Let me begin by stating that I have always felt myself to be a stereotypical American male, born and raised in the South. It wasn’t until I began to seriously entertain my deep love of history that I learned otherwise. It was a slow, perhaps still ongoing process that has given me a lifelong appreciation for what it means to be an American. It’s also led me to constantly ponder what it means to fit in, to assimilate into a group or a culture. Should one even try under all circumstances? But I digress.
Growing up, I was the child of a two-working-parent household. This meant when I was younger, I spent all summer day at my maternal grandparent’s house on the other side of our small town. My grandfather’s family ran a small, corner grocery store that, as long as I could remember, seemed to be from another era. My maternal grandfather is who I would say I gained my appreciation for all sorts of historical knowledge. He loved to tell me, and anyone else who would listen, about the great events of 20th-century history, most of which he survived. It had never occurred to me as a young child that the fact that this part of my family was Italian was unusual-likewise their devout Catholicism in our small southern town. Fortunately, he loved to share the stories about how our family came to live in Natchitoches, Louisiana.
It wasn’t until my teen years that I began to wonder how an Italian family ended up in such a place in the early 1900s. I began to fill in the gaps as the years progressed. A watershed moment was when I took a local history class during graduate school. My professor, a New Jersey native, was very interested in how minority groups integrated into the culture of the American South. She was fascinated when I told her about my Italian roots and urged me to research it further. As a result, I made very ham-fisted attempts to extract meaningful oral interviews from my grandfather, one of his surviving sisters, and other relatives of their generation. The websites of the early World Wide Web era of the late 1990s helped to fill in the gaps and provide context.
Rosario and Constance Catanese (my great-grandparents) married in Cefalu, Sicily in 1904. They decided to go and visit Constance’s brothers and sisters in Louisiana soon after. Family tradition insists this was not an attempt at immigration. Rather, this was intended to be a short-term visit. Rosario had been to America once before, serving on an Italian naval vessel that brought a papal emissary to New Orleans to negotiate on behalf of the families of four Sicilian immigrants murdered by their neighbor. Constance, being a female child, had brought a considerable dowry to the marriage. Therefore, the struggling immigrant yearning to breathe free does not appear to be a relevant comparison. So it may very well be that this family story is true.
“Ross and Connie,” as they would later be known, arrived in the United States at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. Patria that same year. They did list their ultimate destination as Natchitoches, Louisiana. With hard work and Connie’s dowry, they opened a succession of grocery and dry goods stores within their first twenty-five years in Louisiana. In their earliest days in America, Ross loaded up a horse-drawn wagon with goods for sale and drove the river road, blowing a conch shell to announce his presence to the many sharecroppers who tended the former plantation lands. Eventually, he traded his wagon for an early Chevrolet truck, making the same journey for many years before the ease of ever improving roads and the automobile made it easier for their rural customers to come into “Catanese Grocery and Dry Goods Store.” The couple opened their final neighborhood store in the 1920’s and built a modern family home next door to it. Ross would die in 1955 and Connie in 1980. Their children Anthony (my grandfather), Rose, and Gussie would continue to operate their grocery store until 1999.
The advent of such resources as Ancestry.com, with its accompanying DNA analysis, has only added to America’s fascination with genealogy and family history. Sharing family trees on the site has aided in tracking down relatives. Sharing DNA results has added many more. This modern tool has verified the fact that I share DNA traits in common with many people hailing from the northwest corner of Sicily, hailing from a region east of the City of Palermo and concentrated in the town of Cefalu. What I’ve learned provided me with a spirit of pride about my family’s past. It gave me an appreciation for what they’d gone through to survive in an alien land and taught me not to take the privileges they’d earned for me for granted.
Sources
Catanese, Anthony. Interviews by Brian Cockrell. Natchitoches, Louisiana. September- November 1999.
Catanese, Rose. Interviews by Brian Cockrell. Natchitoches, Louisiana. September- November 1999.
Dark, Sadie. Interview by Brian Cockrell. Natchitoches, Louisiana. October 1999.
Maggio, Charles. Interview by Brian Cockrell. Natchitoches, Louisiana. November 1999.
Pelligrini, Angelo M. Americans By Choice. New York: The MacMillian Co., 1956.
Pisani, Lawrence Frank. The Italian in America. New York: Exposition Press, 1957.
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