By Celia Viggo Wexler

“The stories of Italian Americans are acts of survival,” Mary Jo Bona, “By the Breath of Their Mouths”

This is a complicated story about a complicated woman.

Because it is so complicated, let’s name the cast of characters:

Two brothers – Domenico and Francesco DeSerio, the sons of a wealthy landowner in the town of Cerignola, 100 miles north of Rome.

And three sisters – Sofia, Rose, and Marie Antoinette Zangrilli. They were the daughters of Cerignola’s mayor, born into a wealthy family having all the advantages that status brought, like servants and a large house.

By all accounts, the three girls were beautiful. Sofia’s granddaughter recalls that she was told her grandmother’s skin had been flawless. My great aunt Rose was known for her waist-length auburn hair. In the one picture I have of my grandmother, she is striking— petite with fair skin and dark eyes, in a stylish suit, and wearing an ostrich plume hat.             

 The DeSerio brothers met — and ultimately married – Sofia and Marie Antoinette Zangrilli. The two brothers and their families immigrated to Hornell, N.Y., a small city in New York’s Southern Tier. So did their sister Rose, who married another Cerignola native living in Hornell.     

It was only during the past few years, after hiring a genealogist and traveling to Cerignola, that I discovered that much of my grandmother’s story rested on a bed of lies.         

Lie one: Cerignola is not 100 miles north of Rome; it is more than 100 miles south.

Lie two: My grandmother and great aunts weren’t the daughters of Cerignola’s mayor. Their father was most likely a tenant farmer.

Lie three: They were not born into a wealthy a family who could afford servants. I saw the modest house where my grandmother was born and where her mother lived and died.    

Lie four: My grandmother had never been known in Cerignola as Marie Antoinette, the name she took in the U.S., a name that even appears in her obituary. The name she was born with was Antonietta Zangrilli, or little Antonia, in honor of the daughter the family lost in infancy the year before.

By the sheer facts of her story – a 21-year-old Italian immigrant, leaving Southern Italy in 1911, one could have assumed that my grandmother would have been one of the young Italian women who perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that same year.

But there were mitigating circumstances. The brothers Domenico and Francesco DeSerio? They likely were the sons of a wealthy landowner, but born in Basilicata, also in Southern Italy.

My grandfather ensured his fiancé had a second-class ticket when she boarded the boat in Naples, escaping the horrors of steerage and the interrogations of Ellis Island.

And in her very being, my grandmother in many ways resembled the woman she pretended to be more than the woman she was born to be.

There is no doubt my grandmother was literate in Italian and a gifted pianist before she immigrated to the U.S.    

Piano was so important to her that my grandfather, who bought and furnished a home to welcome his new bride, included a baby grand among the furnishings.

As for literacy in English, she was so confident in her reading and writing abilities in both languages that she taught Italian to American women. The ten-week course offered the ladies of Hornell the opportunity to learn to pronounce, speak and read Italian. A reporter from the Hornell Evening Times attended her class and was smitten: He called her a “most competent and delightful instructor.”                

And in the steamer trunk that I inherited, my grandmother’s possessions included both a French textbook and a sample of tatting. Such fine needlework was taught to upper class women, not the lower classes.

When I asked clinical psychologist Dr. Lorraine Mangione about this reinvention, she was pretty surprised. She said that she knew scores of Italian American women both in her work, among her friends, and as the co-author of “Daughters, Dads and the Path Through Grief –Tales from Italian America.”

“I cannot say that I’ve ever heard that before,” she told me.  

I could find only one similar example. The maternal grandmother of poet Diane di Prima seemed to have adopted some of my grandmother’s affectations. Di Prima’s grandmother also called herself Antoinette, although she left off the Marie. The Antoinette, di Prima surmises, reflected the notion that French “was still to some extent the language of the upper classes.”

Like my grandmother, Antoinette Mallozzi also had a strong bias against Southern Italians, including di Prima’s Sicilian father’s family.

And as my grandmother’s sense of class and regional difference affected me, her grandmother’s biases also affected di Prima.

In di Prima’s family, her maternal grandparents, the Mallozzis, were “smarter, thinner, more ambitious,” she writes. The di Primas were low class, “fat and loud.”

“I felt it as a moral imperative,” di Prima writes, to emulate the classier Mallozzis. As she put it: “Mallozzi or bust.”

When my mother married a Sicilian American, my grandmother called my father “common,” a comment my mother shared with me. And she gave her children the impression that their roots were in Florence. My uncle Fran was always looking for family links to the Medicis.

Influenced by my grandmother’s pretensions, my mother always felt she had married down. I wanted to be on Team DeSerio and not on my father’s Team Viggo, a bastardization of his real last name, Virga.

My father was the son of poor immigrants living in Louisiana, the second youngest of eight children. When he was a toddler, he lost his mother, a victim of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. His father farmed out the children to Baptist orphanages and relatives. My father was put on a train and sent to uncaring cousins in Rochester, New York.

He dropped out of school young. But he was bright and sensitive. He loved reading Shakespeare and was a devout Catholic. He worked hard, sometimes holding down two jobs. And he supported my desire to attend the University of Toronto.

He was a good and decent man who deserved the love I only showed him when he was an old man, after my mother died and I rethought my conduct.

I never felt at home in what I thought was my Northern Italian/Sicilian skin. I never fit in, except when it came to academic achievement. I had few friends, and there were few Italians in the posh Catholic girls’ high school I attended. I was the only Italian in my advanced placement class. And despite my demonstrated talents, I was not given any tuition help. I cleaned the school on Saturday mornings to get a discount.

There were many micro and macro-aggressions along the way. The worst – being deprived the honor of valedictorian, despite having the highest grades in my senior class. That honor went to the daughter of upper-class Irish-Americans. Years later, that daughter wrote me an email apologizing for that injustice. I basically shrugged it off in my response to her. Somehow, it seemed inappropriate to let her know how bruised that act of prejudice had made me feel.

Writing was my way out. Journalism was my way in. I could interview anyone as a professional. The sense of inferiority disappeared as long as I was not playing myself.

If there is a such a thing as generational trauma, I endured it.

And when I learned that the Northern Italian veneer and accompanying snobbery were false, my first emotion was white-hot anger.

Why? Why had my grandmother constructed this mythology that so dazzled my mother that she always longed for a far different life with a far different partner, her restless discontent hovering like a pall over our family?

Why did my grandmother never confide her true origin story to her loved ones?

Mangione helped me see my grandmother’s conduct from a different perspective. Knowing the prejudice against Southern Italians, and wanting to shield her future children, my grandmother essentially “passed” as a resident of the only part of Italy the U.S. considered civilized.

That deception made a lot of sense.  

Prejudice against Southern Italians was common in Northern Italy, and became endemic in this country as millions of Southern Italians “invaded” the U.S. in the early 20^th century.

Indeed the same year my grandmother arrived here, Congress released the findings of the Dillingham Commission, a joint investigation by the U.S. House and Senate, to understand who these new immigrants were.

When it came to Italians, great distinctions were made between the North and the South. Infused by the racism of that era, the Commission reported that Northern Italians spoke the “Florentine dialect as embalmed in literature by Dante, Petrarch and Boccacio in the fourteenth century.” The Northern Italian “race” was “broad-headed and tallish,” while Southern Italians were dark and short.

I always wondered why my grandparents, with their talent and ambition, just didn’t move to Tuscany or Milan. But as the Dillingham report makes clear, Northern Italians were also prejudiced against Italians from the South. The report cites damning conclusions from an Italian sociologist, who described Northern Italians as “cool, deliberate, patient, practical” and able to do quite well in the “political and social organization of modern civilization.”

And Southern Italians? You can almost see that Italian sociologist shrug as he dismisses them as “excitable, impulsive …impracticable” a race of individualists with “little adaptability to highly organized society.”

The truth may very well have been that my grandfather’s family somehow rescued my grandmother and her two sisters from poverty, and educated them. The DeSerio family was relatively small – three sons and no daughters. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine the DeSerio parents expected their sons to marry women who were not of their class.

But somewhere in my grandmother’s past is a benefactor, as potent as a fairy godmother.

But my grandmother’s story couldn’t have been simply a Cinderella story of a girl whisked out of poverty. Such a story would not have erased the taint of the South that would still attach to her. No, the reinvention had to be complete. And clearly her spouse must have been complicit. They both claimed Cerignola as their birthplace, which made it easier to explain how they met.

“I think a lot of people transformed themselves by coming here,” Mangione remarked. “You made up a new story. … That to me is kind of a beautiful thing.”

My grandfather did likely come from money, and was trained as an engineer, but to better assimilate, he even changed his birthdate. Records in Italy show he was born on April 8. But in this country, he took the date March 17. “His Irish friends got such a kick out of that,’ my mother would recall.

His engineering education got him a job as a machinist with the Erie Railroad, and he got involved in city politics. He was deputy naturalization clerk, and ultimately also received the authority to issue passports.

My grandmother and grandfather were a power couple in Hornell. Lies made it happen. And that aura paved the way for their children. When my mother won second prize in the Lincoln Essay contest, the headline in the Hornell Evening Tribune proclaimed, “Miss Mary DeSerio Shows Much Ability.”

My uncle Don was a violin prodigy, who traveled the Southern Tier accompanied on the piano by my grandmother. The children excelled at Hornell High School, my uncle Don graduating at age 16.

Granted, these fabrications may have helped the DeSerio children succeed when they were young. But why keep up the charade when the U.S. had gotten somewhat more tolerant, and they were adults?

By then, Dr. Mangione surmises, her story was so much a part of who she was, that it became her truth. The discrepancies wouldn’t have been important to her, especially in light of my grandfather’s sudden death in 1932. She found herself a widow, trying to raise six children. Her “new identity,” Mangione surmises, likely “got her through her husband’s early death.”

It wasn’t a matter of deceiving her children about her origin story, Mangione speculated.  “She was living out this other story.”

One part of that story was an account my grandmother told her children of attending a Catholic boarding school in a mountainous region in Italy. Another mystery, since finishing schools for Italian young women were only the privilege of the rich.

A violent storm arose suddenly when the students were saying the rosary outdoors. Lightning struck one of the sister’s rosary beads, knocking her off her chair.

I don’t know which parts of that story are true. I do know that for her entire life, my grandmother was deathly afraid of storms.

As World War II came to a close, most of the DeSerio family, their spouses and children, had settled in Rochester, New York. My mother was pregnant with my brother and unable to care for my grandmother, who walked with a cane. On April 5, 1952 she had been placed in a private nursing home on a temporary basis, just until the baby was born. That day, Rochester reported a record amount of rainfall and strong winds.

I can imagine her alone and apart from her family, terrified as the storm grew in fury.  Whatever the cause, my grandmother had a massive stroke. She died the next day.