Abstract
Reviewed by: William Boelhower, Robert Thomas, and Rita Wetta Adams, Louisiana State University, USA
Mario Mignone’s highly enjoyable and instructive autobiography The Story of My People engages with the ‘Myth of the American Dream’, a myth’s staying power for the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Although it is very much an ‘American’ story, Mignone’s narrative becomes so by recounting the vicissitudes of his southern Italian family’s fight to ‘make it’ in the dynamic but tough world of urban New York. After a wrenching moment of departure, his story begins to unfold during the early 1960s in the Bronx. In a rich sequence of scenes dealing with cultural, linguistic, and economic challenges, the autobiography charts the steady rise of the Mignone family, which came to the United States from a small, centuries-old farm set on a hill top called Gran Potenza, a few miles outside the city of Benevento, Italy.
By anyone’s yardstick, the cultural leap would seem daunting: from a poor agrarian world with none of the amenities of modern life to the jostling arena of America’s premier metropolis. But there are still other drawbacks which make the autobiography rich in incident. The family of eight must leave without their father, who has been blacklisted by mistake as a Socialist, and only two of the seven children are old enough to work. Moreover, neither Mario nor Matilde – 20- and 18-years old, respectively – speaks English. And yet, by the end of the first four years, the family was able to buy its own home and a car and build up a bank account. The Story of My People recounts the successful drama of ‘how we did it.’ The secret lies in understanding the central concept of ‘my people’ or, if you will, the power of the Mignone family to work in concert, just as they had always done on their farm. The discipline and drive and commitment were already in place when they landed in New York. Having spelled out the crucial theme of values, the narrator is quick to add that a large extended family which had emigrated to the United States earlier was now waiting to embrace them and help them get on their feet without having to experience too much cultural shock. Almost from the outset, the autobiography introduces the reader to what will become a resourceful multigenerational story, with its cultural continuities.
If the author’s autobiography recounts a success story, it is only because of the family’s fierce determination and unquestioned set of values, which all of its members share. Even the younger boys pick up part-time jobs after school, stocking shelves in a grocery store and delivering newspapers. Busy getting by, the family never considered itself poor: ‘No house, no car, no money in the bank and we never felt that we were destitute.’ In the narrator’s words, poverty is also ‘a state of mind’ that his family would not acknowledge. As for Mario, ‘Riveted to the machine and working with all my energy, I was satisfied with what I was doing, but I was determined that it was not going to be my life’s work.’ Indeed, here is where a second door suddenly opens to him. One Friday evening, Mario’s cousin, Gianni, introduces him to another world: the Italian Club at City College, New York, where other first- and second-generation Italian American youths meet and share their common social condition and desire to get an education. Here, finally, the American Dream will add up to more than just mind-numbing work. As the narrator notes, it was a golden moment in the history of Italian American progress in New York City, a moment when the children of immigrants sought entrance into the professional classes.
Already in chapter three, which provides a synoptic account of the cultural history of the 1960s in America, the reader discovers that the narrator of The Story of My People will avail himself of a variety of roles that the genre of life-writing conventionally allows. A notoriously composite text-type, autobiography is often as much essay and philosophical reflection as it is story, and here arise its specific challenges. Mignone’s narrator, too, is part storyteller and part social commentator. He readily passes from the order of events to that of ideas. When, for example, he recounts incidents dealing with young Mario’s growing contacts with New York City at large, the narrator remains covert and the narrative rolls on in the past tense from event to event, as if we were reading a novel. At this narrative level, we can only wish that the author had added another 15 chapters. There are many moving moments in The Story of My People to savor as the children of this immigrant family move up and outward in pursuit of an American education. At one point, the family must come to terms with Domenico’s decision to study at Cornell University, which means living away from home for the first time. When his parents and Mario accompany Domenico on the long drive to Ithaca, there is a heavy silence in the car for much of the way. Finally, considering the long drive back to the Bronx, they rather unceremoniously drop him off outside the dormitory with all his belongings in two plastic bags, while all around him the parents of other students are helping to unload televisions, suitcases, radios, and other furniture. Reflecting on this scene years later, when he brings his own daughter to college for the first time, the narrator confesses, ‘When we took that trip we just did not understand that aspect of collegiate culture.’ The pathos of that earlier moment involuntarily comes back to him as he notes how times have changed.
Mignone’s autobiography is full of such reflections as his narrator often finds occasion to contrast his own early struggles to get ahead with those of his American peers or those of his children and grandchildren. Mario the narrator is now in full view, and the range of his thoughts and convictions takes the form of cultural commentary, comparative evaluation, testimony, confession, and even judgment. Based on his experience of the trials and triumphs of immigration, these discursive moments have a dramatic life of their own and often follow upon a particularly memorable event or situation in one of the young tyro’s encounters with American life. Thus, we are served his thoughts on such crucial issues as poverty, work, family values, learning a second language, the role of labor unions, immigration, ethnicity, American television, the meaning of democracy, the notion of human capital, and the current viability of the American Dream. As these instances appear, the pace of the narrative suddenly shifts and the reader is challenged to reflect more broadly on the lessons the narrator’s experience has taught him. For example, at one point we are presented with this elementary meditation: ‘In emigrating, which constitutes a second birth, one acquires a second life and will live with two lives, the second having a dimension determined by the age of the rebirth. My second life started at twenty, when I was already mature and with a great deal of experience.’ The pace of the autobiography is dictated by the alternation of scene and comment, making it both a compelling story and a sophisticated meditation on the embattled theme of family.
The closing chapters of the autobiography deal movingly with Mignone’s return with his wife and three small children to the hill-top farm on the Gran Potenza in 1978, only to discover that nothing is the same. As he walks alone through the now abandoned farmhouse in the dimming, late afternoon light, going from room to empty room, he suddenly realizes that you can’t go home again: ‘I was seeing ghosts. There were no connecting threads.’ But the autobiography is not driven only by the voice of a narrative ‘I,’ for it is indeed ‘my people’ that Mignone ambitiously sets out to recount. And to do so, he regularly uses the inclusive pronoun ‘we,’ the viewpoint of a collective subject. Ultimately, it is this ‘we’ that is charged to tell the spacious story of his nuclear and extended family, and at times even that of his generation of Italian youths who struggled together to make it at City College and then at Rutgers University where Mario completed his PhD.
Finally, there is an even deeper, more popular ‘we’ that functions as a foundational level in the autobiography, fusing the two orders of story and idea together into a common sediment. I am speaking of the astute sprinkling of a good 20 proverbs – in the dialect of Benevento, Italian, and English – that are scattered indelibly throughout the narrative and exemplify the folk wisdom that these southern immigrants brought with them. Several of these proverbs are from his father, who is finally allowed to emigrate to America equipped with his age-old, southern Italian wisdom. I presume that it is this kind of collective common sense that forms the cultural humus of the author, who has remarked that he came to the United States already mature and armed with a lot of experience. This important autobiography more than proves him right.