Strega Rosa; Chapter 1
by Antonia Teresa Amore-Broccoli
Chapter 1
Nonna Vittoria De Cecco Broccoli (b. 1889 - d. 1991)
As a child, whenever I accompanied my nonna Vittoria to the Detroit neighborhood grocery store, I remember she would cash her Ford Corporation payroll check at the check out stand while purchasing her groceries. She signed her checks with a simple X and proudly stuffed her cash in her bra, right against her bare chest, as the cashier peered at us oddly and suspiciously. This was many years after my nonna Vittoria had lost her husband, who was about twelve years her senior. Nonna went to work the factory lines assembling automobiles like many other immigrant Americans and southern Black which ensured a steady livable wage. Many Black come north from the south to Motor City Detroit Automobile industry especially after WW2.
My Papa’s side of the family is quite interesting. My father was born to Vittoria and Ruffino Broccoli. My nonna Vittoria DeCecco (her maiden name) was born August 31,1889 in Sant' Elia Fiumerapido, Italy, to Carlo and Giovanna DeCecco. This story emerges partly from my memory and also directly from my nonna Vittoria who first told it to me.
In 1991 at the age of 33 as an undergraduate student in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during my spring break, I visited my nonna Vittoria. She was 91 years old then, and it was only a few weeks before her death on May 2nd of the same year.
I had been asked to interview subjects of my own choosing for an American Studies Oral History/Herstory class at UCSC. I chose to interview Italian American women and started with my maternal Italian ancestors, my mother and aunts. This also included my paternal, larger than life matriarch nonna Vittoria. My nonna answered every outlined question I had asked about her life in Italy and her journey, coming to America. I learned new facts and never revealed secrets about my family history through that interview. I spent several hours interviewing Vittoria over a span of four days while I was caring for her by myself. I was relieving her primary caregiver, my Aunt Francis, who was her youngest daughter.
I recorded her speaking on a cassette player, listening as she moved from one language to another, speaking both English and Italian. By the end of our time together it was as if she was talking to one of her comare, not her granddaughter. She seemed relaxed and liberated as she spoke her truth, in her own words. It seemed she had not ever told anyone her full story. It was as if all the shame and feelings that she held inside her bosom, hidden within her flowing cotton dresses, was finally released. It was a deep feeling of relief, like removing the tight panty hose garter that held her stockings in place on long work days. This story had been burdening her for more than seventy-five years. She told me her real story and I felt lucky and so honored to receive it. Perhaps she had never had the opportunity to be heard or to have someone who cared deeply actually listen and witness her full truth. Certainly nobody asked her these direct questions, nor sat with her for so long. My attention and presence over four days seemed to give way to a gradual process of nonna Vittoria letting go.
It is believed that her mother, my great grandmother Giovanna, had a mental illness. Vittoria was separated from her mother while still fairly young. In fact, I was able to research that my great grandparents, Carlo and Giovanna DeCecco, first came to America when my grandmother Vittoria was only an infant, just a few years old. As a toddler, she did not accompany them on the ship, or at least there is no record of her traveling with them. Everyone, even infants, was counted and recorded in the ship records. It is believed that Vittoria lived with her grandmother Carmela as a baby and during her early years as a child. She went to school until she was in the third or fourth grade and was pulled from school to work on the family farm in Sant' Elia Fiumerapido, in southern Italy, in the Lazio region, Province of Fresinone. My maternal grandparents were from there too.
I know from the records of ships going into Ellis Island that Vittoria came to America when she was 11 years old, with her father and mother. That was when she joined her two adult older sisters and one brother, who were already living in the U.S. I also know that her younger sister, Elisabetta, had lived in the country in rural Michigan on a farm when they were kids. I don't know why she didn’t live with her mother and father, but I believe they went back to Italy. I know from oral stories that her father was in Italy. Little was spoken about her mother.
The first existing record I found in my research showed Vittoria living in America when she was 11 years old. The document is dated April 23, 1909. She came through Ellis Island with her parents, Carlo and Giovanna DeCecco, along with a three month old cousin named Angelo who is listed as Carlo’s nephew. Ruffino, the man she was later to marry and who became my grandfather, came to America via Niagara Falls, New York, in February of 1907. That was two years earlier than nonna Vittoria.
I have early photos of Vittoria when she was age 11, and soon after when she joined her older sisters and brother and worked in a grocery store in New York City. She worked there either with one of her two sisters or with her brother. I do know that Vittoria lived with one of these sisters and her sister’s husband upstairs, above the grocery store, in New York City.
I also have a record of a sister named Teresa, born February 24, 1882 and died February 17, 1936. She didn’t even live to age 54. I’m not sure if this was the sister who worked at a brothel or if there was a family friend who worked at a brothel. My grandmother Vittoria, who was a teenager at the time, also went to work at this brothel in NYC. According to my grandmother Vittoria, she cared for the women who lived at this brothel. She told me she would brush their hair, wash their clothes, and keep up their bedrooms. Vittoria would help with their meals too. Overall she was like a personal assistant to the women who worked in this brothel.
My grandmother told me that she became pregnant as a result of being a victim of rape by some of the men who visited the other women working at the brothel. From her story, which she told me in a mixture of Italian and English, this is what it sounded like. As I have mentioned, she told me this story during the final months of her life in 1991. She reported that there were several men who visited several women in that brothel. Because of the fact that she was a virgin, it’s highly possible she had been gang raped or raped serially by these frequent visitors. Once Vittoria’s family discovered her pregnancy, she was sent back to Italy in complete shame at the young age of 14 years old. As a teenager, I remember my mother telling me the story of how horrific it was for Grandma Broccoli, because she was sent back to Italy at the age of 14. She had to leave America and go back to work laboring in the fields after living and working in New York City. This was the story my mother always repeated to me.
Before my direct conversation with Nonna, during my spring break of 1991, I never knew why my grandmother Vittoria was sent back to Italy aside from having to work the family farm. I had no idea what the real reason was for her return. No one spoke of the fact that Vittoria was raped, became pregnant and was then sent back to Italy in shame. I do recall many comments about that it was a hardship for Vittoria to be sent back to Italy at the age of 14 after living in America for six years and expected to go back to working the fields on the farm like she had done as a child.
Vittoria gave birth to her first baby girl in her small southern Italian village. She named that baby girl Carmelita. Vittoria also told me that she lost her baby Carmelita at 6 months old to a illness. I believe she named the baby after her grandmother Carmela. Carmelita means little Carmela in Italian. Vittoria went on to tell me that when she was in Italy she was raped again. Because she was an unwed mother at the age of 14 or 15, with an infant, she had a poor reputation in her little village. She reported to me in Italian that this is why she believed the men and boys thought they had a right to rape her. Nonna Vittoria explained to me how she was gang raped while working the fields. She said she was dragged down into a ditch by a group of boys and another man, all of whom raped her.
I'm not sure what caused the infant’s death. Maybe it was strep throat or the flu or pneumonia. Many women lost infants during the turn of the century before antibiotics were widely available and accessible. I can’t imagine how horrible that period of her life must have been for my nonna, raped two different times, once in New York and later again in Italy, and having to endure these terrible acts virtually alone at such a young age. It still amazes me that she shared this story with me, only a month before she died. After all those years, I may have been the only one who ever heard the exact truth of these two horrible life experiences, directly from her.
According to my grandmother and according to custom at the time, divorce was illegal in Italy at the turn of the century. Due to her history of being raped twice, and being an unwed mother, my grandmother was rendered unmarriageable at this time. She also couldn't go live in a nunnery because she had given birth to a child out of wedlock. According to my grandmother she would have actually liked to join the local nunnery but she couldn't do so. I wondered if this was because of the deep community shame with which she was now regarded, because of her situation as a rape survivor.
While she didn't actually tell me that she held a lot of shame, her face, her stance, and her words seemed to carry shame as she told me her painful story. This shame of course never really belonged to her but was laid on her by a misogynist Italian society, that unfairly blamed women for the sexual assaults they had endured at the hands of men. After being victimized by two rapes, and experiencing inconsolable grief after losing her first baby girl at age 6 months, understandably my grandmother Vittoria was extremely sad and distraught at this time in her young life, in Italy.
Nevertheless, I always like to imagine that some time later, the people of the village stepped in. Perhaps, they arranged for my grandfather Ruffino Broccoli to meet my grandmother Vittoria. Ruffino at the time was already married to another woman and they had a 4 or 5 year old child, Dominic Broccoli, who later became my GodFather and Uncle Nick. Despite this fact, and because divorce in Italy was illegal, my grandfather Ruffino was introduced to my grandmother Vittoria later on, when they were both in America. Soon after, Ruffino left his legally married wife and the mother of Dominic and brought the young boy to America. The ship records depict him traveling two months before my Grandmothers second arrival to America in 1920.
I researched ship records of my grandmother Vittoria’s return to America at the age of 23. She came through Ellis Island a second time, as a young adult. Ruffino Broccoli is listed as arriving on a different ship but in the same year, and he was accompanied by other DeCecco’s, who were relatives of Nonna. So clearly he must have been known by Nonna's family members. They were all living in the same little town in southern Italy Sant' Elia Fiumerapido. At least their residence is listed as Sant' Elia Fiumerapido and departing Naples on the ship records. Sant' Elia Fiumerapido is in the Capania region which lies in the mountains north of Naples and and south of Rome. The little rolling hills farm town is about the same distance to either major city by about 140 km.
Once in America, On December 4, 1920, in New York my grandfather Ruffino, although still married to Mariana in Italy, legally married Vittoria. This is not very different from the way things are done in many Latin countries. I didn't fully grasp this point until I attended the University of California and took literature classes, including one called Italian Women Writers. We read the well-known book, A Woman, written by Sibilla Aleramo in 1906. This book, considered scandalous and shocking at the time, revealed and captured many disturbing truths about what happened to all too many Italian women in the very misogynist and patriarchal traditional Italian society of a century ago. The author captured all the secrecy and shame, and how they colluded to keep Italian women’s life stories hidden, and therefore also hid the suffering they endured. Crucial facts were never spoken of, but instead buried for decades in deep silence. At this time, the truth of women’s lives was unutterable. To this day, many of these odious traditions still have influence in the culture. That women’s studies course opened my eyes to these realities, and it gave me a sharp sense of what my own grandmother had actually lived through in her time, in that small and backward southern Italian village of her origin. Afterward, I had so much empathy for her painful experiences.
As I mentioned, my grandparents, Vittoria and Ruffino, were married in New York on December 4, 1920, almost exactly one hundred years ago as I write this now. Despite her new legally married status in America, my grandmother nevertheless continued to live with shame for years because she felt her marriage was a fraud since my grandfather never actually divorced his first wife in Italy. But legally, he could not divorce his wife in Italy because divorce at that time was illegal in both countries. The only way a woman and a man could separate or “divorce” in Italy was if the man took the child and left, since the children were considered the property of the man.
While growing up as a young adult and a teenager, my mother often told us that Uncle Dominic's actual mother Mariana, Ruffino's first wife, was the town whore and the town alcoholic back in Italy, and he had no choice but to take his child away from her. This was the official story, passed down orally in our family. But I myself have often wondered about the heartache Mariana must have endured having her child, my godfather, Uncle Dominic, torn from her and taken far away, to another country, without her consent. Is that what drove her to alcoholism?
So after living in Italy for nine years, my grandmother Vittoria at age 23, came back a second time to America. Perhaps this “solution” to marry Ruffino was her only option, since she was scorned and shamed, as she described to me, because she had given birth to Carmelita, her first child, out of wedlock. That was the baby who had now passed away. She was scorned and shamed for this baby for many years, despite the fact that this deceased infant was the direct result of a rape, or possibly multiple rapes, when she was only a teenager.
After settling in America, Ruffino and Vittoria gave birth to their own child, my father. They named him Joseph Alfred Broccoli. Later on, Vittoria also had a second child, whom she named Carmelita again. However, this poor infant, the namesake of her first baby, was also doomed to face an early death, as that tragic story was told to me. Nonna stated Carmelita (#2) was the only baby she gave birth to in a hospital, as all of he older children were born at home.
My Nonna was convinced that the nurses at the hospital caused the infants early death because they gave the infant sugar water, or curdled, old baby formula that was rotten. My mother told my sisters and me that when they brought this new baby back from the nursery, Vittoria found a bottle in her crib, hidden underneath the mattress. The bottle was full of fermented curdles of milk. Vittoria asserted that this was the cause of the infant’s death. This second baby Carmelita also faced an early death under the saddest of conditions. My nonna suffered yet another loss while still at a young age herself.
In 1927, nonna Vittoria then gave birth to her third child, my Aunt Francesca. She said she made sure this baby was born at home. Later, my grandfather Ruffino Broccoli had a stroke and he became disabled. After this, my grandmother Vittoria soon became the head of their household and she had to go back to work. So at this point, nonna Vittoria was responsible for her three children, while also caring for a sick, bed-bound husband, and working full-time for the Ford Motor Corporation.
When my Aunt Francesca was 16, she too gave birth to a child out of wedlock, whom she named Vittoria, after her mother. However, my grandmother Vittoria forced my aunt to give up this child for adoption to Dominic Broccoli, my aunt’s half brother, and his wife Mary. The two worked in a bar and raised young Vicky as their own daughter. Francesca never acknowledged Vicky’s existence again, even upon her death in 2001. We never knew who the baby’s father was. Here was yet another instance involving the removal of a child from a mother under harsh conditions, with no chance for the mom to mourn or even acknowledge her loss. I always wonder if my Aunt too was a victim of rape and/or incest.
Clearly, a disturbing theme of deep silence, shame, and heartbreaking loss runs through our family blood, especially where the women are concerned. Their silent shame and devastating losses were thorough and life crushing. The expectation of silence was a moral burden and a gag order, obeyed especially by the women in our family. It was as commonplace and old world as the family custom of stomping grapes to make the homemade wine we fermented in our Detroit cellars. Winemaking was a custom of celebration and cultural pride. But this custom of soul crushing silence, victim blaming, and brutal loss, although also passed from generation to generation through daily living, had nothing to do with celebration or cultural pride.
The complicated story of my grandparents’ marriage may seem like an absurd, crazy tale, but it didn't seem that way to me because I had been hearing so many different versions of it for most of my young life. There were so many variations on this family story that dated back to the old country, involving my grandparents, Vittoria and Ruffino. Basically, in our family the bottomline was this: it was widely believed that my grandparents were not legally married. Despite the fact that there was an actual legal record of their marriage in the United States, our family never acknowledged this marriage as real. According to Italian Catholic custom, it was only in the eyes of the Catholic Church that one was considered actually married. So Ruffino’s first marriage in Italy was seen as legitimate and his second marriage in America was seen as fake. This is very similar to the plight of the protagonist in the book A Woman, published in 1907, mentioned earlier.
Divorce was not legal in Italy until 1970 and when a couple did separate, the children always went with their father. They were considered his property. Within the Catholic Italian culture of my family, the marriage of Vittoria and Ruffino, even though it happened in a new country and had a legal record there, was seen as invalid and not real.
Clearly, on the night I was born, in 1959, the suffocating, soul crushing oppression of women, specifically our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, was certainly alive and well, thanks to the longstanding patriarchal beliefs and practices of Italian Catholics, those in Italy and those in America.
Nevertheless, on that frigid winter night when I was born, my mother was celebrating her parents’ wedding anniversary. There was a terrible blizzard, and in the midst of that intense winter storm, Ma went into labor with me. That stormy night was perhaps indicative of what was to come later for me, in my young life.
