Jim Correale
I sometimes watch the PBS show Finding Your Roots, where Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents guests information about their ancestry. With researchers combing through dusty records and geneticists employing the latest in DNA technology, the guests – generally well-known folks like actors, athletes, and writers – find out previously unknown stories about people in their family tree.
In most episodes there are moments when the guests are overcome with emotion. They are choked up, they shake their heads, and sometimes they are at a loss for words. Occasionally a guest will wipe tears from his or her eyes. It’s understandable, whether in response to the horrors experienced by an ancestor in a concentration camp or as a slave, or to the courage exhibited in battle or in the day-to-day struggle to lead a decent and meaningful life.
What I’m not as clear about is why, during almost every episode, my eyes get misty.
I don’t personally know any of the people on the show. Their relatives are not my relatives. Their family history doesn’t, as far as I know, cross paths with mine. What is it that triggers my emotions?
My own limited investigation into my roots traces paths back to various locations in southern Italy. I’ve been lucky enough to visit two towns that are most prevalent in the lives of my forebearers – Montemiletto, in the mountains of the province of Avellino, and Mineo, in the southeast of the island of Sicily. I don’t have any information about the lives of those people, but it seems most likely that, as far back as I can imagine, they all worked sunrise to sundown, in fields and later, maybe, factories, toiling long hours despite sore backs and blistered fingers.
When, in the early 20th century, my ancestors crossed the Atlantic, packed tightly in steerage with others who dreamed of a better life in America, they were not sure they’d ever see their parents or their homeland again. They arrived willing to take on any job they could get, knowing that years of hard work and low pay would be their future, but believing that one day they’d be able to buy a modest house and that their children would attain heights they could only dream of.
This continued right up through my parents – my mother was a fish packer before I was born, and my father worked in construction until a staging collapse at Logan Airport nearly killed him. The courage, strength, and resolve of those who came before me is something I think about all the time.
I, on the other hand, have earned my living teaching and writing. I am the beneficiary of all of the backbreaking labor that undoubtedly filled my family tree. Their sweat and their sacrifices have allowed me to live a much less physically taxing life, and it’s this recognition, I’m pretty sure, that I see on the faces of guests on Finding Your Roots that tugs at my emotions.
One hundred years after my ancestors arrived on these shores, people still come to the United States for opportunities that will lead to better lives for their children. These people possess the same courage, strength, and resolve as waves of immigrants before them, and they are willing to work just as hard. What they often find waiting for them is a labyrinthine and lethargic immigration system –now compounded by a government intent on vilifying them.
When Italians came to the US they were also denigrated, discriminated against, and scapegoated by those who didn’t know any better – or worse, those who knew better but sought to gain some political advantage. If I respond with anything but empathy and respect to others who make the difficult decision to leave the land of their birth and undertake the arduous journey to America, it would be as though I forgot everything that my ancestors sacrificed for me.
Jim Correale is a teacher and writer
living on the North Shore.
