Sign in | Log in

On Visiting My Grandmother’s Grave on the Way to Trader Joe’s

On Visiting My Grandmother’s Grave on the Way to Trader Joe’s

Joseph Sciorra (January 8, 2008)
Joseph Sciorra
St. John’s Cemetery, December 31, 2007

Musings on memory and stories on New Year's Eve.

Tools

  • Email
  • Print

I stopped by my grandmother’s grave on New Year’s Eve on the way to Trader Joe’s. I’ve been meaning to do so ever since New York City’s second franchise opened in Queens at the end of October. I mean, it’s right on my way, a mere 6.8 miles/13 minutes from my apartment, according to expedia.com. It’s ok to say that I went to the cemetery just to have a story to write

on this blog? 

 
I came. I reflected. I photographed.
 
I mean, it’s not the first time I’ve been there. I discovered that my maternal grandmother was buried in St. John’s Cemetery in 1990 when I told my parents I was documenting carver Michael Colonna, who had a number of funerary statues and tombstones there. Sometime between then and now, I stopped to visit for the first time. 
 
I remembered it was a simple, flat grave marker but I was taken aback last week by its paltriness: no first name and no birth/death dates. For years, we’ve been hearing about an on-going disagreement (I’m being discreet) between my mother and her two remaining siblings about those quintessentially Italian, twinned preoccupations of filial responsibility and money. The bottom line is they can’t overcome their habitual skirmishing and reconcile so as to put up a decent headstone for the poor women’s grave.
 
So, what I do I know about my grandmother? 
 
First name: Carmela. 
 
It’s easier for me to list what I don’t know:
 
  • The year she was born.
  • Her maiden name.
  • The year she died. (I know she died after her last child, my aunt Ellen, was born, who came right after my mom, who was born in 1927, so, I’d guessestimate 1932? Boh.)
  • Cause of death.
  • Why St. John’s Cemetery.
 
Even my maternal grandfather’s surname has been a big mystery:
 
  • My grandmother’s maker reads: ANNIBALLA.
  • My mother’s birth certificate reads: ANIBALLA (AH! My grandmother’s maiden name was PALMACCIO. That rings a bell.).
  • My parents’ marriage certificate lists my mother’s maiden name as: ANNIBELLA.
  • My birth certificate lists my mother’s maiden name as: ANNIBALLE.
 
(How I got around the lawyer at the Italian consulate when I applied for Italian citizenship is another story.)
 
The informational lacuna points to the various trajectories family memory takes and the way stories link people across time, or don’t. 
 
This is all retrievable information. 
 
I’m the product of post-World War II immigration (it’s much more complicated than that but suffice it to say I was the first to be born and raised in the States): my parents speak Italian; we have close relatives in Italy who we visit and communicate with. This is not some mythic nonna lost in the hazy, distant past, a tale of ethnic memory lost Bill Tonelli documented so brilliantly in his now unfortunately out-of-print 1994 account The Amazing Story of the Tonelli Family in America. 
 
Memories are short lived and tenuous as Kym Ragusa so eloquently describes in her own memoir The Skin Between Us. Ragusa’s descriptions of gleaning autobiographical information from the scant collection of family photos points to the way imagination and retelling are integral to family memory.
 
My mother didn’t regale us children with stories of her mother because she was too young to know her before she died. What she did tell us kids was that my widowed grandfather, living in Brooklyn with five kids, decided to return to Maranola (frazione di Formia, provincia di Latina, nella regione di Lazio) to get a new wife, bringing her to New York to live. The woman – name unknown – was, according to all my mother’s accounts, in keeping with the classic European fairy tale stepmother, who, ever resentful, beat and starved her new charges. I knew this woman only by the epithet “La strega.” (In fact, when my sister visited Maranola as an adult, inquiring about our step-grandmother by name, people in town replied, “Ah! Ma Lei sta cercando la strega!”). According to my mother, her stepmother decided she couldn’t deal with the new world, and demanded to return to the medieval hamlet of Maranola, just in time for Nazi occupation, American bombing raids, and raping French Moroccan soldiers. 
 
As individual and family memory attenuates, collecting the “data” of historical records is an option in retrieving a sense of one’s past. A quick search on line tells me that my grandmother was listed – as Carmela ANNIBALLI– in the 1930 census. Yet piecing together family history, especially of a people who were officially deemed unimportant, leads to documents that chronicled a certain kind of history, i.e., institutional information gathered to monitor and control people’s behaviors and movements. Such retrieval is fraught with its own set of problems as journalist Frank Viviano discovered in his hauntingly moving Blood Washes Blood, his account of locating his great-grandfather’s murder in Risorgimento Sicily.
 
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs wrote that individual reminisces are collectively grounded, constituted, and reproduced in “social frameworks of memory.” An individual’s memory is situated in the social world in which she operates, be that the family or a larger, expanding social network. 
 
“We can understand each memory as it occurs in individual thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group. We cannot properly understand their relative strength and the ways in which they combine within individual thought unless we connect the individual to the various groups of which he is simultaneously a member” (On Collective Memory). 
 
It is in the recounting of narratives to others – stories remembered, stories collected and archived, stories imagined and invented – that we reconstitute the past and, ultimately, our selves. It was stories I began searching for in a simple cemetery plot in Queens, somewhere between the cobbled-stone streets of Maranola and the organic produce aisles of Trader Joe’s. Anno nuovo, vita nuova.

TAGS

memory history stories

DISCLAIMER: Posts published in i-Italy are intended to stimulate a debate in the Italian and Italian-American Community and sometimes deal with controversial issues. The Editors are not responsible for, nor necessarily in agreement with the views presented by individual contributors.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - RIPRODUZIONE VIETATA.
This work may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission.
Questo lavoro non può essere riprodotto, in tutto o in parte, senza permesso scritto.
Add a comment