Mothers and Daughters (Part 1)
Everyone has a long ancestral history worthy of a novel – buried and forgotten scandals, battles, and betrayals. Stories are passed down from generation to generation, mutating along the way to bury shameful secrets or embellish glories. Where your own story fits in along the generational journey can often be hard to fathom, but there is no doubt, whether you like it or not, that your formation has been indirectly affected by both the truths and the mutations.
My maternal great grandmother’s story is not very different to that of many women of her generation. Born in 1880 to a simple family in the mountaintop town of Isernia, Italy, Angelina’s life was one of poverty and hardship, not knowing from one day to the next where her next meal would come from and how long it would be before she got it.
It was a time when children were sent to work in order to contribute to the family’s survival rather than to school to guarantee their future. Young girls were married off to increase the family’s access to earnings while simultaneously transferring responsibility for their subsistence to someone other. They lived in the kind of conditions that drove the inhabitants of a town away from their homes to bigger and increasingly farther away places. It took desperation rather than optimism to make such a move, but staying required just as much fortitude.
Angelina stayed.
In the handing down of my great grandmother’s story, there are many gaps and unknowns. Today only my mother and her cousin are the keepers of her history and their versions differ – the reasons for these differences, themselves, shrouded in scandal.
My mother believes her grandmother was married at the age of 14. So far, not so abnormal given that it was common back then for girls to marry young. But shortly after she was married, according to my mum, her husband Cosimo left for America in search of work and a better life for his family, leaving Angelina alone in Isernia. As my mother tells the story, Cosimo was gone for over 30 years before returning to collect his wife – and, as it turns out, the two children she managed to have in his absence; my grandmother and her brother.
My mum’s cousin, however, maintains that Angelina was in her late 20s perhaps early 30s when she married Cosimo and had her two kids with him before he left for America. He initially sent some financial support but this appears to have dwindled after time. In her version, Cosimo would be away for 15 years before returning for his family.
Which of these two stories is true, we may never find out. Both are clear on one thing, however, and that is that Angelina was left alone to fend for herself, and later her two children, in poverty. How she survived and raised her children is no doubt a story filled with as much determination as desperation. To what lengths will a woman go to survive? What kind of person does she need to become to defend what is hers and what effect does this have on the lives of her children?
It was Angelina herself who told my mother that she was married at 14. The rumour that her children were not Cosimo’s came to my mother from a trusted family member. Did Cosimo really abandon Angelina for over 30 years? Were her children the product of a consensual (if not loving) relationship, or the seeds of an act of survival? Or worse, abuse? Who else knew the truth? And was the knowledge of their inception a burden her children had to carry with them all their lives, one that would have an impact on their own children?
So many questions!
Angelina lived to be 86 years old. When Cosimo returned from America, she flatly refused to go back with him, running him out of town instead. She was, by all reports, not a woman to be messed with, capable of instilling fear even in the local gypsies; I suspect her husband was not prepared for the viper she had been forced to become. Whatever she did to survive, and however she did it, it worked. We may never discover what really happened but you’ve got to admire her for her resilience. The trickle down effects of her story, though, are something else.
…to be continued…