness to use them. Most during the first decade of the century came from depressed southern Italy. When they arrived at Ellis Island, some would have a sign with the letters W.O.P. placed around their necks. The letters stood for "without passport," and similar signs also were hung around the necks of Danes or Poles without documents, but because so many Italians arrived at Ellis Island during this period, "wop" became a term of derision for them.

     Chicago, which previously had been settled by the English, the Germans, the Swedes, and the Irish, also was just beginning to see its first large Italian immigration at the turn of the century. Like the many ethnic groups that preceded them, the Italians settled into their own neighborhoods. One major center of Italian population was on the near west side around Taylor Street. But these were more often northern Italians, who had arrived in Chicago somewhat earlier than their still poorer countrymen from the mezzogiorno. The southerners in the second wave of Italian immigration more often headed far south into neighborhoods that a half century later would become black.

     The migration patterns of the Italians were similar to those who had come before and to those who would come later. Because they were poor, usually unskilled in the trades of the New World, often with little education and unable to speak English, they settled together in the poorest parts of town where rents were cheap. Not only did the Italians hover together in what later would be identified as underpriviledged neighborhoods, but people from different towns and villages also hovered together in sections of those neighborhoods, a sociological phenomenon not easily apparent to other Chicagoans who lumped anyone with dark hair, dark skin, and a melodic name ending in "i" or "o" as part of a single ethnic group. Yet on a more subtle level, Sicilians might occupy one section of the neighborhood, Neapolitans another. The Falconarese were not numerous enough to fill a section, but they too roomed with, or nearby, each other. This was not done entirely by intent. Nobody drew lines on the map of the city and said here is where each group would live; that was more likely to occur several decades later when blacks began streaming into Chicago from the south. With the Italians, however, one paisano, or countryman, would arrive, establish a beachhead for the waves of friends and families who would follow. He would move into a neighborhood and everyone else would move in with, or around, him. And a pattern would be established, one that would be broken only when the immigrant and his family obtained enough status and security to move out, and sometimes not even then. The Taylor Street neighborhood--though largely gutted when a campus was created for the University of Illinois Chicago--remains largely ethnic Italian.

     In the beginning, it was as much friends as families settling together, since the first wave of Italian immigrants was almost entirely young and male. Giovanni Musacchio at age twenty was almost the prototype Italian immigrant, a restless young man who justified his split from his family in the old country by sending money to support them and promises that he would return.

     Thus, like so many of the others, Uncle John settled into a tiny apartment in a south-side neighborhood called Grand Crossing Park. It was called Grand Crossing, because several railroads crossed nearby, one of them the Illinois Central, where John went to work as a water boy, trailing the gangs that laid and repaired track on the still expanding American rail network. As a new arrival he was the lowest person on the crew, his wages of a few pennies an hour reflecting that. But with those few pennies multiplied by long hours of labor, six or seven days a week, he could pay for lodging, send money back to Italy, and tuck away mattress money for his inevitable return home.

     John lived not merely in an Italian neighborhood, but also among the Falconarese who lived among those Italians. To native Chicagoans, he was an Italian, a "wop," a "dago," although not a "guinea," which was a derogatory expression used more often by the Boston Irish. Nobody in America would have understood what "ghegi" meant. At work, he spoke Italian because fellow Italians shared the unskilled labor jobs on the railroad. He also spoke Italian on the streets of his ethnic neighborhood. But when he climbed the stairs to the apartment he shared with other Falconarese, he reverted to his Albanian roots, continuing to speak the Arberesh dialect from their Calabrian mountain village. Thus was John Musacchio a member of an ethnic group within an ethnic group, a fact that was lost entirely upon the English-speaking people of Chicago, many who had preceded the wops and dagos to this Midwestern city by barely a generation, yet nevertheless occupied a superior position, one step higher on the economic and social ladder.

     So stood the Irish, who lived on the other side of the tracks, east of the I.C. railroad. These were Irish who, having achieved a measure of economic stability, had moved away from the shanty Irish neighborhood near the stockyards where they had first found jobs. They might not yet have been classed as lace-curtain Irish, but they at least looked down their noses at immigrant groups who arrived in the United States after them, particularly when those immigrants knew neither the language nor the political system. In other words, the Italians. "Niggers" had not yet been invented, at least as far as Chicago ethnic groups were concerned. The Italians were Chicago's niggers during the early decades of the century.

     As might be expected, the Irish neighborhood was well endowed with taverns. For a nickel you could buy a bucket of beer--if you were Irish. If you were Italian, the bartender might fill your bucket, but you better go elsewhere to drink it. It was not easy, however, negotiating the territory between where the Micks lived and the Wops lived. Tough Irish gangs roamed this territory and did not take kindly to olive-skinned people entering their boundaries.

     When John arrived in Grand Crossing, he was warned of the threat from the Irish gangs. He shrugged at the suggestion that he might get beaten up. "So what else is new?" John snorted. The same had happened back in Italy when, as a Falconarese, he had ventured down to the town of San Lucido, whose Italian citizens did not care for the strange-speaking people from the hills.

     So Uncle John shrugged at the suggestion that the Irish offered more of a threat than that he had faced from the Lucitanos. He sauntered forth into Irish territory, returning bruised and with his eye blackened. In those days, gangs used mostly their fists, sometimes sticks or clubs, occasionally rocks and poorly aimed bricks. Fearless, John organized other young Italians into a group and, the next time he ventured east along 79th Street crossing the tracks, they waited, hidden. Sighting the Irish toughs, John retreated across the tracks as the Irish followed--into the ambush. It was a tactic that had been perfected five centuries before by Scanderbeg and used by John's ancestors among the Muzaki--although John certainly had little knowledge of that. There were bruises and black eyes on both sides that day, but a truce was established and from that day the Irish permitted John, and others carrying buckets, to visit their taverns to get their suds.

     In 1909, John Musacchio, having amassed a modest fortune from four years of labor on the train gang, returned to Falconara. He owned a suit of clothes. He certainly had more capitol than the $10 which he had brought to the United States. Because he had lived frugally and sent regular sums of money back to his family, he had acquired his nest egg. He was returning to Falconara not from any dissatisfaction with his life in America, but because it was time to get married.

    The woman he chose was Chiara Tocci, the first child of Francesco and Rosaria Tocci, a person whom I later always referred to, and addressed, by the single word Zia, pronounced, "Tsee-yuh." I hardly remember her ever being called by her first name, Chiara, which was pronounced "Key-ah-ruh." My Zia Chiara, or Aunt Clara, was always, simply, "Tsee-yuh."

     Zia, of course, is the Italian word for "aunt." There most certainly must have been an Albanian word also meaning "aunt," but apparently it had vanished from the Arberesh dialect of the people of Falconara during nearly five centuries in Italy. Zia Chiara was the older sister of Angela Tocci, Ledda, my mother. In the early years of my marriage--and even today--it always would surprise me that people on the other side of the family, our cousin John Molinaro for example, would refer to my mother also by the title, Zia. In my mind there was only one "Tsee-yuh" and it was the wife of Uncle John, who for some reason never was referred to by the Italian word for Uncle, Zio.

     My memories of Zia Chiara are of a small woman, a tiny woman, a dynamo of energy, a person who fussed constantly over anybody, friend or relative, who came into her home. In this respect, she probably took after her mother, Rosaria, about whom the same has been said. Zia's home was spotlessly, in fact immaculately, clean. Anyone who for whatever ethnic prejudice considered the Italians, particularly the southern Italians, unclean never had walked into a home ruled over by Zia Chiara. Dirt--even the slightest spec of dirt--could not survive in an environment dominated by this woman! Germs withered under her glare.

     About Zia's fussing, my husband Hal with his Irish roots, could not get more than two steps in the door without being offered a glass of milk. Practically nobody in an Italian family, unless they are babies, drinks milk. In fact the sight of an adult sipping milk at supper time is almost enough to turn an Italian's stomach. But Italians are people of manners, respect, so if someone not a paisano was known to drink milk, they will offer it to him whether he wants it or not. Hal did drink milk, although not as much as Zia would have liked, and I suspect she kept a quart of milk in the icebox mainly for his occasional visits with me and our children. (One exception to the rule of Italians not drinking milk was my father, although it was not cow's milk Joe drank. He had a fondness for goat's milk.)

     Nobody could eat enough food to satisfy Zia, either during a casual visit or at the magnificent, but typically Italian, meals of soup, pasta, meat, vegetables, bread, salad, and fruit she served on family holidays. There were two dishes that seemed particularly Falconarese. One was vasholis, round steak cut thin and lined with bacon, then rolled around a stuffing that included eggs, ground beef, and pork, all tied with a string and broiled in a pan with tomato sauce. As many ethnic American males specialize in hamburgers grilled outdoors over charcoal, Uncle John specialized in vasholis. He supervised their preparation and took great pride in their being properly done. My mouth waters at the thought of Uncle John's vasholis.

     A second dish was melanjon, eggplants scooped out and stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, roman cheese, eggs and various seasonings, then fried. Melanjon also was made with green pepper shells, and although all the Falconarese women made the dish, my father claimed that the best were made by Zootza, the wife of Big Joe. Reportedly Zootza used more ground beef than the other cooks; that was her secret. My mother often scrimped on the meat, because my father did not give her enough shopping money. Easter was the day on which the family, by tradition, went to the home of Uncle John and Zia Chiara for dinner. To not heap your platter with two or three helpings of each course was, if not a gross insult, at least an indication that you found Zia's mastery of the Falconarese version of la cucina italiana wanting. Despite my husband’s love of food, Hal was not a big eater, and he later claimed he always sat at the table with a feeling of guilt, worried that he might offend by not eating himself sick.

     Yet Zia was a wisp of a thing, less than five feet, short like most of the Falconarese, weighing certainly less than 100 pounds. Uncle John stood barely a few inches taller, and though muscular probably weighed not much more. It was a measure of his courage, if not common sense, that even at this size he was able to brave the Irish neighborhoods seeking his bucket of beer.

     Nevertheless, Giovanni Musacchio and Chiara Tocci both stood tall in their home village of Falconara-Albanese on the day of January 23, 1909. Falconara had its own marching band at this time with trumpets, trombones, a brass drum, so the band led the wedding procession as Giovanni and Chiara marched from the bride's home to the municipio, the town hall. There, they signed the town registry and took part in a civil ceremony.

     From the municipio, the procession continued, trumpets sounding, drum booming, to the church, San Michele di arcangelo. That Giovanni Musacchio would have his marriage to Chiara Tocci consecrated within a Roman Catholic church and before a priest, particularly Zotti Nun, was, indeed, an accommodation on his part, made certainly out of respect for his bride and her family. John would make fewer such accommodations after that.

     Uncle John remained in Falconara long enough to get his wife pregnant. The first and only child of Giovanni and Chiara Musacchio was

born on March 11, 1910. Female, she was named, in the Italian tradition,

Marianna, after her father's mother. During the birth Zia had what would

be described as "female problems" and would not be able to conceive any

more children. At the time of Marianna Musacchio's birth, however, her

father no longer was in Falconara. John had left in June of 1909 to return to the United States.

     Uncle John was not abandoning his family. It was the only way he could support them, and fulfill his ambition to buy back the family lands lost by grandfather Agosto. "He felt money was power," Uncle Mike would claim. "By acquiring money, John knew he could control the family."

     Uncle Mike first traveled to the United States at this time, several months after John's return. Mike later would tell the story of his first trans-Atlantic passage, which had cost him $33. He was age sixteen. "When I came to the U.S. the first time, it was 1909," Uncle Mike recalled. "It was a pretty good boat, but they had bunk beds. It took fourteen days. It was November, the sea was rough."

     After clearing customs, he remained in New York only seven hours, then boarded a train to Chicago. Mike's ticket on the Wabash railroad, which cost $7, had been paid in advance by his older brother. Mike remembered that the train was dirty and it took three days and three nights to reach Chicago, a long time considering the fact that express trains such as the Twentieth Century Limited soon would cover the same distance overnight. Arriving in Chicago, Mike went to an apartment at 7712 South Greenwood Avenue. There he roomed with his brother, Big Joe, and his cousin John. Within a few years, my father also would join them.

     Uncle Mike's brother, who had an ample waistline, had been given the nickname "Big Joe" to differentiate him from his cousin, My father, who had the identical name: Giuseppe Musacchio. Big Joe eventually would change the spelling of his last name to Musashe, pronounced Moo-saysh. Mike also slightly changed his last name, dropping one letter from Musacchio, thus Musachio. Whereas in Italy, Musacchio was pronounced Moo-sah-key-oh, the Americanized version became Moo-sah-shee-oh. Another more distant branch of the family would shorten their name to Musso.

     Big Joe eventually would marry Theresa Tocci, who I knew by the name of Zootza. Not directly related to the Francesco Tocci we knew as Chico, she was what might be called another distant cousin. Zootza came to the United States as a young girl, unmarried, accompanied by her mother. She also would remember her trip by boat to the United States. "The weather was bad, the seas rough," Zootza recalled. "Everyone was throwing up. The kids would urinate all over. Everyone was jammed together, down low in the boat, sleeping in bunk beds on top of one another." Zootza recalled the woman in the bunk above her combing her hair and lice falling upon her.

     Uncle Mike's wife Marietta, although she would not come to the United States until years later, would recall her impressions of the difference between Italy and the United States. "When I came through Naples, the city was so beautiful," she remembered, "but New York was so dirty."

     Conditions weren't very pleasant in Chicago when the Italian

immigrants arrived in their new home. "Sidewalks were made out of wood," recalled Uncle Mike of the Grand Crossing neighborhood. "Underneath was a ditch with water in it. The homes were wooden. Beside them were empty lots. A lot of homes were being built in Grand Crossing Park. The Bohemians and Germans bought homes for $100-150 and brought them out to Greenwood and put them on empty lots, fixed them up, and made lots of money. The toilet was in the alley, a little shanty. A sink. Water running all the time. Summer it smelled bad; winter you froze to death."

     When Uncle Mike first arrived in Chicago, he found it impossible to obtain a job at the factories in the area, which were owned by Bohemians and Germans. "Polish or Italians couldn't get in there," Mike claimed. Living above them in the apartment on Greenwood, however, was an Italian named Santo, who worked as straw boss on the Pennsylvania Railroad. "Come with me, Mike," Santo said. "I'll get you a job on the railroad."

     At 5:00 on a Monday morning, Mike went with Santo to the Pennsylvania yards near 63rd and Halsted. They traveled by street car, which cost five cents. Mike worked one month, twenty-eight days, before receiving his first paycheck: $27. He gave it to Big Joe, who advised his younger brother, "If you want to go back to work, give Santo some of your paycheck." This was the padrone system, common among Italian immigrant laborers, who owed their jobs to their bosses. Padrone means patron, or master, or boss. It is used to describe a person in authority who sponsors another.

     Uncle Mike, however, was outraged that he should have to bribe somebody for the privilege to work. "How much does he expect?" "Three or four dollars," suggested his brother.

     "If I give him something, what do I have?" complained Mike. He

decided not to pay the padrone. As a result, Mike lost his job with the

railroad. The next day, however, Big Joe talked to another friend, Frank

Nesci. He got Mike a different job: seven cents an hour, ten hours a day.

     Considering what seven cents will purchase today, if it will purchase anything, an hourly wage of seven cents seems miniscule. To a sixteen-year-old boy from a village where there was little work other than in the fields, however, it seemed like a fortune. As bad as the working and living conditions on the south side of Chicago might have been, the future seemed more promising there than in the mountains of Calabria.

Chapter 12 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

Higdon's Home Page