The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

One of the interesting sights of Catania, Sicily, as of nearly every other city I visited in Europe, is the market-place. I confess that I have a fondness for visiting markets. I like to wander through the stalls, with their quantities of fruit, vegetables, meat and bread, all the common, wholesome and necessary things of life, piled and ranged in bountiful profusion.

I like to watch the crowds of people coming and going, buying and selling, dickering and chaffering. A market, particularly an old-fashioned market, such as one may see almost anywhere in Europe, in which the people from the town and the people from the country, producer and consumer, meet and bargain with each other, seems a much more wholesome and human place than, for example, a factory. Besides that, any one who goes abroad to see people rather than to see things will, I believe, find the markets of Europe more interesting and more instructive than the museums.

During my journey across Europe I visited the markets in nearly every large city in which I stopped. I saw something of the curious Sunday markets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, London, with their long lines of shouting hucksters and their crowds of hungry shoppers, and the Jewish market in the Ghetto of Cracow, Poland, where pale-faced rabbis were slaughtering, according to the strict ritual of the Jewish law, droves of squawking geese. Among others, I visited the Monday market in Catania, which differs from the markets I had seen elsewhere in the multitudes of articles of household manufacture offered for sale, and in the general holiday character of the proceedings.

It was like a country fair in one of our Southern cities, only cruder and quainter. For example, instead of the familiar shooting gallery, with painted targets, one enterprising man had set up a dozen painted sticks on a rough box, and offered to the public, for something less than a cent, the opportunity to shoot at them with an ancient cross-bow, such as I did not imagine existed outside of museums. Then there were all sorts of curious and primitive games of chance. Among other devices for entertaining and mystifying the people I noticed a young woman seated in a chair, blindfolded. A crowd surrounded her while she named various objects belonging to the crowd, which her companion, a man, held in his hands. At the same time she told the colour of the hair and eyes, and reeled off a prophecy in regard to the future of the different persons to whom the article belonged.

More interesting still were the public story-tellers, who seemed to take the place, to a certain extent, of the daily newspaper among the masses of the people, so many of whom can neither read nor write.

The story-tellers stood upon little platforms, which they carried about with them like portable pulpits, in order that they might be plainly visible to the crowd. Each carried a large banner on which were painted a series of pictures representing the scenes in the stories which they told.

These stories, together with the pictures which illustrated them, had apparently been composed by the men who told them, for they all touched upon contemporary events. In fact, most of them referred in some way to America. Like those songbirds that have only one constantly repeated note, each story-teller had but one story, which he told over and over again, in the same tones, with the same attitudes, and same little dramatic surprises.

Although I was not able to understand what was said, it was not difficult to follow the narrative from the pictures. One story told the fortunes of a young girl who had been lured away to America. Perhaps she was one of those "white slaves" to which I noticed a good many references in Italy, and in other of the emigrant countries. At any rate, she was imprisoned in a very dark and dismal place in some part of New York which I was not able to locate from the picture. Then her brother, or perhaps it was her lover, whom she had left behind in Sicily, saw a vision. It was a vision of St. George and the dragon, and after seeing this vision he rose up and went to America and rescued her. The touching thing about it all, the thing that showed how realistic this whole tale was to the crowd that stood and listened to it in rapt attention, was that when the story reached the point where the picture of St. George and the dragon is referred to, the men simultaneously raised their hats. At the same time the speaker assumed a more solemn tone, and the crowd listened with a reverential awe while he went on to relate the miracle by which the young woman had been saved.

The sight of this crowd of people, standing bareheaded in an open square, listening reverentially to the story of a street fakir, struck me, like so much else that I saw of the life of the common people in Catania and elsewhere in Sicily, as strangely touching and pathetic. It reminded me of all that I had read and heard of the superstitions of the common people of the country and gave me as insight, such as I had not had before, into the way in which the masses of the people feel toward the Catholic Church, with all its religious ceremonies and symbols. It led me to suspect, also, that much in the religious life of the Sicilian people which looks, perhaps, to those who have had a different training, like superstition, is in fact merely the natural expression of the reverence and piety of a simple-minded and, perhaps, an ignorant people.