Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family - Softcover

Tintori, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312334648 ISBN 13: 9780312334642

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008

Synopsis

"Nearly every family has a skeleton in its closet, an ancestor who "sins" against custom and tradition and pays a double price. Karen Tintori refused to allow the truth to remain forgotten. This is a book for anyone who shares the conviction that all history, in the end, is family history."--Frank Viviano, author of Blood Washes Blood and Dispatches from the Pacific Century

"Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine

"Unto the Daughters reads like a nonfiction version of the film Godfather II--if it had been told from the point of view of a female Corleone."--Eleni N. Gage, author of North of Ithaka

Karen Tintori thought she knew her family tree. Her grandmother Josie had immigrated from Sicily with her parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Detroit, and with Josie's eight siblings, worked to create a home for themselves away from the poverty and servitude of the old country. Their descendants were proud Italian-Americans.

But Josie had a sister that nobody spoke of. Her name was Frances, and at age sixteen, she fell in love with a young barber. Her father wanted her to marry an older don in the neighborhood mafia--a marriage that would give his sons a leg up in the mob. But Frances eloped with her barber. And when she returned a married woman, her father and brothers killed her for it. Her family then erased her from its collective memory. Even 80 years and two generations later, Frances and her death were not spoken of, her name was erased from the family genealogy, her pictures burned, and her memory suppressed.

Unto the Daughters is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps the many layers of family, honor, memory, and fear to find an honor killing in turn of the century Detroit.

"Many books are called ‘page-turners' by reviewers, but this one will truly have you glued to the turning pages for hours. It's a must read for anyone researching their Italian ancestry."-- Comunes of Italy Magazine
KAREN TINTORI is a writer and journalist who lives in Michigan with her family. Karen's books include Trapped, a 2002 Chicago Tribune favorite book, and The Book of Names (co-author), among others. Visit her website at: www.karentintori.com

About this title

About the Author

KAREN TINTORI is a writer and journalist who lives in Michigan with her family. Karen's books include Trapped, a 2002 Chicago Tribune favorite book, and The Book of Names (co-author), among others.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Unto the Daughters
Chapter OneIf not for her father's passport, defaced but not destroyed, Francesca never would have surfaced. She would have remained a woman lost to history, her story swallowed in the depths of the Detroit River off Belle Isle.The passport was issued in 1914, during the reign of King Vittorio Emanuele III, just fifty-three years after the patriot soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi led the resurgence that unified a patchwork of city-states into a country called Italy. My family left Italy for America with a single passport. Issued to my great-grandfather, it included my great-grandmother and their children, listed in birth order on its inside pages. It was a time when women and children were considered a man's property, when he expected his bride to be a virgin, and their blood-stained wedding sheets were hung in the living room to prove it. It was a time when, married or single, many Italian men openly eschewed monogamy, but a family's honor was bound up in the chastity of its women.I saw the passport only once, in 1993, but the secret ancestor it had concealed for nearly eighty years instantly became my obsession. I'd had no inkling that my great-aunt Frances had ever existed. She was a blank.In many families there are secrets. In Italian families, generations go to their graves without divulging those secrets. My mother had never breathed a word about her mother's ill-fated sister Frances, not even to my father. Despite their forty years togetheras soul mates, he died without ever hearing a whisper of the scandal.Obsessed, yet fearful of family reprisals for searching out their secret, I fought to piece together my great-aunt's story. A guarded snippet was divulged here, a reluctant dribble there, then basta! no more. At times my mother's and her sisters' and their cousins' resistance seemed impregnable, made worse because I needed them as go-betweens to Frances's siblings--their parents. I could no more force myself to press my grandmother on a subject that caused her so much pain than I could force myself to obey my mother and "let it go!" In the face of my own escalating horror, I remained fixated on ferreting out the truth about Frances's life.She haunted me.Detroit, 1980s and 1990sMy search for my family's history had begun seven years before I learned of Frances. In the late eighties, on my third trip to Israel, I discovered that Tintori was also a Jewish name. Abraham ben Chayyim dei Tintori, or Abraham the Dyer, was an early printer of Hebrew incunabula who worked in Bologna.My grandpa Tintori had come to Illinois from the mountains near Bologna to mine coal, and I began searching for twigs on his family tree to learn about the grandfather I'd never known. While I was researching the Tintoris, I decided I should begin to collect information about the Mazzarino side of the family as well. One of the first dictums of genealogy is to sit down with the oldest living relative and ask as many questions about the family as you can, as many times and in as many different ways as possible. My oldest, closest relatives on the Tintori side were long dead when I began their genealogy. I decided I'd better grab Gramma Mazzarino while I could.One week while she was staying with my mother, I asked my grandmother if I could ask her some questions about her life as alittle girl in Sicily, about her parents and grandparents and their history. I already knew a lot, about the voyage to America, the story of her engagement rings, and how the Mafia stepped in to save her wedding. I knew her sisters and brothers and their children well enough, had visited at their homes and spent holidays, weddings, and funerals with them."I already told your cousin Claire," she told me. "Go ask her. She's got it all on the tape."Claire had no idea what I was talking about. She'd interviewed Grandpa Mazzarino for a short biography when she was in sixth grade, but she'd never asked Gramma about her girlhood in Sicily, let alone taped it.I went back to Gramma, who remained adamant. "Claire, she's got it on the tape. Go ask her."Thinking perhaps my grandmother had gotten my cousins confused, I asked around. No one had Gramma on tape, audio or video. The tape didn't exist."You know, all Gramma and Grandpa's papers are in Aunt Grace's basement," my mother told me, when I mentioned that I would have to write letters to the various comunes in Italy and pay for the family birth certificates and marriage licenses. "Before you go spending money, ask your Aunt Grace what Gramma's got there."I asked. Grace told me. The papers were somewhere in the basement, she didn't know where exactly, but there were naturalization papers, birth certificates, that sort of thing. I asked her to search for them, if she didn't mind. I wanted to make photocopies of them for my genealogy research.Years went by as I continued researching the Tintoris and my grandfather's survival of the Cherry Mine disaster, and I kept asking Aunt Grace about that box of papers in her basement. Sometimes she'd make a date with me for an afternoon the next time Gramma would be staying with her for a week. Each time, she came up with another excuse for breaking the date.My mother went through widowhood, a courtship, an engagement,and a remarriage, and still, no matter how many times I asked, I was no further ahead in my Mazzarino research.Suddenly, when my grandmother was eighty-nine, she relented. She would be staying with my mother and her husband during Christmas week. She would answer my questions about her life in Sicily while I videotaped it.On Christmas Eve, 1990, I set up my tripod in my mother's kitchen and began to ask about my grandmother's life in Sicily. Two hours later, when I shut down so they could get ready for a Christmas Eve party, my reluctant interviewee had become a ham. Gramma asked when we could do it again.We never did. She was only at my mother's every third week, I was caught up in family, career, and volunteerism--and I thought I had all the information I needed.It would take me three more years to get my hands on those papers of hers, though, and a decade longer to unravel the truth about Aunt Frances.Detroit, 1993It is a Tuesday morning in the summer of 1993, and finally I am in the same room with the Mazzarino family documents--my youngest aunt's kitchen. I almost want to pinch myself, for, even as I was parking, I'd had visions of Grace apologizing as she told me she hadn't found them after all."Here's my grandfather's passport," she says, lifting a worn, faded booklet from the musty box she'd set on her kitchen table. I've just rounded that table to kiss my grandmother, who sits running her fingers up and down the handle of her coffee cup.Aunt Grace sidles alongside me, opening the passport to an inside page, and I glance over at a handwritten list of familiar names--my great-grandmother's, Gramma's, and her siblings'. Jabbing a pearl-polished fingernail at the one entry that had beenobliterated from the long list with a pen, Grace breaks the silence."That's the one they got rid of. Did your mother ever tell you?"My head jerks back reflexively, as if she'd thrown water in my face, and for a moment I cannot move, cannot speak, my eyes wide with shock."Never mind," Grace says, snapping the booklet closed with the realization that my mother had never told me anything."Who's she going to show? Who's she going to tell? What's she going to do with these?" Gramma Mazzarino begins to babble in Sicilian, her voice rising in panic with every question. Stupefied, I look down on the back of my grandmother's head, now glowing pink through her fluff of white hair. Her ears glow bright red with agitation."Gracie!" she shouts. "What's she going to do with these? People can get hurt!"I close my ears to my grandmother's sputtering, relieved that our eyes cannot meet, because if they do, I know that I will never again have the chance to get my hands on these papers that have taken years of requests and canceled appointments to pin down. I don't know which I want more--to grab Grace and demand that she explain or to snatch the box of documents from the table and bolt for my car."Aunt Grace. What are you talking about?"She looks away. "Never mind." She is replacing the papers atop a pile jumbled inside a worn cardboard shoe box. "Your mother will tell you." I am dismissed.Grace turns to silence her own mother, who has not stopped sputtering in Sicilian."Nobody, Ma! Okay? Nobody else is going to see them. She's just going to go make copies of them for herself and then she's bringing them right back here."I am unable to wrap my head around what is going on in this kitchen. I want to stamp my foot and silence my grandmother and force my aunt to finish what she's started.Suddenly I flash on Gramma's repeated refusal to sit with my tape recorder and recount the stories of her childhood. Her insistence, time and again, that I didn't need to preserve her oral history because a tape of it already existed."Aunt Grace, you can't do this to me." I round the oval table to follow her now to the sink. "What 'one they got rid of'?"Now it is Grace's turn to be agitated. She fidgets a dishrag across the counter, swiping at imaginary crumbs. Her tone turns clipped, final."You have to ask your mother. I thought she already told you.""If she didn't tell me by now, she's not going to. Tell me!"The dilemma she's spawned is twisting all over Grace's face. Her mother is clamoring for her to drop the subject I'm pressing her to finish. I stare at her, she stares back. She throws down the dishrag."That's the one they murder...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0312334648
• ISBN 13: 9780312334642
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256