| Chapter 3: | Stores, Houses |
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to East Harlem with them in the late nineteenth century. Not all saints were immigrants, I thought.
During St. Benedict’s feast day he was paraded along the streets of Black Harlem as well as along the thoroughfares of East Harlem. African Americans were amazed at the sight of Italians holding aloft a statue of a Black man. The thirties and forties were decades of intense institutional racism against men and women of color. But Italians came from a country where discrimination was based on regional differences rather than on skin color. And Sicilians especially understood the stigma of discrimination since they had been the slaves of Roman oppressors and more recently the victims of North Italian domination. Italians would only share American racial bigotry when they had been taught American racial preferences. By that time Italian East Harlem no longer existed. African Americans handed the Italians five and ten dollar bills which were then pinned on the saint’s vestments. They were generous to a fault.
“Why is St. Benedict black?” I asked my grandmother.
“He is black because he had bugs in his hair,” she told me. “His mother couldn’t remove them no matter how hard she tried. So in desperation, she immersed him in a cauldron of boiling water and the bugs were killed.”
“Why wasn’t he killed, grandma?”
“Don’t be silly, my son. He was a saint. He couldn’t be killed. It was a miracle.”
St. Benedict was greater than even Superman and Batman, I concluded.