From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(73)
Still, I had wondered the whole night before about Franca and her kids. How would they feel about me getting the land? She and Nonna had definitely discussed this, because Franca was designated as the intermediary, the one taking me to the lawyer’s office that afternoon. Thus, I guessed, it was okay with her. It was no secret that the taxes Italy levied on homeowners with second properties were debilitating for many in rural Sicily where unemployment reached upwards to 50 percent for young people. Leaving the house to Franca would someday make her a second-home owner. To my basic understanding of Italian tax law, that could possibly be more of a burden than a gift to her, especially if she needed to support her daughters into adulthood with her already precarious work. In my name, it might be easier. The taxes would be minimal for me compared to what I paid in California. Still, a tax work-around didn’t really seem to be the reason for the gift. Perhaps this had been Nonna’s plan all along? The wedding gift her son had never gotten.
Before I left the house, Nonna had been outside hanging out laundry. Inside, I saw where she had laid one of her widow’s black skirts on the table with a needle and thread. She would be mending it while I was away handling the land transfer. When she crossed through the front door, momentarily balancing herself in the doorjamb, she began speaking as if in midthought: “If the land doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to no one.”
“Grazie,” I had responded. I felt tears coming on. She didn’t like morning tears.
“If we start now, we won’t stop. The day is long.”
Then she put magnifying glasses on top of her regular glasses and sat down to work.
As Franca, Cosimo, and I continued downward on the winding road, passing abandoned farmhouses and the little-used Cerda train station, I realized I hadn’t called my parents to tell them the news. I hadn’t told my sister. It had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, I had been too overcome by the turn of events. I needed time before I knew how I felt about it all, before I could feel in any way celebratory. At that moment, it was bittersweet. Saro and I had often dreamed about owning a house in the Sicilian countryside, surrounded by an orchard of olive trees. Now the possibility of that was happening without him.
With the house also came responsibility. Will I be able to afford it in the future? Who will help maintain it? Will I even want to keep coming back once Zoela is grown? All that felt hard to explain to my family all at once. Still, I knew they’d appreciate the significance of landownership. Since slavery and Reconstruction, landownership had been the way my family (on both sides) had charted their progress, wrestled with the past, and stayed connected with one another. Now it was my turn to stay connected, albeit in an unexpected place. As Cosimo slowed the car to a near stop behind a moving tractor carrying large bales of wheat, I contemplated what family land meant to me.
By the time my maternal grandmother was a teenager in an area of rural East Texas between the black post-Reconstruction settlements of Piney and Nigton, her family had acquired several hundred acres of timberland. They had farmed it and labored on it. The land had come to them bit by bit, in minor acquisitions. It was low-lying and difficult to farm but affordable to people born the children of slaves, without education. Whites with an eye to ownership looked to the areas with better farming land surrounding Nigton, leaving a small community of blacks, like my family, to quietly begin buying some of the land on which their ancestors had been enslaved. They had eked out a living in a territory surrounded by Klansmen, somehow surviving in a social system committed to Jim Crow.
Still, that land was theirs. And it was enough to farm and rear four children, sending one—my grandmother—to college and on to earn her master’s degree. By the time she was married and raising my mom in a nearby town, the land was being worked less. Meanwhile, the local timber industry prospered, often by claiming eminent domain on black-owned properties. Later, the vacation spot of Lake Livingston went from a glimmer in some developer’s eye to a destination spot for Houstonians. The development stoked the interest of local speculators, who systematically swindled land away from absent owners.
In a storied tradition as American as apple pie and cronyism, a local white landowner “Dusty” Collington and his family had successfully misappropriated the land of many black farmers by manipulating records at the county clerk’s office. He had preyed on the absent generation of Nigton’s descendants, those who had moved to other parts of the country during the Great Migration, those who had aspired to greater opportunity.
Between 1960 and 1980, while my grandmother had been a county away, Dusty had asserted that family members had sold him the land for a price. He even had “records” to prove it, a forged deed of sale signed with an X. The X was meant to substantiate his claim of illiteracy on the part of the seller. He claimed that my great-grandmother had signed with the X—proof that she was herself illiterate and had sold the nearly 150 acres to him. I don’t know which galled my grandmother more, the fact that Collington said her mother was illiterate (even though her signature was on other documents in the county clerk’s office) or the fact that he was suggesting that she had sold off the family land without mentioning it to her daughter. By the time my grandmother died at ninety-seven, the year before Barack Obama would become president and the year Saro was too sick to travel to her funeral, the family land had dwindled down to less than a hundred acres despite only a tiny percentage of the original acreage having ever actually been sold.