And as they toil in the fields and factories of this great nation, they say to themselves, “The Old Country was a terrible place. Here in America, I live in luxury!” They smile and shed a tear, partly from emotion and partly from the industrial airborne carcinogens that will eventually kill them. A few upwardly mobile, American-born generations later, one of their descendants gets a bright idea. “Hey!” someone says. “We ought to visit the Old Country. We can smile at the adorable native people and eat the adorable native food and consume the adorable native alcoholic beverage of choice. Then we can vomit on the nearest historical landmark. If we’re lucky, we can buy a T-shirt at the site of the mass grave where Great-great-grandma was killed by opposition troops! Perhaps the charming locals will show us a bit of their famous hospitality rather than stab us on sight.” Thus did I end up in Sicily, the Alabama of Italy. It is a fact that my grandmother, whose people were from southern Italy but not Sicily, used to refer to my grandfather’s Sicilian-American mistress as “that black bitch.”
