Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora

Daguerreotype: Lace Maker

—Sandra M. Gilbert

From days spent bending over the pattern,

eyes and fingers caught in the tightening

mazes of the lace,

she has assumed the shape

of a hook, its deft ferocity,

thin glitter and abstraction.

She stares into the camera, very old,

no children now, no stewpots, never a berrying

afternoon with sun like pure hot iron

at her back, nothing but a shawl

on her shoulders now, black and thick:

and her eyes, passionate hooks,

say only the lace, the lace is left,

only the white paths, the stitches like steps

in a dance whose meaning is still unknown,

the walls of thread impossible to cross,

the tiny corners, the fields of webs and flowers,

the serious knotting and unknotting at the end.

THREADS OF WOMEN

Donna Laura

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Donna Laura, they called my grandmother

when they saw her sitting in the doorway, sewing

delicate tablecloths and linens, hours of sewing

bent over the cloth, an occupation for a lady,

Donna Laura, with her big house falling

to ruins around her head,

Donna Laura, whose husband

left for Argentina when she was twenty-four,

left her with seven children and no money

and her life in that southern Italian village

where the old ladies watched her

from their windows. She could not have

taken a breath without everyone knowing.

Donna Laura who each day sucked

on the bitter seed

of her husband’s failure

to send money and to remember

her long auburn hair,

Donna Laura who relied on the kindness

of the priest’s housekeeper

to provide food for her family.

Everyone in the village knew

my grandmother’s fine needlework

could not support seven children,

but everyone pretended not to see.

When she was ninety, Donna Laura

still lived in that mountain house.

Was her heart a bitter raisin,

her anger so deep it could have cut

a road through the mountain?

I touch the tablecloth she made,

the delicate scrollwork,

try to reach back to Donna Laura,

feel her life shaping itself into laced patterns

and scalloped edges from all those years between

her young womanhood and old age.

Only this cloth remains,

old and perfect still, turning her bitterness into art

to teach her granddaughters and great-granddaughters

how to spin sorrow into gold.

White on Black

—Louise DeSalvo

I was thirty-seven years old when I gave up knitting for a very long time. I had been knitting off and on for thirty years, since I was seven and learned how to knit from my grandmother. By the time I was thirty-seven, aside from my childhood projects of irregular scarves and unwearable mittens, I had knit a pair of argyle socks for my husband, too itchy to wear; a really ugly and poorly assembled maroon sweater for him too; a rose sweater for myself, but because I had forgotten to check the dye lot of the wool I’d bought, the front and the back were different shades; and about twenty items for my babies, all yellow and green and adorable and knitted before they were born.

But at thirty-seven, I gave up knitting for a very long time, because I thought I had better things to do, like write poems about knitting, like this one, called Casting Off, which I wrote because I had stopped knitting, but also because thirty-seven was the unraveling time for me.

Yes, thirty-seven is the unraveling time, when sweaters carefully knit while children played must be undone, when what was made before must be unmade, because the wool is needed for another use, and because, what one knows at thirty-seven is that the making of those sweaters was unnecessary, or, if not unnecessary, then an occupation undertaken to prevent the hand from slapping, or to hold the anger in, or to turn the anger into sweaters or mufflers to help keep out the cold, to convince them that they were cared for, that the garment that caressed them came from hands that cared, and so, in caring, knit them mufflers that, pulled a bit too tight reminded them that the hands that knit, knit so as not to strangle.

Yes, thirty-seven is the unraveling time, the time to knit no more, the time to be perhaps indelicate, to be indecent, even, the time to be pariah, vamp, and whore, the time to throw away the knitting needles or to use the knitting needle to pry the unwanted fetus from the womb or to poke out an eye that has raised its eyebrow once too often, mockingly. Thirty-seven is the unraveling time, the time when variegated skeins are loosened, when the cords, tied end to end, are cast off.

Most days, as I was growing into womanhood, my old Italian grandmother used to sit, silently, all day long, very close to the radiator in a corner of the dining room of our house in Ridgefield, New Jersey, her old black shawl covering her shoulders, as she crocheted white tablecloths, or knitted sweaters or afghans from the wool that she had unraveled from the old sweaters we had outgrown, outworn, or despised. During the winter, the radiator hissed and clanked, creating more noise than heat. But sitting close to the radiator in the corner of the dining room meant that my grandmother never sat in the light and that my grandmother could barely see the work that she was doing, for that corner of the dining room was forever in shadow, and the economies of our household forbade the use of artificial light during the day. I knew that my grandmother was there, always there, for she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, but crochet and knit, for here in Ridgefield, she had no friends, no acquaintances, even—so far was she from Hoboken, where she had lived for so many years, so far from a meaningful life, earning her own living as the superintendent of the tenement where we all lived, complaining with her cronies on the stoop of our building. Still, as I went about my childish life, I often forgot that she was there, in the corner near the radiator, always there.

Her old Italian grandmother used to sit very close to the radiator to keep herself warm, she used to say, all through the long northern winters, the heat of the southern Italian sun having long since abandoned her.

Her old Italian grandmother used to sit in her straight backed chair, all in black, mourning her husband of ten years, as she crocheted the white lace tablecloths that she would give the girl, her granddaughter, when she became a bride, as she reused old wool for sweaters that no one in this house wanted, sweaters that no one would wear.

It was more than seven years since her husband had died, seven years since they had taken her to this place where she didn’t want to be, and she wore black still, although the girl could remember the two of them, husband and wife, grandfather and grandmother, scowling at one another across the kitchen table, him swearing in the harsh accents of the village in Puglia where they had both come from. As the girl’s mother had said so many, many times, there was no love lost between them.

She was his second wife. His first had been much more beautiful. And there are two photographs, now crumbling, of him as bridegroom, twice decked out in the black suit that he would be buried in, twice newly shod, twice with boutonniere (the first, a single rose; the second, a sprig of lily of the valley), twice holding the pose for the photographer begrudgingly, he, so unused to finery, who had laid the rails of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad single-handedly if one were to believe his stories, who had been brought here all the way from Italy to do that, bringing with him his first wife, his girlish wife, who took in washing during pregnancy, who died, from influenza, like so many others, when their baby was but three months old.

Soon after, he worked out an arrangement with a woman from his village, looking for a situation. He needed her to care for his child; she needed him so that she could come to America. And on the boat, on the way over, she knit him a sweater from finely spun wool that she had secured by bartering a linen tablecloth her mother had embroidered for her trousseau, for she was inclined neither to finery nor extravagance, though her mother believed that this cloth, adorning her daughter’s table on Sundays and feast days, would prove that she came from a respectable family. The local Italian priest had written her for him to say that it was sometimes very cold in this new land, even cold indoors, because they had only a coal stove in the kitchen to heat their living quarters, and it was inadequate to the task, and that it was colder, even, where he worked, outdoors on the railroad, for many months of the year, up north near a big lake, far bigger than the one near their small village, and that it was colder than she could ever imagine, and so she knit this sweater to please him, to show concern for him, although she did not yet know that she would not ever please him, that since his first wife had died, no one could please him but his tiny undernourished daughter that he needed this woman to attend. And she knit herself a shawl too, on the voyage over, for she was quick with her needles, and the wool was thick, and the work went fast, for she had nothing else to do, and she was unused to inactivity. The shawl was black, for though she would wear white for their wedding, he was in mourning, so black was what she used for her work, and black was what she would wear for some time to come, perhaps forever, though she had heard it said that the women in this new land, even older women, even women from the old country, sometimes wore colorful garments of reds or blues or greens, and there was something within her that would have liked to wear those colors too although she would not dare to wear them. Yes, the black shawl was something that she would wear around her shoulders to keep herself warm in this strange new place with this strange climate and she was happy at her knitting, and it satisfied her to knit this shawl that she knew she would make good use of. But she had decided that, no, she would not knit the child a thing, not now, perhaps not ever, because, although she would care for her, the child was his, not hers, not theirs, the child was not her blood.

Why my grandmother sat close to the radiator during the winter, I could well understand, for, though it threw off very little heat, this place was one of the warmest parts of our old, poorly heated, drafty house. Her body, born to southern Italian sunshine, never got used to the cold, though she lived here longer than she lived there.

By the end of November each year, she would be wearing her long underwear, two or three dresses (one atop the other), two or three hand-knit wool sweaters (one atop the other) knit from fanciful lace patterns, out of keeping with her otherwise austere appearance, and her old black shawl. Everything except her long underwear—dresses, sweaters, shawl—was black, everything was frayed and worn, everything was poorly mended, for she was no seamstress like her mother; like my mother, she had no patience for the needle.

Often, my father would yell to my mother, so loud that my grandmother could hear him, and in Italian, so that she could understand him, although he rarely communicated with her directly, for he resented her presence in his household, hated her intrusion into their lives, though, what could he do, she had nowhere else to go: Tell her to buy some new clothes, some warm clothes, goddamn it. Tell her that she’s a disgrace. Tell her that people will think that we aren’t taking care of her. Tell her to take a bath. Tell her that she stinks. My grandmother would manipulate another very complicated stitch on the white tablecloth that rested on her lap, or she would tug at another seam in the sweater that she was unraveling, and she would ignore his yelling, ignore what he was saying, and defeat him, as always, and for this, if for nothing else, I loved her, for to us both, he was the enemy, and I could not count the times that she had thrown her needlework to the ground, stitches slipping off needles, ball of wool or cotton unwinding across the floor, to put her body between his and mine, I could not count the times that she had taken the blow that was meant for me.

So, my grandmother would continue to buy nothing new, nothing American, nothing warm enough for winter, even though wearing more than one dress and all those sweaters and her black shawl and no coat on frigid winter mornings when she went to mass, marked her as a peasant, disgraced my parents, and embarrassed me—embarrassed me so much that I betrayed her, by laughing with my friends rather than silencing them when they called her the old witch, when they called her the garlic eater and held their noses and said Puew, puew, when they said she ate babies for breakfast.

On the rare occasions my mother would come home with a new dress—black, surely, but with a pattern of delicate little white flowers, or a store-bought sweater (solid black, of course), or an overcoat (black, again)—my grandmother, knowing that it was better to yield than to resist, and knowing that yielding was the best and most potent form of resistance, would take the item, thank my mother, hold the garment out in front of her at arms’ length, and put it in her bureau drawer or closet, where it stayed, unused, until she died.

Why my grandmother sat inside the house close to the radiator in the summer, I could never really understand. Yes, the radiator felt cool to the touch, but that corner of the dining room was stifling. There was the front porch, with its breezes, or the back porch, with its shade, but my grandmother didn’t ever sit outside except perhaps in evening, after supper, as the sun went down.

The radiator, I came to believe, must have grown to be something like my grandmother’s companion. It, and her needlework, and the dim replicas of the food that she cooked that she had loved in the old country, became her only comforts. The radiator didn’t yell at her, the way my parents did, nor mock her, as others outside the household did. The radiator didn’t tell her what to do; it didn’t tell her to be what she couldn’t be: an American. It didn’t condemn her for what she couldn’t not be: a southern Italian peasant. The radiator didn’t betray her the way I did. In summer, when it was chilly to the touch, it must have radiated the idea of coolness from its ugly gray mass so that, for a woman used to having so little, it might have seemed little enough. There, ignored and despised, she could carry on with the work that was the one thing, the only thing that sustained her, that and a love for me that defied explanation, for she detested my mother, and I did nothing to deserve her love, nothing to invite it, except, perhaps, bringing her a cool glass of water now and then so that she would not have to interrupt her work, and, once, sitting on the floor next to her for a few mornings so that she could teach me how to knit.

And so she sat, through the years in that darkened room, on the straight backed chair, close to the radiator, crocheting the tablecloths meant to grace our tables on important occasions, though she herself would not sit at those tables, but take her meager fare in the kitchen all by herself. Or knitting the sweaters that we never wore, knitting the afghans that, when finished, we would throw into the bottoms of our closets, so hideously garish and ugly in their colorations were they that no one with any self-respect—this is my mother talking—would ever use them, much less display them. There she would sit, this woman at her needlework, through the late 1940s, the ’50s, the ’60s, into the early ’70s, until the year 1974, when she was taken to the nursing home run by the state.

There she died, in a nursing home that didn’t cook pasta or anything Italian, which accounted, my mother believed, for the fact that my grandmother lost so much weight. And it didn’t permit knitting needles, or crochet hooks, or wool, either, for fear that the patients might use the needles as weapons or the wool as a way to strangle themselves, a nursing home where the only outlet for a patient’s creativity was cutting and pasting, on Fridays, but always under strict supervision, an activity geared to the seasons—snowflakes in winter, flowers in spring and summer, and autumn leaves in the autumn that she died.

My grandmother—the Vermeer of needlework. Her handiwork, unappreciated in her time, now, family treasures after her death, after my mother’s death. The sweaters are gone, and the afghans too. They were collected and thrown into giant plastic bags and dropped into a Goodwill box after her death, together with all that unused clothing my mother had bought her, and her old black shawl which, by now, was tattered and moth eaten.

But the tablecloths, I still have—heirlooms that adorn our family’s festive tables, presents that I give my sons, and their wives, and that I will pass on to my grandchildren. I have many, many tablecloths to share. For you can crochet a lot of tablecloths, through all those years, when you have little else to do.

My grandmother must have known how little we valued, how little we desired what she made. Yes, we covered the dining room table with her tablecloths on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. But that is all. The afghans, we never used. The sweaters, rarely. But still, she kept crocheting, still, she kept knitting, so that, at her death, there were thirty or so tablecloths, stuffed in bureau drawers all over the house, in boxes under her bed and in the bottom of her closet. As if to crochet and to knit was what was important. As if what she made was not. As if the admiration of others didn’t matter.

Once, I saw her finish a tablecloth and begin a new one on the same day without stopping to admire what she had accomplished; without holding it up to the light of the window, admiringly. To crochet and to knit in the absence of anyone’s desire but your own. To crochet and to knit because the very act of knitting, the very act of crocheting gives you what others do not, what others cannot give you, what this country that you came to does not give you: a sense of worth and some small scrap of human dignity.

No ‘So

—Rosette Capotorto

My mother does not sew. My mother learned not to sew.

Her small act of rebellion, not to learn to sew.

Can I say she refused to learn? In the usual absence of

facts and history is it accurate to say

that my mother refused to learn to sew?

She learned to clean. Says she cleaned her mother’s floors

on her knees with a scrub-brush every Saturday.

She learned to cook. She learned to care for babies.

But I’ve never seen my mother sew on a button. Or hem a skirt.

Perhaps she has done so. But the image is incongruous.

My mother did not teach us how to sew. Her children

three daughters and a son. School and girl scouts

and life in general demanded that a girl at least

sew on a button.

We learned to use a stapler to put up hems.

When buttons went missing we pinned blouses and skirts

with safety pins. We learned to do it so well that the

safety pins could not be seen through the fabric.

All the other women in my mother’s family sewed.

Sewed for us. My grandmother made clothes for us

and for our dolls.

Our Barbies had hand-stitched evening dresses with satin capes.

There is a photo of me and my sister in homemade