There are many labors which are shared by men, women and children, such as herding the goats, treading the grapes in the winepress, vegetable-gathering and attending to the irrigation. This latter is very important. The loads which men and women can carry on their heads are huge. I have seen a man coming in at the finish of a five-mile trot with 120 pounds of grapes on his head, and all the way he has maintained a gait very similar to that of a dog. Very early in life the children are taught to carry loads on their heads.
The morning of the second day, people began to come to us for advice and information. There were two or three old men in Gualtieri,—old beyond the ability for anything but very light labor. They wanted to send their sons to America that the boys might get a foothold and then bring them. They all asked me what was the best work for a young man to do in my country. All were farmers living in the village, who went out each day to work the little patches of ground they called farms.
Part of the Family Gathered in the Kitchen (From left to right: Ina, Tono, Giovanina, Antonio, Mrs. Squadrito, Giovanni, Jr., Nicola, Maria)—Felicia Pulejo—Concetta
These holdings were almost invariably owned by some one else, a few by well-to-do people in the village, most of them by the Duke of Avarna, who lives in Naples and never comes near Sicily, though he owns nearly all the ground around Gualtieri. The actual farmers tilled the soil, bought or preserved the seed, supplied the implements, looked after the construction and maintenance of the irrigation, harvested the crop and often marketed it, then gave the landowner’s agent, the middleman at Faro near by, half of all they produced. Of what they had left, three per cent went for direct or indirect taxes, and they gave “voluntarily” to the church one tenth. A little calculation will show one that even if a farmer have a prosperous season and be not in debt or have any misfortunes, he retains, when he has finished his contributions to the support of the non-producing classes, aristocrats, tradesmen, army, church, and middlemen, but thirty-eight per cent of what he produces by toil from before dawn till after dark. When I say that ninety-four per cent of the production in southern Italy is agricultural, and that the one important source of wealth is the cultivation of the soil, and the control of wealth the ownership of the land, it can be understood how and why the poor farmer, having heard what betterment there is in the United States will borrow money at twenty per cent for six months to get himself or a son over here to establish a foothold from which he can broaden a space of relief and liberty. Many of these boys in Gualtieri, anxious to go, desired to escape the forcible conscription every two years, which takes every other able-bodied young man, and keeps one fifteenth of the able-bodied men of the country under arms at all times. The Italian government never relinquishes its claim on its men for military duty, and no matter whether they become American citizens or not, if they have not served their term and return to Italy, they are arrested and conscripted. A notable test case of this was that of the young man from Baltimore,—Schipriano, son of an Italian general,—in which the government won.
Even though the Squadritos have raised themselves to an independent footing in Gualtieri and own a little land, the power of the landlord was demonstrated fully to me when, on the second day of our stay, Giovanni Squadrito got out from among the things he had brought back from America a nice piece of oilcloth, a treasure in Italy, and tramped off to Faro and presented it to the middleman, the agent of the Duke of Avarna, as a sort of propitiatory offering. At the agent’s office there was a considerable staff of clerks and bailiffs, which showed me what a business is this collecting of the crops and rents.
One poor old woman toiled across the hills to see my wife to implore her to take her to America. She had a daughter who had gone there as a servant last year, and in the three months previous to the old woman’s first visit to us she had had no letter or word of news. She was nearly frantic and wished to go in search of the girl. In the time we were in Gualtieri before our party started for New York, no tidings came. My wife was forced to tell her that she could never go to America, the age limit and the public-charge law would stop her at Ellis Island and send her back.
It was not unusual for a whole family from far over the hills to arrive late some afternoon to pay their respects, and before they had been seated long a certain uneasiness on the part of the women culminated in the oldest man of the party producing from inside his shirt a strip of paper, much thumbed, torn and pasted. In faded ink it bore the names and addresses of a son, a brother, father, perhaps daughter across the ocean. Though they knew my home to be New York, they were often disappointed because I could not give them news of the beloved relative in Bangor, Me.; Birmingham, Ala.; Brownsville, Tex.; in Chili, Brazil or Canada. One man had a button photograph of Francesco Zotti, who had formerly been my neighbor in New York. As it chanced I once shook hands with Zotti, and when I told his relatives this they actually cried for joy.
The people have no true conception of America, though Italy is flooded with books of views principally of New York and the Pan-American Exposition, and there is a brave effort made by the Italians in America to write home adequate descriptions of the new land. Once I was called upon to settle a most bitter and acrimonious dispute between two men as to what America was like. One, who had a brother in Wilkes-barre, Pa., thought it was all coal mines, steel mills and railroads, while the other, whose cousin worked in a New York barber shop, maintained that America was all high buildings and railroads which run over the house-tops. Each new letter caused the argument to break out afresh.
One woman, who had a husband working in a saloon in Pittsburg, was very effusive in her greeting and her conversation with us until, in answer to her question as to what kind of parrot we had, I replied: