The Inheritance 1478011890, 9781478011897

Citation preview

THE

Inheritance

THE

Inheritance Elizabeth A. Povinelli

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON

2021

© 2021 Duke University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Text designed by Elizabeth Povinelli and Amy Ruth Buchanan Cover designed by Aimee Harrison with Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Sang Blue and Calibri Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Povinelli, Elizabeth A., author. Title: The inheritance / Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, [2021] Identifiers: lccn 2020028569 (print) | lccn 2020028570 (ebook) | isbn 9781478011897 (hardcover) | isbn 9781478014034 (paperback) | isbn 9781478021346 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Povinelli, Elizabeth A. | Povinelli, Elizabeth A.— Family. | Women anthropologists—United States—Biography. | Women anthropologists—United States—Pictorial works. | lcgft: Autobiographies. Classification: lcc gn21.p685 a3 2021 (print) | lcc gn21.P685 (ebook) | ddc 301.092—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028569 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028570

Cover art: Elizabeth Povinelli

To Emilia Ambrosi Long gone, never absent.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface xi

Act I 1

Act II Papa 85 The Vorburgers 135 Gramma 163

Act III 211 Reading List 317

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Acknowledgments This book would never have come into existence without the thoughtful engagement of Zulaikha Ayub, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, David Barker, Sheridan Bartlett, Thomas Bartlett, Michael Cunningham, Stacey D’Erasmo, Susan Edmunds, Catherine Fennell, Daniela Gandorfer, Natasha Ginwala, Daniel Kaiser, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, Mark Povinelli, Sharon Povinelli, Roberta Raffaetà, Vivian Ziherl, and audiences at live performances at RedCat, Los Angeles; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Watch This Space, Alice Springs, Australia. Early images from this book can be found in the e-flux journal Routes/Worlds and the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art calendar Stagings. Soundings. Readings.

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Preface The following is not a factual history. It is a meditation on the activities and processes through which we come into or take possession of something as if a birthright. My reflections roam from the US South of the 1960s and 1970s to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian-Hungarian Alps and then back again. I am certain that members of my intimate and extended family have different memories of the events I describe—and different archives supporting or undermining their factual basis. In other words, although it is a piece of nonfiction, The Inheritance is not a strict history. In the guise of a memoir, The Inheritance examines the patterns of violence, dislocation, racism, and structural inequality that have shaped not merely my life but all lives within what Hortense Spillers has described as the American grammar of race.

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Act I

Most people believe that their inheritance is passed down through blood or soil.

2

3

Mine hung over our TV like a purloined letter. It throbbed like a wound you found you had but couldn’t remember getting.

4

5

I was probably six or seven before it began to stand out from all the other objects inside and outside our house— before it became strange to me in its difference from everything else.

6

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8

By that time, we were living in Shreveport, Louisiana. Let’s say it was around 1969. Five years earlier, we had moved into a new suburb, Spring Lake, located on the edge of a vast pine and oak forest.

9

We must have brought the framed image with us when we left Buffalo, New York, because I never saw anything like it where we landed. Our neighbors down south had Elvis, Jesus, and Confederate flags hanging on their walls.

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11

When I was young, I assumed that if you wanted to know what something was or meant, you just asked: What, where, why, how, when? Then you received an answer and all was made clear.

12

So I tried what.

13

I asked, “Mom, what is this a picture of?” She answered, “Ask Gramma or Papa. Or ask your father.”

14

“Now, put it back on the wall or you’ll start a huge fight over a pointless problem.”

15

Now, I knew what a problem was. We did mathematics early in my family. “A problem is a puzzle placed on top of a trouble.” And even then I knew that one problem . . .

16

. . . usually led to another.

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18

The main problem in my house was one of division. And the main division was kids against parents. Trouble started whenever we tried to solve it.

19

My parents had wanted twelve children. They had seen the 1950 film Cheaper by the Dozen. In the end, there were only six of us spread out across eight years—girl, boy, boy, me, boy, girl. The first four kids came out one after the other, with barely any breathing room for my mother. Boom, boom, boom, and boom. The last two had a couple years spacing. I was usually clumped with the oldest even though I was the fourth. It was a good swing position—youngest of the oldest, oldest of the youngest. Chickens were bigger in those days, but I can still remember looking at our Sunday night bird and wondering where the six extra pieces would have come from had my parents achieved their reproductive goal.

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21

We weren’t poor. My mother said we wore homemade hand-medowns because she loved us all equally. I think she was also haunted by the six extra kids who never materialized. If we complained, she said we were lucky to have clothes. A distant look in her eyes suggested that she knew what she was talking about.

It wasn’t just our clothes. Our faces were exactly the same—or that’s what the neighbors said.

24

Inside the ho use, w treate e were d as in and w tercha eren’t ngeab le unit s.

On the one ha nd, it s tant to eemed our pa extrao r ents th thing w rdinar at we e wan ily k n ted to e w no ma we cou impor­ be if w tter ou ld e be any worke r gend word g d hard er. The ender. e y n d ough, id M n’t act and sa y fathe ually u y, “Bet se the h, it do r would star a girl . e inten esn’t m . .” On s e a ly at m tter th the ot for Ch e at you her ha ristma n a d r e s , . m just I kids lik got do y broth lls and e me d ers go t guns did the id then Barbie . I cut u s clone u a l a t h ll and th ing tha the ha en bur t ir off m ied he y c heap r in th e back yard.

25

26

Chores also reflected an underlying sexual division of labor. The girls worked every Saturday vacuuming, scrubbing, folding, and ironing inside the house. The boys sweltered outside, mowing and hedging the lawn and fixing our perpetually broken secondhand cars.

The oldest would pass down to the youngest tricks about how to minimize the labor. For instance, my oldest sister taught me you could just turn on the vacuum cleaner and Mother would think you were working when you were actually reading.

27

The differences between what my parents said and what they often did when it came to gender were nestled in other social distinctions that taught us some basic mathematical principles such as the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers.

28

For instance, my older brother T said he was the most important of us kids because although he was s­ econd-born, he was the firstborn son. My father backed him up because they shared the same first name. All the rest of us thought his claim laughable. We knew our oldest sister, C, held all the cards.

29

So there were millions of ways you could divide in my family besides parents against kids. There were oldest and youngest; mother’s side, father’s side; mothers, daughters; fathers, sons; wives, sisters; girls, boys.

30

The most important divisions of all, however, were between humans and donkeys and Povinellis and asses—those who knew how to survive and those who didn’t.

31

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My siblings and I knew how to survive. If we weren’t in school, our parents sent us outside with instructions not to come back before dinner. It didn’t matter what we were wearing in those early years. We didn’t see much of anyone when we patrolled the vast forest around our house. Later, we purposely hid from the neighborhood kids. Some teased us, calling us “Probaloni” because they didn’t know how to pronounce provolone. But we were tough and got along fine in our insular world. My mother tried to break us up, forcing us to “socialize” with the other kids on the block. She would send us outside two by two, telling us to play with our age-appropriate neighbors. We’d pretend to head off in the right direction but then meet up at a predesignated place in the woods.

33

34

When it rained, my parents pointed us to the World Book’s Childcraft No. 9, “Make and Do.” We liked to invent our own games. My brothers made seventeenth-century ships out of manila folders they stole from my dad’s office, using toothpicks and thick thread for the rigging. They drew huge world maps with chalk on our concrete driveway and agreed to maneuver their battleships according to set rules but then had huge arguments about their implementation. They sprayed their finely wrought boats with gasoline and flicked matches at them to make the battle realistic. Sometimes they rubbed gasoline on their clothes and flicked matches at each other. Everything went up in smoke.

35

D and I came up with a game we called Never Ready. The rules were simple. At any time and in any place, either of us could attempt to kill the other. He once crouched on the top of the refrigerator, attacking me from above. I later retaliated from behind a door. Mother, seeing D turning blue from my choke hold, asked, “Where do you kids come up with these games?” She warned, “You will hurt yourselves one day.”

36

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Our forest redoubt slowly shrank as the ­middle-class, white neighborhood expanded. None of the kids who moved in wore homemade clothes, let alone hand-me-down homemade clothes. They threw away toys we could only dream of having—trolls, trucks, Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

38

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The larger the suburb grew, the quieter my father was in front of the funny framed image. Once I got him alone and asked him, “What is this?” “This is your inheritance, Beth, your home, our village,” he said as if he were talking to me. I knew he wasn’t, even when I was there.

40

“This is where we all come from—not only Povinellis but Ambrosis like Gramma and Ziesta; Nellas, too, like Zitony.” I couldn’t make out a village, let alone a house, in the green, brown, and blue streaks of the image. As I struggled to see what he did, my father continued, “But there are no Povinellis other than us down here. We are on our own, alone.”

41

That was true. Everyone I knew with the surnames Povinelli, Ambrosi, and Nella lived in Buffalo, New York, or just across the Canadian border in Hamilton, Ontario. I was born in Buffalo during a frigid February.

42

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Gramma and Papa Povinelli lived at 24 Leonard Street. Whenever we visited, my parents would say it was great to be back where there were four seasons. I didn’t agree. Winter bit my nose and painted my lips as blue as the blueberries that grew in the bushes behind my cousins’ house in Rochester. My five siblings and I wore sweaters in the summer.

I learned the word bitter there—and not merely in reference to the winter.

No matter how warm it was outside, it was cold and damp in Gramma and Papa’s cellar. Sometimes I was sent down there to get knives for the dinner table. At the foot of the stairs, I could feel the piercing dampness rising. Before that cellar, I hadn’t known humidity could be cold as well as hot.

46

No one had cellars in Louisiana. The water table was so high in some places that they buried folks above ground. The white middle class laid concrete foundations under their houses that slowly cracked over time. Many poor black families just got flooded.

47

All sorts of things went on underneath Papa’s house. Laundry rained down from the ceiling after passing through secret chutes stationed throughout the house; an enormous wooden cask fermented grapes scavenged from local vineyards after the harvesting machines had gone by; . . .

. . . and Papa’s knife-making and grinding equipment filled the entire space with stone and wood dust and the reek of tool grease. Everywhere lay knives with our surname stamped into their wooden handles. I coveted each and every one of them.

48

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Upstairs the temperature ran hot and cold. Gramma and Papa’s framed image held pride of place next to the fancy china cabinet in their dining room.

51

I would often find them and other relatives standing in front of the image talking to it . . .

52

. . . as if they were talking to people on the other side of the glass.

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55

Over the long dinners, I listened to the stories everyone told about “the village,” hoping to learn about the content of my inheritance hidden in the rich-hued ridges of the framed image. Many of the stories were in a language I didn’t know, so I paid attention to the way bodies pressed into each other or veered apart. 56

I sought to embody what I couldn’t understand, pressing my skin against the modulation of family emotions. I tracked my grandparents’ and grandaunts’ and -uncles’ gestural semaphores. I listened to tone and to a specific sharpness of breath that signaled a coming disturbance in the rhythm of the conversation. 57

At any minute, the chatter of people talking over each other in an ever-rising commotion might turn eerily silent.

58

In these moments, you could hear the clink of forks and knives and the gulps of wine being swallowed.

59

You could see ghostly figures that had our faces tapping the edge of the table.

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Then BOOM! I knew these sharp flashes of rage intimately. How everything seems great and then suddenly is not. I saw some of what my father inherited from his father in their mutual outrage at any slight, at any question of their intelligence, their authority, the righteousness of their fury. 62

o wh y e nk do ere. e th all h m I a you t go

Lagala sta Angelo. You know nothing of the village.

fa yo ! e h nk do roac u Yo ck-a co

63

No one seemed to notice me and my siblings during these storms and furies.

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65

I thought Gramma and Papa’s neighbors were whispering about them. But no one except my relatives would have understood what anyone was saying even if they had pressed their ears against the windowpane.

66

I didn’t understand— and not merely because the languages spoken were not my own. There was something wrong with the frame itself. The image couldn’t gather the dislocations of sense and narrative. Instead of bringing the family together, the frame shattered it.

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“Beth, what are you doing? Come back inside.”

So, one day I stopped asking what and tried asking why. I received the dodge of where.

“Dad, why does everyone in this family fight about this image?”

“Those are the mountain ranges of Trentino, just below the Dolomites in the Alps. Our village, Carisolo, is right here,” he said, pointing to what seemed like a random spot on an indiscriminate landscape. “You inherit Carisolo from me and Papa.”

“But where is it? Like where IN THE WORLD?”

“Italy.”

71

Look out if Papa be anywhere nearby.

“Don’t you ever say Carisolo. You are from Karezol. Karezol is beautiful. We have our mountain and a river that separates us from Pinzole. No, not Carisolo, not Italy. You get neither from me.”

72

“Elizabeth, you are a proud mountain girl. You come from one of the six original families of Karezol—Povinelli, Ambrosi, Nella, Maestri, Beltrami, and Bertarelli. You are part of our Povinelli clan, the Simonatz Povinellis. We marry Ambrosi and Nella. You must never forget this—you must never forget who you are.”

He didn’t have to worry. I would never forget not knowing what he was talking about.

73

“You see, Elizabeth? You hear our cows, Elizabeth? So sweet. Your village is beautiful, yes?”

74

“Dad, stop it! You’re just confusing her. Beth, there’s no difference between Carisolo and Karezol.”

“I can’t see anything but squiggly lines.”

75

“You’re a smart girl, Elizabeth. You see the difference. You are like me. You don’t listen to anyone; you don’t obey anyone. If they say, `nothing has changed,’ you say, `I have my own eyes.’ You say, `You can destroy me, but I will never change my mind. I know who I am.’”

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“Stop it, Dad.” “Whose side are you on, son?” “I am on reality’s side! Karezol is exactly the same as Carisolo. It’s just a different name. Carisolo is Karezol. Karezol is Carisolo. Let’s just leave it at that.” 78

“You sta zitto! I don’t want to hear nothing from someone just out of his short trousers. You’re not too old for me to give you a good hiding.”

79

Karezol/Carisolo—of all the ways my family divided things, this referentially meaningless difference undergirded them all. So I decided . . .

80

. . . that if our inheritance was nestled in a problem emerging from a trouble located so far away that no one could agree on its proper name or even give me a proper answer about what or where it was, then maybe I could learn how we ended up in America no matter the intensely fraught attachments to the place that splintered into countless pieces the closer one got to it. These are the stories passed down from my grandparents about how we arrived in America.

81

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Act II

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PA PA

86

Papa said it began with a priest cheating him out of his name.

“I should never have been christened Angelo. Firstborn son, me. I should have my father’s name and his father’s: Giovanni. The priest, he robbed me, Elizabeth. They are all robbers.”

87

Then his story would take a turn into Karezol’s little schoolhouse.

“So, the kid he thinks he’s a smartso. He says to me, ‘Aye, Angelo, who’s your father?’ So, of course, I stab him right here in his head. Because that’s what you do. You understand, Elizabeth? Anyone says anything to you, you show him. You’re no donkey.”

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After he lobotomized his nemesis, Papa climbed out the school window, walked over the Alps . . .

. . . and caught one boat to New York City and then another along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, New York.

93

From there Papa claimed to be the creator of all things.

94

“I made the Povinelli knife business, Elizabeth.” “I brought over your Gramma, her sister, and her Nella husband, Elizabeth.”

95

Sometimes in the summer, we visited my Nella cousins. Their house sat on acres of gorgeous grass fields with a deep aqua pond from which trout were plucked for lunch. They set enormous tables for dinners that stretched through the night.

Course after course came— strange-tasting cheeses and homemade wines. I thought it was a magical kingdom. I thought being a knife grinder must be akin to royalty.

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In his own cramped urban house, Papa sometimes bad-mouthed the Nellas in the ordinary ways that families do: “I set the Nellas up in Canada. Some of that Nella money should really be mine. Simonatz Povinelli, Ambrosi, and Nella. We are one family. We are all one Karezol. So why don’t they pay me back?” And yet all our relatives pooled their money to bring our Simonatz side of the Povinelli family to America—and their spouses and children along with them. 98

By the 1930s, Gramma and Papa’s Buffalo neighborhood was its own little Alpine village. Everyone was making and sharpening their knives. Because that’s what relatives do—what they need to do. They need to create a surrounding, a barrier to outsiders, invaders, people who would do far worse than take your money and never pay it back.

99

Sure, you had to be careful with knives, but you had to be more careful with anyone from outside your village. The world was a hard place filled with people who were greedy or desperate, who would come over the mountains at any moment to steal from you or slaughter your family.

“Elizabeth, trust only your family.” “Papa, I am OK. There are no mountains in Shreveport. It’s too flat. It’s all bayou and bog.” “Elizabeth, they can come from anywhere. You must be tough like your Papa. Feel my arm, aye? Like steel. Elizabeth, look me in the eye and tell me, ‘Me, I am tough. No one takes anything from me.’”

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But my Papa had two very different eyes. One was clear, cold, and blue like my own. The other was a cloudy mustard scar. He would often shut the blue one tight and look out of his jaundiced portal.

“You want to know how your Papa got this eye?” “No, not really.”

102

Actually, I did. Papa’s stories were hypnotic to me. They had qualities that you might find in a medieval print or a classic American horror flick. They teased you to follow them ever deeper into their rotting cellar. 103

“I was making new beautiful knives with the softest rosewood handles and Povinelli burned in their sides for all my grandkids, for your weddings.”

104

“But a steel chip, it broke off and, pow! Right into your Papa’s eye.”

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“I grabbed any old rag and ran upstairs to your Gramma.” “Drive me to that quack of a doctor!”

107

He forgot that he had never let Gramma learn how to drive. Other relatives let their wives learn. His daughters drove, and he was proud of them. Not his wife, though. No. Wives, sisters, and daughters were regulated by different principles according to the Law of Papa. Not surprisingly, Gramma looked at him with weary irony when he told her to grab the car keys off their bedroom dresser.

108

Or at least she always had an ironic look on her face when Papa told and retold this story to us. That never slowed him down.

“So, I drove—me, Elizabeth. Gramma, she sat on the passenger side. She tells me, ‘Turn right, turn left’ until we made it to the doctor.”

109

“Angelo, I have to take your eyeball out.”

110

“I’ll kill you before you take my eyeball. Just sew it back up.”

111

“Angelo, look at your hands. They are filthy. If I don’t take your eyeball out you’ll get an infection and be dead in no time at all.” “My hands? I am not soft like you.”

112

“OK, but I can’t use any anesthesia to dull the pain when I sew up your eye.” “Pain. I am from the Karezol. I don’t know this word pain.”

113

“Elizabeth, the Protestants, they spit on us. They think we are dirty people because they do not know work. What did he know, this smarty-pants? I never got any infection.”

“So, I said to him, ‘See? No infection.’ Then he says to me, ‘OK, but see the scar on your eye from the stitches? Sorry, but I have to sandpaper it smooth.’”

114

Papa, you must have seen me shudder. I think you hoped I would—that all of your grandkids would shudder in the face of your stories. You meant to scare the living bejesus out of us. You weren’t a sadist exactly. You just thought brutality made children tough enough to repel foreign invaders and thieving relatives. You meant to show us that we could shake without breaking.

115

“If I beat you it is to make you stronger.”

116

Papa, you were raised like this and were tough. Others would learn the same way. You weren’t given your father’s name, so you didn’t give your name to my father. What they did to you, you did to him, and he did to us, and on and on, every generation gifted the same brutal inheritance as the last. Pain, we learned, was for the weak and useless, for those who wouldn’t survive a minute what you claimed with a laugh. Pain made us strong, all right. And as stubborn as donkeys. Strong and stubborn enough to walk away— which most of us would eventually do, though not until years later.

117

Besides, back then all educational practices were pitiless. At least they were in my southern Catholic school.

“Kneeling on rice will teach you to say ‘Yes Ma’am’ and ‘No Ma’am.’” “Holding a few textbooks will teach you proper southern manners.”

118

Fgrav = gravitational force G = universal gravitation m1 = mass of 1st object m2 = mass of 2nd object d = distance b/w center of the two objects

119

However, none of your stories were quite true, were they, Papa? The immigration documents I later found show you weren’t born in Karezol, as I had thought, as you implied. You were what people now disparagingly call an anchor baby. Your father and mother, Giovanni and Candida—or John and Candace, as they would say in Shreveport—made sure you were born in Buffalo so they could secure a route from the foot of the Dolomites to the edge of the Great Lakes. When our Simonatz clan began leaving the village in the late nineteenth century, Karezol was a just a little impoverished village with high mortality rates on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was a frontier between warring parties and had been as long as anyone could remember. In the years leading to the First World War, the region was split between those who wanted to remain in the empire and those, like Gramma’s Ambrosi family, who supported the Risorgimento (reunification) with Italy, between those who said they were from Karezol and those who said they were from Carisolo. You were baptized by an American priest, not one from the village, your parents happily nodding beside you.

122

Your father and his Ambrosi relatives started Povinelli Knives. All they needed from you was the sheer fact of your birth. Then they sent you packing back to our village. Work in America was hard. They didn’t need a bawling toddler making it even harder for them. And they were the lucky ones. Fashioning a bridge from their shattered and fractured landscape to a land of relative peace, sharpened knife after sharpened knife, was the taxing but necessary means of their survival. It’s why your mother made the arduous journey to Buffalo to give birth to you, and it’s why they named you Angelo. You would be the little Angel that saved them all.

123

Why wasn’t this enough for you? Why wouldn’t you cherish this baptismal gesture? Perhaps because after they used you to save them, they sent you back to the one place where the inheritance of names mattered. During a visit to Carisolo in 2019, I sat with the mayor, a Povinelli from a different clan, and the village genealogist, a Nella, answering questions about my family lineage and how it fit into the broader Simonatz clan. As I traced the lines connecting one generation to the next, Giovanni or Domenico was the name of every firstborn son stretching back to the seventeenth century.

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So, I begin to understand the rage around your name. Before you were even in short trousers, Angelo signified a dislocation and dispossession from your communal inheritance. You were simultaneously tied to Karezol through your father yet denied full title to your birthright.

126

You grew up in Karezol with your mom and your six brothers, two of whom died before reaching their early teens, as well as with your cousins. The entire village was one extended family. But with no father or uncles around, no wonder that kid teased you about your parentage. Your name, Angelo, stuck out like a scarlet A.

127

Eventually you were taken away, back to Buffalo. My brother M thinks the timing of your flight was triggered by an impending conscription into the AustroHungarian royal guard as the First World War heated up. The casualties along the northern border between Italy and Austria-Hungary were enormous and horrific. Bullets were not the only danger. More than ten thousand men died from extreme cold and avalanches alone. Others were felled by disease.

128

The history of empires and nations wasn’t, however, the history Papa taught us. The memories Papa bequeathed us were personal—how smart he was, how tough he was, what he had invented, who had crossed him. Most of all we heard the insult of his name, Angelo. His severed patrilineal connection to “our village” became his obsession. Everything else, “It is nothing, Elizabeth. It is for donkeys.” 129

Not until much later did I begin to wonder whether even the story of your eye was true. By then I had learned that truth slides across history like a sharp blade along flesh. For all that was false in what you said, “Nothing I am telling you, Elizabeth, is a lie.” It was the form of truth that slides down the valleys that define Trentino, Alto Adige. Truth consisted not of what was being said but of what was being left out in order to maintain one’s sense of oneself or of what could no longer be said because the world had drained the words of their referential meaning.

130

For you, truth was not a light switch—up/down, on/off—but a way of conveying a horror that allowed your grandchildren to move into a deeper reality, a reality in which places and lives were sorted according to their relevance. People learned what to turn toward and what to turn away from, when the slightest mistake might mean the end of you and your family.

131

You said, “Listen to the winds coming over the mountains, up the gorges, across the gossips. Listen for the sound of a danger barreling toward you. Listen to what no one is saying.” Once when we were picking blackberries along a train trestle in our southern neighborhood, my oldest sister, C, told us to press our ears against the railroad track. “You can hear inside the steel what is barreling toward you. But be careful not to become entranced by the sound or you won’t see the train racing toward you until it is too late.”

132

This is how I listened to your stories—some inward sound that guided and entranced. That lied and lied but always told some truth.

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THE VORBURGERS

When I was a little girl, I believed Papa’s claim that the world revolved around his severed birthright. But there were millions of immigrants in his position.

136

The emptying of our Alpine village was hardly exceptional. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a great European hemorrhaging as refugees sought escape from continental wars and the realignments of empires and nations.

137

US nativism reached a fever pitch after the First World War. Federal legislation was passed to stem the tide of southern European “degeneracy” and “anarchism” washing through Ellis Island. This must have contributed to Papa’s adamant anti-Italian attitude. His language of morons, stupidos, and darkies had a deep American inflection no matter its Alpine heritage. As Europe boiled, people crawled over each other to enter the land of the free, each with their own precious ancestral images.

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My mom’s father, Charles Vorburger, was one of those people. He also had an ancestral landscape that no longer made any sense. But he did not frame and hang it on his wall.

140

Maybe his parents taught him that no map was worth the price of the printing, as the value of the German mark kept dropping dizzyingly before one hand could pass a bill to another. 141

Rumor has it his parents put five marks in his pocket when he was fifteen, . . .

142

. . . pointed him in the direction of America, and said, “Goodbye and good luck.”

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Grandpa Vorburger didn’t bother with epic narratives about his past. The past was for suckers. He left his past behind. As for jobs, forget it. They were for people who didn’t know that their lives could turn on a dime.

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He placed his marker on chance.

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148

We weren’t told much more. The innuendos made certain things clear. Nobody waited for anything.

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Then marriage and babies with no money for baby carriages. The Vorburger family was so poor they fostered my mom out for a while so she could have food and clothing.

One day, Grandpa Vorburger won big in a pony race. Instead of blowing the money on more booze and women, he bought a butcher shop. I have imagined Papa coming by to sell and sharpen his knives. But it never happened. And Grandpa Vorburger didn’t last long, dying from lung cancer when I was just a kid.

152

Grandma Vorburger mourned for a bit. Then she thought of better things to do.

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154

I only have a sketchy sense of Grandma Vorburger. I know her first name was Catherine, but I don’t know her surname at birth. I know she was left with four kids, no money, and no employment. Desperate, she walked into the local hospital and demanded they give her a job, any job. So they let her clean the toilets and floors.

155

Her kids grew and married. Independent and tough-minded, she remarried several times, spending her life drinking and playing bingo. That’s really about all I know.

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157

Grandpa and Grandma Vorburger represented all that was wrong with American families. At least that was Papa’s view.

158

Maybe he would have thought differently if they had been from our village, had names like Povinelli, Nella, Ambrosi. But they didn’t. So Grandpa Vorburger, dispatched from his own faraway family, disappeared from mine.

159

160

Everyone risked disappearing under the pressure of Papa’s obsessions. One old guy sometimes sat in the corner of Papa’s dining room. The man wore a pressed Tyrolian suit and cap, sipped red wine, and spoke in a strange language in front of the framed image.

“Who is he, Papa?” “He is no one, Elizabeth.”

He was in fact my Gramma’s father, my Great-Grandfather Ambrosi.

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GRAMMA

My mother said I had Gramma Povinelli’s eyes. She would cover my mouth and chin and say it was like looking in a mirror.

164

By the time I was ten or eleven, everyone said Gramma was not herself. They never said who she was instead.

165

They said and said, but what I heard from her own mouth was that death danced on the western wall of the village church of Santo Stefano. “If the moon is just right, Elizabeth, the dancers, they sway in the night sky.” A grand procession of the doomed hanging over the village, silently intoning, “Prepare for death. Your deeds are like chickens. They will come home to roost.” 166

As for cows, “Their manure, it keeps the house so warm,” Gramma said, “and everything smelling so sweet.”

167

No one had chickens in my Spring Lake neighborhood. But my best friend, Hinnie, and her brother, Tootie, who lived on a little rural block on the outskirts of Shreveport, had lots of chickens to wring by the neck. Hinnie also had a mean-ass Shetland pony that we rode bareback to a little pond behind her house to catch catfish.

She steered the pony this way or that by grabbing its nostrils and yanking. That pony had had enough of this by the time I showed up. Every time we got on its back, it’d break into a gallop, drop its head, and scrape us off using any low-hanging branch. 168

169

If we wound up on foot, deep in the backwoods, we might wander over to Hinnie’s older brothers’ moonshine still. They were often there getting shit-faced on hot languid afternoons. My first glass of alcohol was from their still. They said, “Y’all look hot. Want some water?” We gulped down and then gagged up the slightly viscous liquid. From then on, I learned to discern various liquids by carefully swirling them around their containers. Water and moonshine, fresh and powdered milk, Coca-Cola and Skoal spit. Especially the last one. You don’t want to make that mistake twice.

170

Many people in Hinnie’s family had round rings faded into the back pockets of their jeans, denim rubbings of the Skoal tins secreted there. The presence or absence of this faded patch was a dead giveaway of the kind of family a person was from. These were the kinds of things that I knew about: Skoal spit, ticks, stubborn ponies, and dippers.

171

I was in my late thirties before I discovered that the sky dancers Gramma was referring to were part of a fresco of Il Ballo di Morte, or Danse Macabre, painted on the outside walls of Santo Stefano by the famous Simone Baschenis clan. They began the fresco about twenty-five years after Columbus arrived in the Americas. It was finished in 1534.

Some historians believe the widespread paintings of Il Ballo di Morte emerged from the mortal horror of the fourteenth century as plagues, famines, and war crisscrossed European Christendom. By the time I knew about the existence of Santo Stefano, I also knew about the decimation of Native Americans by diseases following European colonialism. I was not taught this in my grammar school. There, colonialism referred to the Revolutionary War—battles between the Redcoats and the Bluecoats.

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174

While I was still growing up, Gramma convinced me that she, not Papa, was the real resident source of knowledge about what she called Carisolo.

“Don’t you listen to your Papa. He knows nothing of Carisolo. He knows only knives. Listen to me. I tell the truth.”

I listened carefully, although I never quite understood what she was saying. Her stories were social cryptograms resonant with dark emotions, as compelling as Papa’s if with a different inflection.

“Elizabeth, men they dig their graves and then stand in them waiting to die. All my brothers they do this. Now where are they? Manure for the crops.”

175

“Elizabeth, you are a strong Trentino girl. When the Germans they come, you go into the toilet and you get the food. You have no choice, yes?”

176

We had indoor plumbing, so I took her to mean “Don’t let yourself get flushed down the toilet.”

177

I took her to mean lots of things she wasn’t actually saying.

178

“Elizabeth, you must always watch out for the men with the hoods and guns.” “Gramma, I have seen them in the woods by my friend Hinnie’s house.” “Elizabeth, they are everywhere.”

179

With these hooded men in the background, Gramma pressed close to her grandchildren with advice about how to survive. I could see my mother hovering in the shadows of these conversations.

180

“Elizabeth, no need for the medicine. The dog, he lick. It’s good.”

181

“Elizabeth, the Pinocchio. It’s not Disney. It’s bad.” “Gramma, is Great-Uncle So-and-So really a son of a donkey?”

182

“Mother, stop! You’ll give her nightmares.”

183

“Elizabeth, why you not in school?”

ick, “I am s a.” Gramm

help “Ok, so ramma your G house. fix the e st mov You mu .” ie d will or you

“You feel better?”

184

“Not really. I feel really hot.”

“You sweat. It’s good. Drink the water.”

“Mother, what are you doing? Beth, get back on the couch!”

“Mother, this is not the old country.”

“You know nothing. This country knows nothing. You want my little Gramma to die?”

185

Sure, Gramma spoke “dialect”—what linguists call Ladin, a mélange created at the edges of empires and stewed in and across the deep valleys pocking Trentino.

186

But the deformations of sense rippling across her conversations signaled some deeper disturbance. Nothing she said was taken to be true.

187

In the beginning, America must have been amazing for someone from a small village in the Alps. When Gramma arrived, Buffalo was a majestic cultured city for the white and wealthy. Presidents lived there. Niagara Falls powered giant hydroelectric machines, transforming the young metropolis into the City of Light. All around, immigrants worked in giant factories and mills.

188

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Gramma, did Papa sell the place to you as a paradise, free of hard work, hunger, and war? 191

So what happened to you, Gramma? Nothing. Exponential nothingness.

192

Everything you multiplied by nothing was still nothing.

193

Day in and day out. Year after year.

194

As Papa made his knives and fumed about his slights, you walked back and forth, back and forth, in a small and shrinking world . . .

195

196

. . . until the little Carisolian neighborhood around Leonard Street was emptied of all your children and their children. “Elizabeth, this America, it takes my children from me and gives me nothing. All my family is far away from here.” Everyone told you, Gramma, to let go of the old country, to accept that in America, people moved away from their relatives. You refused to let this go even after everything else was long gone.

197

Within this nothingness, you obsessed about death, coining new paradoxical problems for me.

“Elizabeth, is better to die when the plane it explodes in the sky, or when it hits the ground?” “Any other choices, Gramma?”

198

You kept saying, “I want go back and be buried with my bones.”

199

Then everything went really wrong. You wandered around in terror. They said you worried too much. It felt worse than worry to me. It felt like the end of the world.

200

After a while, a decision was made to see if electroshock would help snap you out of your anxious melancholia. Your teeth fell out or were shattered. The antidepressants they gave you came with a ban on the foods you loved. You stopped remembering all the stories.

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I sat absolutely still beside you. I waited for you to come back. I said I believed you about that Pinocchio kid. Some said the war had left a permanent mark on your mind. I think what you lost was not your mind but your world. Or in losing your world, you lost the mind that made sense only there. The nerves of your entire being, thickly twined into the mountains and rivers of Carisolo, were sliced off, your language was lost in transit, your ways of caring for others characterized as abuse. Your collapse was for me the most consequential puzzle placed on top of the pile of trouble that was my family.

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204

Then you died. Then Papa died. By that time, I was far away. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Belyuen, Australia.

205

Whatever the cause, Gramma’s collapse left a permanent scar on everyone. If you got close enough to it, you could see in tiny script, “I make no sense here.” My mother would sometimes pull me aside and say, “It’s because your Papa never let her work, go out, learn to drive, socialize with anyone outside of the village family. You see how strong your Grandma Vorburger is? It’s because she works. Your Papa can say what he likes, but you can’t cage up someone and then expect them to be OK.”

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My mother said other things, like about how my father hid in the clothes closet after he hit us too hard or for no reason. “It’s because he feels so bad about his mother. How your Papa treated her. How her desires never mattered.” I think she meant he saw himself becoming Papa, but she didn’t say that. She never said other things either, like if Dad was becoming Papa, was she worried about who she was becoming in this topology of inheritance.

208

As Mother held her hand to my face and we looked into the mirror, I wondered who I was becoming in the unbridgeable rift between Carisolo and Karezol. I should have been thinking about what was happening to me as this fault line opened up in America.

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Act III

Chekhov wrote that if a gun is on the mantle in the first act, then it must go off in the last. So let me start over, from the beginning, but this time writing my birthright from the perspective of those who mattered and those who didn’t in the place where I actually lived.

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As I said, we moved to Shreveport from Buffalo in 1964, when I was two and a half. 215

This was around the time that the US Congress passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Shreveport lay in the heart of the Bible Belt, the largest city in Caddo Parish, awash in Confederate flags. The parish was still well known at the time as the lynching capital of Louisiana, structurally racist, rabidly anti-Catholic, and vehemently antiunion.

As a toddler and young child, I knew none of this, or of the basic facts that led to these two pieces of federal legislation, or of the names that would become synonymous with them—Rosa Parks, the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter Sit-In, the Freedom Riders, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis, even Martin Luther King Jr., just to name a few.

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I didn’t have to know in order to be absorbed into the system against which all those folks were struggling. All the roads crisscrossing Shreveport’s neighborhoods pointed to its ongoing racial history. The lines between neighborhoods were stark, sudden, and policed. Dad built our house on the edge of a newly designated white suburb, C-39.

221

The white suburbs were carefully laid with glaring concrete streets and drainage systems that filtered away monsoonal rains and standing water. They also seared the top layers of flesh off our calloused bare feet.

222

The black neighborhoods were left in dirt or sealed with black tar. In the summer, the tar roads gave way when your heels hit them. Soft footprints followed you from behind, then slowly disappeared. Water stagnated as the rains flooded everything. Mosquitos bred.

223

It was always thick hot, stinking hot everywhere. Sticky sweat glued your clothes to your body. “Like being sealed in plastic wrap,” everyone said. The air let out a piercing high-pitched hum in protest. Pine sap stung the nose.

224

Water moccasins lurked when you tried to get relief in small lakes and ponds. Copperheads, cottonmouths, pygmy rattlesnakes, and box turtles camouflaged themselves in the pine needles and blackberry patches.

225

One thing all the neighborhoods shared were the rumbling trucks that spewed clouds of DDT out of giant tanks perched on their backsides. We ran behind them in a mad game of “Who can hold their breath the longest,” only to discover later that we were not the sole originators of this toxic pastime. Throughout the South, black and white, poor, rich, and middle-class neighborhoods were soaked in the industrial poison as kids played merrily in the bilious clouds. One can say that this is how racism works—it poisons all sides. Fair enough, true enough as long as those in power are ignorant of the equality of harm. Where I lived, what was shared quickly redivided once whites discovered they didn’t have more of the best of whatever was available.

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227

Our journey down South began when Dad convinced Papa to let him go to college rather than carry on the family knife-grinding business. Dad said it was a pitched battle, but Papa eventually let him and his brother L graduate in engineering and his two sisters become nurses. My aunts stayed in Upstate New York. Uncle L went to work for NASA in Columbus, Ohio.

228

Dad settled into a job working for AT&T in Buffalo, where he met my mother.

229

Papa and Dad’s pitched battles played out in a larger war. As Uncle L helped the country head to the moon, civil rights, labor, environmental, gender, and Native American movements were rising up against older structures of power—Jim Crow legislation, the Indian Relocation Act, the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Others reacted in an equal and opposite motion.

In Louisiana, the targets of conservatives were segregation and “union commies.” The first state attempt to push through “open shop” laws, as antiunion legislation was called, was in the 1940s. The powerful Catholic Church in the southern, Cajun part of the state blocked it, incensed that one of the prime backers of the legislation was the virulently anti-Catholic Christian American Association. When the CAA receded to the sidelines, the Catholic Church dropped its objections to the law. AT&T built a manufacturing plant in Shreveport soon thereafter. Five years later, my dad was transferred from Buffalo to Shreveport to manage the production line at the Western Electric plant that made AT&T rotary telephones.

231

I have to remember that I was two and a half when we moved to Shreveport, so everything that I am writing here is being told in retrospect. These are not things I remember. They are things I learned. I do remember that my father deeply felt his alienation from the city based on his ethnicity and religion. He’d often say, “All our kind are far away, Beth. People don’t like our sort here.” By “kind” he meant Catholics and Italians. Catholics were not Christians where I lived as a child. There were Christians of all sorts, and there were Papists. We were idol-worshiping Papists.

232

But . . . and so—I don’t know which to say—my father ran for the local school board and lost.

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We often heard at the dinner table about the injustice of how Dad was treated on the basis of his religion and ethnic heritage. I saw Papa’s touchy dignity tapping at the edge of these conversations.

235

Maybe the inheritance of an explosive resentment is why Dad flew into rages and his six kids flew out of the house through any window or door available. Whatever. In our world, we knew the belt was still mightier than the word. Or we didn’t think it wise to wait around and see which would win.

236

In the face of these emotional storms, we developed what polite company called “inner strength.” We also developed a code for where to meet up after we had made our escape. C Alpha Charlie: See you at the sandstone cliffs.

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It wasn’t only to avoid domestic troughs that when not in school, we spent our days in the surrounding blackberry patches, creeks, bayous, ponds, lakes, gullies, and ravines. The entire expanse of the woods seemed an untouched world, ours to explore. We looked for box turtles, melted leeches off our legs with salt, dug caves into precarious sandstone cliffs, and tried to spot snakes before they spotted us.

239

We collected crawdads, nuts, and berries and played with toys pilfered from the neighbors’ trash. We documented the relationship between soils and plants, animals and habitats, all initially under the direction of our oldest sister, C.

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How my sister learned about the flora and fauna of the woods, the way sunlight fed plants and plants fed us, I cannot say for sure. I suspect from the local public library where my mother left us for what seemed like days on end. I later learned that after Mother dropped us off, she would go back home and crawl into bed, exhausted by her six hyperactive children. And other things.

243

We knew the other reasons she pulled the blankets over her head. But we were too busy developing our inner strength to intervene.

“Where’s S?”

“I know you stole those trolls from the Ns’ house when Mom made us go over there to play.”

“I did not. I found them in their trash.”

244

“She’s over here.”

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Our woodland retreat was marked for a white upper-middle-class development—that’s how we got there in the first place. So, over time, the forests were flattened. First the pond, then the ravine, then the berry patch, then . . . A prosperous white population clawed ever deeper into the landscape, one house after another obliterating the material conditions of our domestic escape. No one cared about the disappearance of this refuge any more than they cared about the dislocation of Gramma from her world.

247

So, we crawled underground and found new earthly dimensions under our feet.

“Y’all go first. I’ll take S and meet you at the lake.”

“Why do we have to go?”

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249

“Are you sure this comes out at the lake?” “Ahhhhhh!”

“What?!!” “Ah, it’s just crawdads. I thought they were snakes.” “I can’t see a thing.”

251

Or we dug down and pretended to be getting somewhere.

“Make sure you document the conditions of our findings so that we can see if they hold in other similar places.”

In the afternoons, my mother would call us for lunch by shouting down into the drainage system.

253

As concrete extended its dominion, rage would not be too strong a word to characterize our response. Some of us became suburban hoodlums. Cutting down barbed wire, breaking into completed but unsold houses, letting small fires get out of hand. Others of us wrote melancholic songs. My little sister, S, wrote entire albums about the loss of the woods.

254

e hen w “Oh, w ung, ll so yo were a es g gam playin .” one . . one by

“Silly, sill out to y Sarah Sp y wen catch t a butt that s erfly he th ought flown had away with a she’d co found that d coon ay . . .”

“. . . b cho ut they ppin ’re g our wet down , we woo t d I am s today. A a the ll alone nd woo , in ds.”

255

When our parents asked what we were doing, my siblings and I said that we were conducting natural science experiments—which was also true. No matter what kind of mischief we got up to, science, or “using your brain,” was our Get-out-of-Jail-Free card. My eldest sister, C, had lots of science in her back pocket, esoteric knowledge about what was edible, what not. In the edible category were bullfrogs, snapping turtles, dandelions, cattails, clover, crawdads, and curled dock, which my brother M and I called the coffee plant because its dried flowers looked to us like coffee grounds.

256

I loved being ordered around by C. “Go find X.” “Prepare it for Y.” I was mesmerized by my brother M’s grip on physics. “You can boil water in a paper cup because water boils at a lower degree than paper, thus the cup will only burn to the level of the water because the water is absorbing all the loose energy.” 257

The application of scientific principles, we quickly discovered, could also be applied to things other than cooking an outdoor snack. You could use them to dodge my father’s tempests and to get more than you deserved.

258

In the steaming hot summers, we would sometimes sneak back inside the house, quiet lest our mother wake, switch on our black-and-white TV with its three channels plus a hazy UHF and watch The Three Stooges, The Twilight Zone, and Dark Shadows. None of these TV shows were allowed. Ours was a house of The Wonderful World of Disney, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic, and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Dad would feel the top of the TV when he came home at night. If the vacuum tubes that powered the image were still warm, there would be hell to pay. So, we made sure to put a tray of ice cubes on top of the set after any illicit viewing.

259

Sometimes we would gather for movie night in the living room, reserved for the neighborhood guests who never came. As my father set up the 16 millimeter projector, my mother cooked popcorn and lined up our Coca-Cola glasses. Coke was the God of Beverages for us. Dad had a sweet tooth; family law dictated that every dinner include a homemade dessert. But Coke was different. Wasteful. American. A gateway drug.

260

We crawled over each other to watch the bubbles ascend from the bottom, arguing about their cause and function. We learned about mass and the law of displacement when C suddenly asked for her Coke without ice. Then we sat mesmerized by such classics as Bell Laboratory Presents: The History of the Microchip, which foretold of a day when the massive computers Dad had shown us at work would shrink to devices you might hold in your hand.

261

As we sat in amazement, my father, like his father, would say, “Elizabeth, Povinellis use their brains so we do not become someone’s donkey.”

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If I had been using my brains, I would have known that this was true only because we were the kind of people for whom the meritocracy of wits worked. I only had to look out the window of St. Catherine’s School to see that in my world, “smarts” were not what counted in the local division of opportunity.

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The evidence was everywhere and just kept coming. George Wallace ran in the 1968 presidential election as the American Independent Party candidate, winning five states—Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia—by pledging “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

266

By 1969, when I was seven, schools had been resegregated through the emergence of private Christian “academies.” Other Christians sent their children to Catholic schools, which were hardly more integrated.

The nuns and lay teachers taught us the myth of Southern Chivalry and what they claimed were the virtues of slavery. They described a new breed of carpetbaggers— homos, pinkos, and commies— who were digging tunnels in preparation for an invasion of the South. The Caddo were said simply to have faded away.

268

When I said that I came from a village, my classmates laughed and questioned my racial heritage. I soon kept this history to myself.

As we coached crawdads onto our homemade nets, we could have looked across Spring Lake and seen an ever-shrinking group of black kids and their families doing the same. Because the refuge we found in “the wet, wet woods” wasn’t empty. It was being emptied in the long process of making way for a white expansion.

270

I never spoke to the black kids across the lake. And they never spoke to me. In the violent 1960s, talking to a little white girl could get a black kid killed. And as much as I wish it weren’t the case, I wonder if I ever thought about this danger for them. I know I was primarily focused on the dangers inside my house—how to dodge the melancholic dips and sudden rages.

271

While Dad was right that our kind weren’t especially loved in the Bible Belt 1960s, neighborhoods, schools, airports, restaurants, and just about everything else were not segregated on the basis of religion. They were drawn in black and white. We were Dogwood White.

272

Take away ingrown narratives about our village, and I reappear as nothing more than a typical white kid with the privilege of not knowing or not having to be affected by knowing all the systems that kept us floating along in our Dixie Cups even as others were boiling in theirs.

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Was my outrage over our lost woodlands, our respite from home, tempered by any real regard for the larger violent and mundane displacements of the black families who used the area before us and the Caddo before them? Did I bother to know that across town, major figures in the African American civil rights movement were holding church services and social protests as the overwhelmingly white police departments beat them?

275

Or did I bother to wonder why we lived in Caddo Parish when most Caddo lived in Oklahoma? Did I register the implications of newscasts from the big three stations about the Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971? About the Red Power movement more generally, as various Native American leaders sought to reclaim their lands and agency?

276

No. I couldn’t see what was in front of my eyes. And I was privileged to see a lot. 277

Dad told us that the United States was much larger than Shreveport. Whenever he had extended vacation time, he would bundle up the family in our ultramodern sky-blue Bel Air station wagon and head north or west, following paper road maps you could buy at any gas station. He said we were off to see America. We certainly did typically white American things—or our version of them. 278

279

When we were bored driving across the long stretches of the new interstate highways, we’d fashion makeshift instruments and chew beef jerky cigars, pretending that we were Papa’s brothers, Uncles Benny and Justy, singing in nonsensical languages at the top of our lungs, our bodies hanging halfway out the windows. “Lagala sta, Papa! Carisolo is a rigmarole!” When we stopped for gas, we could only envy the curios: Dad and Mother said money didn’t grow on trees. 280

If no camping spots were available, Dad smuggled us into motels. My little brother and sister, D and S, were stuffed into pillowcases. My older brothers, T and M, would wear the same clothes when they went outside for ice so the manager would think them the same person. We already looked like we’d been stitched from the same bolt of cloth.

281

One problem with Dad’s theory that we were seeing America was that, from the point of view of the highway, we mainly witnessed the kind of America that white Americans wanted to see and so were actively constructing. As we hurtled down the highways, surely it should have been apparent that, while there were many families like my own whose pasts were catastrophic, there were many more, unlike mine, who had their futures shoved behind locked gates, closed roads, barbed wire fences— or tossed to the winds as a highway blasted through.

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Another problem was that the dislocations and disregard Papa, Gramma, and then Dad experienced were problems inserted into a national trouble with a broad American grammar.

284

The watery infrastructures that pulled us across the ocean might not originally have been built for our Alpine bodies. By the time I was a kid, the concrete roads that we traveled along to see America certainly were.

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The same highway system my father lauded as a feat of engineering, allowing us access to the wonders of the United States, shattered other worlds—black neighborhoods in cities and Native American lands throughout the West. None of these people seemed to matter, nor their lands, nor the more than human geological and ecological forms on which they depended. They were nobodies, as my Papa would have put it.

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I am not discounting the wreckage of my family’s history. I am not denying that the framed image hanging on our den wall created a powerful emotional vortex that drowned many of my family. Initially created by territorial dislocations and dispossessions, its force was compounded by linguistic, emotional, and sensory dissociations increasing from generation to generation.

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Yes, it scarred the retina of anyone who stared into it too long or too intensely.

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Yes, it doubled my visual field, made me nauseous and prone to migraines.

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Yes, it blew apart my psyche. I began having strange hallucinations. Ordinary objects became massively engorged. A piece of broccoli on my fork was suddenly an enormous oak, a running tap, a cascading waterfall. I couldn’t tell my parents. I thought they would electrocute me the same way they had Gramma. I kept quiet about what I saw and focused on my studies.

293

Years later, a psychologist friend told me that I had been experiencing visual panic attacks. I found this diagnosis interesting if a rather thin way of understanding what it was like to live in a haunted house whose walls had long ago fallen in on themselves.

295

For a while I convinced myself I merely faced a problem of topological coordination. I tried everything I knew to reconcile the warring parties, correlate the geographical deviations, mediate the divergent perspectives.

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Even if I could have found all the dispersed pieces of our shattered inheritance, they would no longer have fit together. The compressions of memory had fundamentally deformed the fragments and lodged unfamiliar material into their heart.

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Exhausted, I would at times despair and think, “I will finish what others started so long ago.” I always missed the mark.

301

I went off in search of my ancestors to ask them what to do.

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They whispered over the winds that they wished for the peace of ash and dust. Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris (Genesis 3:19).

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But after the dust had settled, I stubbornly remained . . .

307

. . . because the compressed deformations were not merely in the past. They were not merely in me in such a way that I could vomit them out. They were me. The intractable meaningless difference between Carisolo/Karezol as it collided with the actual place where I lived created a foreign substance lodged deep within me, something obdurate, or, in Jacques Lacan’s words, “something strange to me, although . . . at the heart of me,” too.

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This may strike some as sad. But for all the ways my past was a wreckage, my future in America was traced onto another story. I may have inherited a historical problem, but unlike others, I was not colored in as a problem of history.

310

My life in America was written as something with great potential, as an arrow pointing to an open road. All the concrete infrastructures helped this potential actualize itself whether or not I noticed the carefully paved asphalt under my feet.

311

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius or social science savant to notice that while my family’s psychic disturbances are real and undeniable, they lie within a racial and settler infrastructure that dismisses an entire host of systematic social harms. All of us travel along this infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or with both feet on the brakes.

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Many Americans go in search of their roots. They hire genealogists. They send off DNA samples. They discover they are biologically part this and part that. They find they are from this general region rather than that. These people might think my family blessed to be able to push a thumbtack into a map and say, quite definitely, “I am from here.” “Karezol/Carisolo is my ancestral home.”

314

But inheritance doesn’t come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others. My Gramma offered me an avenue into this insight. It took many others to force me to begin to use it.

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Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Chiocchetti, Fabio. “È (ancora) possibile una politica linguistica nelle Valli ladine?” In Mondo Ladino, edited by Fabio Chiocchetti, 281–291. San Giovanni di Fassa: Istitut Cultural Ladin, 2007. Choate, Michael I. Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Cole, Luke W., and Sheila R. Foster. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1969. DeWayne, Tim, dir. Beyond Galilee. Ahead of the Curve Productions, 2012. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2016. Fullilove, Mindy Thompson. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do about It. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

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Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: Norton, 2008.

Keller, Tait. “The Mountains Roar: The Alps during the Great War.” Environmental History 14.2 (2009): 253–274.

Grinde, Donald A., and Bruce E. Johansen. Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and People. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 1995.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno. Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Heffernan, Michael. “History, Geography and the French National Space: The Question of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914–18.” Space and Polity 5.1 (2001): 27–48. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Hoosain, Emam. “What Are Mathematical Problems?” Humanistic Mathematics Network 27 (2004): 1–8. https://core.ac.uk/download /pdf/70986304.pdf. Isabella, Maurizio. “Rethinking Italy’s NationBuilding 150 Years Afterwards: The New Risorgimento Historiography.” Past and Present 217.1 (2012): 247–68. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Johnson, Kevin. The “Huddled Masses” Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Joseph, Peniel E. The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

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Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. London: Norton, 1992. Lieb, Emily. “‘White Man’s Lane’: Hollowing Out the Highway Ghetto in Baltimore.” In Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City, edited by Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak, 52–69. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.” In American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. Accessed July 26, 2020. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama /redlining/#loc=5/39.88/-94.58. McDaniel, Clyde O., Jr. “Housing Segregation of Blacks in the South.” In Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Elizabeth D. Huttman, Wim Blauw, and Juliet Saltman, 272–84. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. McGreevy, John. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the TwentiethCentury Urban North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mohl, Raymond A. “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities.” Journal of Urban History 30.5 (2004): 674–706.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.

Mussi, Danilo. Carisolo: Storia e Monumenti. Trento, Italy: Antolini, 2010.

Standing Rock Syllabus. Accessed June 9, 2020. https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress. com/standingrocksyllabus/.

Nagle, Rebecca. This Land (podcast). 8 episodes. 2019. https://crooked.com /podcast-series/this-land/. Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nevin, David, and Robert E. Bills. The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South. Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Nichols, David A. Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Poché, Justin D. “Religion, Race, and Rights in Catholic Louisiana, 1938–1970.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2007. Ritterhouse, Jennifer. Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Taylor, Dorceta. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Thompson, Mark. The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Vandal, Gilles. “The Policy of Violence in Caddo Parish, 1865–1884.” Louisiana History 32.2 (1991): 159–82. Warrior, Robert Allen, and Paul Chaat Smith. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387–409.

Roediger, David R. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. “Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt: Right-to-Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943–1958.” Pacific Historical Review 78.1 (2009): 81–118.

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